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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?

#371

Post by yreg »

qwertox wrote: post #191
pkalinowski wrote: post #175

Unreal Keanu: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FeHzQizPDNg people in the comments have no idea it's a deepfake. Without knowing beforehand, I wouldn't recognize it too.

I was about to downvote you until I read your comment after watching the video. This video leads me to believe that there will soon be a time when popular people will just pick some pre-made advertisements. No need to go and film it since that has already been done without that person. We'll then accept deep fakes as a valid marketing strategy (or whatever purpose may come up), until some protests require them to be…

In Slovakia we've already had a deepfake ad of a well-known news anchor.

The ad starts as a news segment where she says that it turns out the covid vaccines don't work and then pivots to awareness campaign about hoaxes and misinformation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zg0_bRoj1U

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

#372

Post by swamp40 »

smallerfish wrote: post #15
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...

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…

> How did they possibly win over investors?

Matt Rogers cofounded Nest. People will throw money at that without asking any questions. Winners often win twice.

Plus the hardware grinder/dehydrator could be used in either your own garden or picked up weekly/monthly and sold locally.

Plus it's Green and it actually makes sense to try and capture that waste. Something individuals can do to make a difference.

I agree $33/mo and a mail-back service is never going to get their $100M back.

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

#373

Post by yread »

Thebroser wrote: post #138

Spatial Transcriptomics. Being able to see gene expression at a resolution of a handful of cells in a cross section of tissue is revolutionizing disease research. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-020-01033-y

All this spatial stuff is mind blowing: CODEX, CyTOF, ...

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

#374

Post by ctack »

O__________O wrote: post #220
yreg wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't able to realize the scale of the shift that's about to happen back then. --- I just remembered another example of hearing about something that seemed like pure magic: Reconstructing what a person is seeing out of their fMRI scan (2011): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo

That’s most interesting aspect to me is that 100s of thousands of people were all likely aware of the developments in the field, but few actually knew what was coming down the road in the near future. It’s these types of gaps I find the most interesting when looking at technologies like this.

What is coming though?

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

#375

Post by alach11 »

irrational wrote: post #289
roughly wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My takeaway is that cells absolutely love doing stuff. I don't mean to downplay organoid work, it's a huge achievement, but ultimately what it's about is giving cells a chance to do what they're programmed to do. What gets tricky is when you’re trying to program the cells to do something different, because they really, really want to do a whole lot of other stuff, and rarely does making your weird enzyme or chemica…

I am a stick.

Is this a reference to The Way of Kings?

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

#377

Post by gwbas1c »

Not real: I used to walk around Silicon Valley claiming that I was selling vibrating toilet seats.

I claimed that they vibrated at the "brown note" which is (South Park Reference) the resonating frequency of your bowels. This frequency would make you go.

I claimed that I had bootstrapped the entire thing by selling it to little old ladies who didn't like eating prunes.

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

#378

Post by swamp40 »

yonixw wrote: post #287
adlpz wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this is the video, for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e1_QhJ1EhQ

In 0:30 you can see the bag changes (the wrinkles), could be just a reshoot, but makes the magic gone.

The bag snaps closed internally. I had to watch it at 25% speed over and over.

The cool thing about slowing it down is you can see its feet wobbling side-to-side at about 10X per second to keep its balance.

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

#379

Post by decide1000 »

About 15 years ago I was at the home of an engineer. He had something which looked like a wallet. He unfolded it and it was an e-ink screen which was foldable. It showed an OS with an app to read and send emails and do some (slow) browsing. The company he worked for was bought by Philips. Never saw that product again.

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

#380

Post by eternityforest »

mattkrause wrote: post #254
twic wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I accidentally grew a heart organoid (of sorts) once. Dissected an embryonic chicken heart, cultured it to make "fibroblasts" (mesenchymal stem cells), forgot about them, left them in an incubator for week, and when i came back, the cells had proliferated and covered the dish in a sheet of cardiac muscle, which was beating irregularly. My takeaway is that cells absolutely love doing stuff. I don't mean to downplay or…

Oscillations are also sort of a "freebie": if Thing A can temporarily inhibit the activity of Thing B and vice versa, activity will start pinging back and forth. It's certainly a neat step forward towards studying brain activity, but the idea that organoids are sitting there dreaming is a bit much.

They can play pong. As far as I'm concerned that's already scary and raises ethical questions.
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