[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent ...
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you
have seen?
If possible, provide links to demos, products pages, etc. Limit
posts to one tech per post to make it easier for votes to reflect
HN's voting patterns and make it easier to filter related comments.
___ Here are some examples from CES:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=SYYXida84Nc
Author : O__________O
Score : 223 points
Date : 2023-01-24 12:06 UTC (10 hours ago)
| peter303 wrote:
| Some of the VR movies are getting quite good. First the newer
| generation headsets- 2K, 90+ fps, cableless- no longer induce
| nausea. Second, movie makers are becoming versant with the
| strengths and limits of this media.
|
| One I saw in December called Container, I felt I was in the room
| with various scenes of realistic 3D people.
| O__________O wrote:
| Agree, even the 2D version of the "Container" trailer looks
| interesting:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gUysXcyNXAo
| MivLives wrote:
| This looks cool. The issue with this sort of movie is
| distribution. For example Container looks cool. I'd love to
| have seen it. But I missed all the festivals it was at. Who is
| going to distribute this to me? I guess Steam but that doesn't
| seem right. I know they've sold movies in the past but I'm not
| sure how many would ever pay. What's the netflix of vr movies?
| dcminter wrote:
| I don't know if it fully qualifies, but I enjoyed this one:
| https://furhatrobotics.com/
|
| They're definitely a bit different to your typical bear (I cannot
| help but wonder why they don't pursue the more obvious
| telepresence possibilities of the device for example)
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Furhat is a social robot: It's basically a humanoid head that
| sits on a desk, and people are supposed to interact with it as
| a person.
| dcminter wrote:
| What part of that precludes telepresence?
| omginternets wrote:
| I remember hearing about an GAN-based tool that would transform
| clothed pictures of women into nudes. That was depressingly
| surreal.
| simonwingtips wrote:
| And oddly enough, there's also a new browser plug-in that uses
| AI to auto-censor images client-side. https://pury.fi/
| Llamamoe wrote:
| The fact that somebody making this feels like an inevitability
| is just incredibly depressing. I mean, sure, it's just a fake
| AI guess, but Jesus Christ come on :-/
| tboyd47 wrote:
| 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.
| wolframhempel wrote:
| "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/
| O__________O wrote:
| Surprised they just didn't combine an automated washer with it
| to make it full service.
| postultimate wrote:
| https://youtu.be/_VfSl0iGAus?t=25
| wongarsu wrote:
| *pet drying chamber, in case anyone else was confused.
| Definitely surreal.
| wolframhempel wrote:
| thanks, changed it :-)
| jiggawatts wrote:
| 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 the cake.
|
| When I grew up, computer monitors were _heavy_ and had big vacuum
| tubes in them made out of thick glass. At the scale of a LEGO
| brick, it was already amazing having a single LED light instead
| of an incandescent light bulb!
|
| A working computer!? With a display? Madness!
| decide1000 wrote:
| About 15 years ago I was at the home of an engineer. He had
| something which looked like a wallet. He unfolded it and it was
| an e-ink screen which was foldable. It showed an OS with an app
| to read and send emails and do some (slow) browsing. The company
| he worked for was bought by Philips. Never saw that product
| again.
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| lqet wrote:
| 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, and it correctly simulated a
| Linux machine on which this simulated remote ChatGPT-API was
| accessed via curl. It was able to give the responses in XML,
| JSON, CSV, and other formats, and it was able to simulate Linux
| tools like cut, grep, sort, awk, jq, sed and others. It was able
| to add an _additional_ layer of a ChatGPT simulation without
| problems. It was able to do entity recognition in a long text I
| provided, and was able to list the entities in a table, with the
| correct wikipedia article and a summary of the article as
| columns. It was able to do rudimentary public transit route
| planning in my home town in Germany (in the form of: go the XY
| Station, trains will run every 15 minutes from there to the main
| station, from there you will have long distance lines to Z,
| etc.), with an apology that it does not have current schedule
| data for Germany and I should visit bahn.de for better results.
| When it failed for math questions, it was able to give me Wolfram
| Alpha queries to find the correct results. It was able to
| formulate complex SPARQL queries to query Wikidata, run these
| against the simulated ChatGPT instance via a curl request, grep
| out some results I wanted, and list them in tabular form with
| corresponding Wikipedia articles.
|
| All of this in one session, as part of a pleasant conversation,
| basically indistinguishable from a conversation with a real
| human.
|
| [0] > Could you explain the difference between A*
| and Dijkstra's algorithm in the style of a Psalm? <
| Sure, here is a Psalm-style explanation of the difference between
| A* and Dijkstra's algorithm: Hark, ye seekers of the
| shortest path, And listen well to what I say: There
| are two algorithms that ye may use, To guide ye on your
| way. Dijkstra's algorithm is a general one, That
| can be used in any case, It explores the graph from the
| source node, To find the path with the least amount of
| space. But A* is a more specialized tool, With
| a heuristic function to guide, It searches more
| efficiently, And helps ye reach the other side.
| So choose wisely, oh seekers of the path, And let these
| algorithms be your guide, For they will lead ye to your
| destination, And help ye avoid the pitfalls on the side.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| A few months ago, I would have said Stable Diffusion, but
| ChatGPT wins, hands down.
|
| We're living in exponential times.
| agalunar wrote:
| Ought to be "to guide you on your way", "helps you reach the
| other side", "for they will lead you", "and help you", since
| "ye" is the plural nominative (not accusative).
|
| I grew up using archaic, Jamesian English regularly (in a
| religious community), so it always sounds wrong when people use
| them incorrectly while attempting to be old-timey, which is a
| bit distracting and ruins the effect.
|
| Apparently ChatGPT suffers from hypercorrection as much as any
| modern speaker.
|
| (The meter is also dreadful, which is another thing that I
| think many modern English speakers don't often do precisely.)
| JackFr wrote:
| That's not even close to the style of a Psalm. It's still
| pretty cool though.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| Yet it will happily tell you random non sense with utter
| certainty like that it takes twenty minutes to boil a whole
| chicken in the middle of a recipe or listing an incorrect
| number of children with fake names while writing a biography.
| kevstev wrote:
| 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 doubt it, and it seems to me
| that the building blocks are already there to commercialize
| this and use it in a real way. The future is going to be
| interesting...
| ActorNightly wrote:
| >nd 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."
|
| ChatGPT3 isn't really the definitive sign of the latter. Its
| just a stepping stone on the way. As soon as humans
| discovered differential calculus, that was the genesis to the
| eventual development of a general AI. Everything else along
| the way is an issue of optimization and spending raw compute
| time, whether its done by humans or machines.
| jredwards wrote:
| I had the same reaction. It's the first time in my life where
| I've ever thought, "This is the beginning of an era. They'll
| give a name to this period of time." And yeah, maybe that's
| overselling it, but I had that thought.
|
| I've seen so many pieces of incredible technology struggle to
| find a use-case. By contrast, ChatGPT almost has too many
| use-cases to catalog, and while it's far from perfect, it
| seems obviously, to me, to be a tipping point of sorts.
| ozim wrote:
| Many are dismissing it because it is just neural network.
| Which were basically at academic works since 80's or earlier.
| It is only that now we have enough hardware and material for
| training neural nets that they start to be useful.
| btilly wrote:
| There is a lot more than that.
|
| 1. We've learned that relu is a really good function to use
| for neural networks.
|
| 2. We've learned that regularization is essential to having
| large networks without overfitting.
|
| 3. We've learned how to scale models up and down so that
| you can train something on a giant cluster then run it on
| your phone.
|
| 4. We've learned how to apply this to lots of specific
| kinds of problems.
|
| etc, etc, etc.
|
| We do NOT simply do what we did in the 80s then throw more
| hardware at it. Instead we are getting better at making the
| hardware do something useful.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| One of them I used was supposed to be 'pick-a-path' style
| fantasy fight the dragon sort of thing. I decided to throw
| the A-Team into it. It integrated them in and even knew the
| correct names and their context of what each char tended to
| do. By far not perfect. But the fact it could do even 'kind
| of' that. Is very interesting. 'kind of' is for some things
| is perfectly fine. The generated art ones are very
| interesting too. It reminds me a lot of early emulation
| discussions. Where people were arguing unless you had cycle
| perfect emulation nothing would work. Turns out 'kind of'
| close works for like 95% of the cases. Some things did need
| that sort of detail. But most didnt.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _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
| is about."
|
| Some of this dismissiveness is just whistling past the
| graveyard, but much of it comes from people who genuinely
| think the human brain is something that operates by means of
| ethereal, ineffable, and unreproducible mystic forces.
| kevstev wrote:
| 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% there yet.
|
| Its just a mindset I don't understand. And on places like
| reddit there is definitely some astroturfing going on or at
| least some definite "camps" that don't like SDC technology,
| but on HN AFAICT its been genuine disdain. So weird.
| daveguy wrote:
| 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.
| benlivengood wrote:
| I'm curious how many people who criticize full self drive
| have actually ridden in the car while it navigates city
| streets. It makes about as many mistakes as a 1-3 years
| of practice new driver. I don't own a Tesla so I've
| ridden with friends. It's a barely noticeable difference
| between human and FSD operation, with very few overrides
| necessary.
| [deleted]
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| 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.
| kevstev wrote:
| 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 the two of them would be a good basis for a
| children's book.
|
| I initially put in a prompt like "tell me a story about the
| hunting dog and the guard dog." and the results were pretty
| meh. I was interested to see if it was actually pulling in
| data from FB so I put her name in instead (she had an FB
| page yes). It did not seem to do much. So I put in some
| things like "the little hunting dog is always hungry." "the
| hunting dog is always looking to hunt" and then did a
| fuller prompt of "the hunting dog and the guard dog are
| going to the park. tell me a story about it" and finally
| got a very good fully fleshed out story about how the
| little dog was on the prowl for a squirrel while the guard
| dog watched out and it was really well written and made
| about as much sense as a fictional tale could. There was no
| awkwardness or other tells that would have made you think
| that this was written by anything other than a human.
|
| Anyway, that is huge that it can do this. I do remember
| when I used to play with other chatbots that remembering
| past context was something they were unable to do, at least
| not well, but in most cases it seems they didn't even
| attempt to. ChatGPT has blown me away in many ways, but
| this is a very specific leap forward.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| 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.
| nemo44x wrote:
| I agree, it's amazing and it's just the beginning. When this
| get numerous iterations of improvement and is distributed at
| scale and integrated with everything it will power the next
| technological leap forward. This to me is obvious.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| Which metre is that supposed to fit? I can't fit that around
| any psalm I can think of, most of which are 8/6/8/6 metre.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Shhhh. Just more bullshitting from the computer bullshit
| machine.
| rsync wrote:
| 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 ?
| wprl wrote:
| I suppose this is nit picking, however that is not in the style
| of a Psalm.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| I've spent far too much time antagonizing ChatGPT, it's good
| shit.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| That's wrong. It's poetic, but incorrect. These tools are about
| as good as a non specialist with time to undertake some
| bullshitting.
| krona wrote:
| I think it captured the essential difference between the two
| algorithms, i.e. the heuristic, so I don't understand how
| this is 'bullshit'.
| joaogui1 wrote:
| A* is more general than Dijkstra, as Dijkstra ia A* with
| the heuristic set to 0. Also it's not in the style of a
| psalm
| [deleted]
| paulgb wrote:
| > These tools are about as good as a non specialist with time
| to undertake some bullshitting.
|
| You're not wrong, but AI being passably good at bullshitting
| (while mostly keeping a rhyme/meter) is still mindblowing to
| me.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| It's an amazing accomplishment technically, and that
| deserves to be emphasized, but it is still not producing
| reliable outputs.
|
| Subjectively incredible; objectively flawed.
| rpdillon wrote:
| What does produce reliable outputs?
| xeromal wrote:
| Humans?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| lol no. LLMs get things wrong, but they don't lose their
| shit when you point it out. I find it pleasant rather
| than frustrating to work on problems with one; the
| shortcoming for me as a sort of sort of conditioned
| passivity that arises out of its orientation to search
| its own knowledge for correct answers rather than asking
| questions.
| rpdillon wrote:
| Humans, in my experience, have even more reasons to be
| flawed than the AI. Yes, the AI can be incorrect, but
| humans can be misled in what they believe the same way,
| and have the added problems of ego and misaligned
| incentives. Heck, in this very thread we have one human
| calling out another for being incorrect about whether or
| not an AI was correct. Locating sources of reliable truth
| is an unsolved problem AFAIK.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Which if you haven't noticed is good enough to land a seat in
| the United States Congress.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| 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.
| danielvf wrote:
| Agreeing with you. Psalms typically employ parallelism not
| rhyming. Two examples: The sun will not
| harm you by day, nor the moon by night.
|
| and My life is consumed by anguish
| and my years by groaning; my strength fails because
| of my affliction,[b] and my bones grow weak.
| pxue wrote:
| "confidently wrong"
|
| That's chatgpt right now. To get it to confidently right will
| take years and years more
| dennis_jeeves1 wrote:
| >"confidently wrong"
|
| Very human I must say.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| I saw dallE and GPT-2 demos and though 'oh pretty cool'
| about a year later we've got stable diffusion that can run
| on phones and ChatGPT which can remember context. I thought
| these things would be 3-5 years out or more. The speed of
| development is so quick, I think confidently right LLM is
| around the corner
|
| In less than a decade, I believe front line support chat
| support jobs and even graphic artist jobs will be made
| obselete
| causi wrote:
| _In less than a decade, I believe front line support chat
| support jobs and even graphic artist jobs will be made
| obselete_
|
| We can finally get the eighty hour long book-accurate
| Lord of the Rings adaptation we deserve.
|
| But seriously, I can't wait to feed a novel into one of
| these things and get a comic book version in return.
| ilaksh wrote:
| The latest models, with the right setup, can already
| substitute for many (not all) tasks in knowledge jobs
| such as graphic design, support chat, even programming. I
| feel like we may be looking at less than 3 or 4 years for
| a lot of jobs to be mostly obsolete. Or at least, the
| traditional version of those jobs.
|
| It's already at the point where you start expecting any
| knowledge worker to be significantly more productive by
| leveraging these tools.
|
| It's hard to imagine that it will be more than five years
| before AI tools are available that can handle almost all
| tasks in these types of jobs.
|
| For example, on my website aidev.codes I just added
| preliminary knowledgebase support. It can reference the
| knowledgebase this to write code. I would say that with
| the code-davinci-002 model at least it seems about at the
| level of a junior software engineer already since it's
| pretty effective with close supervision by a senior
| peogrammer, except for the fact that it cannot interpret
| visual information.
|
| Knowledgebases/embedding search can also be used right
| now with these models for answering support questions.
| The only thing holding it back from very very wide scale
| adoption is the problem of making up information. There
| are already solutions in progress for this. It's unlikely
| that will take more than a few years to roll out and
| replace the current generation of models. Google and
| Microsoft will probably roll out their internet-scale
| chat search interfaces this year even if they can't fully
| mitigate the hallucination problem immediately.
|
| I would guess more like 2-3 years for many knowledge-
| based jobs. If you want employment/contracts you will
| need to be very good at leveraging AI, or people will
| just use the AIs instead.
| browningstreet wrote:
| The wall of content and interactive exchanges that will
| fill the internet from chatgpt generated things will become
| harder and harder to wade through or evade.
| kevinwang wrote:
| I agree that the output is often wrong despite looking right,
| but in this instance I don't see anything wrong in this
| example.
| JackFr wrote:
| > I don't see anything wrong in this example
|
| It's not in the style of a psalm.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Dijkstra's cannot be used as generally as described. A-star
| can potentially be more general, but that's highly
| dependent on heuristic. Dinkstras is a-star with a "min
| weight on shortest path first" heuristic. Because a star
| doesn't expand shortest paths first necessarily, it cannot
| necessarily find the shortest path to any node except the
| prescribed endpoint. Dijkstra's will find all shortest
| paths with cost less than the path to the endpoint, and
| that's helpful sometimes.
| kevinwang wrote:
| I actually think the robot's poetic take matches my
| thinking more closely than this description
|
| Edit:
|
| I guess in this description dijkstras is more specific,
| in that dijkstras is the specific instance of A* with a
| zero heuristic.
|
| But I think what HAL over here was saying is that you can
| use dijkstras in a superset of scenarios in which you can
| use (non-trivial) A*, so in that sense dijkstras is more
| general than A*, so it's not wrong.
| lqet wrote:
| What is your definition of "general" here? The classic
| shortest path problem (which the psalm addresses) is
| described as finding the shortest path between two nodes,
| and given non-negative edge weights, Dijkstra's algorithm
| is perfectly general here. It will find such a shortest
| path in any graph, no further restrictions.
|
| For A*, everything depends on the heuristic, as you said.
| If h(v) = 0, A* is equivalent to Dijkstra's algorithm, so
| potentially, it can be as general. But the wrong
| heuristic (inadmissible, inconsistent) will lead to wrong
| results, and so calling it a "specialized" tool is
| correct. The heuristic gives you a specialized version of
| Dijkstra's algorithm which is faster on specific graphs.
|
| > Dinkstras is a-star with a "min weight on shortest path
| first" heuristic.
|
| I am not quite sure what you mean here. Dijkstra's
| algorithm is A* with _no_ heuristic. I am not sure how a
| "shortest path first" heuristic would look like - do you
| mean that Dijkstra's algorithm chooses the node to expand
| next based on its shortest-path cost to the target t?
| Even if you would construct such a heuristic h(v) = c(v,
| t) by explicitly calculating c(v, t) each time, this is
| not what Dijkstra does, as it would basically be a
| _perfect_ heuristic - you would then only visit nodes on
| the shortest path.
|
| If you meant that Dijkstra's algorithm is A* with a
| "neighboring node with shortest path from start node
| first" heuristic, that's also not strictly true, because
| expanding the nearest node first is already built-in to
| A*. A* does not chose the next node v with the smallest
| h(v), but with the smallest g(v) + h(v), where g(v) is
| the shortest path cost from the source node to v.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| > 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 glossing over too much, to
| the point of being misleading. Perhaps I'm being too
| pedantic, fine, but a more enlightened comparison would
| read more like our discussion than what was given.
| kragen wrote:
| i would rather say that a* is an optimization of
| dijkstra's algorithm
|
| they both solve the single-pair shortest-path problem in
| digraphs with nonnegative arc weights
|
| a* which explores nodes in a different, better order
| thank dijkstra's algorithm, but can only be applied in
| cases where you can compute an admissible heuristic
|
| that makes it less general than dijkstra's algorithm,
| which works to find shortest paths in any digraph with
| nonnegative arc weights, not just the ones where an
| admissible heuristic can be computed
|
| any problem you can solve with a* can be solved with
| dijkstra's algorithm (usually more slowly) but the
| converse is not true
|
| now, in a sense, a* with an _inadmissible_ heuristic such
| as h(v)[?]0 is 'more general' in the sense that it can
| emulate dijkstra's algorithm and also do other things;
| you could say that a* is a class of algorithms of which
| dijkstra's algorithm is one
| twic wrote:
| > It necessarily cannot solve as many problems as a star.
|
| Could you give an example of a positive-weight shortest
| path problem with A* can solve, but Dijkstra's algorithm
| cannot? I do not believe there is such a thing. Or did
| you mean something else?
|
| > And Dijkstra's won't work in "any case" at all, esp
| graphs with negative edge weights.
|
| A* won't solve those either.
| endorphinbomber wrote:
| You realize it had the constraints of a poem, and needed
| to take some liberty with description there?
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Sure sure. I'm being pedantic. But replacing two
| sentences would fix it.
| [deleted]
| PebblesRox wrote:
| 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."
| kragen wrote:
| what's incorrect about it
|
| as far as i can tell it seems perfectly correct but
| admittedly my understanding of a* search is limited to
| messing with amit's visualizations of it
| soperj wrote:
| 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.
| Keyframe wrote:
| _which are very clearly wrong_
|
| but not always; And that's what makes it scary. You know
| people will use it and trusting it.
| jredwards wrote:
| As long as you're armed with that information, though, it
| makes getting to an 80% solution (to many things) almost
| effortless.
| jerry1979 wrote:
| I believe the data gets trained by human rankers, and it
| should therefore regress to their mean. That said, if they
| train it to seek approval, I suppose we could teach it like
| any other student.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I don't like OpenAI's implementation defaults that much.
| But the thing is you can have a conversation with an LLM
| _about_ bullshitting, explore the reasons why it 's
| undesirable and inferior to sincere conversation, and then
| leverage those points of agreement to modify conversational
| behavior, at least within the scope of that conversation.
| yen223 wrote:
| This is my main problem with HN, funnily enough.
| krsw wrote:
| Not much worse than a number of people I've talked with, to
| be honest.
| twic wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| 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.
| iliane5 wrote:
| The fact that a "dumb", generative model that is simply
| predicting the next token when given a prompt can talk so
| well, perform complex tasks and interact with humans in
| such a convincing manner is pretty fascinating.
|
| There is obviously more to human intelligence than text
| based conversation but it is pretty humbling that such an
| aspect of ourselves can be replicated and be so
| convincing at such an early stage and perform better than
| some humans even when it makes stuff up: toddlers can't
| talk, kids are smarter but don't have the technical
| knowledge, most adults only have a few specific areas of
| expertise, etc.
| lqet wrote:
| > 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.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Subjectively incredible; objectively questionable.
| dennis_jeeves1 wrote:
| 'poetic': you have described it accurately. I fail to see
| what the hullabaloo is all about. Call me jaded.
| vijayr02 wrote:
| So perfectly suited for a management role? :)
| treis wrote:
| They blocked people from generating performance reviews so
| at least some were trying.
| dennis_jeeves1 wrote:
| Well suited for more most walks of life actually where BS
| reigns supreme :)
| mjhay wrote:
| I did read somewhere that in some tests, ChatGPT-generated
| MBA papers got better grades than average MBA students.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It is passing medical exams and will be used to help diagnose
| issues with similar reliability as humans.
| tootie wrote:
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| That can only be possible in a limited set of cases where
| the inputs necessary to make a diagnosis are all present in
| the patient chart. Human clinicians rely on other inputs to
| make most diagnoses including visually looking at the
| patient from multiple angles, asking them questions,
| manipulating and feeling the patient's body, listening
| (with or without stethoscope), and even smell. We are a
| long way from the robotics and sensor integration
| technology necessary to automate those steps in the
| diagnostic process.
| Acutulus wrote:
| 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 are simple,
| dependable and iconic in my way of life. I sat there for a
| minute reading over it, nearly in disbelief.
|
| I can accept a system such as ChatGPT synthesizing from data it
| sucked in, making educated guesses and so on. But to see it do
| such lingustic gymnastics with a very non-concrete request was
| humbling. It's given me a lot of pause about the way I absorb
| digital information and the varying degrees to which I have
| implicitly assumed the reliability of that information; site A
| slightly more trustworthy than site B, et cetera. To me, that
| old trust heuristic I relied on, one I have honed thanks to
| unfettered broadband for two decades, is now completely
| upended. It probably has been for some time to be fair, but my
| time with ChatGPT really cemented that feeling.
|
| Every freshly written statement that comes to me through an
| internet connected device now gets a side-eye by default.
| raptor556 wrote:
| 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 simulate "consensus" in online discussions and thus gently
| sway public opinion.
| SqueamOssi wrote:
| Yeah - I can't believe how much this HN discussion seems
| like a human generated thread.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Spot on. I am interested in any publications that might
| have come out of your research if you care to share.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > large entities (political campaigns, nations, etc.) that
| are using bot networks on social media sites
|
| I think this has been conventional wisdom for a few years
| now.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _It 's definitely a rough estimate but about ~65% of text
| content was determined to be a bot._
|
| A scary number. I wonder about a per-subreddit
| distribution, though. I imagine the primary subreddits have
| slightly worse human-to-bot ratio, niche subreddit somewhat
| better, with non-political, non-easily-monetizable
| subreddits having the best.
|
| Did your analysis also attempt to identify troll farms?
| Would the content produced by protein bots be grouped in
| the ~65% of bot content, or the remaining 35%?
| a123b456c wrote:
| Ok how do we know you're not a bot?
| friendlyHornet wrote:
| Dear fellow human,
|
| you have won cake. There will be a party in your honor
|
| Please lie on your stomach with your arms at your sides.
| A party associate will arrive shortly to collect you for
| your party.
| alex_duf wrote:
| >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?
| WoodenChair wrote:
| > 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.
| yakubin wrote:
| Reasoning and statistical machines who are actually
| pretty bad at both.
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| We are heuristical which may not be logical, but it makes
| sense from an organism perspective.
|
| For example since the world is uncertain and chaotic we
| seek either to conserve or expend for future gains. This
| can explain many stock trading behavior, despite often
| being a non optimal viewpoint
| Acutulus wrote:
| I certainly can't see us humans as anything other than
| that. But if that's true, us human machines seem to have a
| large number of "low level programs" running in the
| background that serve to blur the boundary between us and
| the machines we build and help us to elevate ourselves to a
| special typing in the universe that very well may not
| exist.
|
| I feel I think too much about mundane things and sometimes
| about wondrously confusing things often to my detriment.
| And at least a few times a week I would swear I run into a
| person with the opposite problem. Their behavior, choices,
| preferences. Their thought processes (at least what they
| share with me) come off as closer to machine than human.
|
| Something in my gut tells me we are more similar to some of
| the things we build than we might care to admit.
| skyde wrote:
| For people familiar with how ChatGpT work, is there a youtube
| video or blog you recommend that explain how it work.
|
| I have a very good understanding of how deeplearning neural
| network work and language model like "Word2vec" that convert a
| sentence or a word to a vector space.
|
| But I completely fail to understand how Given an initial text
| as prompt, ChatGpt will produce text that continues the prompt.
| skyde wrote:
| I cant believe it _simply_ use self-attention to generate one
| word at a time. It got to be more complex than that.
| wnolens wrote:
| Until ChatGPT, the term "artificial intelligence" felt like a
| misnomer for any of the tech that came out in the last 10y
| (which seemed mostly like statistical techniques for solving
| specific optimization problems).
| quanto wrote:
| could you provide some examples of your prompts leading to
| simulation of Linux within ChatGPT?
| booleandilemma wrote:
| ChatGPT, which might be the biggest thing since smartphones, but
| also, this self-healing clothing:
|
| https://www.gearpatrol.com/outdoors/a648024/coalatree-whistl...
| O__________O wrote:
| Here's GIF of the cloth "healing" after being rubbed:
|
| https://hips.hearstapps.com/amv-prod-
| gp.s3.amazonaws.com/gea...?
| jeffwask wrote:
| The Mobility Scooter craze. South Park nailed it. One day there
| were a couple scooters and you went oh interesting. A moth later
| there were thousands clogging every sidewalk with no discernible
| method of managing these devices. Then just like they came they
| were gone.
|
| How many billions spent? How much e-waste was generated?
| lopis wrote:
| I think we're well past the craze curve. I see way less
| scooters nowadays. Somewhere there is a mile high mountain of
| old scooters.
| ausbah wrote:
| they are still very prevalent in seattle. not as much of an
| issue so long as ppl stick to empty sidewalks and bike lanes
| jollyllama wrote:
| Mobility scooters are the things disabled people ride. There
| should be a term to refer to these electric, Razor-style form
| factor scooters, but I think they are just pushing the Vespa-
| style scooters (many of which are also electric) into the term
| moped and taking the term "scooter" for themselves. I call them
| kid scooters.
| pavon wrote:
| I've always seen the terms kick-scooter and motor-scooter to
| disambiguate the later two.
| [deleted]
| FeistySkink wrote:
| Unfortunately it's still a thing almost everywhere in EU.
| LeonM wrote:
| Unfortunately, the EU country I live in does _not_ allow
| them.
|
| And that is unfortunate, because whenever I visit another EU
| country I find them very useful.
| alistairSH wrote:
| 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 street when they're done riding.
|
| If you're an older pedestrian, or otherwise mobility
| challenged (but able to walk), they're a nightmare.
| ericpauley wrote:
| 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.
| alistairSH wrote:
| People don't generally park their cars in yards, across
| sidewalks, or in the woods. All places I've come across
| electric push scooters. Sure, cars are ubiquitous, but
| people mostly park them in designated parking spaces
| (also ubiquitous) or risk a parking ticket, boot, or tow.
|
| DC adopted a parking zone strategy for the scooters.
| Haven't been downtown in a while, but imagine that could
| work without dedicated docks.
| kirse wrote:
| IMO central-city cores need to get redesigned around Bio/EV-
| only transport like walking, bikes, scooters, etc. You drive up
| to various parking-only rings where there is boatloads of
| parking and EV-transport docking stations and then
| walking/bikes/EVs get you last-mile accessibility to buildings,
| shops, etc.
|
| Scooters do annoy me at times as a pedestrian but its mainly
| b/c city infra wasn't really designed for this middle ground,
| as cyclists can attest. Plus I am equally as hypocritical for
| sometimes zipping around on a scooter on sidewalks, so I don't
| complain too much. If I ever get a shot at building up a
| town/city this is one of my reqs.
| smusamashah wrote:
| Gecko inspired sticky tape which is so strong (and yet non-
| sticky) that 4 of them lying on a curved surface can pull a car.
|
| Veritasium video https://youtu.be/vS0TuIPoeBs?t=640
| sergiotapia wrote:
| ChatGPT. I'm 33 and first time I've ever truly been blown away.
|
| It's been really valuable as well not just a novelty. I'm certain
| it will change almost every aspect of our lives, starting with
| our children and how they learn in our current education
| pipelines. The bubble don' popped!
| incomingpain wrote:
| Deep fakes certainly hit me wrong. Especially given how easy it
| is to do to celebrities.
|
| It started off with mundane stuff with a great message:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ54GDm1eL0
|
| Then South Park guys, Trey Parker, doing absolutely hilarious
| deep fake video. They make Al Gore and Trump say poop.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WfZuNceFDM
|
| But then basically the same time I saw deep fakes presented as
| true. Trump saying dumber things than normal. Biden appearing
| like he has late stage dementia. None of it true. As an outside
| observer of american politics... pretty damned concerning.
|
| But then I read a real statistic. 95% of deep fakes... are to
| make fake porn. Women who have never done porn now have tons of
| porn made of them. Worse yet, you can't do anything about it. You
| dont own the copyright. There is no copyright infringement. You
| cant sue for royalties because they assert its not you and you
| never did porn.
|
| So the USA/DHS decided they would try to police this. Try to get
| this all under control. They proceed to put a registered spy in
| charge of it who only policed 1 side of the aisle.
|
| So this technology is destabilizing the USA and heading directly
| toward... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_American_Civil_War
| joncrocks wrote:
| You should watch "the capture"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Capture_(TV_series) (spoilers
| in the wiki article).
| incomingpain wrote:
| Thanks for the tip and it does look good but I seem to be
| watching paw patrol and blippi lately and nothing at all I
| want to watch.
| gofreddygo wrote:
| Lol. This hit me hard.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| cf https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/31/opinion/sarah-andersen-
| ho...
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I mean, is there really any question? There is only one answer.
| Okay, maybe two. Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT.
|
| Lot's of surreal stuff out there, but these two ... there is no
| question. Not one.
|
| Living in exponential times.
| mrkarezina wrote:
| I was thinking the same thing until I saw things like this in
| the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34503617
|
| Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT are cool, but once you get a
| better understanding of the model and how it's trained it
| doesn't seem that exciting personally.
|
| But being able to engineer living organisms? That's sounds like
| something out of blade runner.
| jgilias wrote:
| Inducing aging in mice and then reversing the process using gene
| therapy.
|
| https://hms.harvard.edu/news/loss-epigenetic-information-can...
| O__________O wrote:
| Prior HN discussion:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34362210
| laurensr wrote:
| "Strandbeest": crawling robots powered entirely by wind -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C97kMKwZ2-g
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| Hehe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMVr7gPjpqk
| aendruk wrote:
| Takes me back to Soda Constructor. It would be fun to
| incorporate wind and sails into the model.
| jasonb05 wrote:
| And sodarace...
| ozim wrote:
| This is surreal good answer thanks for sharing.
| maCDzP wrote:
| Beautiful - thank you for showing.
| lee101 wrote:
| LLMs like ChatGPT E.g. https://text-generator.io that combines
| then with image/web link content understanding, so it can answer
| questions about pictures with text in them like reciepts or
| simulate how people would talk about documents or respond to
| emojis/content.
|
| It's apparent in the future machines will have a deep level of
| understanding and it will be easy to extend/build upon and also
| affordable
| alamortsubite wrote:
| This video on Helion impressed me, though admittedly I know very
| little about nuclear fusion:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38
| O__________O wrote:
| Worth nothing Helion has raised $577.8M of which $375M was
| provided by Sam Altman.
| terramex wrote:
| Youtube recommended me a good rebuttal of that video yesterday:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vUPhsFoniw
| O__________O wrote:
| Would be super curious to hear Sam's response to that video
| given it claims that it's impossible for it to be a clean
| reaction, which contradicts statements I believe have heard
| Sam make about it.
| swamp40 wrote:
| All cell networks can contain memories, not just neurons.
|
| Plant and animal body shapes (morphology) are determined from
| memories stored as voltage gradients) inside cells, not from the
| DNA. Just like neurons are good at allowing the body to navigate
| in 3D space (our world), other cell networks are good at creating
| 3D shapes (leaves, fingers, legs, livers, etc.)
|
| You can decouple them, provide your own voltage gradients and get
| new body shapes using the same DNA.
|
| https://www.xenobot.group/ https://www.drmichaellevin.org/
| https://twitter.com/Kriegmerica
| twic wrote:
| This is a wild misstatement of what is going on. Morphogenesis
| is primarily governed by chemical interactions between
| proteins, on cell surfaces and secreted into intercellular
| space, as has been studied for decades:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_biology
|
| And the proteins, and the maps and schedules for their
| production, and the machinery which gives them effect, are all
| encoded in the DNA.
|
| I haven't actually followed Levin's recent work, so i don't
| know if he's going round actively misleading people about this,
| or if people are hearing about his work and assuming that's the
| whole story. To be honest, from what i've heard, he seems like
| a crank.
| bglazer wrote:
| I don't think Levin is a crank. He went on Lex Fridman's
| podcast and talked about his bioelectricity work and
| morphogenesis. Like you said, I think people who don't know
| much about development took that to be the whole story, when
| in reality it's just one academic doing what academics do
| best: talk about their own work.
|
| Edit: one small quibble with your comment is that it's too
| reductive to say that morphogenesis is all encoded in the
| DNA. It's really an emergent property of the whole system.
| Like DNA is only a few billion base pairs, which is not
| nearly enough to store the precise positions of every cell,
| much less every protein.
| twic wrote:
| Thanks, this makes sense.
|
| I think my reduction and your quibble is really a matter of
| semantics. It's true that the genome doesn't contain
| explicit coordinates for every feature of every cell. But
| at the same time, if you start with the same DNA, you get
| the same morphogenesis, and if you start with different
| DNA, you get different morphogenesis, so i would say the
| morphogenesis is very much encoded in the DNA. It's just
| that it's in a highly compressed representation, and the
| decompression machinery includes the laws of physics!
| bglazer wrote:
| Yeah sounds like we are both expressing the same idea.
|
| I'm usually pretty touchy about software analogies for
| biology but "decompression machinery includes the laws of
| physics" is a good way to frame it.
| swamp40 wrote:
| > _if you start with the same DNA, you get the same
| morphogenesis_
|
| Then how do you explain their creation of xenobots using
| _only frog DNA_?
|
| That was the whole point of the experiment - to disprove
| your statement.
|
| https://wyss.harvard.edu/news/team-builds-first-living-
| robot...
| twic wrote:
| Okay, same DNA in the same context then. That experiment
| doesn't disprove it in the slightest. Indeed, the fact
| that the experiment is repeatable confirms it.
| abledon wrote:
| This is related to the electricity guiding embryo formation of
| a frog, discovered back in 2011?
| https://now.tufts.edu/2011/07/18/face-frog-time-lapse-video-...
| swamp40 wrote:
| Yes, you can literally see the pattern of the face. And
| change it. Can you imagine the next 50 years?
| abledon wrote:
| I bet that this upcoming century will have advances in this
| field that will validate some of what the ancient monks had
| going with their concepts of "Chi" in China and "Prana" in
| India. Their "Energetic Life Force Residing in each cell"
| narag wrote:
| I had no idea this kind of flying is possible right now:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB97hQWZ1Oo
|
| I guess they'll regulate it to death. This one maybe will be more
| accesible:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gq_lvCdRRe4
|
| Also this one seems to be old news, but it's dreamy:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjbW6RjnQ-8
| f0e4c2f7 wrote:
| Without a doubt ChatGPT. Still surprises me daily.
| yreg wrote:
| To piggyback, it's been almost a year and I still haven't
| gotten over the first time I saw DALL-E 2. Or the first time
| I've used GPT-2 (via AI Dungeon Google Collab sheet). Not sure
| when was the previous last time I've felt that sense of wonder.
| Perhaps the first time I've interacted with the original
| iPhone?
|
| Edit: I remembered some more from the past:
|
| - First Boston Dynamics Atlas videos.[0]
|
| - First successful Falcon 9 landing[1].
|
| - A video explaining how the Curiosity landing will be done and
| then watching the stream when it happened.[2]
|
| - The concurrent landing of two Falcon Heavy boosters on
| land.[3]
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANv5UfZsvZQ
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2I8AoB1xgU
|
| [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX1Y2JMK6g8
| bemmu wrote:
| First time I got the "there's something special happening
| here" vibe was seeing the early "hallucination" images some
| years ago. Some examples here:
| https://www.businessinsider.com/these-trippy-images-show-
| how...
|
| My wild guess for the next 5 years is that we'll have Stable
| Diffusion with the ability to create NeRF scenes.
| yreg wrote:
| I wasn't able to realize the scale of the shift that's
| about to happen back then.
|
| ---
|
| I just remembered another example of hearing about
| something that seemed like pure magic:
|
| Reconstructing what a person is seeing out of their fMRI
| scan (2011): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo
| O__________O wrote:
| That's most interesting aspect to me is that 100s of
| thousands of people were all likely aware of the
| developments in the field, but few actually knew what was
| coming down the road in the near future. It's these types
| of gaps I find the most interesting when looking at
| technologies like this.
| ctack wrote:
| What is coming though?
| Acutulus wrote:
| I'm right there with you. Google's DeepDream I think?
|
| That first week of DeepDream images flooding the web showed
| me that someone had snuck a can of worms onto the table,
| and while they had graciously not opened it immediately,
| they had maybe cracked the lid just a bit
| roughly wrote:
| 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 freaked me out, though, was learning about
| organoids - lab-grown clusters of organ cells used to research
| the effects of genetic disorders. Liver, kidney, and heart
| organoids are fine, but these are also used to study brain
| disorders, in which brain organoids - clusters of neurons - are
| grown from the stem cells of affected individuals. These clusters
| of neurons have been known to start firing and even display
| synchronized patterns...
| tbenst wrote:
| As an experimental neuroscientist that has recorded fairly
| extensively from brain organoids, I would advise that these are
| HIGHLY underdeveloped cultures. When patch clamping, I had to
| depolarize neurons in a human brain organoid to -25mV to
| trigger action potentials (normally -60mV is sufficient;
| healthy neurons resting membrane potential is -70mV) Despite
| imaging organoids for hours with light sheet--a functional
| imaging technique that allows for observation of nearly all
| neurons in the organoid simultaneously, I did not observe any
| spontaneous action potentials, only diffusive waves of calcium
| activity.
|
| Of course, not all organoids are created equal, and the
| protocols around extracellular matrices are improving
| constantly, but for folks interested in systems neuroscience
| the organoid field is still too underdeveloped to ask
| interesting questions around functional activity.
| iamwizard wrote:
| As someone who recently left the field of experimental
| neuroscience, anecdotes like this hit at why media coverage
| of neuroscience is so sensationalized and reductive: it takes
| a lot of nuance and background to convey the impact of any
| given finding.
|
| In a lot of cases being even slightly reductive of EXACTLY
| what was reported immediately destroys the meaning and
| context of a finding. It's a field that actively resists
| compression of information and is so heterogeneously
| interdisciplinary that having the correct context to
| interpret a finding even within the field is often difficult.
| afpx wrote:
| Why did you leave the field? The compensation?
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| ...not only that, they also developed something like precursors
| to eyes. As in light sensitive cells.
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/mini-brains-grown-...
| Balgair wrote:
| To add: anything to do with optogenetics.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optogenetics
|
| TLDR: Input the genes into a nerve cell and now you can fire
| the nerves with light pulses.
| iamwizard wrote:
| The even crazier thing about opto is that it's old hat at
| this point. You can teach an attentive undergraduate lab
| assistant to do it and a sizeable portion of labs working
| with any animal short of a primate did or does use it to
| address questions.
| Balgair wrote:
| Care to share the 'new hat' methods?
| raptor556 wrote:
| If I were to restart my career, this is likely the field I'd
| pursue. I read The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha
| Mukherjee last year and just became enraptured in the
| possibilities.
|
| I'm wondering if there's anything I can contribute to that
| field as someone with general programming capabilities.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| Except somehow the required education is much higher and the
| pay is much worse than software, right?
|
| I'm personally surprised we don't have 20x as many people
| working in biotech.
| [deleted]
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It's because bioengineering does not yet result in huge
| capital outputs and productivity gains that other
| engineering fields enable abstractly.
|
| Once that happens and the existing underemployed bio-
| scientists are printing money through wealth/value
| creation, you will get your 20x.
| roughly wrote:
| There's sort of a running joke with how the market treats
| biotech as well - a bio company could announce they'd cured
| death and get a 5% bump in their stock price, whereas a
| tech company says the word "blockchain" and doubles their
| share price. As a software engineer, you can get pay into
| the ballpark of what you'd get elsewhere, but you should
| probably just ignore the "equity" section of that offer
| letter.
| anarticle wrote:
| The marginal and capital costs of biotech are way higher
| than tech. It is absolutely fascinating however.
|
| In the research field (my old field) most things don't
| work!
|
| "If it always worked, it would be business. Let's go the
| pub." -- me to grad student after 12h of imaging cells that
| took months to grow up :)
| volkk wrote:
| i imagine a big reason for this is that we don't have a
| silicon valley of biotech pumped with VC money. and
| presumably a big reason for that is there's all kinds of
| red tape when it comes to health and humans. no such thing
| as "disrupting" if you're going to violate some intense
| laws and then get arrested for it or get your labs shut
| down. or even worse, the potential resulting violence from
| fundamentalists surrounding your campus, or stalking
| employees. scary stuff
| Balgair wrote:
| TBF, San Diego and Boston are the centers for Biotech.
| The issues you raise are the correct ones.
| asielen wrote:
| Also Oyster Point in South San Francisco (north of
| Silicon Valley) is a massive biotech hub.
|
| In some way hubs are even more important in biotech than
| in software because of the massive startup cost.
| roughly wrote:
| Well, even getting past the human/medical side - one
| thing the computer/VC people miss coming into the field
| is Bio is both expensive and not amenable to the kinds of
| growth/pricing curves computers have been. It costs money
| to grow a cell strain in a tube, but to grow 100 cell
| strains, it costs... 100x as much. It takes 24 minutes
| for E.coli to reproduce, but in another couple years
| we'll be able to get that down to... 24 minutes. There's
| opportunities for improving the cost, reducing the spend
| on reagents (or finding better ones), reducing the number
| of strains required, that kind of thing, but the
| computer/internet/digital industry's basically priced a
| Moore's law curve in on everything, and that just doesn't
| work in Bio. The capital costs are large and the time to
| iterate is really slow compared to digital.
| toss1 wrote:
| Yup, Theranos attracted more than $700 million, was
| valued at $10 billion, and silently returned bogus test
| results for thousands of people. They weren't doing
| anything like altering people's DNA, immune systems,
| endocrine systems, etc.
|
| Yes the barriers and regulations are (rightly) much
| higher than just business or consumer software, but I
| fully expect that the VC money will be, and in fact is
| already moving there. VC is very herdlike, and it'll only
| take a few really hot biotech hits to open the
| floodgates. I'd predict 5-10 years away, maximum.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _no such thing as "disrupting" if you're going to
| violate some intense laws and then get arrested for it or
| get your labs shut down. or even worse, the potential
| resulting violence from fundamentalists surrounding your
| campus, or stalking employees. scary stuff_
|
| Or, you know, actually "disrupt" something, like
| endocrine system of half a million people, or the entire
| global economy.
|
| For the past decade, "Uber for Biotech" was my go-to
| scary hypothetical to post in HN comments. I'm
| increasingly worried we may actually get one for real.
|
| (And to be absolutely clear: I'm fine with the biotech
| part itself. I'm worried about the consequences of using
| it to frack markets, SV-style.)
| roughly wrote:
| > I'm wondering if there's anything I can contribute to that
| field as someone with general programming capabilities.
|
| Oh there Absolutely is!
|
| In general, there are four really high impact areas for
| computer folks - automation of lab equipment allows for
| scaling the number of experiments and the data that can be
| gathered by orders of magnitude; data science and engineering
| to sort, catalog, and investigate that data; building and
| scaling scientific computing systems to run analysis
| repeatably at scale; and even standard application building
| to manage and improve the overall process of tracking
| experiments and coordinating between groups.
|
| The scientists and bioinformatics folks are very good at what
| they do, but someone who really understands how to build,
| manage, and scale software systems is an enormous force
| multiplier. If you're interested in the field, I really
| strongly recommend it.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| If I want to do data engineering for such labs, how should
| I aporoach or even find such opportunities? I heard they
| hire graduate students for that in general.
| hassancf wrote:
| Glorified tech support for scientists? No thanks.
| roughly wrote:
| That's really not what the job is at this point. At least
| where I've been, there's an understanding of the
| strengths of what compute systems and software can offer
| for accelerating the work that's done and opening new
| avenues for experimentation and methods development -
| it's very much a collaboration, not a one-sided tasking.
|
| That said, you don't get to just go off and faff around
| with code - you do have users and they do know more about
| you about the problem space you're working in, so you do
| have to spend some time to learn to understand what
| you're building and the context you're operating in,
| which is different from most other tech jobs. The failure
| case for most software/computer folks coming into bio is
| not recognizing the difference between biology and
| physics before building systems.
| [deleted]
| schnitzelstoat wrote:
| I just finished that book, it was really good. I can't wait
| to read The Song of the Cell.
| twic wrote:
| 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 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.
| _Wintermute wrote:
| A project I was involved in was using optical flow to
| quantify the beating of cardiomyocytes grown in culture. I've
| done plenty of tissue culture but watching sheets of cells
| actually beat at a reasonable heart rate was still pretty
| wild.
| mattkrause wrote:
| Oscillations are also sort of a "freebie": if Thing A can
| temporarily inhibit the activity of Thing B and vice versa,
| activity will start pinging back and forth.
|
| It's certainly a neat step forward _towards_ studying brain
| activity, but the idea that organoids are sitting there
| dreaming is a bit much.
| eternityforest wrote:
| They can play pong. As far as I'm concerned that's already
| scary and raises ethical questions.
| roughly wrote:
| > 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.
| irrational wrote:
| I am a stick.
| alach11 wrote:
| Is this a reference to The Way of Kings?
| irrational wrote:
| Yes! Well, Stormlight Archive anyway.
| weard_beard wrote:
| SKELETON EDIT
| Teever wrote:
| how far away is this from a 'two guys with the same name
| fucking around in a garage' (Apple mythical origin story)
| sort of setting?
|
| Like when can I be a mad scientist making irregular beating
| sheets of chicken heart muscle in my basement?
| roughly wrote:
| There are a bunch of biohacker spaces around, and they'll
| often run classes - small scale lab work isn't actually
| that restrictive, cost or resource wise.
|
| Also, The Odin - https://www.the-odin.com/ - sells DIY kits
| and classes (and is just generally one of my favorite
| groups of weirdos)
| twic wrote:
| You'd need:
|
| fresh fertilized chicken eggs
|
| lab gloves
|
| an egg incubator
|
| a dissecting microscope
|
| tissue culture dishes
|
| phosphate-buffered saline
|
| a pipette pump
|
| 10 ml pipettes
|
| two pairs of dissecting tweezers
|
| 70% ethanol solution
|
| kimwipes
|
| lab gloves
|
| a steady hand
|
| tissue culture medium (DMEM is fine)
|
| fetal calf serum
|
| penicillin-streptomycin mix
|
| a micropipette
|
| micropipette tips
|
| a tissue culture incubator
|
| a tank of carbon dioxide
|
| ideally, a laminar flow cabinet, but reasonably careful
| technique and the pen/strep would probably see you through
|
| So, when? Depends if you have Prime really.
|
| The thing is, growing sheets of cells is not a big step
| towards doing anything interesting. You need to do chemical
| and genetic manipulation of the cells, and that's the hard
| part.
| nicd wrote:
| I think you could do that today? Incubating a cell culture
| is definitely possible. You can either purchase used lab
| equipment, or even build your own incubation chamber.
|
| I don't think OP's chicken heart experiment requires
| genetic tinkering, but even if it did, my understanding is
| that CRISPR is surprisingly accessible to hobbyists. For
| example, https://www.the-odin.com/diy-crispr-kit/.
| tootie wrote:
| The phase 1 trials for the Moderna vaccine were ready within 3
| months of the first case being recorded in Wuhan. And much of
| that time was still just bureaucracy and logistics. Sequencing
| of the viral genome was done in a matter of days and so was the
| conversion of the DNA sequence to an mRNA vaccine. Then it was
| months of safety and efficacy studies. If we can prove the
| long-term safety of the process in it's entirety, we could see
| vaccines be produced in days.
|
| https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-clinical-t...
| jareklupinski wrote:
| I agree, I think we're pretty early in harnessing
| bioengineering, compared to what we do internally literally
| without thinking about it.
|
| how far along is yeast mutation?
|
| I've fantasized about retiring to somewhere remote and starting
| a yeast radiation garden, to experiment with using those micro-
| machines to re-assemble matter for us
| milesvp wrote:
| > These clusters of neurons have been known to start firing and
| even display synchronized patterns...
|
| This doesn't surprise me at all. Dr. Thomas DeMarse was
| training rat brain slurries (think brains thrown into a
| blender) to fly flight simulators in 2004. I've long suspected
| brain cells tend to self organize and in particular want to
| minimize change in inputs over time. (and yes this is a gross
| over simplification given that I know of at least a half dozen
| types of neurons).
| iamwizard wrote:
| Neurons don't do a substantial amount of self-organizing
| without hormone gradients and other external factors to cause
| them to organize. It's unfortunately inherently difficult to
| generalize the function and organization of neurons since
| there are not only hundreds, or more, distinct classes, but
| each class has thousands of inputs and outputs to the local
| and distant network that almost all have an important impact
| on their function, and the generation of this network of
| inputs and outputs and what factors affect their operation,
| is highly dependent on the exact subclass of neuron in
| question.
|
| Mapping neural outputs of some small network to some
| operation is easy since all you're concerned with is the
| output, not the actual operation and organization of the
| network. Scientists could get macaques to play Pong using
| electrodes (like what Musk demonstrated with Neuralink)
| since, iirc, the 80s. This is also the exact reason that
| neural nets tell us nothing about the actual function of the
| brain.
| mtmail wrote:
| 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...
| smallerfish wrote:
| Wow - they raised $100 million. They're expecting people to pay
| $33/mo for the service, which includes the grinder/dehydrator
| bin, plus the cost of mailing the dense milled organics back to
| their processing facility.
|
| Figure that actual physical expenses cost $18/mo, leaving
| $15/mo profit per household; on top of that, they'll have
| extensive marketing costs - let's say marketing & employee
| costs take another $10/mo, leaving $5/mo profit per household.
| That means they'd need 1.6 million households to subscribe for
| a year just to get their investors their money back, or about
| 1% of the potential market.
|
| How did they possibly win over investors? If I could short this
| I would.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| > How did they possibly win over investors?
|
| Low interest rates have shifted massive amounts of capital to
| vc. We're talking trillions possibly, including sovereign
| funds and ultrabillionaire family offices.
|
| Are those wealth and investment managers nuts? Maybe, but
| I've concluded the most likely explanation is that they know
| _exactly_ how to play the vc game: place a number of wild
| bets and hope that one in a hundred pays off. They sometimes
| seem to barely do due diligence, perhaps for efficiency and
| speed in allocation, and because the vc portion of their
| otherwise well-diversified portfolio is tiny. You and I get
| to partake in the schadenfreude if these stupid ventures
| collapse but they're wiping their tears with the returns they
| make on other asset classes - stocks back then, fixed income
| now, etc.
|
| If interest rates go back to the "old normal" for a sustained
| period of time then maybe this ends, but maybe the new normal
| is here to stay. We've been told there'd be a big cleanse of
| stupid or otherwise unprofitable ideas (can we really cram
| more SaaS solutions into every single niche under the sun?)
| but I'm seeing very little of the sort, other than layoffs
| and downsizings which are not thus far commensurate with the
| fireworks we were promised.
| smallerfish wrote:
| It's true, but the raise _just happened_, which means
| there's still loose VC money out there. The narrative has
| been that there's been a transition to more conservative
| funding...apparently not in this case, at least.
| peyton wrote:
| There's usually a lag... raise might've happened >1 year
| ago.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> the most likely explanation is that they know exactly
| how to play the vc game: place a number of wild bets and
| hope that one in a hundred pays off._
|
| But isn't a key point of this theory of investing that you
| invest in _many companies that have a 1% chance of making a
| 100x return_ - rather than investing in companies with a 0%
| chance?
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Paid composting collection sounds like a ridiculous idea
| but if for example they manage to become a standard and
| get monopolistic contracts like waste management
| companies, on a national level... there's your moonshot.
| Here, have a hundred mill.
| hedora wrote:
| I'd pay $100-200 for the trash can thing. There is a company
| making a smaller one, with the idea that you toss the output
| into your own compost pile. It cuts down on odor, rodents and
| time to compost completion.
|
| What happens to the trash can if I stop paying the
| subscription fee?
|
| (Fast forward a few years, and someone will rewrite the above
| as a postmortem.)
| sh1mmer wrote:
| We have a Vitamix Foodcycler [1] we got on sale. It works
| well but the cycles take a while and it doesn't process
| that much at once. Honestly we just went back to using a
| counter top bucket and then putting it in our municipal
| food waste bin.
|
| Austin turn all that stuff into compost, and then give it
| away to the community (just turn up with bags) and I assume
| use on city run parks and so on.
|
| [1] https://www.vitamix.com/us/en_us/shop/foodcycler-fc-50
| twosdai wrote:
| I used a local version of this type of product in a city I
| used to live in.
|
| Main positive is as you mentioned, food waste smell is
| gone, and no rodents/animals in the trash either inside or
| outside.
| soperj wrote:
| Honestly if you have a big enough pile, just bury the waste
| in the compost. Or get a Green Cone Solar Digester, I've
| literally put hunks of meat & coconut husks and it just
| disappears, no rodents, no smell. I was putting buckets of
| compost in there every week and it would just melt into the
| earth.
| nstart wrote:
| There is the part where they expect to earn back from
| reselling the compost.
|
| > Mill has partnered with two processing facilities that
| purchase and turn all this dried food into a chicken feed
| ingredient, filtering out any errant forks or inorganic
| materials that accidentally get tossed in the bin.
|
| The bit about filtering out inorganic material seems a little
| too convenient to gloss over though.
| eitland wrote:
| As a kid who grew up on a small (by Norwegian standards)
| dairy farm I remember it confused me that food waste
| couldn't be sold to farms.
|
| As a grown up, seeing all the stuff people put into food
| waste I can understand it.
|
| What I still can't understand though is how many people
| mistake food wrapping for food..!
| yourapostasy wrote:
| _> ...how many people mistake food wrapping for food..!_
|
| It isn't mistaking, it is not prioritizing the cognitive
| load for the separation effort. When I was in Japan, I
| was impressed with the level of fastidious compliance I
| witnessed in materials separation. That convinced me the
| talk in the US about how mainstream households could not
| possibly support a comprehensive cradle-to-cradle
| materials handling infrastructure are really talking
| about culture and/or necessity and not logistics.
| rsync wrote:
| "... I was impressed with the level of fastidious
| compliance ..."
|
| Diversity is neither bad nor good - it just has benefits
| and costs.
|
| You witnessed one of the costs.
|
| On the other hand, we invented jazz and snowboarding.
| Those are examples of benefits.
|
| I prefer the diversity.
| SirSavary wrote:
| Japan, a country famously known for lacking innovation?
| rsync wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| I am a compost _consumer_ and I have no desire to
| plasticize my pastures and fields the same way we've
| filled the oceans with plastic.
|
| You can see this for yourself: just go to Home Depot and
| buy a bag of dirt ... it's not even micro plastics ...
| whole objects like ballpoint pens and so on.
| rcme wrote:
| I paid around that much to have my compost picked up from my
| apartment weekly. They would drop off a reuseable bucket for
| the upcoming week and pick up the bucket from the previous
| week.
| Thrymr wrote:
| It's a reasonable local business for a waste disposal
| company. How is a VC funded company expecting "tech-like"
| returns?
| elil17 wrote:
| How did you figure those numbers? They don't seem related to
| any of the content in the article or any other content I can
| find about them online.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Makes me wonder if they're just iterating until they find a
| business, or trying to have some cashflow while they develop
| some IP.
| kragen wrote:
| a grinder/dehydrator for organic household garbage would be
| pretty useful without the service, because desiccated organic
| garbage won't rot and stink; you can dispose of it at your
| leisure thereafter, whether by composting, burning, feeding
| to chickens, or just dumping
| swamp40 wrote:
| _> How did they possibly win over investors?_
|
| Matt Rogers cofounded Nest. People will throw money at that
| without asking any questions. Winners often win twice.
|
| Plus the hardware grinder/dehydrator could be used in either
| your own garden or picked up weekly/monthly and sold locally.
|
| Plus it's Green _and_ it actually makes sense to try and
| capture that waste. Something individuals can do to make a
| difference.
|
| I agree $33/mo and a mail-back service is never going to get
| their $100M back.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Sometimes (often these days) i can't tell if these things are
| parodies or real products. It reminds me of Juicero:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juicero
|
| In Europe many countries have specific trash bins for food
| waste, they're collected by the city and reused for compost and
| biogas. No subscriptions, no investors, no soon to be e-waste
| wifi and bluetooth connected trash can, no shipping dirt in box
| barbazoo wrote:
| Some of their assumptions seem to be very much US based where
| "green bins" for garden and food waste might not be a thing?
| I don't know but where I live in Canada, contents of the
| green bin definitely don't end up in the landfill like they
| say. So it's not even a problem that needs solving in many
| other places.
| rubylark wrote:
| In the US, it depends on the waste services provider, city,
| and county. I've had garbage companies that offer compost
| and yard waste services and some not. Sometimes it's
| provided through the city or county for free or for a fee,
| though not everywhere
| HideousKojima wrote:
| In the US too, plenty of cities (even small ones) offer
| compost collection as part of standard trash and recycling
| collection.
| jcims wrote:
| AVE did a great teardown of one a couple years ago,
| impressive machine with a stupid purpose.
| klntsky wrote:
| We should normalize having chickens in the office.
| ok_dad wrote:
| I have chickens roaming wild outside my office window, and I
| assure you that meetings are not much fun with "BOK BOK
| BOK..." resonating constantly through the mic. They are so
| f-ing loud.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| I don't think this is very practical. It would cause too many
| communication issues in the agile process.
| klntsky wrote:
| The chickens are agile enough to lay eggs on their own
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| No. Have you ever raised chickens, or cleaned out a coop?
| aj_icracked wrote:
| 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 :)
| tlavoie wrote:
| Curious about the "world's best coop" part. What does
| this mean? (Asking as someone with chickens, and some old
| coops now.)
| adrianmonk wrote:
| Although it sounds funny, this is actually kind of a
| serious question: are you concerned about an egg bubble?
| luisapic wrote:
| [dead]
| klntsky wrote:
| FAANG companies probably have enough money for additional
| space and employees to look after the chickens
| huslage wrote:
| We should not be mailing compost around...that sort of defeats
| one of the purposes. There are local composting companies/orgs
| in most major metropolitan areas. Mine is Compost Now.
| O__________O wrote:
| It would be interesting to see an environmental impact analysis
| of use of mail vs a compost cycle that's does not use mail.
| Find it hard to believe they're reusing the labels, boxes,
| plastic wrapping, etc too.
| Majestic121 wrote:
| I think the impact analysis should be between a compost cycle
| that uses mail vs no compost cycle, because I would imagine
| that the alternative to this is just throwing food in the
| trash for most people
| barbazoo wrote:
| Blows my mind that that's a thing. If it's urban, how is
| there no compost bin system. If it's rural, just have a
| compost bin outside. It's like people don't know how to
| live anymore with every part of their lives being handled
| by some shitty subscription service. Food, waste, what's
| next, a box you can ship your poop in that's 39 bucks a
| year?!
| Majestic121 wrote:
| I'm not really defending the service, and I think it will
| fail because it looks like a logistical nightmare and I
| don't understand why people would pay 30 bucks for this,
| but if it was free it could be somewhat convenient.
|
| Especially in an urban setting if you don't have a
| compost bin in your building : it's not as ubiquitous as
| you seem to think.
| klondike_klive wrote:
| Turd.ly
| O__________O wrote:
| Possibly, though there are plenty of high-density urban
| areas that require separating compost materials and pick it
| up with trash, recycling, yard waste, etc. -- so to me that
| would seem like a better comparison; or just compare all
| options.
| dtx1 wrote:
| Here in Germany we have to split our garbage and one "bucket"
| so to speak is compostable and gets taken by the regular
| garbage trucks and I assume is composted in large facilities.
| That seems like a more reasonable approach because it scales to
| a whole city doing it
| coldpie wrote:
| Here in Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA, they are planning to ship
| compostable plastic bags to homes, which you can use to put
| organics into the normal metal/paper/plastic recycling
| stream. Those bags get picked out at the recycling center and
| used for compost to sell to local farms/etc and (hopefully)
| at least pay for the program, and maybe even bring in some
| extra funds. No extra cost to users or hassle mailing
| packages of garbage (lol).
| adrianmonk wrote:
| > _compostable plastic bags_ ... _normal metal
| /paper/plastic recycling stream_
|
| That's really clever since it avoids needing to have
| separate trucks.
|
| Will they also accept leaves and yard trimmings? These are
| much larger in volume, so I'm not sure if they could be
| handled, but maybe with large bags it's fine.
|
| > _sell to local farms /etc_
|
| My city sells to farms and also sells it in bags at retail
| stores. It's meets standards that are supposed to make it
| safe to use in your backyard garden.
|
| Also, since it costs money to put stuff in a landfill, and
| since this diverts from the landfill, it saves a bit of
| money that way too.
|
| (Further info:
| https://www.austintexas.gov/department/dillo-dirt)
| tunapizza wrote:
| Same here -- I live in Eastern Canada and my municipality
| is rolling out a program where you'll put compostables in a
| separate bag, but the sorting is done by the trashman.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| And then the yellow bags for plastic, which they take to SE
| Asia on the otherwise empty container-ships, so that it gets
| dumped on a beach or into a river, while Germany fills its
| quota for recycling.
|
| Sorry for the cynicism, this was the case a few years ago,
| maybe not anymore?
| super256 wrote:
| > this was the case a few years ago, maybe not anymore?
|
| I'm not sure what happens with the plastic in SE Asia, but
| we still send most of our plastic there.
|
| https://de.statista.com/infografik/25368/wichtigste-
| abnehmer...
| hannob wrote:
| Bullshit.
|
| This statistic is listing the share of exported plastics
| that are exported to certain countries. But that's not
| "most of our plastic", because overall exports are around
| ~10%. So "most of our plastic" is either recycled or
| burned within Germany. (Not saying any of this is ideal,
| but it's not helping to spread false information.)
| super256 wrote:
| I apologize. I chose poor wording to the point where my
| sentence it is becoming untrue.
|
| I meant something like: "The majority of plastic we
| export to other countries is still being exported to SE
| Asia".
| blueflow wrote:
| Majority of it is burned, as always.
| dtx1 wrote:
| I don't see what you are trying to say here? That we
| shouldn't even try to recycle anymore because some garbage
| gets shipped to SE Asia?
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| Which is better for the environment, taking it a few
| kilometers outside of Berlin and burying it in a landfill
| that is properly insulated and managed, or shipping it
| across to world and dropping it on a beach in Thailand
| where turtles and birds get tangled into it?
|
| The first is what happens with your regular garbage, the
| second is what happens (with some fraction) of the
| "recycled" yellow bag plastic.
|
| I was not trying to say anything particular, just how
| "recycling" has become a form of gaslighting to avoid the
| tough question of how to produce less garbage in the
| first place.
| martin_a wrote:
| As the other comment said, it's more likely that they get
| burned.
|
| I think it happened that due to waste reduction, "normal"
| garbage is sometimes not enough to keep the furnaces
| running, so they take recyclable material from the yellow
| bags and burn it, to keep the temperatures stable...
| nicoburns wrote:
| This definitely happens for plastic. But food waste does
| tend to actually get composted.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Things like this make me realize how poor the rest of the world
| is, and how wealthy America is.
| adenozine wrote:
| 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.
| kragen wrote:
| the tx-0 that was the predecessor of the dec pdp-1 had simd
| instructions in 01958
| adenozine wrote:
| I knew the first half of that sentence, but I'm shocked that
| it had SIMD way back then. I looked on wikipedia but didn't
| find anything about that tidbit, do you happen to know where
| you learned that?
| kragen wrote:
| 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
| adenozine wrote:
| I think I found it?
|
| Either way, I appreciate the tidbit. Good reading
| inspiration.
| kragen wrote:
| post post
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| And imagine what it would be like if you were actually allowed
| to access all that power.
| rafaelero wrote:
| I was yesterday reading about Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.
| The effect sizes this method is achieving for relieving a bunch
| of mental illnesses are extraordinary. This is going to
| revolutionize psychiatry in the near future.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Expensive AR glasses. You can see through them like they aren't
| there, then when they are turned on your entire field of view is
| a powerpoint screen with edit-ability levels of clarity.
|
| Surprised to see that this is close to mainstream, can't wait to
| turn on my monitors while at a bench by the river.
| gabythenerd wrote:
| I was just going to post this, AR glasses are getting really
| impressive, although I tried to get a pair and almost all
| companies are either in the "Coming Soon" stage or perpetually
| out of stock.
|
| Also tried getting the enterprise Google Glasses but it's
| difficult getting them as a hobbyist.
| amir734jj wrote:
| This https://youtu.be/vS0TuIPoeBs
|
| It's just amazing
| I_complete_me wrote:
| It's about gecko tape, tape that imitates how a gecko's feet
| adhere to surfaces. By Veritasium, FYI.
| rom-antics wrote:
| I've been seeing videos about this for probably 20 years
| (here's a link from 2009 https://phys.org/news/2009-06-gecko-
| feet-advances-science-fr...). But it's starting to seem like an
| elusive graphene-type material that will never be
| commercialized :(
|
| When can I finally buy some gecko gloves, damnit!
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| The problem is they don't maintain their stickiness
| tunnuz wrote:
| ChatGPT, DALL-E, whatever DeepMind produces.
| ignite wrote:
| Not new, but quantum locking. Literally making things float. I'm
| still convinced it's magic.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4r_Dz_lJS4
| roeles wrote:
| 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 fast.
|
| https://balancebelt.net/nl/
| depsypher wrote:
| Not 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.
|
| https://www.tromphoneapp.com/
|
| Disclosure: this is my own pet project. Discussed here
| previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33898421
| Havoc wrote:
| The motions on the recent Boston dynamics demo video were eerily
| realistic and humanlike. Sure preprogrammed but still that
| smoothness stood out to me as something new
| gpanders wrote:
| It's interesting to see both the advances in humanoid robotics
| and language models like ChatGPT. The obvious next step will be
| to combine these two to achieve a truly human-like android,
| just like in old school science fiction.
|
| Of course, bridging the uncanny valley to make it even look
| passably human is another milestone entirely.
| adlpz wrote:
| I believe this is the video, for reference:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e1_QhJ1EhQ
| yonixw wrote:
| In 0:30 you can see the bag changes (the wrinkles), could be
| just a reshoot, but makes the magic gone.
| swamp40 wrote:
| The bag snaps closed internally. I had to watch it at 25%
| speed over and over.
|
| The cool thing about slowing it down is you can see its
| feet wobbling side-to-side at about 10X per second to keep
| its balance.
| code_runner wrote:
| The ability for the robot to move in multiple directions at
| once... bending knees and arms and waist at the same time,
| threw me for a loop.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| Satellite connectivity for mobile devices. I think it's all still
| pretty immature, but the potential for both good _and_ bad is
| incredible.
|
| https://www.emergingtechbrew.com/stories/2023/01/12/some-and...
| antipotoad wrote:
| The yaybahar. It really sounds like there are electronics
| involved, but no:
|
| > Yaybahar is an electric-free, totally acoustic instrument
| designed by Gorkem Sen. The vibrations from the strings are
| transmitted via the coiled springs to the frame drums. These
| vibrations are turned into sound by the membranes which echo back
| and forth on the coiled springs. This results in an unique
| listening experience with an hypnotic surround sound.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aY6TxC1ojA
| O__________O wrote:
| Appears to be a variant of a spring drum:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/results?search_query=Spring+drum
|
| Enable to find an example, but seen another variant where the
| spring is suspended in the center of a hollow tube with caps on
| the ends and hole on the side for sound to escape.
| ladberg wrote:
| 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.
| LorenDB wrote:
| USB-C/Thunderbolt is amazing. It blows my mind that you can have
| a graphics card, plus peripherals, plus storage, all connected by
| a single cable through a single, hot-pluggable(!) port.
| someotherperson wrote:
| > through a single, hot-pluggable(!) port
|
| Don't forget _reversible_ too!
| MH15 wrote:
| I've recently set up my work laptop and home desktop to run
| through USB-C. Power/Video/Data to the laptop from the monitor,
| and Data to the desktop from the monitor, both through USB-C.
| There's an extra DisplayPort connection to the desktop I'd like
| to prune someday, but for now it's brilliant to be able to swap
| one USB-C connection and my monitor, mouse, keyboard, speakers,
| webcam all work flawlessly. Really helps with work from home, I
| don't have enough room in my apartment for two desks.
| tricky wrote:
| 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
| lofatdairy wrote:
| I'm aware that Elisa Konofagou at Columbia has done quite a bit
| of work on this in the past decade if your interested in more:
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4038976/
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030156290...
| O__________O wrote:
| Related news coverage:
|
| https://google.com/search?q=lipsman+ALS+MR-guided+focused+ul...
| gnarcoregrizz wrote:
| I'm really hopeful about focused ultrasound for non-invasive
| treatment of various brain diseases.
| Static2280 wrote:
| This is interesting to me because my mother has MS and it's
| _because_ the blood-brain barrier is too open that she has
| health issues. Surprising there's good reason to open it up.
| tricky wrote:
| I learned about this from a talk given by one of the authors.
| The guy next to me asked, "If you open up the blood-brain
| barrier, doesn't that mean nasty things can cross, too?" and
| the author was like, "yep." There are definitely risks.
| HorizonXP wrote:
| Hah, I worked in Kullervo's lab in the early 2010s. It is,
| indeed, surreal, what you can do with MR-guided focused
| ultrasound.
| Ftuuky wrote:
| Seeing a dude grow human neurons directly connected to a computer
| chip to make a "human AI", all from his garage [0]. It showed me
| what is possible with science these days if you have enough
| dedication and know-how. Made me feel deeply excited and scared
| for the incoming future.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2YDApNRK3g
| guerrilla wrote:
| 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.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Probably not a lot. Babies when they're born have billions of
| neurons but believe me, there isn't much going on yet :)
| jaywalk wrote:
| What a deeply disturbing comment.
| barbazoo wrote:
| What's "deeply disturbing" about that? I just meant that
| cognitively there isn't much going on yet.
| guerrilla wrote:
| No, I don't believe you at all. If you hurt the baby, it
| suffers. Inability of most people to remember those times,
| doesn't make that not the case.
| heywherelogingo wrote:
| "believe me" - he could well have been a baby himself.
| jcims wrote:
| This is why I give that engineer at Google a lot of slack for
| his concerns that Lambda was conscious.
|
| There's a bit of an imperative, in my opinion, to over-index
| on that concern, because we could be building and torturing
| things for decades because people are afraid of losing their
| jobs.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Fair enough, it does make sense to have a higher tolerance
| for false positives than false negatives in this domain. I
| think that's a hard thing for people to accept though since
| so far it's been very obvious the objects and systems we
| interact with have not been conscious (except to
| pansychists of course.) It might be good to get practice in
| and build the habit early though, even if we don't think
| these current systems are conscious.
| jcims wrote:
| Exactly. In the instance it doesn't seem warranted at
| all, but at some point we will have to accept
| 'whistleblower' type accounts of the same nature with a
| bit less excoriation.
| antipotoad wrote:
| Also in a subsequent interview with the Google engineer
| [1], it comes out that the sentience claim _was_ a bit of
| an attention grab, but with the reasonable purpose of
| airing the topic of AI ethics, and how machine learning
| is running way ahead of our thinking on its consequences.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgCUn4fQTsc
| jcims wrote:
| Oh wow, thank you! I hadn't seen that one.
| greggsy wrote:
| The thought of clandestine modding labs and neural implants
| brings to mind a future similar to Ghost in the Shell.
| agent281 wrote:
| At this point I feel like people must also be trying to
| modify their DNA in secret. I wonder if we'll hear some
| horror stories in the next few years.
| nuphonenuacc wrote:
| Search for lactose intolerance in the linked channel. Not
| completely secret.
| Ftuuky wrote:
| Was going to say that.
|
| He "cured"(?) his lactose intolerance with CRISPR tech
| (for a few months but still very impressive).
| jcims wrote:
| One of the few YouTube channels that i can identify by the
| experiment alone.
| 7ewis wrote:
| Maybe not weird or surreal enough for HN. But I am amazed by the
| stability and quality of videos from my drone.
|
| It's just amazing that I could easily fly a kilometer away whilst
| having a live feed of the footage being streamed back to my
| controller.
|
| I have a sub 250g drone, so it's so light yet easily able to
| withstand pretty strong winds and the videos look great on a big
| 4K TV afterwards!
| Dzugaru wrote:
| Absolutely this - I was completely blown away by the technology
| since it was a long long childhood dream for me (to fly or
| control something flying remotely).
|
| I've flown the thing off the top of the volcano (at 3000
| meters), and in heavy wind and clouds and was amazed how stable
| it is, how easy you can fly one and the 4k video it generates
| is breathtaking.
|
| One thing I still want for this is to remove 500m ceiling and
| being able to pierce the clouds fast - not sure if this is
| possible anywhere since it's probably dangerous and illegal,
| but that would complete my childhood dream I think (short of
| actually learning to fly a real small plane or a glider).
| wil421 wrote:
| I do a lot of kayaking (not white water kayaking) and fishing
| off my kayak in lakes, rivers, and the ocean on calmer days.
|
| Does your style drone have any following features? Looking for
| something to fly around looking for fish and something that
| will follow me or do fly-bys when I'm doing something with the
| family.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| Yeah, the DJI Mini 3 Pro is that drone... get the basic
| controller version.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| in some form, this was present on DJI drones even 2
| generations ago
| kerpotgh wrote:
| I think Skydio has the best autonomous follow feature I've
| seen so far.
| Ftuuky wrote:
| Not OP but Skydio might have the drones you need?
| jcims wrote:
| DJI is a juggernaut and i imagine will catch up, but when i
| last looked about a year ago Skydio autonomous tracking was
| dramatically better. It was the first thing that popped
| into mind when reading that question.
| xrayarx wrote:
| I thought about that too and they are all not watertight.
| There are Swellpros that are, but they are not hobby drones.
| And their specs are no match to current hobby drones.
| 7ewis wrote:
| I have a DJI Mini 3 Pro, it has a feature called Active
| Track[0] where you highlight a subject on the screen and then
| select how you'd like it to follow you. It can go alongside
| you or behind you - can follow things like cars too. Despite
| the sensors, it can be a little scary getting it to follow
| you when there are trees or telephone lines nearby, but in a
| lake or the sea it should be great. There are safety features
| where if it loses connection to the controller it can hover
| in place, land or return to home (where it took off from).
|
| [0] - https://store.dji.com/guides/film-like-a-pro-with-
| activetrac...
| mkurz wrote:
| Which drone do you have?
| 7ewis wrote:
| It's a DJI Mini 3 Pro. Never had any experiences with other
| drones, so can't compare it to others - but I love it!
|
| The new DJI Mini 3 does look good too if you're on more of a
| budget.
| joenot443 wrote:
| Is now a good time to get into the hobby? I remember having an
| interest in college but it seemed so expensive and prohibitive.
| Have drones reached the same cost-value consumer sweet spot
| that 4K tv and e-bikes are recently enjoying?
| googlryas wrote:
| It seems like every amateur or even personal production has
| these big beautiful sweeping aerial shots now, when 10 years
| ago it would be only available to medium size productions that
| could rent a commercial drone, and 20 years ago only available
| to large productions that could afford to rent a helicopter.
| tempoponet wrote:
| The original "Planet Earth" was a showpiece for HD, but also
| these kinds of sweeping shots that people had rarely seen
| before. These were done with heavy cameras and complicated
| wire systems run through caves and forests. Today it seems
| almost pedestrian and quaint.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Do you worry about losing it though?
| 7ewis wrote:
| Yeah, I have insurance with 'Flyaway Coverage'. Still have to
| pay a fee and there's a limit to the number of claims you can
| make over a time period but it's a lot cheaper than buying a
| new drone.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Wow how much is it? Where do you buy it? Is it worth it for
| a sub $500 drone?
| richiebful1 wrote:
| Looks like something you can buy with a DJI drone from
| their online store.
|
| https://store.dji.com/guides/dji-care-refresh-flyaway-
| covera...
| [deleted]
| ubermonkey wrote:
| 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 probably
| starting the clock on needing a full replacement. I think they
| were hoping for 10-15 years, but I got only 8 before joint pain
| and bone loss forced the issue.
|
| Last Monday -- so, 15 days ago -- I went in at 5AM for a total
| hip replacement.
|
| _Which was done on an OUTPATIENT basis._ I walked out of the
| hospital (with a walker, granted) on the new joint, and was at
| home in a lounge chair by 5PM. By the end of the week, I was off
| the walker entirely and using a cane. By day 9, I was routinely
| moving around the house without even the CANE, though I need it
| for any meaningful walk.
|
| The main thing I'm supposed to be doing is walking. I could
| manage a half mile within a week. Last night I walked 1.2 miles
| at a 30% faster pace than my first half-mile walk. I should be
| shut of even the cane in another week or two.
|
| To me, this kind of objectively major SKELETON EDIT being
| effectively banal from a medical POV is pretty surreal. I mean,
| it's not "put Luke in the bacta tank" surreal, but it's a whole
| lot closer to that I realized was realistic.
|
| (Now: I'm completely willing to note that the ease I've had with
| this is tied to a number of factors, including probably first the
| fact that I live in a top-tier city for this kind of medical
| attention, and I have excellent health insurance. But still.)
| raydiatian wrote:
| SKELETON EDIT could be a sci fi novel name.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| That's amazing. Decades ago you would be crippled for life
| after an event like that. Now you might be essentially back to
| functioning :)
| ubermonkey wrote:
| The really amazing thing is that even 20 years ago, a return
| to full activity with no limitations was nearly a given after
| a THR. The improvements here are mostly in terms of how
| quickly that recovery happens.
|
| My mother, in her working life, was a physical therapist, but
| she's been retired for 25 years. In her career, the hip
| replacement was miraculous but required a serious hospital
| stay, and had a higher complication rate. Improved techniques
| and understandings about the recover process have made
| ENORMOUS differences since then.
| kirubakaran wrote:
| Congratulations!
|
| > I live in a top-tier city for this kind of medical attention
|
| What city is that, if you don't mind?
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Houston.
|
| We have shitty weather in the summer, and the landscape is so
| flat as to make pancakes look topographically interesting,
| but if you have cancer or need orthopedic surgery it's hard
| to find a better place to go.
| kragen wrote:
| maybe beijing, shanghai, zurich, minneapolis, or moscow
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Assuming there is only one Kragen, I am amused but not
| surprised to see you here.
| ryanisnan wrote:
| This is incredible. I have heard that surgeons are effectively
| carpenters of the human body, which minimizes their skills I
| think a bit unfairly. This is technology at its finest.
| Congratulations on the speedy recovery!
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| "carpenters of the human body"
|
| I've seen a video of a knee replacement. And yes, it's very
| much like a carpenter working on a piece of wood. The
| hammering, the nailing, the sawing, it's all there. If
| someone was doing it to me, I would definitely be freaked
| out.
| skrbjc wrote:
| 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.
| flemhans wrote:
| 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?
| feeela wrote:
| The main difference between Europe and the US on this point
| is health insurance (or the lack of in the US). Those
| technologies are available worldwide - it heavily depends
| on whether you can afford it or not.
| drewbeck wrote:
| I've got a new hip in my future and I've been hearing more of
| these stories. Incredible, and incredibly relieving. Congrats
| on your new skelly!
| entropicgravity wrote:
| CRISPR gene editing. Rewrite every instance of your genome in
| situ. And you not only survive but thrive, unbelievable.
| kokojumbo wrote:
| LTO Tape drives that run their cooling at 100 percent power when
| idle and have no particle filters
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34502596
| amelius wrote:
| Tape drives need to be disrupted. They are way too expensive.
| RockRobotRock wrote:
| Not saying this isn't true, but you made the thread and the
| video. Is there anyone else talking about this?
| KaiserPro wrote:
| most things don't have filters.
|
| I don't think I've seen a drive failure because of it though. I
| think the last time the robot failed it was mostly because of
| the autoloader not working properly.
| mkj wrote:
| Tape drives (3592) in a Singapore data centre had lots of
| problems in the smokey burning season until they put in
| filtering specifically for the drives. In other office-like
| data transfer rooms in other cities they didn't seem to have
| problems, so perhaps there's something especially bad about
| smoke.
| [deleted]
| stoltzmann wrote:
| This isn't that uncommon in datacenter hardware. Most of the
| gear does not have filters on intakes. The air should already
| be filtered in the facility anyways.
|
| Running fans at 100% is slightly weirder, but also not unheard-
| of.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Not real: I used to walk around Silicon Valley claiming that I
| was selling vibrating toilet seats.
|
| I claimed that they vibrated at the "brown note" which is (South
| Park Reference) the resonating frequency of your bowels. This
| frequency would make you go.
|
| I claimed that I had bootstrapped the entire thing by selling it
| to little old ladies who didn't like eating prunes.
| natural20s wrote:
| AI image generation from text prompts. Midjourney, DallE, etc.
| These platforms are quickly disrupting the visual art and
| commercial art world. This isn't just "Putin as a Vampire Riding
| a Nuclear Bomb" wacky art. If you spend time looking at how these
| platforms are being used - they are quickly becoming production
| tools that are helping accelerate ideation and creation. Here are
| some examples:
|
| * Developing logo concepts - the rendered text is usually wrong
| but the layout and design can be used to "hand build" a final
| concept
|
| * Developing UI and web page designs
|
| * Architectural designs and renderings
|
| * Packaging design
|
| Personally I'm using it to develop very niche imagery for a
| roleplaying game (Welcome to Grimsbury). Everything from
| postcards, postage stamps, posters, signage and illustrative
| imagery is coming out of Midjourney. The amount of control I have
| over the final product, the detail and unexpected "awesomeness"
| is mind blowing. I just generated a set of vintage postage stamps
| in the gravure style of scientists opening otherworldly portals.
| I could print them out and use them to mail a letter.
|
| Artists and illustrators are very concerned about this technology
| - and rightly so. I was budgeting almost $2,000 to pay for art
| for my game - now - I spend $10-$20 a month to get hundreds of
| images that I 100% own the commercial rights to use. This will
| get me to the Kickstarter phase where I will then use kickstart
| $$$ to pay an illustrator to help with the final product - but
| Midjourney gets me launched.
| notTechbut wrote:
| Not really a tech but technology assisted bio electric therapy:
|
| https://youtu.be/HKWyB9qLP_s
|
| https://youtu.be/XheAMrS8Q1c
| Thebroser wrote:
| Spatial Transcriptomics. Being able to see gene expression at a
| resolution of a handful of cells in a cross section of tissue is
| revolutionizing disease research.
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-020-01033-y
| JZL003 wrote:
| Cool I work in spatial transcriptomics, it's still early days
| but not too far off we're going to get great resolution and
| great capture. Especially for the brain, and maybe even tumor
| micro-environments it could be really cool
| yread wrote:
| All this spatial stuff is mind blowing: CODEX, CyTOF, ...
| agumonkey wrote:
| not sure if it qualifies as technology:
|
| - nicolas schabanel team works on molecular DNA programming, they
| had game of life capable structures made of DNA tiles. The
| mentioned being capable of transpiling tiny lambda calculus
| expressions but were stuck (this was in 2013~) due to thermal
| degradation on long programs. His courses are on dailymotion.
|
| - michael levin morphogenesis / developmental biology research:
| dude revived 50s~ ideas with gap junctions and cell levels
| "information processing" .. he ended up regrowing a second head
| on a larva after reprogramming cell messaging to alter the
| natural regeneration process. He was in a lot of
| interviews/podcasts in the last months.
| dennis_jeeves1 wrote:
| Michael levin's work is indeed outstanding.
| jcims wrote:
| I truly feel there's going to be some kind of industrial
| revolution with DNA or derivative based manufacturing.
| agumonkey wrote:
| A lot of trends are showing nanotech reaching mainstream.
| Just two days ago there was a veritasium video about gecko
| skin like thin film that could hold smooth objects passively.
| v8xi wrote:
| Its just getting revved up :)
| HideousKojima wrote:
| It definitely comes straight out of sci-fi at least. In the
| original _Deus Ex_ , I think when you first break into the
| Versalife offices in Hong Kong, you can overhear an employee
| talking about their universal constructors (basically 3d
| printers that work at the atomic level). The employee mentions
| one of his friends created Conway's Game of Life with
| buckyballs.
|
| Edit: nevermind it's a Versalife employee at a nearby bar/club,
| not in the offices themselves.
| leesec wrote:
| Seconding Michael Levin, that guy is doing some incredible
| stuff
| agumonkey wrote:
| It made me feel something very very new, a blend of infinite
| "power" at reach and at the same time something that could
| really break sanity and ethics forever.
| wojciii wrote:
| Currently there's an intense war in which drone tech is being
| used in ways that I didn't imagine possible.
|
| I think that this technology will evolve rapidly based on what I
| have seen so far:
|
| - drone picking a dropped radio
|
| - the usual fire correction of
|
| - race drones with explosives
|
| - dropping ordinance from 3d printed attachments
|
| - machine gun drone (prototype)
|
| The above are just off the shelf drones modified or built from
| scratch racing drones.
|
| The military drones used (that I have seen video of) are both
| expensive and give a large explosion) but not very creatively
| designed.
|
| It's just a question of time before autonomous systems will be
| able clear up a trench by dropping smaller drones which only kill
| humans. The technology to detect specific range of temperaturs
| generated by our skin is already available and used in alarms.
| benevol wrote:
| Energy with magnetics: https://www.KryonEngine.org
| justusthane wrote:
| The great thing about perpetual motion machines is that you
| don't need to spend a lot of time digging through all the
| details, and you don't even need to be well-versed in physics,
| to understand that they're impossible. You just have to know
| that energy cannot be created or destroyed.
|
| Two items of note from their FAQ:
|
| > "Except for the usual forces such as mechanical friction,
| resistance due to air, etc., no major force opposes this
| movement to the point of canceling it. "
|
| Yes, and those "usual forces" require additional energy input
| to overcome.
|
| > "The correct application of the Law of Thermodynamics (a)
| refers to closed systems which (b) exist in a reality of which
| 100% is known and understood. Both (a) and (b) can only ever be
| true with absolute certainty in theory, but never within the
| limited perception of reality how humankind experiences it - in
| other words: How much sense does it make to think that a system
| which is observed in only 4 dimensions can never and will never
| be influenced by what is contained and happening in the
| following 8 (higher) dimensions?"
|
| So they're using magnets to pull energy from other dimensions.
| Got it!
| blackbear_ wrote:
| > The correct application of the Law of Thermodynamics [...]
| exist in a reality of which 100% is known and understood
|
| Uh, are they really saying that thermodynamics only starts
| working when we have a perfect understanding of reality, and
| not a picosecond before that? What the actual duck.
| mackatsol wrote:
| Is there a working model?
| lnsru wrote:
| It's another scam...
| greggsy wrote:
| Perpetual motion and free energy stuff was interesting things
| to read about back in early 2000's internet (around the time
| when conspiracy theories were kind of niche).
|
| The only thing of interest recently has to be the EmDrive [1] -
| only because the rigorous testing it was put through finally
| put the mail in the coffin of backyard free energy nuts.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive
| notinfuriated wrote:
| Does it not seem suspicious to you when you see a video of the
| device, and it's of a 3d model?
| pavlov wrote:
| _"What does Kryon mean?"_
|
| _"The correct question would be: Who is Kryon? Kryon supports
| Humanity in many precious ways - not only by dropping hints
| about upcoming revolutionary technologies based on magnetism,
| such as (shallow depth) geothermal energy generation, (mass-
| scale) water desalination and magnetic engines. You are
| encouraged to tune in to the neverending stream of new free
| audio channellings."_
|
| It seems a being from another dimension has blessed humankind
| with a perpetual motion machine. Where do I send my money?
| kzrdude wrote:
| I guess the jetpak demonstrations where they actually seem
| realistically usable are very cool
| spzb wrote:
| Zombie pigs : https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02112-0
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Not just pigs, if I recall correctly, for organ transplants
| they often need to declare the person deceased and then
| partially revive the body and organs but in order to not revive
| the brain they have to either bypass or close off the blood
| flow to it. So a donor can be declared dead and then have just
| their body brought back to "life" to provide more time for the
| transplant to be arranged.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Thanks for all of the replies. This post gives me fantasy of
| waking up one morning finding all of my family responsibilities
| gone so that I can dive it some random weird things and grow my
| brain.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| AI nsfw bf/gf apps. It probably just makes sense to this
| generation but for me, it feels like something out 90s era sci
| fi.
| bitcoinmoney wrote:
| Any example? Didn't know these exist
| lofatdairy wrote:
| I think Replika (https://replika.com/) is one of the bigger
| ones. I know of it from a few youtube videos making fun of
| it, but I really don't know how anyone can form an attachment
| to a chatbot.
| langitbiru wrote:
| Replika:
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/z34d43/my-ai-is-sexually-
| har...
| Kelteseth wrote:
| This always reminds me of the film "Her"
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/
| yamtaddle wrote:
| And Blade Runner 2049.
|
| And Star Trek TNG, with the holodeck (LOL, friggin' Riker)
|
| A bunch of other stuff if ones with robotic bodies count.
| Star Trek: TOS has some. Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927)
| features a robot re-creation of a character's dead lover.
| Though that's a bit different than one simulated without a
| reference.
| [deleted]
| pkalinowski wrote:
| 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.
| smt88 wrote:
| Looks completely fake to me. The face moves very unnaturally
| and doesn't even stick to the body properly. It looks like a
| super realistic mask (meaning it has many of the same problems
| a mask has).
| folmar wrote:
| Really, this is one of the most unconvincing deepfakes I've
| seen.
| qwertox wrote:
| 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.
| hannes0 wrote:
| It will never be watermarked. Photoshop edits also are not
| labeled as such.
| yreg wrote:
| In Slovakia we've already had a deepfake ad of a well-known
| news anchor.
|
| The ad starts as a news segment where she says that it turns
| out the covid vaccines don't work and then pivots to
| awareness campaign about hoaxes and misinformation.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zg0_bRoj1U
| roughly wrote:
| I love Keanu, but he's sort of "easy mode" for a deep fake,
| isn't he?
| littlestymaar wrote:
| In fairness, Keanu Reeves, like Kristen Stewart, isn't the
| hardest person to deepfake...
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| Is this because both are actors and therefore there is lots
| of available training data? Or something even more specific
| to these two people?
| coolspot wrote:
| Keanu Is weaved into the source code of this simulated
| world.
| twic wrote:
| I assume the point is that, like Lindsay Lohan [1], they
| have limited ranges of facial expression.
|
| [1] https://lohanfacial.ytmnd.com/
| danuker wrote:
| Here it is as a non-Short:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeHzQizPDNg
| O__________O wrote:
| For clarity, is it only the face that's faked?
| bvaldivielso wrote:
| Neurons in a Petri dish learning to play pong
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03229-y
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-01-24 23:01 UTC)