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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?

#391
post #167

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.

This is my exact problem with ChatGTP, it looks great when you don't know what it's talking about, but as soon as you do, it looks foolishly over-confident in it's answers which are very clearly wrong.

As long as you're armed with that information, though, it makes getting to an 80% solution (to many things) almost effortless.

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

#392

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?

Mobility scooters are the things disabled people ride. There should be a term to refer to these electric, Razor-style form factor scooters, but I think they are just pushing the Vespa-style scooters (many of which are also electric) into the term moped and taking the term "scooter" for themselves. I call them kid scooters.

I've always seen the terms kick-scooter and motor-scooter to disambiguate the later two.

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

#393

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?

IMO central-city cores need to get redesigned around Bio/EV-only transport like walking, bikes, scooters, etc. You drive up to various parking-only rings where there is boatloads of parking and EV-transport docking stations and then walking/bikes/EVs get you last-mile accessibility to buildings, shops, etc.

Scooters do annoy me at times as a pedestrian but its mainly b/c city infra wasn't really designed for this middle ground, as cyclists can attest. Plus I am equally as hypocritical for sometimes zipping around on a scooter on sidewalks, so I don't complain too much. If I ever get a shot at building up a town/city this is one of my reqs.

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

#394
post #80

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.

I think it captured the essential difference between the two algorithms, i.e. the heuristic, so I don't understand how this is 'bullshit'.

[deleted]

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

#395

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…

I've got a new hip in my future and I've been hearing more of these stories. Incredible, and incredibly relieving. Congrats on your new skelly!

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

#396
post #80

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.

I think it captured the essential difference between the two algorithms, i.e. the heuristic, so I don't understand how this is 'bullshit'.

A* is more general than Dijkstra, as Dijkstra ia A* with the heuristic set to 0. Also it's not in the style of a psalm

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

#397

I remember hearing about an GAN-based tool that would transform clothed pictures of women into nudes. That was depressingly surreal.

And oddly enough, there's also a new browser plug-in that uses AI to auto-censor images client-side. https://pury.fi/

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

#398
post #11

Maybe not weird or surreal enough for HN. But I am amazed by the stability and quality of videos from my drone. It's just amazing that I could easily fly a kilometer away whilst having a live feed of the footage being streamed back to my controller. I have a sub 250g drone, so it's so light yet easily able to withstand pretty strong winds and the videos look great on a big 4K TV afterwards!

Is now a good time to get into the hobby? I remember having an interest in college but it seemed so expensive and prohibitive. Have drones reached the same cost-value consumer sweet spot that 4K tv and e-bikes are recently enjoying?

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

#399

This https://youtu.be/vS0TuIPoeBs It's just amazing

I've been seeing videos about this for probably 20 years (here's a link from 2009 https://phys.org/news/2009-06-gecko-feet-advances-science-fr... ). But it's starting to seem like an elusive graphene-type material that will never be commercialized :( When can I finally buy some gecko gloves, damnit!

The problem is they don’t maintain their stickiness
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