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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?

#261

Post by roughly »

volkk wrote: post #237
epicureanideal wrote: post #224

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…

Well, even getting past the human/medical side - one thing the computer/VC people miss coming into the field is Bio is both expensive and not amenable to the kinds of growth/pricing curves computers have been. It costs money to grow a cell strain in a tube, but to grow 100 cell strains, it costs… 100x as much. It takes 24 minutes for E.coli to reproduce, but in another couple years we’ll be able to get that down to… 24 minutes. There’s opportunities for improving the cost, reducing the spend on reagents (or finding better ones), reducing the number of strains required, that kind of thing, but the computer/internet/digital industry’s basically priced a Moore’s law curve in on everything, and that just doesn’t work in Bio. The capital costs are large and the time to iterate is really slow compared to digital.

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

#262

Post by twic »

jvanderbot wrote: post #122
lqet wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your definition of "general" here? The classic shortest path problem (which the psalm addresses) is described as finding the shortest path between two nodes, and given non-negative edge weights, Dijkstra's algorithm is perfectly general here. It will find such a shortest path in any graph, no further restrictions. For A*, everything depends on the heuristic, as you said. If h(v) = 0, A* is equivalent to Dijks…

> Dijkstra's algorithm is a general one, That can be used in any case, I take issue with this statement. "any case" implies it's more general than A star, which is not true, it's a specialization of A star with (ok you win) h(v) set to nothing. It necessarily cannot solve as many problems as a star. And Dijkstra's won't work in "any case" at all, esp graphs with negative edge weights. The explanation struck me as glo…

> It necessarily cannot solve as many problems as a star.

Could you give an example of a positive-weight shortest path problem with A* can solve, but Dijkstra's algorithm cannot? I do not believe there is such a thing. Or did you mean something else?

> And Dijkstra's won't work in "any case" at all, esp graphs with negative edge weights.

A* won't solve those either.

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

#263

Post by nuphonenuacc »

agent281 wrote: post #202
greggsy wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thought of clandestine modding labs and neural implants brings to mind a future similar to Ghost in the Shell.

At this point I feel like people must also be trying to modify their DNA in secret. I wonder if we'll hear some horror stories in the next few years.

Search for lactose intolerance in the linked channel. Not completely secret.

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

#264

Post by heywherelogingo »

barbazoo wrote: post #213
guerrilla wrote: post #81

Earlier 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 :)

"believe me" - he could well have been a baby himself.

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

#265

Post by rubylark »

barbazoo wrote: post #210
lm28469 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes (often these days) i can't tell if these things are parodies or real products. It reminds me of Juicero: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juicero In Europe many countries have specific trash bins for food waste, they're collected by the city and reused for compost and biogas. No subscriptions, no investors, no soon to be e-waste wifi and bluetooth connected trash can, no shipping dirt in box

Some of their assumptions seem to be very much US based where "green bins" for garden and food waste might not be a thing? I don't know but where I live in Canada, contents of the green bin definitely don't end up in the landfill like they say. So it's not even a problem that needs solving in many other places.

In the US, it depends on the waste services provider, city, and county. I've had garbage companies that offer compost and yard waste services and some not. Sometimes it's provided through the city or county for free or for a fee, though not everywhere

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

#266

Post by natural20s »

AI image generation from text prompts. Midjourney, DallE, etc. These platforms are quickly disrupting the visual art and commercial art world. This isn't just "Putin as a Vampire Riding a Nuclear Bomb" wacky art. If you spend time looking at how these platforms are being used - they are quickly becoming production tools that are helping accelerate ideation and creation. Here are some examples:

* Developing logo concepts - the rendered text is usually wrong but the layout and design can be used to "hand build" a final concept

* Developing UI and web page designs

* Architectural designs and renderings

* Packaging design

Personally I'm using it to develop very niche imagery for a roleplaying game (Welcome to Grimsbury). Everything from postcards, postage stamps, posters, signage and illustrative imagery is coming out of Midjourney. The amount of control I have over the final product, the detail and unexpected "awesomeness" is mind blowing. I just generated a set of vintage postage stamps in the gravure style of scientists opening otherworldly portals. I could print them out and use them to mail a letter.

Artists and illustrators are very concerned about this technology - and rightly so. I was budgeting almost $2,000 to pay for art for my game - now - I spend $10-$20 a month to get hundreds of images that I 100% own the commercial rights to use. This will get me to the Kickstarter phase where I will then use kickstart $$$ to pay an illustrator to help with the final product - but Midjourney gets me launched.

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

#267

Post by TeMPOraL »

raptor556 wrote: post #225
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'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 si…

> It's definitely a rough estimate but about ~65% of text content was determined to be a bot.

A scary number. I wonder about a per-subreddit distribution, though. I imagine the primary subreddits have slightly worse human-to-bot ratio, niche subreddit somewhat better, with non-political, non-easily-monetizable subreddits having the best.

Did your analysis also attempt to identify troll farms? Would the content produced by protein bots be grouped in the ~65% of bot content, or the remaining 35%?

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

#268

Post by milesvp »

roughly wrote: post #214

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…

> These clusters of neurons have been known to start firing and even display synchronized patterns...

This doesn't surprise me at all. Dr. Thomas DeMarse was training rat brain slurries (think brains thrown into a blender) to fly flight simulators in 2004. I've long suspected brain cells tend to self organize and in particular want to minimize change in inputs over time. (and yes this is a gross over simplification given that I know of at least a half dozen types of neurons).

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

#269

Post by twic »

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #218
littlestymaar wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, Keanu Reeves, like Kristen Stewart, isn't the hardest person to deepfake…

Is this because both are actors and therefore there is lots of available training data? Or something even more specific to these two people?

I assume the point is that, like Lindsay Lohan [1], they have limited ranges of facial expression.

[1] https://lohanfacial.ytmnd.com/

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

#270

Post by bglazer »

twic wrote: post #255
swamp40 wrote: post #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 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 act…

I don’t think Levin is a crank. He went on Lex Fridman’s podcast and talked about his bioelectricity work and morphogenesis. Like you said, I think people who don’t know much about development took that to be the whole story, when in reality it’s just one academic doing what academics do best: talk about their own work.

Edit: one small quibble with your comment is that it’s too reductive to say that morphogenesis is all encoded in the DNA. It’s really an emergent property of the whole system. Like DNA is only a few billion base pairs, which is not nearly enough to store the precise positions of every cell, much less every protein.

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