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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?

#381

Post by kragen »

adenozine wrote: post #356
kragen wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I knew the first half of that sentence, but I'm shocked that it had SIMD way back then. I looked on wikipedia but didn't find anything about that tidbit, do you happen to know where you learned that?

reading ivan sutherland's dissertation on sketchpad, the first gui, which ran on the tx-0; it's also mentioned in a recent ieee (spectrum?) article promoting the risc-v vector extension, but unfortunately i didn't save the link

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

#382

Post by btilly »

ozim wrote: post #366
kevstev wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a lot more than that.

1. We've learned that relu is a really good function to use for neural networks.

2. We've learned that regularization is essential to having large networks without overfitting.

3. We've learned how to scale models up and down so that you can train something on a giant cluster then run it on your phone.

4. We've learned how to apply this to lots of specific kinds of problems.

etc, etc, etc.

We do NOT simply do what we did in the 80s then throw more hardware at it. Instead we are getting better at making the hardware do something useful.

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

#383

Post by Ftuuky »

nuphonenuacc wrote: post #263
agent281 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I feel like people must also be trying to modify their DNA in secret. I wonder if we'll hear some horror stories in the next few years.

Search for lactose intolerance in the linked channel. Not completely secret.

Was going to say that.

He "cured"(?) his lactose intolerance with CRISPR tech (for a few months but still very impressive).

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

#384

Post by jasonb05 »

aendruk wrote: post #251
laurensr wrote: post #84

"Strandbeest": crawling robots powered entirely by wind - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C97kMKwZ2-g

Takes me back to Soda Constructor. It would be fun to incorporate wind and sails into the model.

And sodarace...

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

#385

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

raptor556 wrote: post #225
Acutulus wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an incredibly striking piece of technology and really shows which way the future winds will likely be blowing. A particular exchange I had with it left a mark on me, in which I requested it to behave like a used car salesman attempting to close a deal with a hungry customer. It proceeded to repurpose idioms, make dad-jokes and sling double entendres about the shared joy of cars and hamburgers and how they both a…

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…

> large entities (political campaigns, nations, etc.) that are using bot networks on social media sites

I think this has been conventional wisdom for a few years now.

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

#386

Post by ActorNightly »

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…

>nd 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."

ChatGPT3 isn't really the definitive sign of the latter. Its just a stepping stone on the way. As soon as humans discovered differential calculus, that was the genesis to the eventual development of a general AI. Everything else along the way is an issue of optimization and spending raw compute time, whether its done by humans or machines.

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

#388

Post by WheelsAtLarge »

ryanisnan wrote: post #364
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!

"carpenters of the human body"

I've seen a video of a knee replacement. And yes, it's very much like a carpenter working on a piece of wood. The hammering, the nailing, the sawing, it's all there. If someone was doing it to me, I would definitely be freaked out.

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

#389

Post by jredwards »

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…

I had the same reaction. It's the first time in my life where I've ever thought, "This is the beginning of an era. They'll give a name to this period of time." And yeah, maybe that's overselling it, but I had that thought.

I've seen so many pieces of incredible technology struggle to find a use-case. By contrast, ChatGPT almost has too many use-cases to catalog, and while it's far from perfect, it seems obviously, to me, to be a tipping point of sorts.

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

#390

Post by lee101 »

LLMs like ChatGPT E.g. https://text-generator.io that combines then with image/web link content understanding, so it can answer questions about pictures with text in them like reciepts or simulate how people would talk about documents or respond to emojis/content.

It's apparent in the future machines will have a deep level of understanding and it will be easy to extend/build upon and also affordable

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