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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?

#491

Post by 93po »

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…

It's wild how low quality so many of the comments are on reddit, to the point that it makes me wonder "Why did this person comment something so empty and non-contributing to a post that already had 3000 comments?"

I don't know whether to believe people are so wasteful of their own time or whether this is just low-effort bot posting to build consensus. Combined with how harshly and instantly main subreddits like /r/politics and /r/news shadow ban accounts, it's basically impossible to dissent

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

#492

Post by 93po »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #79
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…

ChatGPT is smart enough at the first prompt, but what really stands out - freakily, I might add - is how it can remember earlier data. You can go several levels deep and it will still reference the first answer and contextualize it properly. "Do X" is great. But "Now change X to Y in the style of Z" is what blows my mind.

In my experience, ChatGPT was perfectly happy providing logic for a question that counteracted previous logic it provided. When I pointed out this conflict, it disagreed that it was in conflict when it clearly was.

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

#493

Post by 93po »

daveguy wrote: post #333
kevstev wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think most of the criticism with self driving is around the over-hyped under-delivered "full self driving" from Musk -- it actually seems to be getting worse compared to 5 years ago. Apparently Cruise and Waymo are doing much more impressive things, but they only get a fraction of the press.

> it actually seems to be getting worse compared to 5 years ago.

You pretty clearly don't know what you're talking about.

> Apparently Cruise and Waymo are doing much more impressive things, but they only get a fraction of the press.

They are doing objectively much less impressive things by relying on sensors that require much less intelligent analysis and will lead them to dead ends at the higher end of abilities that Tesla's approach won't.

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

#494

Post by 93po »

daveguy wrote: post #481
chrisco255 wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're doing more impressive things why is it not in production at scale, right now? Just earlier today there was a story of a Waymo car getting stuck in an intersection in SF. Those cars still need constant intervention and human assistance that's why.

The miles between intervention is known for Waymo and Cruise. Tesla refuses to publish this data.

Waymo and Cruise have published their known operating areas. It's tiny and only during certain times of day (middle of the night).

Tesla operates nearly everywhere. The scale of what's happening isn't even comparable.

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

#495

Post by andrei_says_ »

roeles wrote: post #336

I've had the good fortune to see people use the balance belt, a belt that you can wear if you have bilateral vistibular loss. The tech is simple, but seeing someone go from not being able to walk without leaning against everything to walking as if nothing is wrong - within 30 minutes - felt like a miracle. The haptic feedback is processed in a very old part of the brain, which makes learning to process and use it fas…

This reminds me about reading on similar device which when worn provides haptic feedback indicating North. The intention is to give the wearer an instinctive sense of North which remains even after stopping to wear the device.

Do you by any chance have any info on this?

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

#496

Post by jesterson »

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 got 3d x-ray-ed by my dentist a while ago. Few seconds and he had whole structure of my teeth in 3d at his laptop. Quite impressive and presumably simplifies their life a lot

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

#497

Post by tboyd47 »

tboyd47 wrote: post #188

The whole industry of carbon sequestration is surreal. It's a completely useless technology except for proving to someone else that you've affected the inputs to an equation to some degree.

To the people who downvoted me, I challenge you to find me one company or even one person using this technology privately without showing anyone what they're doing. If you can't find that, then it's all just dramatic theatre for handout money or pats on the back. That's it.

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

#498

Post by elamje »

roughly wrote: post #214

If you're not in the bio field, you may not be aware just how routine genetic modification has become. For the larger companies, projects can involve thousands of different iterations on DNA sequences, all of which are created, put in a cell, grown, sequenced, and analyzed. It's absolutely routine at this point - it's not a science or even engineering challenge project it's an operations project. The one that really…

In the past 6 months, I decided to leave traditional B2B SaaS completely and move to this space. I realize there is still amazing money to be made in traditional tech, but the more I read, research, and network in SynthBio/BioTech/TechBio I know this will be the most important field in our lifetime. From a mission and a financial perspective, I've never been more convicted about a space than this.

I believe everyone that was distracted by easy money flowing into crypto and B2B SaaS the last couple of years is looking at generative AI (rightfully so!), but the real opportunity in in BioTech/TechBio. VC cycle likely to follow AI for the time-being, but I'm betting a full career pivot on BioTech. Please email me if you are exploring or excited about the space!

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

#499

Post by daveguy »

93po wrote: post #494
daveguy wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The miles between intervention is known for Waymo and Cruise. Tesla refuses to publish this data.

Waymo and Cruise have published their known operating areas. It's tiny and only during certain times of day (middle of the night). Tesla operates nearly everywhere. The scale of what's happening isn't even comparable.

Estimates from users of FSD are ~5 miles between disengagements.

https://sites.google.com/view/fsdbetacommunitytracker/home?p...

Even the best self reported areas are less than 100 miles between disengagement.

Waymo and Cruise are at around 30,000 miles between disengagement.

Tesla has released nothing.

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

#500

Post by 93po »

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…

If you tell them you can't lift your arms over your head they're required to just wave you through without a pat down. Or at least this was the case until 2020 or so when I stopped doing this because I would get routinely threatened by TSA employees who were frustrated at how much this exception highlighted what a joke their jobs were.
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