This https://youtu.be/vS0TuIPoeBs
It's just amazing
Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
21–30 of 512 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#22The motions on the recent Boston dynamics demo video were eerily realistic and humanlike. Sure preprogrammed but still that smoothness stood out to me as something new
The ability for the robot to move in multiple directions at once… bending knees and arms and waist at the same time, threw me for a loop.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then the yellow bags for plastic, which they take to SE Asia on the otherwise empty container-ships, so that it gets dumped on a beach or into a river, while Germany fills its quota for recycling. Sorry for the cynicism, this was the case a few years ago, maybe not anymore?
> this was the case a few years ago, maybe not anymore? I'm not sure what happens with the plastic in SE Asia, but we still send most of our plastic there. https://de.statista.com/infografik/25368/wichtigste-abnehmer...
Bullshit.
This statistic is listing the share of exported plastics that are exported to certain countries. But that's not "most of our plastic", because overall exports are around ~10%. So "most of our plastic" is either recycled or burned within Germany. (Not saying any of this is ideal, but it's not helping to spread false information.)
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here in Germany we have to split our garbage and one "bucket" so to speak is compostable and gets taken by the regular garbage trucks and I assume is composted in large facilities. That seems like a more reasonable approach because it scales to a whole city doing it
And then the yellow bags for plastic, which they take to SE Asia on the otherwise empty container-ships, so that it gets dumped on a beach or into a river, while Germany fills its quota for recycling. Sorry for the cynicism, this was the case a few years ago, maybe not anymore?
This definitely happens for plastic. But food waste does tend to actually get composted.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#25Compost bin that requires a subscription. You send the compost via mail to a processing facility https://www.fastcompany.com/90834481/nests-co-founder-design...
Wow - they raised $100 million. They're expecting people to pay $33/mo for the service, which includes the grinder/dehydrator bin, plus the cost of mailing the dense milled organics back to their processing facility. Figure that actual physical expenses cost $18/mo, leaving $15/mo profit per household; on top of that, they'll have extensive marketing costs - let's say marketing & employee costs take another $10/mo, l…
> How did they possibly win over investors?
Low interest rates have shifted massive amounts of capital to vc. We’re talking trillions possibly, including sovereign funds and ultrabillionaire family offices.
Are those wealth and investment managers nuts? Maybe, but I’ve concluded the most likely explanation is that they know exactly how to play the vc game: place a number of wild bets and hope that one in a hundred pays off. They sometimes seem to barely do due diligence, perhaps for efficiency and speed in allocation, and because the vc portion of their otherwise well-diversified portfolio is tiny. You and I get to partake in the schadenfreude if these stupid ventures collapse but they’re wiping their tears with the returns they make on other asset classes - stocks back then, fixed income now, etc.
If interest rates go back to the “old normal” for a sustained period of time then maybe this ends, but maybe the new normal is here to stay. We’ve been told there’d be a big cleanse of stupid or otherwise unprofitable ideas (can we really cram more SaaS solutions into every single niche under the sun?) but I’m seeing very little of the sort, other than layoffs and downsizings which are not thus far commensurate with the fireworks we were promised.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#26Gecko inspired sticky tape which is so strong (and yet non-sticky) that 4 of them lying on a curved surface can pull a car.
Veritasium video https://youtu.be/vS0TuIPoeBs?t=640
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#27Deep fakes certainly hit me wrong. Especially given how easy it is to do to celebrities.
It started off with mundane stuff with a great message: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ54GDm1eL0
Then South Park guys, Trey Parker, doing absolutely hilarious deep fake video. They make Al Gore and Trump say poop. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WfZuNceFDM
But then basically the same time I saw deep fakes presented as true. Trump saying dumber things than normal. Biden appearing like he has late stage dementia. None of it true. As an outside observer of american politics... pretty damned concerning.
But then I read a real statistic. 95% of deep fakes... are to make fake porn. Women who have never done porn now have tons of porn made of them. Worse yet, you can't do anything about it. You dont own the copyright. There is no copyright infringement. You cant sue for royalties because they assert its not you and you never did porn.
So the USA/DHS decided they would try to police this. Try to get this all under control. They proceed to put a registered spy in charge of it who only policed 1 side of the aisle.
So this technology is destabilizing the USA and heading directly toward... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_American_Civil_War
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#28Energy with magnetics: https://www.KryonEngine.org
The great thing about perpetual motion machines is that you don't need to spend a lot of time digging through all the details, and you don't even need to be well-versed in physics, to understand that they're impossible. You just have to know that energy cannot be created or destroyed.
Two items of note from their FAQ:
> "Except for the usual forces such as mechanical friction, resistance due to air, etc., no major force opposes this movement to the point of canceling it. "
Yes, and those "usual forces" require additional energy input to overcome.
> "The correct application of the Law of Thermodynamics (a) refers to closed systems which (b) exist in a reality of which 100% is known and understood. Both (a) and (b) can only ever be true with absolute certainty in theory, but never within the limited perception of reality how humankind experiences it - in other words: How much sense does it make to think that a system which is observed in only 4 dimensions can never and will never be influenced by what is contained and happening in the following 8 (higher) dimensions?"
So they're using magnets to pull energy from other dimensions. Got it!
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#29Compost bin that requires a subscription. You send the compost via mail to a processing facility https://www.fastcompany.com/90834481/nests-co-founder-design...
Wow - they raised $100 million. They're expecting people to pay $33/mo for the service, which includes the grinder/dehydrator bin, plus the cost of mailing the dense milled organics back to their processing facility. Figure that actual physical expenses cost $18/mo, leaving $15/mo profit per household; on top of that, they'll have extensive marketing costs - let's say marketing & employee costs take another $10/mo, l…
There is the part where they expect to earn back from reselling the compost.
> Mill has partnered with two processing facilities that purchase and turn all this dried food into a chicken feed ingredient, filtering out any errant forks or inorganic materials that accidentally get tossed in the bin.
The bit about filtering out inorganic material seems a little too convenient to gloss over though.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#30Compost bin that requires a subscription. You send the compost via mail to a processing facility https://www.fastcompany.com/90834481/nests-co-founder-design...
Wow - they raised $100 million. They're expecting people to pay $33/mo for the service, which includes the grinder/dehydrator bin, plus the cost of mailing the dense milled organics back to their processing facility. Figure that actual physical expenses cost $18/mo, leaving $15/mo profit per household; on top of that, they'll have extensive marketing costs - let's say marketing & employee costs take another $10/mo, l…
I paid around that much to have my compost picked up from my apartment weekly. They would drop off a reuseable bucket for the upcoming week and pick up the bucket from the previous week.