This https://youtu.be/vS0TuIPoeBs It's just amazing
It's about gecko tape, tape that imitates how a gecko's feet adhere to surfaces. By Veritasium, FYI.
Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
41–50 of 512 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#42ChatGPT. This is the only technology that truly freaked me out in my lifetime (I am 35). It competently explained to me the difference between Dijkstra's algorithm and A* in a psalm-like poem [0]. It was able to find misspelled words in a long text I just made up, list them in alphabetical order, and explain to me why I misspelled them. It correctly simulated a ChatGPT instance which was accessible via a HTTP API, and it correctly simulated a Linux machine on which this simulated remote ChatGPT-API was accessed via curl. It was able to give the responses in XML, JSON, CSV, and other formats, and it was able to simulate Linux tools like cut, grep, sort, awk, jq, sed and others. It was able to add an additional layer of a ChatGPT simulation without problems. It was able to do entity recognition in a long text I provided, and was able to list the entities in a table, with the correct wikipedia article and a summary of the article as columns. It was able to do rudimentary public transit route planning in my home town in Germany (in the form of: go the XY Station, trains will run every 15 minutes from there to the main station, from there you will have long distance lines to Z, etc.), with an apology that it does not have current schedule data for Germany and I should visit bahn.de for better results. When it failed for math questions, it was able to give me Wolfram Alpha queries to find the correct results. It was able to formulate complex SPARQL queries to query Wikidata, run these against the simulated ChatGPT instance via a curl request, grep out some results I wanted, and list them in tabular form with corresponding Wikipedia articles.
All of this in one session, as part of a pleasant conversation, basically indistinguishable from a conversation with a real human.
[0]
> Could you explain the difference between A* and Dijkstra's algorithm in the style of a Psalm?
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#43Compost bin that requires a subscription. You send the compost via mail to a processing facility https://www.fastcompany.com/90834481/nests-co-founder-design...
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
Here in Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA, they are planning to ship compostable plastic bags to homes, which you can use to put organics into the normal metal/paper/plastic recycling stream. Those bags get picked out at the recycling center and used for compost to sell to local farms/etc and (hopefully) at least pay for the program, and maybe even bring in some extra funds. No extra cost to users or hassle mailing packages of garbage (lol).
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#44This video on Helion impressed me, though admittedly I know very little about nuclear fusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#45This https://youtu.be/vS0TuIPoeBs It's just amazing
I've been seeing videos about this for probably 20 years (here's a link from 2009 https://phys.org/news/2009-06-gecko-feet-advances-science-fr...). But it's starting to seem like an elusive graphene-type material that will never be commercialized :(
When can I finally buy some gecko gloves, damnit!
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#46Without a doubt ChatGPT. Still surprises me daily.
To piggyback, it's been almost a year and I still haven't gotten over the first time I saw DALL-E 2. Or the first time I've used GPT-2 (via AI Dungeon Google Collab sheet). Not sure when was the previous last time I've felt that sense of wonder. Perhaps the first time I've interacted with the original iPhone?
Edit: I remembered some more from the past:
- First Boston Dynamics Atlas videos.[0]
- First successful Falcon 9 landing[1].
- A video explaining how the Curiosity landing will be done and then watching the stream when it happened.[2]
- The concurrent landing of two Falcon Heavy boosters on land.[3]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANv5UfZsvZQ
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pa…
It's true, but the raise _just happened_, which means there's still loose VC money out there. The narrative has been that there's been a transition to more conservative funding...apparently not in this case, at least.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#48ChatGPT. This is the only technology that truly freaked me out in my lifetime (I am 35). It competently explained to me the difference between Dijkstra's algorithm and A* in a psalm-like poem [0]. It was able to find misspelled words in a long text I just made up, list them in alphabetical order, and explain to me why I misspelled them. It correctly simulated a ChatGPT instance which was accessible via a HTTP API, an…
That's wrong. It's poetic, but incorrect. These tools are about as good as a non specialist with time to undertake some bullshitting.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#49Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#50not sure if it qualifies as technology:
- nicolas schabanel team works on molecular DNA programming, they had game of life capable structures made of DNA tiles. The mentioned being capable of transpiling tiny lambda calculus expressions but were stuck (this was in 2013~) due to thermal degradation on long programs. His courses are on dailymotion.
- michael levin morphogenesis / developmental biology research: dude revived 50s~ ideas with gap junctions and cell levels "information processing" .. he ended up regrowing a second head on a larva after reprogramming cell messaging to alter the natural regeneration process. He was in a lot of interviews/podcasts in the last months.