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

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421–430 of 512 posts

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

#421

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.

Also psalms don't rhyme, even in the original Hebrew. Also even if it is supposed to be a poem with rhyme and meter, ChatGPT's poem doesn't have correct meter.

You have to tell it explicitly the correct number of syllables in a haiku, otherwise it gets it wrong.

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

#422
post #192
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…

RE: chatGPT ... There was an "ask HN" a week or so ago about knowing how your personal machine was or was not compromised ... I am imagining training a model on all of the PDFs and email and receipts and contracts that I have spent the last 30 years protecting ... and then exploding my home directory with 2M parallel copies. Now what ? Which is the real correspondence ? Which contracts are real ? Which invoices and r…

Chaffing on steroids.

On the other hand, note that you'd also need some way of distinguishing ... wheat from chaff ... for your own ability to track your correspondence, transactions, records, etc.

Otherwise, that is an interesting idea, particularly in a world in which storage is cheap relative to the size of documents. We're rapidly approaching an era in which storage capacities sufficient to hold the entire Library of Congress collection of books (as text) on a residential PC or server will be highly viable.

The larger problem is probably that your copy of that data isn't particularly important in most cases, it's what lies on others servers that's been generated by you / snarfed from your devices / activities. And that's far harder to chaff.

Another issue would be that any generated content that raises / matches suspicions could, in a regime with poor civil liberties protections, simply become more ammunition used against you. The old Cardinal Richelieu "six lines" dictum, though in this case, not necessarily in your hand.

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

#423

A hobbyist made a 2x2 angled LEGO brick with a computer and an OLED display embedded into it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wBrOV2FJM8 This is a mind blowing level of miniaturization, especially considering that this was assembled by someone at home with commercially available off-the-shelf parts! The fact that he used a cheap, readily available 3D printer to manufacture the jigs and mould parts is the icing on th…

Where do I get one?

Ps: yes it runs doom:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TJHSMpYi8bg&t=0s

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

#424
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…

Agree- so many are dismissing it because its not perfect In fact, I'd submit that phenomenon as its own entry in the Weirdest or Most Surreal Tech Trend contest. People who, when confronted with a talking dog, say things like, "This talking dog is an idiot. It thinks 429 is prime, its painting looks like something from Bob Ross on acid, and the C++ code it wrote for me is full of bugs. I don't see what all the hype i…

I consider it more like the golden calf that people worshipped while Moses was away. The Quranic version is it was made of gold, it made a sound, and so people idolized it.

I think it's a good parable. It's something expensive and man made. Even though it's on average dumber than a typical human, people try to ascribe godliness to it. And so many judge whether it has achieved omniscience. For many of us, it's just a better tool, an IDE, but for some, it's an oracle or divination tool that they use to decide whether they should marry someone.

I think the term "artificial intelligence" makes it even more confusing.

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

#425
post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been down the AI diagnosis path before and even a purpose-built system failed to live up. I think that GPT, much like Tesla autopilot, is going to spend a very long time ironing out it's "last mile" before anyone will trust it. The tendency for AI to be spectacularly wrong when it fails to grasp context is still pretty prevalent.

Just curious is it a political issue (risky and who to sue) or a technical issue (ai has far worse judgement)?

Mostly that it faired poorly against human doctors. Real-world medical data is too messy to feed into a machine.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/31/machine_learning_the_...

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

#426

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.

IDK, it's pretty much a social norm to put away your shopping cart, and yet...

People are selfish and will do anti social shit for convenience if they can get away with it.

Cars only go where they belong because the state can and will punish you with towing or fines, making the reward of being selfish and anti social not worth the risk.

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

#427

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 love telling people all about how I tore my biceps clean off the bone and a surgeon went in there and just screwed it back on.

There's now a screw in my humerus that's holding my muscles together. Also got a sick scar and a story to gross out people at parties.

Definitely wasn't worth $15k though.

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

#428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha! I actually run a company that does Coop cleaning, babysitting, coop set up, day old chick delivery, etc. We're launching the world's best Coop in 45 days, stay tuned :)

Although it sounds funny, this is actually kind of a serious question: are you concerned about an egg bubble?

Not at all, I assume egg prices will normalize in a few months / quarters to previous consumer costs - call it $1.50-$2 a dozen. It's super odd though that we're launching a company that allows anyone with a backyard to raise chickens / get eggs. For a lot of people, eggs are a bonus byproduct of raising them. A lot of people get joy from it, reduce nearly all their food waste, fertilize their yard, teach kids on taking care of them, they'll take care of you, etc. :)

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

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha! I actually run a company that does Coop cleaning, babysitting, coop set up, day old chick delivery, etc. We're launching the world's best Coop in 45 days, stay tuned :)

Curious about the "world's best coop" part. What does this mean? (Asking as someone with chickens, and some old coops now.)

We're building a product at the intersection of smart home tech (think cameras with computer vision for predators, alerts, etc), light robotics (automatic doors), and services (think press a button and a person shows up to clean the coop, etc). We did this small news article a few months ago that shows what we're doing if interested https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/chicken-coop-sitting-...

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

#430
post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My brother had a shoulder surgery that he put off for many years. The doctor actually told him that he did the right thing because the type of surgery he needed has some such a long way in the last 10 years. It's great that we're still making so much progress in these areas.

How far behind is e.g. Europe compared to the U.S.? Do these innovations generally spread, or are they hindered by local regulations in each country?

Many of the worlds best hospitals are in Europe, in countries like Denmark, Germany, Sweden, France and Sweden. Just as one example, Charité in Berlin is world famous and have had "more than half of all German Nobel Prize winners in Physiology or Medicine" (https://www.charite.de/en/), just as one example.

Granted, many of the best hospitals are indeed in the US, but I guess less people have access to the many great hospitals in the US (or can afford access rather) compared to hospitals in Europe.

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