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

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71–80 of 512 posts

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

#71
post #34

Magnetic resonance focused high intensity ultrasound to open the blood-brain barrier in humans to deliver drugs directly to brain tissue - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12426-9

This is interesting to me because my mother has MS and it's _because_ the blood-brain barrier is too open that she has health issues. Surprising there's good reason to open it up.

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

#72
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...

Things like this make me realize how poor the rest of the world is, and how wealthy America is.

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

#73
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.

Shhhh. Just more bullshitting from the computer bullshit machine.

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

#75
post #67
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?

It's a DJI Mini 3 Pro. Never had any experiences with other drones, so can't compare it to others - but I love it!

The new DJI Mini 3 does look good too if you're on more of a budget.

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

#76
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…

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

It is passing medical exams and will be used to help diagnose issues with similar reliability as humans.

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

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There’s usually a lag… raise might’ve happened >1 year ago.

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

#78
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!

[deleted]

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

#79
post #62
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 doub…

ChatGPT is smart enough at the first prompt, but what really stands out - freakily, I might add - is how it can remember earlier data. You can go several levels deep and it will still reference the first answer and contextualize it properly.

"Do X" is great. But "Now change X to Y in the style of Z" is what blows my mind.

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

#80
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…

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 think it captured the essential difference between the two algorithms, i.e. the heuristic, so I don't understand how this is 'bullshit'.
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