Zombie pigs : https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02112-0
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Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
301–310 of 512 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#302Earlier 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?!
I'm not really defending the service, and I think it will fail because it looks like a logistical nightmare and I don't understand why people would pay 30 bucks for this, but if it was free it could be somewhat convenient.
Especially in an urban setting if you don't have a compost bin in your building : it's not as ubiquitous as you seem to think.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#303Earlier 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…
Spot on. I am interested in any publications that might have come out of your research if you care to share.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#304ChatGPT. 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…
I suppose this is nit picking, however that is not in the style of a Psalm.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#305Compost bin that requires a subscription. You send the compost via mail to a processing facility https://www.fastcompany.com/90834481/nests-co-founder-design...
Wow - they raised $100 million. They're expecting people to pay $33/mo for the service, which includes the grinder/dehydrator bin, plus the cost of mailing the dense milled organics back to their processing facility. Figure that actual physical expenses cost $18/mo, leaving $15/mo profit per household; on top of that, they'll have extensive marketing costs - let's say marketing & employee costs take another $10/mo, l…
a grinder/dehydrator for organic household garbage would be pretty useful without the service, because desiccated organic garbage won't rot and stink; you can dispose of it at your leisure thereafter, whether by composting, burning, feeding to chickens, or just dumping
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#306If 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.
The even crazier thing about opto is that it's old hat at this point. You can teach an attentive undergraduate lab assistant to do it and a sizeable portion of labs working with any animal short of a primate did or does use it to address questions.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#307I was at the airport recently and the TSA had 3D x-rays which shocked me! Looked like a normal x-ray but the agent was able to orbit around and zoom in on their computer screen.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#308Earlier 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 don't like OpenAI's implementation defaults that much. But the thing is you can have a conversation with an LLM about bullshitting, explore the reasons why it's undesirable and inferior to sincere conversation, and then leverage those points of agreement to modify conversational behavior, at least within the scope of that conversation.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#309If 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…
The phase 1 trials for the Moderna vaccine were ready within 3 months of the first case being recorded in Wuhan. And much of that time was still just bureaucracy and logistics. Sequencing of the viral genome was done in a matter of days and so was the conversion of the DNA sequence to an mRNA vaccine. Then it was months of safety and efficacy studies. If we can prove the long-term safety of the process in it's entirety, we could see vaccines be produced in days.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-clinical-t...