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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?

#171

Post by [deleted] »

jollyllama wrote: post #150
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.

[deleted]

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

#172

Post by jcims »

guerrilla wrote: post #110
jcims wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 syste…

Exactly. In the instance it doesn't seem warranted at all, but at some point we will have to accept 'whistleblower' type accounts of the same nature with a bit less excoriation.

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

#176

Post by lofatdairy »

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

I'm aware that Elisa Konofagou at Columbia has done quite a bit of work on this in the past decade if your interested in more:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4038976/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030156290...

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

#177

Post by WoodenChair »

alex_duf wrote: post #169
Acutulus wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

>I can accept a system such as ChatGPT synthesizing from data it sucked in, making educated guesses and so on On that note I find it interesting that this has sometimes been an argument to dismiss chatGPT as "non intelligent". What are we if not statistical machines, synthesizing from the data we've sucked in over our lifetime?

> What are we if not statistical machines, synthesizing from the data we've sucked in over our lifetime?

Reasoning machines who are actually pretty bad at statistics.

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

#178

Post by Keyframe »

soperj wrote: post #167
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.

This is my exact problem with ChatGTP, it looks great when you don't know what it's talking about, but as soon as you do, it looks foolishly over-confident in it's answers which are very clearly wrong.

which are very clearly wrong

but not always; And that's what makes it scary. You know people will use it and trusting it.

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

#179

Post by lofatdairy »

bitcoinmoney wrote: post #104
smrtinsert wrote: post #52

AI 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

I think Replika (https://replika.com/) is one of the bigger ones. I know of it from a few youtube videos making fun of it, but I really don't know how anyone can form an attachment to a chatbot.

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

#180

Post by langitbiru »

bitcoinmoney wrote: post #104
smrtinsert wrote: post #52

AI 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

Replika:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/z34d43/my-ai-is-sexually-har...

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