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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?

#311

Post by swamp40 »

twic wrote: post #295
bglazer wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks, this makes sense. I think my reduction and your quibble is really a matter of semantics. It's true that the genome doesn't contain explicit coordinates for every feature of every cell. But at the same time, if you start with the same DNA, you get the same morphogenesis, and if you start with different DNA, you get different morphogenesis, so i would say the morphogenesis is very much encoded in the DNA. It's…

> if you start with the same DNA, you get the same morphogenesis

Then how do you explain their creation of xenobots using only frog DNA?

That was the whole point of the experiment - to disprove your statement.

https://wyss.harvard.edu/news/team-builds-first-living-robot...

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

#312

Post by iamwizard »

tbenst wrote: post #296
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…

As an experimental neuroscientist that has recorded fairly extensively from brain organoids, I would advise that these are HIGHLY underdeveloped cultures. When patch clamping, I had to depolarize neurons in a human brain organoid to -25mV to trigger action potentials (normally -60mV is sufficient; healthy neurons resting membrane potential is -70mV) Despite imaging organoids for hours with light sheet—a functional im…

As someone who recently left the field of experimental neuroscience, anecdotes like this hit at why media coverage of neuroscience is so sensationalized and reductive: it takes a lot of nuance and background to convey the impact of any given finding.

In a lot of cases being even slightly reductive of EXACTLY what was reported immediately destroys the meaning and context of a finding. It's a field that actively resists compression of information and is so heterogeneously interdisciplinary that having the correct context to interpret a finding even within the field is often difficult.

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

#313

Post by kragen »

adenozine wrote: post #194

The availability of different peripherals on smartphones. The first time FaceID succeeded in the dark, with my grizzled, bearded, asleep, partially obscured face I remember the flicker of amazement that I used to feel all the time thirty years ago when everything was new. I sometimes think about my phone the way I think about a blank piece of paper before I write in it, just the sheer magnitudes of magnitudes of poss…

the tx-0 that was the predecessor of the dec pdp-1 had simd instructions in 01958

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

#315

Post by bglazer »

twic wrote: post #295
bglazer wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks, this makes sense. I think my reduction and your quibble is really a matter of semantics. It's true that the genome doesn't contain explicit coordinates for every feature of every cell. But at the same time, if you start with the same DNA, you get the same morphogenesis, and if you start with different DNA, you get different morphogenesis, so i would say the morphogenesis is very much encoded in the DNA. It's…

Yeah sounds like we are both expressing the same idea.

I’m usually pretty touchy about software analogies for biology but “decompression machinery includes the laws of physics” is a good way to frame it.

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

#316

Post by Thrymr »

rcme wrote: post #30
smallerfish wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I paid around that much to have my compost picked up from my apartment weekly. They would drop off a reuseable bucket for the upcoming week and pick up the bucket from the previous week.

It's a reasonable local business for a waste disposal company. How is a VC funded company expecting "tech-like" returns?

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

#317

Post by anigbrowl »

xeromal wrote: post #162
rpdillon wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does produce reliable outputs?

Humans?

lol no. LLMs get things wrong, but they don't lose their shit when you point it out. I find it pleasant rather than frustrating to work on problems with one; the shortcoming for me as a sort of sort of conditioned passivity that arises out of its orientation to search its own knowledge for correct answers rather than asking questions.

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

#318

Post by O__________O »

jgilias wrote: post #314

Inducing aging in mice and then reversing the process using gene therapy. https://hms.harvard.edu/news/loss-epigenetic-information-can...

Prior HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34362210

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

#319

Post by swamp40 »

abledon wrote: post #245
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 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-...

Yes, you can literally see the pattern of the face. And change it. Can you imagine the next 50 years?

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

#320

Post by [deleted] »

hassancf wrote: post #297
roughly wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm wondering if there's anything I can contribute to that field as someone with general programming capabilities. Oh there Absolutely is! In general, there are four really high impact areas for computer folks - automation of lab equipment allows for scaling the number of experiments and the data that can be gathered by orders of magnitude; data science and engineering to sort, catalog, and investigate that data; b…

Glorified tech support for scientists? No thanks.

[deleted]
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