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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?

#181

Post by Acutulus »

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?

I certainly can't see us humans as anything other than that. But if that's true, us human machines seem to have a large number of "low level programs" running in the background that serve to blur the boundary between us and the machines we build and help us to elevate ourselves to a special typing in the universe that very well may not exist.

I feel I think too much about mundane things and sometimes about wondrously confusing things often to my detriment. And at least a few times a week I would swear I run into a person with the opposite problem. Their behavior, choices, preferences. Their thought processes (at least what they share with me) come off as closer to machine than human.

Something in my gut tells me we are more similar to some of the things we build than we might care to admit.

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

#182

Post by rsync »

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..!

Agreed.

I am a compost consumer and I have no desire to plasticize my pastures and fields the same way we’ve filled the oceans with plastic.

You can see this for yourself: just go to Home Depot and buy a bag of dirt … it’s not even micro plastics … whole objects like ballpoint pens and so on.

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

#183

Post by danuker »

pkalinowski wrote: post #175

Unreal Keanu: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FeHzQizPDNg people in the comments have no idea it's a deepfake. Without knowing beforehand, I wouldn't recognize it too.

Here it is as a non-Short: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeHzQizPDNg

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

#184

Post by soperj »

hedora wrote: post #83
smallerfish wrote: post #15

Earlier 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.)

Honestly if you have a big enough pile, just bury the waste in the compost. Or get a Green Cone Solar Digester, I've literally put hunks of meat & coconut husks and it just disappears, no rodents, no smell. I was putting buckets of compost in there every week and it would just melt into the earth.

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

#185

Post by googlryas »

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!

It seems like every amateur or even personal production has these big beautiful sweeping aerial shots now, when 10 years ago it would be only available to medium size productions that could rent a commercial drone, and 20 years ago only available to large productions that could afford to rent a helicopter.

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

#186

Post by rsync »

yourapostasy wrote: post #143
eitland wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"... I was impressed with the level of fastidious compliance ..."

Diversity is neither bad nor good - it just has benefits and costs.

You witnessed one of the costs.

On the other hand, we invented jazz and snowboarding. Those are examples of benefits.

I prefer the diversity.

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

#187

Post by richiebful1 »

bilsbie wrote: post #117
7ewis wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I have insurance with 'Flyaway Coverage'. Still have to pay a fee and there's a limit to the number of claims you can make over a time period but it's a lot cheaper than buying a new drone.

Wow how much is it? Where do you buy it? Is it worth it for a sub $500 drone?

Looks like something you can buy with a DJI drone from their online store.

https://store.dji.com/guides/dji-care-refresh-flyaway-covera...

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

#190

Post by wongarsu »

wolframhempel wrote: post #189

"Petmiglia" - a 360 degree automated pet drying chamber I came across at IFA. If your dog is scared of a hairdryer, why not put him in the hairdryer? http://en.petmiglia.com/

*pet drying chamber, in case anyone else was confused. Definitely surreal.
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