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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?

#341

Post by gabythenerd »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #335

Expensive AR glasses. You can see through them like they aren’t there, then when they are turned on your entire field of view is a powerpoint screen with edit-ability levels of clarity. Surprised to see that this is close to mainstream, can’t wait to turn on my monitors while at a bench by the river.

I was just going to post this, AR glasses are getting really impressive, although I tried to get a pair and almost all companies are either in the "Coming Soon" stage or perpetually out of stock.

Also tried getting the enterprise Google Glasses but it's difficult getting them as a hobbyist.

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

#342

Post by v8xi »

jcims wrote: post #91
agumonkey wrote: post #50

not sure if it qualifies as technology: - nicolas schabanel team works on molecular DNA programming, they had game of life capable structures made of DNA tiles. The mentioned being capable of transpiling tiny lambda calculus expressions but were stuck (this was in 2013~) due to thermal degradation on long programs. His courses are on dailymotion. - michael levin morphogenesis / developmental biology research: dude re…

I truly feel there’s going to be some kind of industrial revolution with DNA or derivative based manufacturing.

Its just getting revved up :)

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

#343

Post by gwbas1c »

dcminter wrote: post #329

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)

Furhat is a social robot: It's basically a humanoid head that sits on a desk, and people are supposed to interact with it as a person.

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

#344

Post by barbazoo »

jaywalk wrote: post #272
barbazoo wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not a lot. Babies when they're born have billions of neurons but believe me, there isn't much going on yet :)

What a deeply disturbing comment.

What's "deeply disturbing" about that? I just meant that cognitively there isn't much going on yet.

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

#345

Post by antipotoad »

jcims wrote: post #172
guerrilla wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, it does make sense to have a higher tolerance for false positives than false negatives in this domain. I think that's a hard thing for people to accept though since so far it's been very obvious the objects and systems we interact with have not been conscious (except to pansychists of course.) It might be good to get practice in and build the habit early though, even if we don't think these current syste…

Exactly. In the instance it doesn't seem warranted at all, but at some point we will have to accept 'whistleblower' type accounts of the same nature with a bit less excoriation.

Also in a subsequent interview with the Google engineer [1], it comes out that the sentience claim was a bit of an attention grab, but with the reasonable purpose of airing the topic of AI ethics, and how machine learning is running way ahead of our thinking on its consequences.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgCUn4fQTsc

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

#346

Post by iliane5 »

twic wrote: post #259
krsw wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not much worse than a number of people I've talked with, to be honest.

Ha ha only serious - for me, the most profound thing about ChatGPT and friends is that they show how much of human behaviour is not actually intelligent in some deep sense.

The fact that a "dumb", generative model that is simply predicting the next token when given a prompt can talk so well, perform complex tasks and interact with humans in such a convincing manner is pretty fascinating.

There is obviously more to human intelligence than text based conversation but it is pretty humbling that such an aspect of ourselves can be replicated and be so convincing at such an early stage and perform better than some humans even when it makes stuff up: toddlers can't talk, kids are smarter but don't have the technical knowledge, most adults only have a few specific areas of expertise, etc.

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

#347

Post by alistairSH »

ericpauley wrote: post #299
alistairSH wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt many people would argue against their usefulness. The problem is management of the scooters when not in use. Even out in the suburbs, the local sidewalks have them discarded haphazardly. Not in a charging stand, not in a group, just ad hoc lying across the sidewalk. The bike share has dedicated stands for groups of 10-20 bikes - this makes far more sense to me than users just dropping them in the sidewalk or…

This feels like largely an issue of societal norms. People leave their cars sitting all over the place and nobody complains. For sure there are places they shouldn’t be left, like right in the middle of the sidewalk. But maybe the expectation of every scooter being in a dock is too extreme.

People don't generally park their cars in yards, across sidewalks, or in the woods. All places I've come across electric push scooters. Sure, cars are ubiquitous, but people mostly park them in designated parking spaces (also ubiquitous) or risk a parking ticket, boot, or tow.

DC adopted a parking zone strategy for the scooters. Haven't been downtown in a while, but imagine that could work without dedicated docks.

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

#348

Post by postultimate »

O__________O wrote: post #200
wolframhempel wrote: post #189

"Petmiglia" - a 360 degree automated pet drying chamber I came across at IFA. If your dog is scared of a hairdryer, why not put him in the hairdryer? http://en.petmiglia.com/

Surprised they just didn’t combine an automated washer with it to make it full service.

https://youtu.be/_VfSl0iGAus?t=25

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

#349

Post by skyde »

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…

For people familiar with how ChatGpT work, is there a youtube video or blog you recommend that explain how it work.

I have a very good understanding of how deeplearning neural network work and language model like "Word2vec" that convert a sentence or a word to a vector space.

But I completely fail to understand how Given an initial text as prompt, ChatGpt will produce text that continues the prompt.

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

#350

Post by mrkarezina »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #109

I mean, is there really any question? There is only one answer. Okay, maybe two. Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT. Lot's of surreal stuff out there, but these two ... there is no question. Not one. Living in exponential times.

I was thinking the same thing until I saw things like this in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34503617

Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT are cool, but once you get a better understanding of the model and how it's trained it doesn't seem that exciting personally.

But being able to engineer living organisms? That's sounds like something out of blade runner.

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