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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?

#321

Post by wnolens »

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…

Until ChatGPT, the term "artificial intelligence" felt like a misnomer for any of the tech that came out in the last 10y (which seemed mostly like statistical techniques for solving specific optimization problems).

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

#322

Post by tootie »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #76
jvanderbot wrote: post #48

Earlier 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.

It is passing medical exams and will be used to help diagnose issues with similar reliability as humans.

We've been down the AI diagnosis path before and even a purpose-built system failed to live up. I think that GPT, much like Tesla autopilot, is going to spend a very long time ironing out it's "last mile" before anyone will trust it. The tendency for AI to be spectacularly wrong when it fails to grasp context is still pretty prevalent.

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

#324

Post by ausbah »

jeffwask wrote: post #106

The Mobility Scooter craze. South Park nailed it. One day there were a couple scooters and you went oh interesting. A moth later there were thousands clogging every sidewalk with no discernible method of managing these devices. Then just like they came they were gone. How many billions spent? How much e-waste was generated?

they are still very prevalent in seattle. not as much of an issue so long as ppl stick to empty sidewalks and bike lanes

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

#325

Post by ok_dad »

klntsky wrote: post #4
mtmail wrote: post #3

Compost bin that requires a subscription. You send the compost via mail to a processing facility https://www.fastcompany.com/90834481/nests-co-founder-design...

We should normalize having chickens in the office.

I have chickens roaming wild outside my office window, and I assure you that meetings are not much fun with "BOK BOK BOK..." resonating constantly through the mic. They are so f-ing loud.

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

#326

Post by abledon »

swamp40 wrote: post #319
abledon wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I bet that this upcoming century will have advances in this field that will validate some of what the ancient monks had going with their concepts of "Chi" in China and "Prana" in India. Their "Energetic Life Force Residing in each cell"

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

#327

Post by a123b456c »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #267
raptor556 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 produc…

Ok how do we know you're not a bot?

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

#328

Post by skrbjc »

ubermonkey wrote: post #290

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 p…

My brother had a shoulder surgery that he put off for many years. The doctor actually told him that he did the right thing because the type of surgery he needed has some such a long way in the last 10 years.

It's great that we're still making so much progress in these areas.

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

#329

Post by dcminter »

I don't know if it fully qualifies, but I enjoyed this one: https://furhatrobotics.com/

They're definitely a bit different to your typical bear (I cannot help but wonder why they don't pursue the more obvious telepresence possibilities of the device for example)

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

#330

Post by afpx »

iamwizard wrote: post #312
tbenst wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 resist…

Why did you leave the field? The compensation?
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