• mozz ( mozz@mbin.grits.dev ) OP
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      2 years ago

      Yeah. Gaben has a strong track record of bringing technology to the market that works, from a company that wasn’t already around and doing things better overall before he got involved with it.

      • firecat ( firecat@kbin.social ) 
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        2 years ago

        Not the strongest because Steam Machines with Alienware had problems and way too early during development of Proton that games couldn’t handle well. The controller was stolen IP and is still currently fighting the lawsuit. VR games are not great as people expected and rarely do new VR games arrived. Leaving the VR headset in storage for mostly the owners life. Lastly, the Steam Deck original has problems and announced updates or free ifix fixes just to not have drifting problems. Still the Steam Deck after the original has some issues with compatibility and deleting their data every update.

        The company has poor track records for hardware. Valve is like the Sony of gaming, they lie about stuff and make you sign up to download the game in their closed ecosystem.

        • mozz ( mozz@mbin.grits.dev ) OP
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          2 years ago

          I hadn’t heard of most of this, and it’s sort of an avalanche, so I picked out one particular part to check out in a lot of detail and see if it held up.

          The controller was stolen IP

          Looks to me like they had buttons on the back of the controller in some way which infringed on one of 105 patents that SCUF holds on specific parts of controller design, and they sued Valve a year after Valve had stopped using the design anyway.

          I’m not qualified to say whether SCUF actually invented something no one else would have thought of, and then Valve deliberately copied them on it, but I’m skeptical. I lean a little more towards the side of “SCUF patented something somewhat obvious, and then wanted Valve to pay them rent in order to set their buttons up in a sensible fashion.”

          But at the very least, saying that it’s demonstrated that it was “stolen” is, to me, not accurate.

          and is still currently fighting the lawsuit

          This part is objectively not true, unless there’s some glacially slow appeals process I’m not aware of. It looks like the whole thing finished in 2021. Am I wrong?

            • mozz ( mozz@mbin.grits.dev ) OP
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              2 years ago

              Yeah. I was around in the games industry way back when the big publishers had a total stranglehold on the whole arena, and Steam was this magic thing that enabled non-AAA games to actually break in in a big way and achieve sales above the double digits, and on top of that I generally like Valve’s games. I was sort of wondering if this is a “live long enough to see yourself become the villain” type of thing, where my good feelings towards Valve aren’t warranted anymore in the present day.

              But, judging by what I saw when I grabbed one of this person’s assertions at random and held it up to the light to examine in it detail for objective truth, I don’t think it’s based on a reasoned and objective basis. What it is based on, I have no idea.

    • jarfil ( jarfil@beehaw.org ) 
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      2 years ago

      Neuralink has a technology that specifically addresses two of the main issues with BCI: data density, and implant effective duration.

      There are more issues, but it addresses those two in particular, which is something quite interesting to see, and can be turned into patents that can be sold to other BCI initiatives.

      The rest of Musk is… well, he’s kind of an “unstable genius”, with enough money to blow on random moonshots, marketing stunts, and random publicity. Honestly, if I had his money, I’d probably do the same: build a few core businesses, then go on tangents to see what sticks to the wall. It can all still be seen under the general theme of “colonizing Mars” though, which is a guiding starshot as good as any, with Hyperloop and Boring company having kind of exhausted what can be done on Earth, Tesla being a borderline failure, SpaceX, StarLink, or indoor farming working pretty well, and X being an experiment at social manipulation.

    • Neurolink existing “just because it can”.

      “Aperture Science, we do what we must because we can”

      You guys seeing this shit?

      Joke aside, iirc Neurolink already been used on disabled people, allowing them to use a computer easily. Whether it will have any use case on healthy people it’s still not clear so far.

      • Neurolink has been used on 1 disabled person, and it was “working” for about 2 weeks before it was announced there are “problems” with the connection to the brain.

        Oh, and it has killed a bunch of monkeys.

        • seang96 ( seang96@spgrn.com ) 
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          2 years ago

          I dislike the thought of ol musky rushing neurolink or even being remotely involved with something put into someone’s brain, the also claimed they doubled the bandwidth of the connections via software optimizations so the disconnected wires doesn’t have a large impact. Also from the comments of other Lemmy users from that article, my understanding was that it is a common problem for some of the wires used to probe the brain for input to pop out after surgeries where they implant a processing chip into a person’s brain.