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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?

#141

Post by tricky »

Static2280 wrote: post #71
tricky wrote: 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.

I learned about this from a talk given by one of the authors. The guy next to me asked, "If you open up the blood-brain barrier, doesn't that mean nasty things can cross, too?" and the author was like, "yep." There are definitely risks.

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

#142

Post by treis »

vijayr02 wrote: post #97
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.

So perfectly suited for a management role? :)

They blocked people from generating performance reviews so at least some were trying.

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

#143

Post by yourapostasy »

eitland wrote: post #95
nstart wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is the part where they expect to earn back from reselling the compost. > Mill has partnered with two processing facilities that purchase and turn all this dried food into a chicken feed ingredient, filtering out any errant forks or inorganic materials that accidentally get tossed in the bin. The bit about filtering out inorganic material seems a little too convenient to gloss over though.

As a kid who grew up on a small (by Norwegian standards) dairy farm I remember it confused me that food waste couldn't be sold to farms. As a grown up, seeing all the stuff people put into food waste I can understand it. What I still can't understand though is how many people mistake food wrapping for food..!

> ...how many people mistake food wrapping for food..!

It isn't mistaking, it is not prioritizing the cognitive load for the separation effort. When I was in Japan, I was impressed with the level of fastidious compliance I witnessed in materials separation. That convinced me the talk in the US about how mainstream households could not possibly support a comprehensive cradle-to-cradle materials handling infrastructure are really talking about culture and/or necessity and not logistics.

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

#144

Post by danielvf »

HideousKojima wrote: post #125
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.

Also psalms don't rhyme, even in the original Hebrew. Also even if it is supposed to be a poem with rhyme and meter, ChatGPT's poem doesn't have correct meter.

Agreeing with you. Psalms typically employ parallelism not rhyming. Two examples:

  The sun will not harm you by day,
      nor the moon by night.
and

  My life is consumed by anguish
    and my years by groaning;
  my strength fails because of my affliction,[b]
    and my bones grow weak.

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

#145

Post by JackFr »

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…

That's not even close to the style of a Psalm. It's still pretty cool though.

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

#146

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

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.

Yeah, the DJI Mini 3 Pro is that drone... get the basic controller version.

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

#147

Post by JackFr »

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.

> I don't see anything wrong in this example

It's not in the style of a psalm.

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

#148

Post by huslage »

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...

We should not be mailing compost around...that sort of defeats one of the purposes. There are local composting companies/orgs in most major metropolitan areas. Mine is Compost Now.

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

#149

Post by yreg »

bemmu wrote: post #137
yreg wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wasn't able to realize the scale of the shift that's about to happen back then.

---

I just remembered another example of hearing about something that seemed like pure magic:

Reconstructing what a person is seeing out of their fMRI scan (2011): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo

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

#150

Post by jollyllama »

jeffwask wrote: post #106

The 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?

Mobility scooters are the things disabled people ride. There should be a term to refer to these electric, Razor-style form factor scooters, but I think they are just pushing the Vespa-style scooters (many of which are also electric) into the term moped and taking the term "scooter" for themselves. I call them kid scooters.
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