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.
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 5 months 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@kbin.social 5 months 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@mbin.grits.dev 5 months 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.
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 the buttons, 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.
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 missing something?
averyminya@beehaw.org 5 months ago
I’ve had conversations with this person before, in my opinion many of the things they fault Valve for are… extreme nitpicking.
Also, IMO Corsair’s patents are BS and are drastically inhibiting accessibility controller availability. Their stranglehold on something as simple as buttons on the backside of a controller shouldn’t be lauded.
bolexforsoup@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
Steam link did not work well and I love my steam deck but it’s got some janky elements. Especially if you frequently flip between desktop and gaming mode.