> I find the breath work to be more useful than meditation. Now any time I find stress I immediately recognize my breath and start controlling it, almost sub-consciously.
I'd just like to note that you're literally describing mindfulness meditation and its effects, there. That's what interoceptive meditation is all about - focusing on your internal state - and breath is an excellent medium for that focus.
Anyone that believes that Wim Hof breathing is woo should literally just spend the three minutes to do a round of it and see the effects by themselves. It is immediately obvious that there is a clear effect on the body from just breathing the right way.
For anyone wanting to try, here is the video I used when I started getting into it: https://youtu.be/lwlEJ2O-6HM
(Don't necessarily pay too much attention to that creator's other videos, he's not very science-based overall.)
Just do the first round and you'll see an undeniable effect on your body and mind. I mean undeniable, not something subtle and small.
Now, the specific effects of it all can be debated. I'm rather doubtful of some of the claims made of it, and it's very clear that a lot of non-skeptical people flock to this sort of thing, so that's expected. But there's something to it, for sure. Try it the next time you're about to do something high-stress, such as public speaking. The difference for me is night and day.
It's a bit subtler, but there's a definite effect. Supposedly it has similar effects on learning as sleep. Whether that's true or not, it's a tool you can try out yourself and decide whether or not it's helpful to you.
These sort of controllers have already been repeatedly attempted for use in gaming for the past decade or more. While working examples do exist and are sold commercially, they just aren't practical, so they haven't caught on.
So I wouldn't have high hopes for this yet, because clearly the technology just isn't there yet to enable high-fidelity brain noninvasive brain interfaces. But it'll never get there without attempts and funding, so it's good to see DARPA work on this.
Personally I'm more excited for commercial applications of things like the synchron implant (https://synchron.com), but those are pretty damn far from viable as well. And also I'm biased because I want to control everything with my brain at all times.
ZLib was always just an interface for Library Genesis, which remains hale and hearty here: https://libgen.is
It seems like ZLib was seized mainly because they started running donation drives and potentially earning money on piracy, although that's just conjecture. Libgen does not do any such thing.
It's just that many people can afford to have hobbies, and hobbies do not have to earn money or be a good investment in order to be worth doing.