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

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221–230 of 512 posts

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

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does produce reliable outputs?

Humans?

Humans, in my experience, have even more reasons to be flawed than the AI. Yes, the AI can be incorrect, but humans can be misled in what they believe the same way, and have the added problems of ego and misaligned incentives. Heck, in this very thread we have one human calling out another for being incorrect about whether or not an AI was correct. Locating sources of reliable truth is an unsolved problem AFAIK.

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

#222

If you're not in the bio field, you may not be aware just how routine genetic modification has become. For the larger companies, projects can involve thousands of different iterations on DNA sequences, all of which are created, put in a cell, grown, sequenced, and analyzed. It's absolutely routine at this point - it's not a science or even engineering challenge project it's an operations project. The one that really…

If I were to restart my career, this is likely the field I'd pursue. I read The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee last year and just became enraptured in the possibilities. I'm wondering if there's anything I can contribute to that field as someone with general programming capabilities.

I just finished that book, it was really good. I can't wait to read The Song of the Cell.

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

#223
Some of the VR movies are getting quite good. First the newer generation headsets- 2K, 90+ fps, cableless- no longer induce nausea. Second, movie makers are becoming versant with the strengths and limits of this media.

One I saw in December called Container, I felt I was in the room with various scenes of realistic 3D people.

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

#224

If you're not in the bio field, you may not be aware just how routine genetic modification has become. For the larger companies, projects can involve thousands of different iterations on DNA sequences, all of which are created, put in a cell, grown, sequenced, and analyzed. It's absolutely routine at this point - it's not a science or even engineering challenge project it's an operations project. The one that really…

If I were to restart my career, this is likely the field I'd pursue. I read The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee last year and just became enraptured in the possibilities. I'm wondering if there's anything I can contribute to that field as someone with general programming capabilities.

Except somehow the required education is much higher and the pay is much worse than software, right?

I’m personally surprised we don’t have 20x as many people working in biotech.

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

#225
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 a…

I've been talking about this for awhile now, but I used to run a marketing service that streamed all reddit content in real time and did text analysis and bot detection. It's definitely a rough estimate but about ~65% of text content was determined to be a bot. I am entirely convinced that there are large entities (political campaigns, nations, etc.) that are using bot networks on social media sites like reddit to simulate "consensus" in online discussions and thus gently sway public opinion.

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

#226
post #59
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.

I think Skydio has the best autonomous follow feature I’ve seen so far.

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

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were to restart my career, this is likely the field I'd pursue. I read The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee last year and just became enraptured in the possibilities. I'm wondering if there's anything I can contribute to that field as someone with general programming capabilities.

Except somehow the required education is much higher and the pay is much worse than software, right? I’m personally surprised we don’t have 20x as many people working in biotech.

[deleted]

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

#228
post #59
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.

I thought about that too and they are all not watertight. There are Swellpros that are, but they are not hobby drones. And their specs are no match to current hobby drones.

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

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the impact analysis should be between a compost cycle that uses mail vs no compost cycle, because I would imagine that the alternative to this is just throwing food in the trash for most people

Blows my mind that that's a thing. If it's urban, how is there no compost bin system. If it's rural, just have a compost bin outside. It's like people don't know how to live anymore with every part of their lives being handled by some shitty subscription service. Food, waste, what's next, a box you can ship your poop in that's 39 bucks a year?!

Turd.ly

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

#230
post #167

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.

I believe the data gets trained by human rankers, and it should therefore regress to their mean. That said, if they train it to seek approval, I suppose we could teach it like any other student.
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