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Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

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Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#71

Post by arcanist_union »

The race for breakeven fusion is heating up, and it's exciting to see. That old adage about reaching breakeven being 'always 30 years in the future' is actually, finally looking more like 5-10 years. Relevant projects, all tokamaks: The largest ever fusion reactor so far which is being built now -- ITER in France, then there's MIT/Commonwealth Fusion's SPARC (they just demoed a type 2 superconductor magnet that developed 20T in its rather large borehole), China's EAST reactor and its recent 200+ million degree temperature and confinement time records, and the venerable JET reactor in the UK, which still holds the Q record of ~0.67 with D+T and they are prepping for another tritium run. These projects are some of the leaders in the field, amongst many others.

The stellarators are also fascinating projects though even more geometrically complex than tokamaks are. The Moebius strip-like twist allows them to impart stability to a ring of plasma in ways that tokamaks can't. The Wendelstein X7 in Germany and the Large Helical Device in Japan are the largest and most recent examples. The Princeton Plasma Physics Lab has a novel stellarator design called NCSX, which interestingly uses coils and arrays of permanent magnets.

The advent of type 2 superconductors at scale will contribute greatly to this speed-up to acheive breakeven with tokamaks and stellarators. The much smaller and newer design MIT SPARC (which will use the more recently developed type 2 superconductors) might even beat ITER(which uses type 1 superconductors) to Q=1+!

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#73

Post by Wurdan »

mRNA vaccines, for me. I'm sure most people read this fantastic write-up of how the covid vaccine works back in December: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...

It really opened my eyes to how far we've come over the years in learning to game our immune system. And the existence of printers for custom DNA blew my mind. I can't even get printers to reliably put ink on paper, let alone create the building blocks of life.

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#75

Post by genewitch »

okaleniuk wrote: post #74

Photonic computing and the return of Fortran. These are two separate things but to some degree they're both boosted by the rise of heterogeneous computing.

Electrons are photons, aren't they? I'm guessing you mean computing with light instead of voltage, but even then, aren't a lot of the same restrictions there, clock fanout and speed (6ghz or whatever)?

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#76

Post by zerocount »

Nothing.

I think people confuse interesting with exciting. Excitement was when I first got my driver's license; when I got my Atari 800 for Christmas; the first time I drove a 1998 BMW M3, whew! that car made me smile every time I drove it! Things like those excited me, not another web framework or programming language, or cloud services, or another phone, or saving the world somehow.

But I do have interests like programming a TI calculator, living off grid, making a rogue-like game, repairing and restoring classic arcade games from the ground up, such as Pacman and Defender.

Excitement only comes every once in a while.

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#77

Post by dkobia »

Wurdan wrote: post #73

mRNA vaccines, for me. I'm sure most people read this fantastic write-up of how the covid vaccine works back in December: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source... It really opened my eyes to how far we've come over the years in learning to game our immune system. And the existence of printers for custom DNA blew my mind. I can't even get printers to reliably put ink on paper, let alone create t…

Truly exciting time. That we now have an mRNA vaccine for malaria, a disease that kills millions is truly understated.

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#78

Post by dkobia »

caffeine wrote: post #67

What excites me at the moment is space - and specifically the advent of space as an accessible, valuable, but dangerous place to be - a perfect place for robots. I think there is a massively exciting amount of development to be done in space robotics, planning, simulation, hardware, etc. The other exciting venue I see is bioinformatics. The advent of mRNA as a usable technology combined with AlphaFold is a new develo…

The first trillionaire will likely be a result of space. I can see a time when robots mine asteroids and process material on the moon.

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#79

Post by genewitch »

muzani wrote: post #54

AI (GPT-3 and similar technology). It's spawning a new generation of games, probably similar to roguelikes in that the effort bar is low enough that someone of generic skill can build one on their own. Games have the potential to be far more emergent than they ever were. AI Dungeon is like the Zork of today.

AI dungeon struck me the same way Eliza did in the mid-90s, trite. It wasn't really interactive, in my estimation. Maybe I just have a poor imagination for that style of game.

Like looking or examine an object twice would give contradictory accounts. Now, unreliable narrator is a valid storytelling device, but it just seemed ... Eliza.

Re: Ask HN: What excites you today (technologically speaking)?

#80

Post by genewitch »

Loeffeldude wrote: post #63
da-x wrote: post #34

Today is like a better version of the 1960's. Two things: 1) The new space age, really aiming far to the Moon and Mars. 2) The altered state of mind that wide acceptance of Psychedelics is going to bring to the masses.

I have never gotten any benefits from psychedelics whatsoever. Sure they are fun and mind blowing but I have never experienced a tangible improvement in my mental health. Actually I had a bad trip and that has had a negative impact on my mental health I had depersonalisation and anxiety for months after.

I think the current trend is micro-dosing, and having never had a "real" psychedelic I'm very keen to try micro-dosing.
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