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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?

#191

Post by qwertox »

pkalinowski wrote: post #175

Unreal Keanu: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FeHzQizPDNg people in the comments have no idea it's a deepfake. Without knowing beforehand, I wouldn't recognize it too.

I was about to downvote you until I read your comment after watching the video.

This video leads me to believe that there will soon be a time when popular people will just pick some pre-made advertisements. No need to go and film it since that has already been done without that person. We'll then accept deep fakes as a valid marketing strategy (or whatever purpose may come up), until some protests require them to be watermarked.

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

#192

Post by rsync »

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…

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 receipts ?

Could one construct a framework where all data at rest is worthless and only witnessed transactions and traffic have any surveillance value ?

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

#193

Post by wolframhempel »

wongarsu wrote: post #190
wolframhempel wrote: post #189

"Petmiglia" - a 360 degree automated pet drying chamber I came across at IFA. If your dog is scared of a hairdryer, why not put him in the hairdryer? http://en.petmiglia.com/

*pet drying chamber, in case anyone else was confused. Definitely surreal.

thanks, changed it :-)

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

#194

Post by adenozine »

The availability of different peripherals on smartphones.

The first time FaceID succeeded in the dark, with my grizzled, bearded, asleep, partially obscured face I remember the flicker of amazement that I used to feel all the time thirty years ago when everything was new.

I sometimes think about my phone the way I think about a blank piece of paper before I write in it, just the sheer magnitudes of magnitudes of possibilities inside it’s tiny little electric chassis.

The power of my phone rivals total computing power of industry giants just a few decades ago, huge computers that people built large container rooms for, poured over schematics, organized millions of dollars for.

For what I make in a month, I could have more than a dozen of my iPhone just laying around if I wanted to. Half the size of a proper table coaster.

Also, SIMD. Like, wow. That was a brainmelter when I learned about it. I’m not quite punchcard programming old, but all the people that I worked with when I started would talk at length about it. Now you can just vectorize… whatever… basically for free.

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

#195

Post by O__________O »

pkalinowski wrote: post #175

Unreal Keanu: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FeHzQizPDNg people in the comments have no idea it's a deepfake. Without knowing beforehand, I wouldn't recognize it too.

For clarity, is it only the face that’s faked?

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

#196

Post by jvanderbot »

endorphinbomber wrote: post #154
jvanderbot wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dijkstra's algorithm is a general one, That can be used in any case, I take issue with this statement. "any case" implies it's more general than A star, which is not true, it's a specialization of A star with (ok you win) h(v) set to nothing. It necessarily cannot solve as many problems as a star. And Dijkstra's won't work in "any case" at all, esp graphs with negative edge weights. The explanation struck me as glo…

You realize it had the constraints of a poem, and needed to take some liberty with description there?

Sure sure. I'm being pedantic. But replacing two sentences would fix it.

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

#197

Post by HorizonXP »

tricky wrote: post #34

Magnetic resonance focused high intensity ultrasound to open the blood-brain barrier in humans to deliver drugs directly to brain tissue - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12426-9

Hah, I worked in Kullervo's lab in the early 2010s. It is, indeed, surreal, what you can do with MR-guided focused ultrasound.

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

#198

Post by krsw »

soperj wrote: post #167
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.

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.

Not much worse than a number of people I've talked with, to be honest.

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

#199

Post by jvanderbot »

lqet wrote: post #118
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.

> 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.

Subjectively incredible; objectively questionable.

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

#200

Post by O__________O »

wolframhempel wrote: post #189

"Petmiglia" - a 360 degree automated pet drying chamber I came across at IFA. If your dog is scared of a hairdryer, why not put him in the hairdryer? http://en.petmiglia.com/

Surprised they just didn’t combine an automated washer with it to make it full service.
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