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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?

#241
All cell networks can contain memories, not just neurons.

Plant and animal body shapes (morphology) are determined from memories stored as voltage gradients) inside cells, not from the DNA. Just like neurons are good at allowing the body to navigate in 3D space (our world), other cell networks are good at creating 3D shapes (leaves, fingers, legs, livers, etc.)

You can decouple them, provide your own voltage gradients and get new body shapes using the same DNA.

https://www.xenobot.group/ https://www.drmichaellevin.org/ https://twitter.com/Kriegmerica

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

#242

USB-C/Thunderbolt is amazing. It blows my mind that you can have a graphics card, plus peripherals, plus storage, all connected by a single cable through a single, hot-pluggable(!) port.

I've recently set up my work laptop and home desktop to run through USB-C. Power/Video/Data to the laptop from the monitor, and Data to the desktop from the monitor, both through USB-C. There's an extra DisplayPort connection to the desktop I'd like to prune someday, but for now it's brilliant to be able to swap one USB-C connection and my monitor, mouse, keyboard, speakers, webcam all work flawlessly. Really helps with work from home, I don't have enough room in my apartment for two desks.

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

#243
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"confidently wrong" That's chatgpt right now. To get it to confidently right will take years and years more

I saw dallE and GPT-2 demos and though 'oh pretty cool' about a year later we've got stable diffusion that can run on phones and ChatGPT which can remember context. I thought these things would be 3-5 years out or more. The speed of development is so quick, I think confidently right LLM is around the corner In less than a decade, I believe front line support chat support jobs and even graphic artist jobs will be made…

The latest models, with the right setup, can already substitute for many (not all) tasks in knowledge jobs such as graphic design, support chat, even programming. I feel like we may be looking at less than 3 or 4 years for a lot of jobs to be mostly obsolete. Or at least, the traditional version of those jobs.

It's already at the point where you start expecting any knowledge worker to be significantly more productive by leveraging these tools.

It's hard to imagine that it will be more than five years before AI tools are available that can handle almost all tasks in these types of jobs.

For example, on my website aidev.codes I just added preliminary knowledgebase support. It can reference the knowledgebase this to write code. I would say that with the code-davinci-002 model at least it seems about at the level of a junior software engineer already since it's pretty effective with close supervision by a senior peogrammer, except for the fact that it cannot interpret visual information.

Knowledgebases/embedding search can also be used right now with these models for answering support questions. The only thing holding it back from very very wide scale adoption is the problem of making up information. There are already solutions in progress for this. It's unlikely that will take more than a few years to roll out and replace the current generation of models. Google and Microsoft will probably roll out their internet-scale chat search interfaces this year even if they can't fully mitigate the hallucination problem immediately.

I would guess more like 2-3 years for many knowledge-based jobs. If you want employment/contracts you will need to be very good at leveraging AI, or people will just use the AIs instead.

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

#245

All cell networks can contain memories, not just neurons. Plant and animal body shapes (morphology) are determined from memories stored as voltage gradients) inside cells, not from the DNA. Just like neurons are good at allowing the body to navigate in 3D space (our world), other cell networks are good at creating 3D shapes (leaves, fingers, legs, livers, etc.) You can decouple them, provide your own voltage gradient…

This is related to the electricity guiding embryo formation of a frog, discovered back in 2011? https://now.tufts.edu/2011/07/18/face-frog-time-lapse-video-...

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

#246

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…

To add: anything to do with optogenetics.

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

TLDR: Input the genes into a nerve cell and now you can fire the nerves with light pulses.

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

#247

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…

I accidentally grew a heart organoid (of sorts) once. Dissected an embryonic chicken heart, cultured it to make "fibroblasts" (mesenchymal stem cells), forgot about them, left them in an incubator for week, and when i came back, the cells had proliferated and covered the dish in a sheet of cardiac muscle, which was beating irregularly.

My takeaway is that cells absolutely love doing stuff. I don't mean to downplay organoid work, it's a huge achievement, but ultimately what it's about is giving cells a chance to do what they're programmed to do.

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

#248
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i imagine a big reason for this is that we don't have a silicon valley of biotech pumped with VC money. and presumably a big reason for that is there's all kinds of red tape when it comes to health and humans. no such thing as "disrupting" if you're going to violate some intense laws and then get arrested for it or get your labs shut down. or even worse, the potential resulting violence from fundamentalists surroundi…

TBF, San Diego and Boston are the centers for Biotech. The issues you raise are the correct ones.

Also Oyster Point in South San Francisco (north of Silicon Valley) is a massive biotech hub.

In some way hubs are even more important in biotech than in software because of the massive startup cost.

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

#249

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…

I agree, I think we're pretty early in harnessing bioengineering, compared to what we do internally literally without thinking about it.

how far along is yeast mutation?

I've fantasized about retiring to somewhere remote and starting a yeast radiation garden, to experiment with using those micro-machines to re-assemble matter for us

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

#250
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

i imagine a big reason for this is that we don't have a silicon valley of biotech pumped with VC money. and presumably a big reason for that is there's all kinds of red tape when it comes to health and humans. no such thing as "disrupting" if you're going to violate some intense laws and then get arrested for it or get your labs shut down. or even worse, the potential resulting violence from fundamentalists surroundi…

> no such thing as "disrupting" if you're going to violate some intense laws and then get arrested for it or get your labs shut down. or even worse, the potential resulting violence from fundamentalists surrounding your campus, or stalking employees. scary stuff

Or, you know, actually "disrupt" something, like endocrine system of half a million people, or the entire global economy.

For the past decade, "Uber for Biotech" was my go-to scary hypothetical to post in HN comments. I'm increasingly worried we may actually get one for real.

(And to be absolutely clear: I'm fine with the biotech part itself. I'm worried about the consequences of using it to frack markets, SV-style.)

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