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

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131–140 of 512 posts

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

#131
post #12

Energy with magnetics: https://www.KryonEngine.org

Perpetual motion and free energy stuff was interesting things to read about back in early 2000’s internet (around the time when conspiracy theories were kind of niche).

The only thing of interest recently has to be the EmDrive [1] - only because the rigorous testing it was put through finally put the mail in the coffin of backyard free energy nuts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive

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

#132

not 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 re…

It definitely comes straight out of sci-fi at least. In the original Deus Ex, I think when you first break into the Versalife offices in Hong Kong, you can overhear an employee talking about their universal constructors (basically 3d printers that work at the atomic level). The employee mentions one of his friends created Conway's Game of Life with buckyballs.

Edit: nevermind it's a Versalife employee at a nearby bar/club, not in the offices themselves.

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

#133
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…

It's an incredibly striking piece of technology and really shows which way the future winds will likely be blowing. A particular exchange I had with it left a mark on me, in which I requested it to behave like a used car salesman attempting to close a deal with a hungry customer. It proceeded to repurpose idioms, make dad-jokes and sling double entendres about the shared joy of cars and hamburgers and how they both are simple, dependable and iconic in my way of life. I sat there for a minute reading over it, nearly in disbelief.

I can accept a system such as ChatGPT synthesizing from data it sucked in, making educated guesses and so on. But to see it do such lingustic gymnastics with a very non-concrete request was humbling. It's given me a lot of pause about the way I absorb digital information and the varying degrees to which I have implicitly assumed the reliability of that information; site A slightly more trustworthy than site B, et cetera. To me, that old trust heuristic I relied on, one I have honed thanks to unfettered broadband for two decades, is now completely upended. It probably has been for some time to be fair, but my time with ChatGPT really cemented that feeling.

Every freshly written statement that comes to me through an internet connected device now gets a side-eye by default.

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

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should watch "the capture" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Capture_(TV_series) (spoilers in the wiki article).

Thanks for the tip and it does look good but I seem to be watching paw patrol and blippi lately and nothing at all I want to watch.

Lol. This hit me hard.

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

#135
post #12

Energy with magnetics: https://www.KryonEngine.org

”What does Kryon mean?”

”The correct question would be: Who is Kryon? Kryon supports Humanity in many precious ways - not only by dropping hints about upcoming revolutionary technologies based on magnetism, such as (shallow depth) geothermal energy generation, (mass-scale) water desalination and magnetic engines. You are encouraged to tune in to the neverending stream of new free audio channellings.”

It seems a being from another dimension has blessed humankind with a perpetual motion machine. Where do I send my money?

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

#136
post #4
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...

We should normalize having chickens in the office.

I don't think this is very practical. It would cause too many communication issues in the agile process.

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

#137
post #46

Without 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 Falco…

First time I got the "there's something special happening here" vibe was seeing the early "hallucination" images some years ago. Some examples here: https://www.businessinsider.com/these-trippy-images-show-how...

My wild guess for the next 5 years is that we'll have Stable Diffusion with the ability to create NeRF scenes.

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

#139
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thats interesting. When I did play with it a bit, it wasn't clear to me if it was actually doing that, but in hindsight it definitely was and was not just a coincidence. When I first used ChatGPT, I had a dog that recently passed, and she had such a big personality (a mischievous always hungry hunting dog) and was just very different than my other dog (a pitbull mix that likes to guard things), and I had thought that the two of them would be a good basis for a children's book.

I initially put in a prompt like "tell me a story about the hunting dog and the guard dog." and the results were pretty meh. I was interested to see if it was actually pulling in data from FB so I put her name in instead (she had an FB page yes). It did not seem to do much. So I put in some things like "the little hunting dog is always hungry." "the hunting dog is always looking to hunt" and then did a fuller prompt of "the hunting dog and the guard dog are going to the park. tell me a story about it" and finally got a very good fully fleshed out story about how the little dog was on the prowl for a squirrel while the guard dog watched out and it was really well written and made about as much sense as a fictional tale could. There was no awkwardness or other tells that would have made you think that this was written by anything other than a human.

Anyway, that is huge that it can do this. I do remember when I used to play with other chatbots that remembering past context was something they were unable to do, at least not well, but in most cases it seems they didn't even attempt to. ChatGPT has blown me away in many ways, but this is a very specific leap forward.

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

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Have you ever raised chickens, or cleaned out a coop?

Ha! I actually run a company that does Coop cleaning, babysitting, coop set up, day old chick delivery, etc. We're launching the world's best Coop in 45 days, stay tuned :)

Although it sounds funny, this is actually kind of a serious question: are you concerned about an egg bubble?
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