"Strandbeest": crawling robots powered entirely by wind - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C97kMKwZ2-g
Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
271–280 of 512 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#272Earlier 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 :)
What a deeply disturbing comment.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#273Not sure it qualifies as surreal, but definitely weird and ridiculous, an app that turns your iPhone into a trombone using AR to track distance from your face.
Disclosure: this is my own pet project. Discussed here previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33898421
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Thats interesting. When I did play with it a bit, it wasn't clear to me if it was actually doing that, but in hindsight it definitely was and was not just a coincidence. When I first used ChatGPT, I had a dog that recently passed, and she had such a big personality (a mischievous always hungry hunting dog) and was just very different than my other dog (a pitbull mix that likes to guard things), and I had thought that…
It usually always comes up with something very meh the first time around. You have to nudge it in the right direction.
I was showing it off to my wife. I asked it to write a lecture for an intro to Latin American poetry with a focus on Pablo Neruda, including a background on Chilean history.
The first result was just 5-6 paragraphs with the most rudimentary 101 on all the above topics.
Then I told it to rewrite it as if the lecture was going to be given to grad students. Next, I told it to include examples of Neruda's poetry along with some analysis. I also asked it to flesh out the segment on Chilean history, with a focus on the independence movement.
The final lecture was good enough that you could walk into a classroom of college seniors and deliver it without any edits. The first one might have been good enough for 9th graders at most.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#275ChatGPT. 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.
Which if you haven't noticed is good enough to land a seat in the United States Congress.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I can accept a system such as ChatGPT synthesizing from data it sucked in, making educated guesses and so on On that note I find it interesting that this has sometimes been an argument to dismiss chatGPT as "non intelligent". What are we if not statistical machines, synthesizing from the data we've sucked in over our lifetime?
> What are we if not statistical machines, synthesizing from the data we've sucked in over our lifetime? Reasoning machines who are actually pretty bad at statistics.
Reasoning and statistical machines who are actually pretty bad at both.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not much worse than a number of people I've talked with, to be honest.
Ha ha only serious - for me, the most profound thing about ChatGPT and friends is that they show how much of human behaviour is not actually intelligent in some deep sense.
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Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not much worse than a number of people I've talked with, to be honest.
Ha ha only serious - for me, the most profound thing about ChatGPT and friends is that they show how much of human behaviour is not actually intelligent in some deep sense.
Exactly. It doesn't just share our abilities, it shares our flaws, which is actually more interesting and more disturbing.
It's not a crystal ball, it's a mirror.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#279Unreal 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…
It will never be watermarked. Photoshop edits also are not labeled as such.
Re: Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?
#280If 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…
I accidentally grew a heart organoid (of sorts) once. Dissected an embryonic chicken heart, cultured it to make "fibroblasts" (mesenchymal stem cells), forgot about them, left them in an incubator for week, and when i came back, the cells had proliferated and covered the dish in a sheet of cardiac muscle, which was beating irregularly. My takeaway is that cells absolutely love doing stuff. I don't mean to downplay or…
> My takeaway is that cells absolutely love doing stuff. I don't mean to downplay organoid work, it's a huge achievement, but ultimately what it's about is giving cells a chance to do what they're programmed to do.
What gets tricky is when you’re trying to program the cells to do something different, because they really, really want to do a whole lot of other stuff, and rarely does making your weird enzyme or chemical top that list.