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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?

#441

Post by hammyhavoc »

throwaway675309 wrote: post #433
lqet wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These tools are about as good as a non specialist with time to undertake some bullshitting. Even if you are right, you still acknowledge that ChatGPT is on the level of a non-specialist bullshitting human you can have a meaningful conversation with. This alone would be enough to freak me out. If you would've told me that this is possible 10 years ago I would've called you crazy.

I know a lot of people are vividly impressed by this but to me "writing in the style of" (Victorian sonnets, poems, hip hop lyrics) is the equivalent of transfer learning and feels more like a cheap parlor trick. While I wont deny that it has impressive summarization abilities in terms of making excellent Q&A if you're willing to vet the information, I wouldn't exactly say that chatGPT is capable of meaningful conver…

I laughed when I read someone call its output "meaningful".

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

#442

Post by hammyhavoc »

PebblesRox wrote: post #332
jvanderbot wrote: post #48

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.

It's also not Psalm-like! The Psalms don't rhyme (even in the original Hebrew). What they do have is a parallel structure where each idea is repeated in slightly different words. This is just generic poetry with a sprinkling of "ye's."

Indeed, I had to laugh.

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

#443

Post by hammyhavoc »

dennis_jeeves1 wrote: post #153
jvanderbot wrote: post #48

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.

'poetic': you have described it accurately. I fail to see what the hullabaloo is all about. Call me jaded.

I'll call you refreshingly grounded.

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

#444

Post by quickthrower2 »

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...

Have I got this right?

I pay $0/m, I chuck my food scraps in the garbage.

OR

I pay $33/m, I fart around with some device in my kitchen, then send them by post to some company and get nothing in return.

And from an environment point of view, it is a device that needs high energy to produce.

I actually compost. It cost say $33 one off for the bin, which sits on soil, and can take probably couple years worth of waste. I am not in an appartment, but surely the solution there is a compost on common outdoor or rooftop area, where the cost is lower because it can be shared.

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

#445

Post by Der_Einzige »

jvanderbot wrote: post #48
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…

That's wrong. It's poetic, but incorrect. These tools are about as good as a non specialist with time to undertake some bullshitting.

Not even always poetic either

Notice that it sometimes struggles to rhyme?

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

#446

Post by Der_Einzige »

HideousKojima wrote: post #125
jvanderbot wrote: post #48

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.

I wrote a whole paper on how to fix this in LLMs!

https://paperswithcode.com/paper/most-language-models-can-be...

Gwern cited it too!

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

#447

Post by sethammons »

barbazoo wrote: post #213
guerrilla wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah this one... This really disturbs me. I can't shake the feeling that it might be conscious somehow; trapped, enslaved and tortured like some kind of Black Mirror episode.

Probably not a lot. Babies when they're born have billions of neurons but believe me, there isn't much going on yet :)

"Believe me" doesn't cut it. Here are some accounts of remembering being born. My earliest memory is at 18 months old.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/43kned/i-remember-being-born

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

#448

Post by adenozine »

adenozine wrote: post #403
kragen wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think I found it? Either way, I appreciate the tidbit. Good reading inspiration.

My bad, forgot:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9774501

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

#449

Post by CamperBob2 »

kevstev wrote: post #298
CamperBob2 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 feel this way about self driving cars as well. Its like even 10 years ago, the capabilities they have today would be considered mind blowing, yet they receive so much hate because they aren't yet adapted to all situations. Its baffling to me, every time I watch a video of one I get all giddy and I am like we are living in the future! Yet even from tech circles, they get so much criticism because they aren't 100% th…

Agreed. However, in the detractors' defense, self-driving cars were hyped beyond all reason by people like Musk, so it's easy to justify some very vocal pushback.

GPT wasn't hyped much at all, in comparison. It just appeared. The next couple of iterations will be interesting to watch, since right now we don't really know what the rate of improvement is going to be. We might be fighting Skynet next year, or we might be in for another 50-year-long AI winter.

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

#450

Post by ladberg »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #439
ladberg wrote: post #307

I was at the airport recently and the TSA had 3D x-rays which shocked me! Looked like a normal x-ray but the agent was able to orbit around and zoom in on their computer screen.

I always opt for the manual pat-down, just in case. Who knows how well the machine is configured to blast me with the right amount of x-rays and not too much. Who knows how carefully it was transported to the airport, assembled at the airport, tested at the airport, etc. Half the time, everybody there looks at me like I'm wearing a tinfoil hat when I politely request the manual pat-down. The other half the time nobod…

Sorry I should clarify: this was for the luggage x-ray and not the person scanner!
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