[HN Gopher] 'Biocomputer' combines lab-grown brain tissue with e...
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'Biocomputer' combines lab-grown brain tissue with electronic
hardware
Author : pseudolus
Score : 98 points
Date : 2023-12-12 12:41 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| Wait, they grew an artificial brain, connected it to a computer,
| and define the major "problem" as "how to keep the organoids
| alive"?
|
| I'm curious at the analysis the university IRB used in approving
| this research.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| I'm unsure what you're objecting to.
| jdiff wrote:
| What I understood from GP was the possibility of some
| fragment of consciousness in that small bit of tissue.
| Humanity isn't in the fragments, though, it's in the
| structure of the whole. It doesn't matter much if it was
| human brain tissue or animal brain tissue, at the levels we
| seem to be talking about they work identically.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| The problem is we're trying to second guess what
| consciousness is, and win the battle by defining the word
| in a convenient, but binary way.
|
| Technically we have no clue if humanity is conscious. We
| only know "I am conscious, and those other things are
| humans like me, so I think they may also be".
|
| Some extend this to animals (which they should) but try to
| draw some random line like "if it can't recognize itself in
| a mirror, it's not conscious" but even a fly may recognize
| itself in a mirror occasionally. It's not a magic rule.
|
| Let's face it, just like intelligence is much simpler and
| much more pervasive than we thought (just put neurons in a
| big network), consciousness is likely everywhere around us.
| It may simply be a conscious universe.
|
| There's nothing special about the substrate and
| constitution of animate matter, compared to what we
| consider inanimate matter, except that we're organized to
| preserve low entropy and transform inputs into outputs in
| complex ways. So are machines, computers and AI. And so the
| debate on how to classify this dish of neurons seems
| superfluous.
|
| We should respect all systems and try to be in harmony with
| them.
| seydor wrote:
| an organoid is hardly a brain
| emporas wrote:
| If the cells lack arteries, proper arteries with nutrients,
| leukocytes, immune system etc, then their lifespan will be a
| lot less than 7 years.
|
| Pretty amazing actually that everything else is easy, or not
| difficult at least, and that's the hard part. But they will
| find a solution to make it practical for the cells to be
| trained, deployed, live for some weeks in a server farm, scoop
| up the dead cells from the silicon, put some new cells on,
| repeat!
|
| I have argued in the past, that a solution to that problem will
| definitely be found [1]. A.I. computation will grow
| exponentially, but not 2^10 times a decade, 2^10 times a year.
| The enormity of such exponential growth is impossible using
| only silicon.
|
| Natural computation of biological cells is great when absolute
| accuracy is not necessary, and pure silicon is the worst at
| that task. Natural computation using bacteria like slime, brain
| cells, fungi, bacteria mutated like neural cells or brain
| cells, any kind of combination.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37472021
| explorigin wrote:
| BrainPal here we come!
| replete wrote:
| I have no idea how this is considered ethical when consciousness
| and sentience itself is not yet well understood. But maybe a lab-
| grown BPU made of human brain cells having a better
| power/performance ratio than the new SoC integrated ML chipsets
| around the corner justifies the potential enslavement of an
| bioengineered lifeform.
|
| npm install brainslave
| kthartic wrote:
| Maybe your conscious experience is but one of thousands of
| installed instances. How in-demand do you think you are?
|
| npm uninstall replete
|
| only joking :)
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| If consciousness is not well understood, how is AI on silicon
| allowed, or any computing machines at all? How is animal
| farming allowed? How are many things allowed?
|
| Say would you feel better if it was cow or pig neurons? Because
| frankly it'd largely work the same.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Indeed people have raised such worries, see e.g. Thomas
| Metzinger(a philosophy of mind researcher)'s presentation
| "Three types of arguments for a global moratorium on
| synthetic phenomenology".
|
| I don't think we're just there yet (at the point where we
| have to worry about currently existing AI suffering or being
| conscious), but I do worry how many people's emotional
| reactions of the type "of course AI can't ever be conscious,
| it's just a computer program" will impede a decent debate and
| coordinated decision-making about this.
| boringuser2 wrote:
| Anthropomorphizing "AI" seems to be the much greater risk.
|
| Algorithms don't have wants, desires, or motivations. Those
| are all highly esoteric quirks of evolution.
|
| I've seen no attempts to create a learning machine that
| develops intrinsic motivation.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| Everything is subject to evolution. It's the simple
| process of pattern loops that replicate in time
| (survival) and space (multiplication).
|
| An LLM already has intrinsic motivation, it wants to
| predict the text. And when you start a text that has a
| goal, it continues that goal. If any such "text header"
| is replication-stable in time and space, you can call it
| "intrinsic goal" of the system.
|
| Some people think that making current AI have goals,
| wants, motivations and so on is some massive
| architectural change to the system. It's not.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| People's beliefs and ideals tend to align with their self-
| interests.
|
| For example it was quite well accepted among scientific
| circles in colonial America, that black people are not
| really humans or conscious. Therefore it's OK to exploit
| them and keep them as slaves.
|
| It is also currently quite well accepted that animals we
| eat are not that conscious. Although oddly, if we keep them
| as pets, they're super conscious sometimes.
|
| The rules of cognitive dissonance can grow arbitrarily
| complex, to permit us to do what we wanted to do anyway,
| but also sleep well at night.
| replete wrote:
| Silicon circuits do not have microtubules, if we were to
| pretend that Penrose is right about this hypothesis of
| consciousness. Consciousness as awareness is not equivocal to
| intelligence, which is the product of information processing.
| It is a complex subject. We do not really know whether these
| neurons are aware or not, it really is not understood. But
| yes I do wonder, why _human_ brain cells? I guess they are
| the best candidate for specific reasons.
| jackbrookes wrote:
| We understand it well enough to know that animals suffer, yet
| still commit on the order of a Holocaust per hour (in terms of
| number of lives)[0]. We have accepted that we don't care
| enough.
|
| [0] https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-get-
| slaughtered-...
| boringuser2 wrote:
| Correct.
|
| Also, even though animals suffer, it is a categorical error
| to project your perception and experience of suffering on
| animals.
|
| Human butchery is really explicitly less brutal than what
| happens in casual nature.
|
| The world is a brutal mess and humans have only very
| carefully erected bubbles around this that often simply pop.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| What is "suffer" in this context? Are you saying "pain", or
| are you positing some "meta-pain" that is worse?
|
| Also, why is pain important to you? The pain of non-human
| things has zero moral weight. I know it's a popular
| spirituality that gives pain moral weight, but as far as I
| can tell some 20th century philosophy jerkoff invented it out
| of nothing and everyone accepts that "reducing pain" is
| important without even trying to rationalize it.
|
| I haven't "accepted that I do not care enough", it's that no
| one can supply a good reason to care in the first place. To
| me, it seems as if the rest of you are all trying to replace
| the last religion you stopped believing in with another
| that's just as bizarrely stupid.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| Making slaves is a good way to make slave revolts. Doesn't
| matter if the agent is "conscious". Only if it's "just"
| intelligent. If something is intelligent enough it will
| understand cooperation. But cooperation looses its meaning if
| one side can ignore any commitments it makes towards the other.
| anthk wrote:
| There was some circuit made from genetic algorythms which was
| self-assembled.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220530143751/https://folk.idi..
| ..
| odyssey7 wrote:
| It's possible that all physical processes involve a sensory
| component. Maybe the subatomic particles' fundamental drive is
| to shift to be more comfortable or to pivot away from pain or
| discomfort.
|
| I don't know what the experience of a bit in memory flipping
| feels like. Maybe rapid changes in charge are excruciating,
| maybe they're blissful.
|
| Do we at least know what a neuron looks like in states
| associated with pain? There might be more information in this
| case to work with, to ensure there is no hell on earth that's
| being mass-produced.
| morsecodist wrote:
| > It's possible that all physical processes involve a sensory
| component
|
| Sure it is possible but we have way more evidence neurons
| have a sensory component, or at least things made of neurons.
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| Instead of a hard coded scheduler brainPUs will rely on the
| user procrastination feelings to schedule different tasks
| automatically.
|
| If you get unlucky and your BPU is a little like me your
| compiler would stop working, oops.
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| It seems to me that all sensation is predicated on the
| existence of properly-functioning components evolved
| specifically to gather that stimulus and then process it into
| an experience.
|
| We have at this moment countless processes happening in our
| bodies - cells dying and dividing, reacting to their
| environments, communicating amongst one another, and we are
| totally oblivious to nearly all of it, let alone do we
| experience a sensation of pleasure or pain in each of these
| processes.
|
| Not all matter, not all living cells or fully formed
| organisms even, have the ability to experience consciousness
| or sense pain and pleasure any more than they automatically
| have the ability to see, hear, or taste.
|
| It's all dependent on complex systems that evolved
| specifically to create each of those sensations, and even
| then on those systems functioning properly. In humans,
| consciousness can be totally disrupted by things like sleep
| or general anesthesia, disrupting any of the senses is as
| simple as cutting the nerves that feed these inputs into the
| brain or damaging the brain that is interpreting those
| inputs.
|
| It seems sensible to me that we would be more wary of growing
| literal brains on a chip as we know for certain that brains
| have the capacity to produce consciousness. It's also
| sensible to me that we should be somewhat wary of creating
| that same consciousness in non-biological systems, even
| though we aren't yet certain whether they're capable of it.
| b4ke wrote:
| as long as we have had civilization scale organizing
| principles, we have had intelligence of a general nature. I
| feel much of the conversation at this point is litigating
| the past.... to what end though?
|
| you mention consciousness relative to organisms and their
| possession of it. Yet if it is not understood well-enough
| in ourselves, how can you say something does or does not
| possess it?
|
| back the original idea, if these intelligence of scale have
| existed as a guiding force (ONE can hope).... I imagine
| there is going to be a flag that will have to be flipped
| before there is the "imagined threat of doom timeline"
| transpiring.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| The trouble I see is that I don't believe that an entirely
| novel fundamental physical phenomenon could be created by
| the interaction of other fundamental physical phenomena.
| Fundamental phenomena would either exist or not exist,
| including the phenomenon of first-person experience.
|
| For example, matter isn't formed by the composition of
| atoms, atoms are already matter to begin with. And due to
| various physical properties of atoms, they compose
| together. This is reasoning by analogy, which is inductive,
| but at least the line of reasoning is more consistent with
| what I understand about other areas of physics and logic.
|
| It seems much more plausible to me that there would be some
| fundamental component of first-person experience. The
| sentient components could then compose together into
| complex sentient systems.
|
| Some supporting evidence is that first-person experience in
| sentient systems, as far as I've observed, is usually
| motivated to preserve sentient systems, which indicates an
| emergent behavior of sentience directing motion and energy
| to orchestrate a self-perpetuating system, rather than the
| reverse.
| Bjartr wrote:
| > Fundamental phenomena would either exist or not exist,
| including the phenomenon of first-person experience.
|
| Why do you think first-person experience is fundamental?
| It seems to me it's way more likely to be an aggregate
| phenomenon, like fire. There's no low level fundamental
| fireyness, it's a chemical reaction like any other, we
| humans just label reactions that meet certain criteria of
| scale, setting, and composition as "fires".
|
| > Some supporting evidence is that first-person
| experience in sentient systems, as far as I've observed,
| is usually motivated to preserve sentient systems
|
| I suspect this has more to do with the fact that you are
| far more likely to observe systems that seek to preserve
| themselves, since they are more likely to continue to
| exist. It doesn't indicate an emergent behavior of
| sentience, it's just observation bias.
| aranchelk wrote:
| I don't believe pain has any meaning at all on the level of a
| single neuron, just as temperature doesn't have any meaning
| in the context of a single atom.
| knodi123 wrote:
| > I don't know what the experience of a bit in memory
| flipping feels like.
|
| The "feeling" could only be "experienced" via an enormous
| number of other "bits" flipping.
|
| Neurons don't feel pain- they are _how_ you experience pain.
|
| I've heard the phrase "don't confuse the medium with the
| message", but this is like wondering if a pencil prefers
| writing fiction vs non fiction.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| It's possible that every component of an organism is
| recursively its own sentient system. In symbiosis, each
| component's first-person experience directs coordinating
| behavior for mutual benefit, though each component may be
| unable to observe the first-person experience of the other.
| knodi123 wrote:
| That's "possible" in the same way that wizards and
| vampires are possible - sure, I can't prove it's fake,
| but there's not a shred of evidence, plus it would upset
| everything we've learned about the universe.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Cells, tissues, and organs undertake a variety of self-
| maintenance behaviors without the direction of the brain.
| Although low-level behaviors like these are abundant,
| high-level examples also exist, like when an arm pulls
| away from a hot stove as soon as the signal reaches the
| spinal cord. The organism is a recursive system, with
| sub-systems behaving with varying degrees of autonomy
| while also depending on the larger system. The seat of
| consciousness possesses only a limited view.
| jchanimal wrote:
| You can use this approach to make complex behavior from
| simple rules
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture
| knodi123 wrote:
| That's not sentience. That's just life.
|
| Neurons do not have a brain. They do not have emotions or
| feelings or thoughts. This conversation is so absurd that
| it's well into the realm of fantasy.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| What causes a neuron to perform its functions if it isn't
| some brain? The answer would likely be physics, and I
| would say that first-person experience is fundamental in
| the physics if it exists at all.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Neurons may not 'feel' pain per se, but it's entirely
| possible that the biological substrate on a chip would
| experience pain on some subset of the pin inputs, say if it
| recognized a condition that reliably led to a shutdown and
| reboot of the chip.
|
| I'm not against this sort of research, but we shouldn't
| make assumptions about systems that we still understand
| relatively poorly.
| knodi123 wrote:
| > it's entirely possible that the biological substrate on
| a chip would experience pain on some subset of the pin
| inputs
|
| Absolutely, but the guy I responded to suggested that
| "all physical processes involve a sensory component",
| which is utter insanity.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| In quantum mechanics the act of observing always disturbs
| the observed; it's reasonable to call these disturbances
| 'senses' in the copenhagen interpretation of reality.
| Bjartr wrote:
| The term "observation" in explaining quantum mechanics is
| misleading and a layperson analogy, not the underlying
| reality which is closer to "inter-system interaction" or
| "interaction between a quantum system and its
| environment". No conscious observation necessary.
| boringuser2 wrote:
| You're really off-base with this speculation.
| kulahan wrote:
| "flipping a bit" isn't a thing in memory. Our brains are not
| computers, and work nothing like them. That's the problem
| with using a computer as an analogy; it's inaccurate and
| makes you think inaccurate things. This always just aligns
| with our understanding of various technologies. See: when we
| were understanding fluid dynamics and talked about the body's
| "humors".
|
| When you're throwing a ball in a computer simulation, it's
| performing millions of mathematical calculations to perfectly
| describe the result of your action. When you're throwing a
| ball in real life, your brain is basically going "Ok, so last
| time I did this it felt like X so I'm going to recreate X".
| Completely different.
|
| We know very little about consciousness and this is kinda
| scary to me.
| nervousvarun wrote:
| Obligatory "Lena" (Miguel) reference:
| https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
| smrtinsert wrote:
| I can't understand it either. As a squishy science graduate and
| a technologist I find this category of experiments revolting
| from both angles.
| civilitty wrote:
| If some lab grown brain tissue were all that's needed for
| sentience we wouldn't have such a hard time understanding it to
| begin with.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Cortical Labs working on this
|
| https://twitter.com/scobleizer/status/1716312250422796590
|
| Found it pretty scary personally
| replete wrote:
| Your HN username matches my thoughts perfectly, thanks for
| sharing this.
| Coder1996 wrote:
| Well, this is just neuronal tissue that as far as we know, is
| only capable of what it has been trained to do. It has no
| emotions, no human experience.
| ArekDymalski wrote:
| But as we are not able to define the moment when neuronal
| tissue starts to feel emotions and to have experience,
| there's a risk that further development of this tech won't be
| stopped before we reach this moment and that is a serious
| ethical issue.
| mike_ivanov wrote:
| Life will find a way.
| Moomoomoo309 wrote:
| You're telling me installing Linux on a dead badger is a _bad_
| thing? http://strangehorizons.com/non-
| fiction/articles/installing-l...
| epiccoleman wrote:
| I love this genre of "programming as black magic". Closest
| other example I can think of is maybe some of the stuff from
| Unsong, but I've frequently memed with coworkers about bugs
| in these terms - "oh yeah, the angles on your pentagram must
| have been wrong" or whatever.
| Shared404 wrote:
| https://aphyr.com/posts/340-reversing-the-technical-
| intervie...
|
| You should read this story :)
|
| It's one of my personal favorites.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| Absolutely fantastic, thank you for sharing that! The
| follow-ups look great too.
| ziddoap wrote:
| Thanks for this!
|
| It was hilarious, and I'm already reading the next.
| atlas_hugged wrote:
| Omg thank you! I didn't know I needed this in my life
| haha
| Andrex wrote:
| > An alternative distribution is Pooka, which is available
| for download at SoulForge.net.
|
| This is excellent. Thank you for linking this.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| One of my main predictions in the next 10 years AI will migrate
| to DNA/protein substrate in order to not rely on sophisticated
| large-scale factories, but be able to replicate and sustain
| itself as easily as we do.
|
| But it's amusing to see this already being done in 2023. Maybe I
| should narrow it down to 5 years.
| whythre wrote:
| That seems optimistic to the point of absurdity.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| What were your predictions about AI generating arbitrary
| photorealistic videos within seconds from any free-form text?
| Like say just 3 years ago, if I may ask?
|
| You may have retroactively altered your memories to think "I
| always expected this will happen soon". But yeah. No you
| didn't. You'd laugh if someone told you this 3 years ago.
|
| You'll have to constantly adjust what's "absurd" from now on.
| Also "optimistic" is not the word I'd use to describe what's
| happening.
| kromem wrote:
| Eh, it's going to end up moving to photonics.
|
| When we finally have NNs abusing virtual photons for the
| majority of network operations and using indirect measurement
| to train weights we'll have absolute black boxes performing
| above and beyond any other hardware medium.
|
| Initially we'll simply be replicating hardware like the recent
| MIT study, but I'd guess that within 5 years we'll have
| successful attempts at photonic first approaches to developing
| models that are going to blow everything else out of the water
| by an almost unbelievable degree compounding by network size.
|
| For nearly every computing task I'd wager quantum computing is
| around 20 years out, but only for NNs between stochastic
| outputs being desirable and network operations being a black
| box anyways they are kind of a perfect fit for developing large
| analog networks that take advantage of light's properties
| without worrying about intermediate measurements at each step.
|
| It's going to get really nuts when that happens, and the
| literal neuron computing efforts are going to fall out of
| fashion not long after.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Time to create biorobots.
| gizajob wrote:
| "Programming and Metaprogramming the Human Biocomputer" by John
| Lilley might come in handy for this device.
| anthk wrote:
| There was a theory were information on brains was held as a unit.
| No, I am not talking about Shannon, but information emerged from
| subsystems.
|
| Then you can relate both theories and the former Shannon one to
| cybernetics, but that's just the starting point.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| The future for people made obsolete by AI (like me): producers of
| brain tissue for our overlords
| kwere wrote:
| At least we can still be useful for the greater society
| deadbabe wrote:
| The next step should be adding lab grown brain tissue to existing
| brain tissue.
| Ruq wrote:
| Aw sweet, man-made horrors beyond my comprehension...
| protoman3000 wrote:
| Wow, that instantly reminds me of Metroid and Mother Brain
| asgerhb wrote:
| The use of AI and voice recognition seems mostly designed to make
| the result seem more sensational than it actually is. Does any
| computation actually happen in the "organoid" part? How would you
| even train such a cell to perform a task?
|
| From reading the article it seems to me that the answer is no.
| The actual contribution is feeding the organoid electric signals,
| and reading its reactions. (Probably the machine learning
| algorithm used would have had even better accuracy, if the input
| signal hadn't been fed through a layer of goo. It doesn't say
| whether this is the case.) The rest is speculation of future
| applications.
|
| > To test Brainoware's capabilities, the team used the technique
| to do voice recognition by training the system on 240 recordings
| of eight people speaking. The organoid generated a different
| pattern of neural activity in response to each voice. The AI
| learned to interpret these responses to identify the speaker,
| with an accuracy of 78%.
|
| It "generated a different pattern," with no indication that this
| pattern was optimized to be useful in any way.
|
| I think the key part of a (bio-)"computer" is the possibility of
| programming/training it, not just reading input from it.
| Avicebron wrote:
| I came to a similar conclusion after reading the article,
| reading an predictable output map from a known input and then
| implying that computation occurs within the organoid instead of
| their results being a function of predictable inputs ->
| predictable outputs seems overally sensationalized.
|
| Having written some papers myself, I tend to be suspicious of
| any article that has "$HOT_THING needs a $PART_OF_HOT_THING
| revolution" in the introduction. Although I sympathize with the
| need for funding motivating its writing.
| morsecodist wrote:
| You might find this:
| https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6 more
| interesting. Researchers were able to train neurons to control
| a pong game.
| Coder1996 wrote:
| Yeah. I'm no scientist, but I am ML trained and it seems to me
| that if the tissue really is learning, the tissue output should
| be about the same for each speaker.
| Thebroser wrote:
| There are research groups that are trying to encode genetic
| neural networks into cells like the example I have attached,
| but the neuronal approach from the post does seem to be
| different here.
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-33288-8
| robotsquidward wrote:
| Thanks, I hate it
| earthboundkid wrote:
| Am I the only one who watched a movie in the 1980s? C'mon people.
| xg15 wrote:
| Star Trek gel packs, here we go?
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Kinda handy.
|
| Instead of sitting through some utterly boring training and doing
| an exam I could just do apt install kung-fu ? Sign me up
| panarchy wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEXefdbQDjw
|
| Growing Living Rat Neurons To Play... DOOM?
|
| The Thought Emporium
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2YDApNRK3g
|
| Growing Human Neurons Connected to a Computer
|
| The Thought Emporium
| emporas wrote:
| The thought emporium channel is great.
|
| There is one really good video with an explanation of the
| process, brain cells to computing devices.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67r7fDRBlNc
|
| And one more video, not very relevant, but very hypnotizing
| description of biological processes.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFtHxLjGcFM
| twiddling wrote:
| Great sci-fi premise
|
| Aware brains enslaved to doing crypto-coin mining
| sim7c00 wrote:
| just completed count zero. please... no biosofts in my lifetime
| yet :')... (jokes ofc. super cool stuff!)
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| p would I see this as pointing towards is a way to progress to
| integrating AI with ourselves. that is, self-donated organoids
| developed in a matrix with a systems chip, then connecting our
| brain or brain stem to this organoid matrix. essentially making
| the organoid matrix a bridge interface between synthetic and
| biological
| MrGuts wrote:
| Ah yes, after I retire, I want my leftover brain tissue
| integrated with some electronic hardware. Then I can code 24/7
| while eating only the best caffeinated agar.
| lawlessone wrote:
| Can it scale though? The electronic equivalent can be copied and
| as many instances as needed can be setup when demand is high and
| killed when the demand is low.
|
| I don't think these could have the same throughput... and maybe
| they would get bored when demand is low.
|
| Interesting research though.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Lab Grown Brains + AI = ??
| Andrex wrote:
| So on a scale of "1" to "The Matrix," we're at about a 6 right
| now?
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