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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?

#361

Post by skyde »

skyde wrote: post #349
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.

I cant believe it simply use self-attention to generate one word at a time. It got to be more complex than that.

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

#362

Post by CamperBob2 »

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…

And imagine what it would be like if you were actually allowed to access all that power.

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

#363

Post by raydiatian »

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…

SKELETON EDIT could be a sci fi novel name.

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

#364

Post by ryanisnan »

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…

This is incredible. I have heard that surgeons are effectively carpenters of the human body, which minimizes their skills I think a bit unfairly. This is technology at its finest. Congratulations on the speedy recovery!

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

#365

Post by Balgair »

iamwizard wrote: post #306
Balgair wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Care to share the 'new hat' methods?

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

#366

Post by ozim »

kevstev wrote: post #62
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…

Agree- so many are dismissing it because its not perfect, but this is an absolutely enormous leap from anything else I have seen in my lifetime, and this crosses the chasm IMHO between "AI is unlikely to really be able to have general applicability" to "AI is probably going to upend life as we know it in our lifetimes." Maybe it will just peter out at this level like self driving car technology did, but I really doub…

Many are dismissing it because it is just neural network. Which were basically at academic works since 80’s or earlier. It is only that now we have enough hardware and material for training neural nets that they start to be useful.

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

#367

Post by dcminter »

gwbas1c wrote: post #343
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.

What part of that precludes telepresence?

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

#369

Post by roughly »

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.

That’s really not what the job is at this point. At least where I’ve been, there’s an understanding of the strengths of what compute systems and software can offer for accelerating the work that’s done and opening new avenues for experimentation and methods development - it’s very much a collaboration, not a one-sided tasking.

That said, you don’t get to just go off and faff around with code - you do have users and they do know more about you about the problem space you’re working in, so you do have to spend some time to learn to understand what you’re building and the context you’re operating in, which is different from most other tech jobs. The failure case for most software/computer folks coming into bio is not recognizing the difference between biology and physics before building systems.

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

#370

Post by jcims »

antipotoad wrote: post #345
jcims wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Oh wow, thank you! I hadn’t seen that one.
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