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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?

#281

Post by throw_pm23 »

dtx1 wrote: post #32
throw_pm23 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then the yellow bags for plastic, which they take to SE Asia on the otherwise empty container-ships, so that it gets dumped on a beach or into a river, while Germany fills its quota for recycling. Sorry for the cynicism, this was the case a few years ago, maybe not anymore?

I don't see what you are trying to say here? That we shouldn't even try to recycle anymore because some garbage gets shipped to SE Asia?

Which is better for the environment, taking it a few kilometers outside of Berlin and burying it in a landfill that is properly insulated and managed, or shipping it across to world and dropping it on a beach in Thailand where turtles and birds get tangled into it?

The first is what happens with your regular garbage, the second is what happens (with some fraction) of the "recycled" yellow bag plastic.

I was not trying to say anything particular, just how "recycling" has become a form of gaslighting to avoid the tough question of how to produce less garbage in the first place.

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

#282

Post by kragen »

jvanderbot wrote: post #48
lqet wrote: 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…

That's wrong. It's poetic, but incorrect. These tools are about as good as a non specialist with time to undertake some bullshitting.

what's incorrect about it

as far as i can tell it seems perfectly correct but admittedly my understanding of a* search is limited to messing with amit's visualizations of it

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

#283

Post by roughly »

Teever wrote: post #258
twic wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There are a bunch of biohacker spaces around, and they’ll often run classes - small scale lab work isn’t actually that restrictive, cost or resource wise.

Also, The Odin - https://www.the-odin.com/ - sells DIY kits and classes (and is just generally one of my favorite groups of weirdos)

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

#284

Post by iamwizard »

milesvp wrote: post #268
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 g…

Neurons don't do a substantial amount of self-organizing without hormone gradients and other external factors to cause them to organize. It's unfortunately inherently difficult to generalize the function and organization of neurons since there are not only hundreds, or more, distinct classes, but each class has thousands of inputs and outputs to the local and distant network that almost all have an important impact on their function, and the generation of this network of inputs and outputs and what factors affect their operation, is highly dependent on the exact subclass of neuron in question.

Mapping neural outputs of some small network to some operation is easy since all you're concerned with is the output, not the actual operation and organization of the network. Scientists could get macaques to play Pong using electrodes (like what Musk demonstrated with Neuralink) since, iirc, the 80s. This is also the exact reason that neural nets tell us nothing about the actual function of the brain.

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

#286

Post by twic »

Teever wrote: post #258
twic wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You'd need:

fresh fertilized chicken eggs

lab gloves

an egg incubator

a dissecting microscope

tissue culture dishes

phosphate-buffered saline

a pipette pump

10 ml pipettes

two pairs of dissecting tweezers

70% ethanol solution

kimwipes

lab gloves

a steady hand

tissue culture medium (DMEM is fine)

fetal calf serum

penicillin-streptomycin mix

a micropipette

micropipette tips

a tissue culture incubator

a tank of carbon dioxide

ideally, a laminar flow cabinet, but reasonably careful technique and the pen/strep would probably see you through

So, when? Depends if you have Prime really.

The thing is, growing sheets of cells is not a big step towards doing anything interesting. You need to do chemical and genetic manipulation of the cells, and that's the hard part.

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

#287

Post by yonixw »

adlpz wrote: post #96
Havoc wrote: post #9

The motions on the recent Boston dynamics demo video were eerily realistic and humanlike. Sure preprogrammed but still that smoothness stood out to me as something new

I believe this is the video, for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e1_QhJ1EhQ

In 0:30 you can see the bag changes (the wrinkles), could be just a reshoot, but makes the magic gone.

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

#288

Post by nicd »

Teever wrote: post #258
twic wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think you could do that today? Incubating a cell culture is definitely possible. You can either purchase used lab equipment, or even build your own incubation chamber.

I don't think OP's chicken heart experiment requires genetic tinkering, but even if it did, my understanding is that CRISPR is surprisingly accessible to hobbyists. For example, https://www.the-odin.com/diy-crispr-kit/.

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

#289

Post by irrational »

roughly wrote: post #280
twic wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. What gets tricky is when you’re trying to program the cells to do something different, because they really, really want to do a whole lot of other stuff, and rarely does making your weird enzyme or chemica…

I am a stick.

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

#290

Post by ubermonkey »

Well, this is far afield from the normal discussions here, but:

8 years ago, I had a pretty bad cycling crash and broke my hip -- which, if you're not aware, means I broke the "femoral neck", or the narrow bit of bone between the long part of the femur and the "ball" that goes into your pelvis.

Post-repair, my x-ray looked like this: http://i.imgur.com/gRqg50J.png

Anyway, with that much hardware in a repair, you're probably starting the clock on needing a full replacement. I think they were hoping for 10-15 years, but I got only 8 before joint pain and bone loss forced the issue.

Last Monday -- so, 15 days ago -- I went in at 5AM for a total hip replacement.

Which was done on an OUTPATIENT basis. I walked out of the hospital (with a walker, granted) on the new joint, and was at home in a lounge chair by 5PM. By the end of the week, I was off the walker entirely and using a cane. By day 9, I was routinely moving around the house without even the CANE, though I need it for any meaningful walk.

The main thing I'm supposed to be doing is walking. I could manage a half mile within a week. Last night I walked 1.2 miles at a 30% faster pace than my first half-mile walk. I should be shut of even the cane in another week or two.

To me, this kind of objectively major SKELETON EDIT being effectively banal from a medical POV is pretty surreal. I mean, it's not "put Luke in the bacta tank" surreal, but it's a whole lot closer to that I realized was realistic.

(Now: I'm completely willing to note that the ease I've had with this is tied to a number of factors, including probably first the fact that I live in a top-tier city for this kind of medical attention, and I have excellent health insurance. But still.)

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