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Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?

#61

Post by Ftuuky »

wil421 wrote: post #59
7ewis wrote: post #11

Maybe not weird or surreal enough for HN. But I am amazed by the stability and quality of videos from my drone. It's just amazing that I could easily fly a kilometer away whilst having a live feed of the footage being streamed back to my controller. I have a sub 250g drone, so it's so light yet easily able to withstand pretty strong winds and the videos look great on a big 4K TV afterwards!

I do a lot of kayaking (not white water kayaking) and fishing off my kayak in lakes, rivers, and the ocean on calmer days. Does your style drone have any following features? Looking for something to fly around looking for fish and something that will follow me or do fly-bys when I’m doing something with the family.

Not OP but Skydio might have the drones you need?

Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?

#62

Post by kevstev »

lqet wrote: post #42

ChatGPT. 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…

Agree- so many are dismissing it because its not perfect, but this is an absolutely enormous leap from anything else I have seen in my lifetime, and this crosses the chasm IMHO between "AI is unlikely to really be able to have general applicability" to "AI is probably going to upend life as we know it in our lifetimes."

Maybe it will just peter out at this level like self driving car technology did, but I really doubt it, and it seems to me that the building blocks are already there to commercialize this and use it in a real way. The future is going to be interesting...

Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?

#63

Post by 082349872349872 »

incomingpain wrote: post #27

Deep 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. T…

cf https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/31/opinion/sarah-andersen-ho...

Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?

#64

Post by elil17 »

smallerfish wrote: post #15
mtmail wrote: post #3

Compost 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 you figure those numbers? They don't seem related to any of the content in the article or any other content I can find about them online.

Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?

#65

Post by Gordonjcp »

lqet wrote: post #42

ChatGPT. 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…

Which metre is that supposed to fit? I can't fit that around any psalm I can think of, most of which are 8/6/8/6 metre.

Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?

#66

Post by jvanderbot »

paulgb wrote: post #53
jvanderbot wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's wrong. It's poetic, but incorrect. These tools are about as good as a non specialist with time to undertake some bullshitting.

> These tools are about as good as a non specialist with time to undertake some bullshitting. You’re not wrong, but AI being passably good at bullshitting (while mostly keeping a rhyme/meter) is still mindblowing to me.

It's an amazing accomplishment technically, and that deserves to be emphasized, but it is still not producing reliable outputs.

Subjectively incredible; objectively flawed.

Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?

#67

Post by mkurz »

7ewis wrote: post #11

Maybe not weird or surreal enough for HN. But I am amazed by the stability and quality of videos from my drone. It's just amazing that I could easily fly a kilometer away whilst having a live feed of the footage being streamed back to my controller. I have a sub 250g drone, so it's so light yet easily able to withstand pretty strong winds and the videos look great on a big 4K TV afterwards!

Which drone do you have?

Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?

#68

Post by jvanderbot »

kevinwang wrote: post #57
jvanderbot wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's wrong. It's poetic, but incorrect. These tools are about as good as a non specialist with time to undertake some bullshitting.

I agree that the output is often wrong despite looking right, but in this instance I don't see anything wrong in this example.

Dijkstra's cannot be used as generally as described. A-star can potentially be more general, but that's highly dependent on heuristic. Dinkstras is a-star with a "min weight on shortest path first" heuristic. Because a star doesn't expand shortest paths first necessarily, it cannot necessarily find the shortest path to any node except the prescribed endpoint. Dijkstra's will find all shortest paths with cost less than the path to the endpoint, and that's helpful sometimes.

Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?

#69

Post by 7ewis »

wil421 wrote: post #59
7ewis wrote: post #11

Maybe not weird or surreal enough for HN. But I am amazed by the stability and quality of videos from my drone. It's just amazing that I could easily fly a kilometer away whilst having a live feed of the footage being streamed back to my controller. I have a sub 250g drone, so it's so light yet easily able to withstand pretty strong winds and the videos look great on a big 4K TV afterwards!

I do a lot of kayaking (not white water kayaking) and fishing off my kayak in lakes, rivers, and the ocean on calmer days. Does your style drone have any following features? Looking for something to fly around looking for fish and something that will follow me or do fly-bys when I’m doing something with the family.

I have a DJI Mini 3 Pro, it has a feature called Active Track[0] where you highlight a subject on the screen and then select how you'd like it to follow you. It can go alongside you or behind you - can follow things like cars too. Despite the sensors, it can be a little scary getting it to follow you when there are trees or telephone lines nearby, but in a lake or the sea it should be great. There are safety features where if it loses connection to the controller it can hover in place, land or return to home (where it took off from).

[0] - https://store.dji.com/guides/film-like-a-pro-with-activetrac...

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