I remember hearing about an GAN-based tool that would transform clothed pictures of women into nudes. That was depressingly surreal.
Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
101–110 of 512 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#102ChatGPT. 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…
A few months ago, I would have said Stable Diffusion, but ChatGPT wins, hands down.
We're living in exponential times.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#103Earlier 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…
I'd pay $100-200 for the trash can thing. There is a company making a smaller one, with the idea that you toss the output into your own compost pile. It cuts down on odor, rodents and time to compost completion. What happens to the trash can if I stop paying the subscription fee? (Fast forward a few years, and someone will rewrite the above as a postmortem.)
We have a Vitamix Foodcycler [1] we got on sale. It works well but the cycles take a while and it doesn’t process that much at once. Honestly we just went back to using a counter top bucket and then putting it in our municipal food waste bin.
Austin turn all that stuff into compost, and then give it away to the community (just turn up with bags) and I assume use on city run parks and so on.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#104AI nsfw bf/gf apps. It probably just makes sense to this generation but for me, it feels like something out 90s era sci fi.
Any example? Didn’t know these exist
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tha…
I actually think the robot's poetic take matches my thinking more closely than this description
Edit:
I guess in this description dijkstras is more specific, in that dijkstras is the specific instance of A* with a zero heuristic.
But I think what HAL over here was saying is that you can use dijkstras in a superset of scenarios in which you can use (non-trivial) A*, so in that sense dijkstras is more general than A*, so it's not wrong.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#106The Mobility Scooter craze. South Park nailed it. One day there were a couple scooters and you went oh interesting. A moth later there were thousands clogging every sidewalk with no discernible method of managing these devices. Then just like they came they were gone.
How many billions spent? How much e-waste was generated?
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tha…
What is your definition of "general" here? The classic shortest path problem (which the psalm addresses) is described as finding the shortest path between two nodes, and given non-negative edge weights, Dijkstra's algorithm is perfectly general here. It will find such a shortest path in any graph, no further restrictions.
For A*, everything depends on the heuristic, as you said. If h(v) = 0, A* is equivalent to Dijkstra's algorithm, so potentially, it can be as general. But the wrong heuristic (inadmissible, inconsistent) will lead to wrong results, and so calling it a "specialized" tool is correct. The heuristic gives you a specialized version of Dijkstra's algorithm which is faster on specific graphs.
> Dinkstras is a-star with a "min weight on shortest path first" heuristic.
I am not quite sure what you mean here. Dijkstra's algorithm is A* with no heuristic. I am not sure how a "shortest path first" heuristic would look like - do you mean that Dijkstra's algorithm chooses the node to expand next based on its shortest-path cost to the target t? Even if you would construct such a heuristic h(v) = c(v, t) by explicitly calculating c(v, t) each time, this is not what Dijkstra does, as it would basically be a perfect heuristic - you would then only visit nodes on the shortest path.
If you meant that Dijkstra's algorithm is A* with a "neighboring node with shortest path from start node first" heuristic, that's also not strictly true, because expanding the nearest node first is already built-in to A*. A* does not chose the next node v with the smallest h(v), but with the smallest g(v) + h(v), where g(v) is the shortest path cost from the source node to v.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#108Earlier 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.
"confidently wrong" That's chatgpt right now. To get it to confidently right will take years and years more
I saw dallE and GPT-2 demos and though 'oh pretty cool' about a year later we've got stable diffusion that can run on phones and ChatGPT which can remember context. I thought these things would be 3-5 years out or more. The speed of development is so quick, I think confidently right LLM is around the corner
In less than a decade, I believe front line support chat support jobs and even graphic artist jobs will be made obselete
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#109I mean, is there really any question? There is only one answer. Okay, maybe two. Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT.
Lot's of surreal stuff out there, but these two ... there is no question. Not one.
Living in exponential times.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh yeah this one... This really disturbs me. I can't shake the feeling that it might be conscious somehow; trapped, enslaved and tortured like some kind of Black Mirror episode.
This is why I give that engineer at Google a lot of slack for his concerns that Lambda was conscious. There’s a bit of an imperative, in my opinion, to over-index on that concern, because we could be building and torturing things for decades because people are afraid of losing their jobs.
Fair enough, it does make sense to have a higher tolerance for false positives than false negatives in this domain. I think that's a hard thing for people to accept though since so far it's been very obvious the objects and systems we interact with have not been conscious (except to pansychists of course.) It might be good to get practice in and build the habit early though, even if we don't think these current systems are conscious.