31 ms·

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

264 points by O__________O 4y ago

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 https://youtube.com/watch?v=SYYXida84Nc

gbell12 4y ago
Computers implemented in other computers. Specifically: Minecraft running in Minecraft https://youtu.be/-BP7DhHTU-I https://youtu.be/-BP7DhHTU-I or Game of Life running in Game of Life https://youtu.be/xP5-iIeKXE8 https://youtu.be/xP5-iIeKXE8 Bonus: Digital clock implemented in Game of Life https://youtu.be/3NDAZ5g4EuU https://youtu.be/3NDAZ5g4EuU Surreal because it makes it apparent that our universe could really be emergent behavior from a simple set of rules.
kokojumbo 4y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34502596
- amelius 4y ago
  Tape drives need to be disrupted. They are way too expensive.
- RockRobotRock 4y ago
  Not saying this isn't true, but you made the thread and the video. Is there anyone else talking about this?
- stoltzmann 4y ago
  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.
- KaiserPro 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
    - KaiserPro 4y ago
      I assume smoke has some level of tar or some other heavy sticky substance, so I could see that being a problem. It also depends on your cooling type as well. Most of the places I worked had a closed loop system, either hot/cold aisle, or radiators on the front of the rack. THe "zombie" rooms did pull air directly from the outside world, but they had massive filters on them. dust wasn't really a problem for us.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
mtmail 4y ago
Compost bin that requires a subscription. You send the compost via mail to a processing facility https://www.fastcompany.com/90834481/nests-co-founder-designed-fanciest-compost-bin https://www.fastcompany.com/90834481/nests-co-founder-design...
- klntsky 4y ago
  We should normalize having chickens in the office.
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    No. Have you ever raised chickens, or cleaned out a coop?
    - klntsky 4y ago
      FAANG companies probably have enough money for additional space and employees to look after the chickens
    - aj_icracked 4y ago
      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 :)
      - adrianmonk 4y ago
        Although it sounds funny, this is actually kind of a serious question: are you concerned about an egg bubble?
        luisapic 4y ago
        [dead]
        aj_icracked 4y ago
        Not at all, I assume egg prices will normalize in a few months / quarters to previous consumer costs - call it $1.50-$2 a dozen. It's super odd though that we're launching a company that allows anyone with a backyard to raise chickens / get eggs. For a lot of people, eggs are a bonus byproduct of raising them. A lot of people get joy from it, reduce nearly all their food waste, fertilize their yard, teach kids on taking care of them, they'll take care of you, etc. :)
Havoc 4y ago
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
- code_runner 4y ago
  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.
- adlpz 4y ago
  I believe this is the video, for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e1_QhJ1EhQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e1_QhJ1EhQ
  - yonixw 4y ago
    In 0:30 you can see the bag changes (the wrinkles), could be just a reshoot, but makes the magic gone.
    - swamp40 4y ago
      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.
- gpanders 4y ago
  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.
7ewis 4y ago
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!
- bilsbie 4y ago
  Do you worry about losing it though?
  - 7ewis 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      Wow how much is it? Where do you buy it? Is it worth it for a sub $500 drone?
      - richiebful1 4y ago
        Looks like something you can buy with a DJI drone from their online store. https://store.dji.com/guides/dji-care-refresh-flyaway-coverage/ https://store.dji.com/guides/dji-care-refresh-flyaway-covera...
- wil421 4y ago
  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.
benevol 4y ago
Energy with magnetics: https://www.KryonEngine.org https://www.KryonEngine.org
- justusthane 4y ago
  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_ 4y ago
    > 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 4y ago
  Is there a working model?
  - lnsru 4y ago
    It’s another scam…
- 4y ago
aaron695 4y ago
[dead]
amir734jj 4y ago
This https://youtu.be/vS0TuIPoeBs https://youtu.be/vS0TuIPoeBs It's just amazing
- I_complete_me 4y ago
  It's about gecko tape, tape that imitates how a gecko's feet adhere to surfaces. By Veritasium, FYI.
- rom-antics 4y ago
  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-friction.html 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 4y ago
    The problem is they don’t maintain their stickiness
smusamashah 4y ago
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 https://youtu.be/vS0TuIPoeBs?t=640
incomingpain 4y ago
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 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 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_American_Civil_War
- joncrocks 4y ago
  You should watch "the capture" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Capture_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Capture_(TV_series) (spoilers in the wiki article).
  - incomingpain 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      Lol. This hit me hard.
- 082349872349872 4y ago
f0e4c2f7 4y ago
Without a doubt ChatGPT. Still surprises me daily.
- yreg 4y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANv5UfZsvZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANv5UfZsvZQ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2I8AoB1xgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2I8AoB1xgU [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX1Y2JMK6g8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX1Y2JMK6g8
  - bemmu 4y ago
    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-googles-ai-sees-the-world-2015-6 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 4y ago
      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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo
      - 4y ago
tricky 4y ago
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 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12426-9
- Static2280 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
  - monknomo 4y ago
    It's an interesting problem - I was reading about bipolar, which also (probably) has the issue of too open a blood-brain barrier. There is a theory that repairing the blood-brain barrier would help, but as drugs repair the barrier, it's harder to get drugs into the brain from the blood, which means the doses need to be higher, which means the side effects are worse. I could imagine a treatment protocol of opening the blood-brain barrier and then administering a low dose of a drug, or something along those lines
- O__________O 4y ago
  Related news coverage: https://google.com/search?q=lipsman+ALS+MR-guided+focused+ultrasound&source=lmns&tbm=nws https://google.com/search?q=lipsman+ALS+MR-guided+focused+ul...
- lofatdairy 4y ago
  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.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4038976/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301562906017467?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030156290...
Ftuuky 4y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2YDApNRK3g
- guerrilla 4y ago
  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.
  - jcims 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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.
bvaldivielso 4y ago
Neurons in a Petri dish learning to play pong https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03229-y https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03229-y
lqet 4y ago
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.
- jvanderbot 4y ago
  That's wrong. It's poetic, but incorrect. These tools are about as good as a non specialist with time to undertake some bullshitting.
alamortsubite 4y ago
This video on Helion impressed me, though admittedly I know very little about nuclear fusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38
- O__________O 4y ago
  Worth nothing Helion has raised $577.8M of which $375M was provided by Sam Altman.
- terramex 4y ago
  Youtube recommended me a good rebuttal of that video yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vUPhsFoniw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vUPhsFoniw
  - O__________O 4y ago
    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.
agumonkey 4y ago
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.
- jcims 4y ago
  I truly feel there’s going to be some kind of industrial revolution with DNA or derivative based manufacturing.
  - agumonkey 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    Its just getting revved up :)
- leesec 4y ago
  Seconding Michael Levin, that guy is doing some incredible stuff
  - agumonkey 4y ago
    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.
- HideousKojima 4y ago
smrtinsert 4y ago
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.
- Kelteseth 4y ago
  This always reminds me of the film "Her" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    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.
- bitcoinmoney 4y ago
  Any example? Didn’t know these exist
  - lofatdairy 4y ago
    I think Replika (https://replika.com/ 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 4y ago
    Replika: https://www.vice.com/en/article/z34d43/my-ai-is-sexually-harassing-me-replika-chatbot-nudes https://www.vice.com/en/article/z34d43/my-ai-is-sexually-har...
- RichardCA 4y ago
  Yes, the 90's, when cable TV channels like Showtime could do this type of marginally R-rated SF. https://youtu.be/ntoEHAL3IGg https://youtu.be/ntoEHAL3IGg
sergiotapia 4y ago
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!
notTechbut 4y ago
[flagged]
laurensr 4y ago
"Strandbeest": crawling robots powered entirely by wind - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C97kMKwZ2-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C97kMKwZ2-g
- maCDzP 4y ago
  Beautiful - thank you for showing.
- aendruk 4y ago
  Takes me back to Soda Constructor. It would be fun to incorporate wind and sails into the model.
  - jasonb05 4y ago
    And sodarace...
- 52-6F-62 4y ago
  Hehe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMVr7gPjpqk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMVr7gPjpqk
- ozim 4y ago
  This is surreal good answer thanks for sharing.
omginternets 4y ago
I remember hearing about an GAN-based tool that would transform clothed pictures of women into nudes. That was depressingly surreal.
- Llamamoe 4y ago
  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 :-/
  - wruza 4y ago
    Say that you’ve never used your imagination and took no interest in this. Much easier to say come on when your hormone levels plunge back to sanity.
- simonwingtips 4y ago
  And oddly enough, there's also a new browser plug-in that uses AI to auto-censor images client-side. https://pury.fi/ https://pury.fi/
  - omginternets 4y ago
    I find this just as baffling, tbh. There are two kinds of excesses: anorexia and compulsive overeating...
jeffwask 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
- FeistySkink 4y ago
  Unfortunately it's still a thing almost everywhere in EU.
  - LeonM 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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.
jonnycomputer 4y ago
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 4y ago
  I was thinking the same thing until I saw things like this in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34503617 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.
Thebroser 4y ago
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 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-020-01033-y
- JZL003 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  All this spatial stuff is mind blowing: CODEX, CyTOF, ...
entropicgravity 4y ago
CRISPR gene editing. Rewrite every instance of your genome in situ. And you not only survive but thrive, unbelievable.
kzrdude 4y ago
I guess the jetpak demonstrations where they actually seem realistically usable are very cool
deleted 4y ago
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pkalinowski 4y ago
Unreal Keanu: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FeHzQizPDNg 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.
- danuker 4y ago
  Here it is as a non-Short: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeHzQizPDNg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeHzQizPDNg
- qwertox 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    It will never be watermarked. Photoshop edits also are not labeled as such.
  - yreg 4y ago
    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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zg0_bRoj1U
- O__________O 4y ago
  For clarity, is it only the face that’s faked?
- littlestymaar 4y ago
  In fairness, Keanu Reeves, like Kristen Stewart, isn't the hardest person to deepfake…
tboyd47 4y ago
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.
- tboyd47 4y ago
  To the people who downvoted me, I challenge you to find me one company or even one person using this technology privately without showing anyone what they're doing. If you can't find that, then it's all just dramatic theatre for handout money or pats on the back. That's it.
wolframhempel 4y ago
"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/ http://en.petmiglia.com/
- wongarsu 4y ago
  *pet drying chamber, in case anyone else was confused. Definitely surreal.
  - wolframhempel 4y ago
    thanks, changed it :-)
- O__________O 4y ago
  Surprised they just didn’t combine an automated washer with it to make it full service.
  - postultimate 4y ago
    https://youtu.be/_VfSl0iGAus?t=25 https://youtu.be/_VfSl0iGAus?t=25
- climb_stealth 4y ago
  > If your dog is scared of a hairdryer, why not put him in the hairdryer? Sounds like one way to emotionally scar the poor thing for life. Personally I found it is mostly the noise that is a problem. We are using a fancy Dyson hairdryer for our dogs and it has made it a bit better. It's a shame the dog dryer promotional videos don't actually show what it sounds like.
- capableweb 4y ago
  How many times do you wash your pet in order to having to put that huge machine in your house? A cat would need be washed very infrequently and a dog something like once a quarter. Maybe people tend to keep some others pets? Although the video just showed cats and dogs.
adenozine 4y ago
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 4y ago
  the tx-0 that was the predecessor of the dec pdp-1 had simd instructions in 01958
  - adenozine 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        I think I found it? Either way, I appreciate the tidbit. Good reading inspiration.
spzb 4y ago
Zombie pigs : https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02112-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02112-0
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  [flagged]
roughly 4y ago
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...
- raptor556 4y ago
  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.
  - schnitzelstoat 4y ago
    I just finished that book, it was really good. I can't wait to read The Song of the Cell.
  - epicureanideal 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - roughly 4y ago
      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.
rafaelero 4y ago
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.
peter303 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Agree, even the 2D version of the “Container” trailer looks interesting: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gUysXcyNXAo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gUysXcyNXAo
- MivLives 4y ago
  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?
LorenDB 4y ago
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 4y ago
  > through a single, hot-pluggable(!) port Don't forget reversible too!
  - angelbar 4y ago
    I thank everyday for that
- MH15 4y ago
  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.
swamp40 4y ago
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.xenobot.group/ https://www.drmichaellevin.org/ https://www.drmichaellevin.org/ https://twitter.com/Kriegmerica https://twitter.com/Kriegmerica
- abledon 4y ago
  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-reveals-never-seen-bioelectric-pattern https://now.tufts.edu/2011/07/18/face-frog-time-lapse-video-...
  - swamp40 4y ago
    Yes, you can literally see the pattern of the face. And change it. Can you imagine the next 50 years?
    - abledon 4y ago
      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"
- twic 4y ago
  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 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.
tunnuz 4y ago
ChatGPT, DALL-E, whatever DeepMind produces.
natural20s 4y ago
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.
depsypher 4y ago
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/ https://www.tromphoneapp.com/ Disclosure: this is my own pet project. Discussed here previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33898421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33898421
jimt1234 4y ago
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-android-phones-will-join-the-satellite-connectivity-party https://www.emergingtechbrew.com/stories/2023/01/12/some-and...
- 93po 4y ago
  T-Mobile is doing this with SpaceX for current devices, no special hardware needed. Enough bandwidth to text and potentially voice calls anywhere with satellite coverage and line of sight to sky (also in your pocket still gets reception apparently).
ubermonkey 4y ago
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 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.)
- skrbjc 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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?
wojciii 4y ago
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.
ladberg 4y ago
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.
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  I always opt for the manual pat-down, just in case. Who knows how well the machine is configured to blast me with the right amount of x-rays and not too much. Who knows how carefully it was transported to the airport, assembled at the airport, tested at the airport, etc. Half the time, everybody there looks at me like I'm wearing a tinfoil hat when I politely request the manual pat-down. The other half the time nobody bats an eye. Depends on the airport and culture, I guess.
  - ladberg 4y ago
    Sorry I should clarify: this was for the luggage x-ray and not the person scanner!
  - 93po 4y ago
    If you tell them you can't lift your arms over your head they're required to just wave you through without a pat down. Or at least this was the case until 2020 or so when I stopped doing this because I would get routinely threatened by TSA employees who were frustrated at how much this exception highlighted what a joke their jobs were.
- jesterson 4y ago
  I got 3d x-ray-ed by my dentist a while ago. Few seconds and he had whole structure of my teeth in 3d at his laptop. Quite impressive and presumably simplifies their life a lot
jgilias 4y ago
Inducing aging in mice and then reversing the process using gene therapy. https://hms.harvard.edu/news/loss-epigenetic-information-can-drive-aging-restoration-can-reverse https://hms.harvard.edu/news/loss-epigenetic-information-can...
- O__________O 4y ago
  Prior HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34362210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34362210
booleandilemma 4y ago
ChatGPT, which might be the biggest thing since smartphones, but also, this self-healing clothing: https://www.gearpatrol.com/outdoors/a648024/coalatree-whistler-self-healing-windbreaker/ https://www.gearpatrol.com/outdoors/a648024/coalatree-whistl...
- O__________O 4y ago
  Here’s GIF of the cloth “healing” after being rubbed: https://hips.hearstapps.com/amv-prod-gp.s3.amazonaws.com/gearpatrol/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/coalatree-jacket-gear-patrol-feature.gif https://hips.hearstapps.com/amv-prod-gp.s3.amazonaws.com/gea...?
dcminter 4y ago
I don't know if it fully qualifies, but I enjoyed this one: https://furhatrobotics.com/ 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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    What part of that precludes telepresence?
    - gwbas1c 4y ago
      I don't think it has anything to do with telepresence. It looks like a robotic receptionist, or a robotic concierge.
      - dcminter 4y ago
        Well, clearly they agree with you. To me, however, interacting with this thing would be a lot more intimate than a tablet on a stick, so it's an obvious direction to take the technology.
        gwbas1c 4y ago
        Case in point: A few hours ago I went to get a routine blood test. The last time I went to the lab, I wrote my name on a clipboard. Today, there was just a touchscreen computer. Someone was trying to check in and was CLEARLY having trouble. After he gave up, I walked up to check in. The check-in "application" was a browser opened up to a full screen. Someone had opened up the F12 debug screen and screwed up the whole page. Because I actually use the F12 screen professionally, I knew to close it and refresh. All the page did was ask me for my name and put me in a queue. This is the exact use case for a Furhat.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
roeles 4y ago
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/ https://balancebelt.net/nl/
- dendrite9 4y ago
  That looks like an interesting device, do you know if it available in the US? I had a friend lose some of his balance due to a tumor. He said he could do surprisingly well with his eyes, probably due to a lifetime of climbing, skiing, etc but others I know do not have that advantage.
  - roeles 4y ago
    I am pretty sure some have been sold to the US. I suggest reading https://balancebelt.net/en/patients/ https://balancebelt.net/en/patients/ and using the "I want to try" button to fill in a contact form. It's a small business, so I expect they'll be in touch shortly after that. Good luck!
- andrei_says_ 4y ago
  This reminds me about reading on similar device which when worn provides haptic feedback indicating North. The intention is to give the wearer an instinctive sense of North which remains even after stopping to wear the device. Do you by any chance have any info on this?
  - roeles 4y ago
    Closest thing I know of is this https://elitacwearables.com/projects/mission-navigation-belt/ https://elitacwearables.com/projects/mission-navigation-belt...
antipotoad 4y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aY6TxC1ojA
- O__________O 4y ago
  Appears to be a variant of a spring drum: https://m.youtube.com/results?search_query=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.
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  This would be ideal for the next Dune film(s)
narag 4y ago
I had no idea this kind of flying is possible right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB97hQWZ1Oo 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 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjbW6RjnQ-8
ignite 4y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4r_Dz_lJS4
decide1000 4y ago
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.
gwbas1c 4y ago
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.
lee101 4y ago
LLMs like ChatGPT E.g. https://text-generator.io 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
markus_zhang 4y ago
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.
jiggawatts 4y ago
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 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!
- raphar 4y ago
  Where do I get one? Ps: yes it runs doom: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TJHSMpYi8bg&t=0s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TJHSMpYi8bg&t=0s
  - capableweb 4y ago
    At some point I'll be more interested in what kind of computing device you cannot make Doom run on.
marcusverus 4y ago
How about drones zero moving parts? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM_ZcN3dleo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM_ZcN3dleo
entropicgravity 4y ago
Brain implant allows ALS patient to communicate at 60 words per minute[1]. [1]https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/24/1067226/an-als-patient-set-a-record-for-communicating-via-a-brain-implant-62-words-per-minute/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/24/1067226/an-als-p...
iancmceachern 4y ago
LVADs. We now have what are effectively artificial hearts. The heartmate 3 has been implanted in tens of thousands of people, patients that would have previously died a horrible death of end stage heart failure are now regularly going 5-10 years on these things. In many respects, for many patients, they are far better than the transplant option.

paulgb 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    What does produce reliable outputs?
    - xeromal 4y ago
      Humans?
      - rpdillon 4y ago
        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.
      - anigbrowl 4y ago
        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.
pxue 4y ago
"confidently wrong" That's chatgpt right now. To get it to confidently right will take years and years more
- Rastonbury 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    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.
kevinwang 4y ago
I agree that the output is often wrong despite looking right, but in this instance I don't see anything wrong in this example.
- jvanderbot 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    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.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
It is passing medical exams and will be used to help diagnose issues with similar reliability as humans.
- nradov 4y ago
  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.
- tootie 4y ago
  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.
  - markus_zhang 4y ago
    Just curious is it a political issue (risky and who to sue) or a technical issue (ai has far worse judgement)?
    - tootie 4y ago
      Mostly that it faired poorly against human doctors. Real-world medical data is too messy to feed into a machine. https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/31/machine_learning_the_hard_way/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/31/machine_learning_the_...
      - markus_zhang 4y ago
        Thanks! I wonder what is the most advanced automatic technique right now. I also think it's difficult to replace nurses -- even though basic nurse work is even easier comparing to a family doctor who needs to diagnose. I figure the reason is that to replace nurse we need a lot of automatic hardware, which needs a lot of investment, unlike ChatGPT which can really replace a service agent given enough training because it doesn't involve hardware.
krona 4y ago
I think it captured the essential difference between the two algorithms, i.e. the heuristic, so I don't understand how this is 'bullshit'.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- joaogui1 4y ago
  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
vijayr02 4y ago
So perfectly suited for a management role? :)
- mjhay 4y ago
  I did read somewhere that in some tests, ChatGPT-generated MBA papers got better grades than average MBA students.
- treis 4y ago
  They blocked people from generating performance reviews so at least some were trying.
- dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
  Well suited for more most walks of life actually where BS reigns supreme :)
lqet 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  Subjectively incredible; objectively questionable.
- throwaway675309 4y ago
  I know a lot of people are vividly impressed by this but to me "writing in the style of" (Victorian sonnets, poems, hip hop lyrics) is the equivalent of transfer learning and feels more like a cheap parlor trick. While I wont deny that it has impressive summarization abilities in terms of making excellent Q&A if you're willing to vet the information, I wouldn't exactly say that chatGPT is capable of meaningful conversation. It has great powers of recollection but its capacitive powers to produce new interesting information feels highly formulaic.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    I laughed when I read someone call its output "meaningful".
HideousKojima 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
- magarnicle 4y ago
  You have to tell it explicitly the correct number of syllables in a haiku, otherwise it gets it wrong.
- Der_Einzige 4y ago
  I wrote a whole paper on how to fix this in LLMs! https://paperswithcode.com/paper/most-language-models-can-be-poets-too-an-ai https://paperswithcode.com/paper/most-language-models-can-be... Gwern cited it too!
dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
'poetic': you have described it accurately. I fail to see what the hullabaloo is all about. Call me jaded.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  I'll call you refreshingly grounded.
soperj 4y ago
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 4y ago
  which are very clearly wrong but not always; And that's what makes it scary. You know people will use it and trusting it.
- krsw 4y ago
  Not much worse than a number of people I've talked with, to be honest.
  - twic 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - CamperBob2 4y ago
      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 4y ago
      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.
CamperBob2 4y ago
Which if you haven't noticed is good enough to land a seat in the United States Congress.
kragen 4y ago
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
PebblesRox 4y ago
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."
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Indeed, I had to laugh.
Der_Einzige 4y ago
Not even always poetic either Notice that it sometimes struggles to rhyme?
TuringNYC 4y ago
>> That's wrong. It's poetic, but incorrect. These tools are about as good as a non specialist with time to undertake some bullshitting. Does it really matter when it comes to real life? Kids take medical advice from TikTok influencers. Half the country believes absurd news they see on Facebook. Half the country believes anything their president says.

kevstev 4y ago

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...

Acutulus 4y ago

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.

alex_duf 4y ago
>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 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    Reasoning and statistical machines who are actually pretty bad at both.
  - swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
    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 4y ago
  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.
raptor556 4y ago
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.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    Ok how do we know you're not a bot?
    - friendlyHornet 4y ago
      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.
- SqueamOssi 4y ago
  Yeah - I can't believe how much this HN discussion seems like a human generated thread.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  Spot on. I am interested in any publications that might have come out of your research if you care to share.

volkk 4y ago

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 4y ago
TBF, San Diego and Boston are the centers for Biotech. The issues you raise are the correct ones.
- asielen 4y ago
  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.
TeMPOraL 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
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 4y ago
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.

roughly 4y ago

> 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.

hassancf 4y ago
Glorified tech support for scientists? No thanks.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- roughly 4y ago
  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.
- wruza 4y ago
  Why? Do you have a bad experience?
markus_zhang 4y ago
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.

twic 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  They can play pong. As far as I'm concerned that's already scary and raises ethical questions.
Teever 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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/ https://www.the-odin.com/ - sells DIY kits and classes (and is just generally one of my favorite groups of weirdos)
- twic 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  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/ https://www.the-odin.com/diy-crispr-kit/.
roughly 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  I am a stick.
  - weard_beard 4y ago
    SKELETON EDIT
  - alach11 4y ago
    Is this a reference to The Way of Kings?
    - irrational 4y ago
      Yes! Well, Stormlight Archive anyway.

tbenst 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Why did you leave the field? The compensation?
  - iamwizard 4y ago
    That was certainly part of it. The structure of neuro academia meant that I would be stuck in a postdoc position for 3-10 years paying, likely, around the NIH minimum of around $55k. Which goes along with more responsibility and drastically less job security than a graduate student without any better chances of actually getting a faculty position. Combine that with the fact that I didn't have the drive or disposition that the field selects for and I was out of there immediately after I got my degree for a more lucrative, more interesting (to me) job with a better work-life balance.

jvanderbot 4y ago
> 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.
- endorphinbomber 4y ago
  You realize it had the constraints of a poem, and needed to take some liberty with description there?
  - jvanderbot 4y ago
    Sure sure. I'm being pedantic. But replacing two sentences would fix it.
- twic 4y ago
  > 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.
- kragen 4y ago
  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

chrisco255 4y ago

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

daveguy 4y ago
The miles between intervention is known for Waymo and Cruise. Tesla refuses to publish this data.
- 93po 4y ago
  Waymo and Cruise have published their known operating areas. It's tiny and only during certain times of day (middle of the night). Tesla operates nearly everywhere. The scale of what's happening isn't even comparable.
  - daveguy 4y ago
    Estimates from users of FSD are ~5 miles between disengagements. https://sites.google.com/view/fsdbetacommunitytracker/home?pli=1 https://sites.google.com/view/fsdbetacommunitytracker/home?p... Even the best self reported areas are less than 100 miles between disengagement. Waymo and Cruise are at around 30,000 miles between disengagement. Tesla has released nothing.
    - 93po 4y ago
      Tesla has FSD released on literally every car in the US that has purchased it. Hundreds of thousands of cars. No one serious in the self driving space is using disengagements to pick winners or leaders on the path to commercialization. There is no standard about what qualifies as a disengagement and companies will interpret and report their disengagements differently. Those interpretations also change over time, making it even more difficult to actually understand how a company has progressed in its technology. And again you're missing the point. Waymo/Cruise are operating in an extremely different and much more narrow context than Tesla's FSD. Let's go put Waymo on a random road in a random city and see how it fares compared to Tesla FSD. I guarantee it will be tremendously worse and no one who knows anything about the space would argue otherwise.
      - daveguy 4y ago
        Hundreds of thousands of 5 mile jaunts. Also, why is Tesla so adamant about how many accidents occured simply with FSD disabled? Shouldn't we know how long prior to the accident FSD was engaged? I mean, hitting the brakes in panic only technically makes it "not FSD". I'd be happy if you showed me any reported data, self or Tesla, of 30k miles before disengagement with FSD. Even within one order of magnitude instead of two.
        93po 4y ago
        Show me data of Waymo or Cruise doing 30k miles before disengagement in the 99% of the country where they don't operate. I guarantee their stats are worse anywhere outside their carefully chosen, extremely narrow operating areas.
        daveguy 4y ago
        If there was a single operating area that Tesla could do as well, they would be shouting it from the rooftops. They are not only silent. They are trying to argue to the state of California that they are not testing self driving capabilities past level 2. Have a great day. Edit: one more thing ... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nsb2XBAIWyA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nsb2XBAIWyA
        93po 4y ago
        Telsa has no reason to hyper focus on a few square miles in some random city and only in the middle of the night. You too.