"Strandbeest": crawling robots powered entirely by wind - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C97kMKwZ2-g
Takes me back to Soda Constructor. It would be fun to incorporate wind and sails into the model.
Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
251–260 of 512 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#252Maybe 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!
Absolutely this - I was completely blown away by the technology since it was a long long childhood dream for me (to fly or control something flying remotely).
I've flown the thing off the top of the volcano (at 3000 meters), and in heavy wind and clouds and was amazed how stable it is, how easy you can fly one and the 4k video it generates is breathtaking.
One thing I still want for this is to remove 500m ceiling and being able to pierce the clouds fast - not sure if this is possible anywhere since it's probably dangerous and illegal, but that would complete my childhood dream I think (short of actually learning to fly a real small plane or a glider).
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#253If 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 or…
A project I was involved in was using optical flow to quantify the beating of cardiomyocytes grown in culture. I've done plenty of tissue culture but watching sheets of cells actually beat at a reasonable heart rate was still pretty wild.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#254If 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 or…
Oscillations are also sort of a "freebie": if Thing A can temporarily inhibit the activity of Thing B and vice versa, activity will start pinging back and forth.
It's certainly a neat step forward towards studying brain activity, but the idea that organoids are sitting there dreaming is a bit much.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#255All 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 a wild misstatement of what is going on. Morphogenesis is primarily governed by chemical interactions between proteins, on cell surfaces and secreted into intercellular space, as has been studied for decades:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_biology
And the proteins, and the maps and schedules for their production, and the machinery which gives them effect, are all encoded in the DNA.
I haven't actually followed Levin's recent work, so i don't know if he's going round actively misleading people about this, or if people are hearing about his work and assuming that's the whole story. To be honest, from what i've heard, he seems like a crank.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#256If 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…
...not only that, they also developed something like precursors to eyes. As in light sensitive cells.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/mini-brains-grown-...
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#257ChatGPT. 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…
Agree- so many are dismissing it because its not perfect, but this is an absolutely enormous leap from anything else I have seen in my lifetime, and this crosses the chasm IMHO between "AI is unlikely to really be able to have general applicability" to "AI is probably going to upend life as we know it in our lifetimes." Maybe it will just peter out at this level like self driving car technology did, but I really doub…
Agree- so many are dismissing it because its not perfect
In fact, I'd submit that phenomenon as its own entry in the Weirdest or Most Surreal Tech Trend contest. People who, when confronted with a talking dog, say things like, "This talking dog is an idiot. It thinks 429 is prime, its painting looks like something from Bob Ross on acid, and the C++ code it wrote for me is full of bugs. I don't see what all the hype is about."
Some of this dismissiveness is just whistling past the graveyard, but much of it comes from people who genuinely think the human brain is something that operates by means of ethereal, ineffable, and unreproducible mystic forces.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#258If 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 or…
how far away is this from a 'two guys with the same name fucking around in a garage' (Apple mythical origin story) sort of setting?
Like when can I be a mad scientist making irregular beating sheets of chicken heart muscle in my basement?
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Not much worse than a number of people I've talked with, to be honest.
Ha ha only serious - for me, the most profound thing about ChatGPT and friends is that they show how much of human behaviour is not actually intelligent in some deep sense.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh yeah this one... This really disturbs me. I can't shake the feeling that it might be conscious somehow; trapped, enslaved and tortured like some kind of Black Mirror episode.
Probably not a lot. Babies when they're born have billions of neurons but believe me, there isn't much going on yet :)
No, I don't believe you at all. If you hurt the baby, it suffers. Inability of most people to remember those times, doesn't make that not the case.