16 ms·
Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?
ChatGPT and other generative AI seems to be taking a lions share of mindspace in the tech industry right now.
I'm curious to hear what interesting new things people are seeing that AREN'T trendy right now (yet?!).
- shafkathullah 3y agohttps://cebra.ai/ https://cebra.ai/ this
- v_vara 3y ago[dead]
- markypants 3y agoMiniaturization of VR headsets is finally a thing. Google the Bigscreen VR headset compared to a valve index.
- Our_Benefactors 3y agoBattery tech Display panel tech Silicon photonics
- throwaway1777 3y agoWhat is new in display panels?
- Our_Benefactors 3y agoExtreme panel curvature, new panel sizes, software baked into the display, technologies like quantum dot reaching near-oled quality at a fraction of the price.
- nojonestownpls 3y ago> software baked into the display now the display can directly serve ads!
- MikeTheGreat 3y agoWhat do you mean by "software baked into the display"? (Like, firmware? Or is this more like an all-in-one type computer but the 'computer' part is equivalent to a Raspberry Pi/Arduino/etc [So - programmable, but somewhat minimal?]?)
- Our_Benefactors 3y agoSome high end displays for example have a piece of hardware to control the display, will all sorts of multi monitor settings. I suppose you could call this firmware but it’s much more advanced than the previous setup of a few buttons for menu driven use. They can also take software updates, I think?
- eternalban 3y agoWhere can I find out about "software baked into the display" vendors, people to talk to? I've long been musing about resurrecting the drafting table for architecture.
- rngname22 3y agoWith rapid progress in AR/VR, traditional display tech improvements are like horse technology advances in 1900.
- vinaypai 3y agoAR/VR needs display tech.
- Our_Benefactors 3y agoOne of the primary limitations in creating an immersive VR experience is a device with the necessary displays and optics. They have to be high resolution, lightweight, durable, low power consumption, and ultra sharp even through the most distorted optical filters. It’s basically the holy grail of display tech.
- sakopov 3y ago+1 for battery tech. Particularly interesting what Enovix is doing in this market.
- Blammar 3y agoIndeed. Lithium-air and sodium-air batteries look extremely promising, the former for higher power densities, and the latter for low temperature environments. I can't wait to get a 500 KWH battery backup for my house for $10k...eventually...
- v-erne 3y ago>> I can't wait to get a 500 KWH battery backup At first it sounded amazing but then when gazing at this number it struck me suddenly - isn't this like an energetic equivalent of 0,5 ton of TNT ? So if I rephraze this statement to "I cannot wait when I will be able to store half a ton of TNT in my garage" this whole premise starts to sound less and less appealing. (especially since there was a electric scooter battery explosion in flat near me which killed someone)
- paulgb 3y agoWebGPU. It’ll be live in Chromium stable this Thursday and will be the biggest step change for browser-based GPU since the original WebGL.
- softfalcon 3y agoExcited to see WebGPU support for this become stable with three.js! They've been working on it in a beta-state, but I foresee huge perf improvements once it's widely accepted on the major browsers.
- echelon 3y agoDo you see folks continuing to build on top of three.js? It looks like Rust game engines like Bevy and Fyrox are set to deliver comprehensive functionality to the browser over WASM/WebGPU.
- softfalcon 3y agoThat’s cool there are WASM enabled Rust engines! I’ll be honest, before you mentioned them, I’d never even heard of Bevy or Fyrox before. As for people continuing to use three.js, yeah, I still see a lot of folks using it to build games. That whole “js everywhere” still seems to be really popular with a lot of folks. It probably also helps that new comp sci students learning 3D graphics are often now taught using three.js instead of C++ like when I was a student.
- dchest 3y agoWebGPU is all the rage right now for hosting AI models in browser :)
- digitallyfree 3y agoThis project is doing LLMs of all things with WebGPU too! https://mlc.ai/web-llm/ https://mlc.ai/web-llm/
- MuffinFlavored 3y ago
- Animats 3y agoNow that the NFT and Meta clown cars have crashed, metaverse work is quietly plugging along. It's a niche, but it may be a Roblox/Fortnite sized niche.
- H8crilA 3y agoIt already is, there's a market for game skins, for example for CSGO. Don't see anything else on the horizon.
- rcme 3y agoIs anything actually exciting happening in the space, though?
- robinwassen 3y agoRoblox are doing steady incremental progress to their platform/engine. Epic released Unreal Engine for Fortnite about one month ago. Meta have some interesting stuff in their pipe. I think that especially Roblox will shift how the younger generation view games, with more emphasis on social. It is their MMOs.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoIs it really much of a shift? Last I checked, Minecraft servers had done pretty well with the generation prior.
- rcme 3y agoIs Roblox really considered the metaverse? I feel like it's just an MMO with a game editor. Not that different than many other games with custom game editors. It feels like a stretch to call this a paradigm shift.
- FireInsight 3y agoWell, Roblox is almost as metaverse as any metaverse. Metaverse is just a buzzword for MMO's with level editors, that are also supposedly selling land that's worth something, a good place for a corporate themepark and having business meetings with uncanny 3D avatars that sound like your colleagues.
- ghaff 3y agoOne of the questions I've been asking is we've basically had physical servers -> VM -> cloud -> container orchestration on about a decade long cadence. So what's next--especially considering you can argue a lot of the low-level architectural things haven't really changed during that period. But, then, perhaps architectural details don't matter a lot at this point relative to things like AI/ML. Even WASM is mostly in the weeds.
- riskable 3y agoPhysical servers (or devices) are next, obviously! IT is cyclical.
- theRealMe 3y agoSpeaking of cyclical IT, my estimate is going “forward” to the terminal/mainframe-esque concept of simple and cheap “terminals” aka laptops that you use to log into a much beefier “mainframe” aka cloud workstation. I’m at a FAANGMULA and I’ve been using a cloud workstation from my cheap laptop as my daily driver for months now. The VM is so much higher-spec’d than what they would have bought me for a desktop. Just don’t look at the price if you plan to run it 24/7…
- ghaff 3y agoAnd for the mostly browser-based stuff I do, outside of multimedia and some development, I'm pretty much on a terminal (except we call it a browser) which I run from 2015-vintage Macs.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cranberryturkey 3y ago> FAANGMULA killin' me smalls.
- jadtz 3y ago
- sesteel 3y agoI just started hearing about WASI. I think I've been living under a rock.
- xpe 3y agoThere are a lot of wireless communication improvements related to WiFi and 5G. I think this opens a lot of doors, especially around low power apps. Also, somewhat related: secure anonymous data exchange has a lot of cool possible applications beyond health exposure tracking.
- riskable 3y agoOne use case for vastly faster wireless communications: VR headsets. Right now if you use a headset wirelessly you're in for a much worse experience than running a VR application natively on the headset itself. If the headset had a fast enough (and low enough latency) wireless connection to your PC though it'd be an enormous leap forward for the technology. Most VR application/game developers limit their polygons/resources to that of a mid-range mobile phone because that's about what the stand-alone headsets can deliver in terms of graphics/memory performance. However, if they knew that end users were going to be running their applications with PC-level hardware it would enable a whole heck of a lot more detail, better AI, level generation, and all-around functionality in VR applications/games.
- porker 3y agoIf low power WiFi could be used instead of Zigbee and have the same battery life or better, that would make building home monitoring and automation devices easier.
- seydor 3y agotext-to-speech
- tonymet 3y agolike usual, basic php + mysql apps making money . they will never die
- meew0 3y agoSomething I'm personally excited about: colour e-ink displays. There are a few decent colour e-ink tablets on the market already, for surprisingly low prices ($400-500). So far the colour reproduction and refresh rate is still somewhat suboptimal, but development appears to be progressing rapidly. I predict that in a few years there will be little reason to get a conventional tablet over an e-ink one, at least for the “reading and taking notes” use case.
- gateorade 3y agoI agree with this and would even go as far as to say color E-INK screens are basically ready to push out greyscale ones right now. The problem is that no one is making a device with them that's any good. I owned one of the boox color e-ink devices for like a week and the experience was awful because it's a full android os shoehorned into something that kind of works on an e-ink display.
- thih9 3y ago> There are a few decent colour e-ink tablets on the market already, for surprisingly low prices ($400-500). Which ones are you referring to? Are they complete and ready to ship products? Or is that a DIY project / kickstarter?
- meew0 3y agoYes, for example this one: https://onyxboox.com/boox_novaairc https://onyxboox.com/boox_novaairc
- spondylosaurus 3y agoBought one of the monochrome Boox readers a while back and love it—the Google Play Books compatibility is what sold me. I thought about splurging for a full-color model but wasn't sure whether the tech was there yet. Do you think it's worth the upgrade or should I hold off a little longer?
- 3y ago
- twitexplore 3y ago[flagged]
- josephpmay 3y agoWe've all pretty much forgotten about AR/VR But Apple's going to be launching their headset next month
- layer8 3y agoIt seems rather controversial within Apple itself: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/03/26/apple-employees-concerned-about-headset/ https://www.macrumors.com/2023/03/26/apple-employees-concern...
- MH15 3y agoI'm really interested to see how they differentiate their headset from HoloLens. Exciting stuff.
- nickthegreek 3y agoI’m kinda of excited about the battery be wired and not on the head unit. I’m hoping Apples is the lightest weight set to date. I never found the HoloLens comfortable. The quest2 would start out okay, but the weight fatigue was real.
- solumunus 3y agoI think most people have realized it's gimmicky and will be for a very long time.
- arein3 3y agoApple should remove the screen from the next iphone and force users to buy the headset to be able to see the display. Similar to how they removed the 3.5mm jack.
- ipaddr 3y agoThe next iphone will be invisible and weigh nothing. People will lineup for days to be the first who gets an empty box.
- cranberryturkey 3y ago
- confoundcofound 3y agoNeurotech
- rado 3y agoHTML
- kyleyeats 3y agoI've recently realized that nobody under 30 has any idea what to do with an index.html file.
- FireInsight 3y agoWell, I know for a fact that atleast two people over the age of 30 are actively teaching groups of high schoolers to write html files in notepad in a programming course.
- earthling8118 3y agoOdd. I'm under 30 and I've been writing HTML for around 15 years. Meanwhile, within the past year or so, I met a frontend dev at work that didn't even know what an HTTP request was. They were over 30 years old. I think your attitude about the matter could use some adjustment. There is more to it than age.
- kyleyeats 3y agoMy comment wasn't about writing HTML.
- cranberryturkey 3y agoHow To Meet Ladies still works fellas!
- crmd 3y agoA lot of smart people in my network (infrastructure stuff) lately doing things around data on kubernetes and data / storage orchestration.
- screwturner68 3y agoWhat do you mean by storage orchestration? Can you give some examples?
- zh3 3y agoStuff that's actually innovative. ChatGPT knows a lot about existing tech - even more than people who think they're pretty steeped in it (including myself here) - but inventive stuff that doesn't show up after a bit of googlefu, it's much less helpful (even useless). So great assistant, great rhythm section but falls down as lead. For now, anyway (and open question, for how long?)
- dev_0 3y ago[dead]
- gateorade 3y agocompute in memory
- cybernoodles 3y agoMars Sample Return going through PDR. Intrinsic AI making a product announcement in two weeks. Deepmind collaborating with Robotis implementing deep RL on the robocup humanoids to play soccer at the next level.
- neatze 3y agoThere was announcement about Deepmind joining RoboCup competition ?
- layer8 3y agoMicro-LED, maybe. Apple is working on using it on the Apple Watch, and if that pans out, likely on larger devices.
- stevenhuang 3y agoCommodity RISCV chips. Some of these have just entered mass production, such as the CH32V003 (10 cents each in 1k quantities). https://github.com/cnlohr/ch32v003fun https://github.com/cnlohr/ch32v003fun Fully open source stack! Grab the below eval board and peck around: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005269690018.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005269690018.html Also see here for awesome writeup on the BL602 chip using the Nuttx RTOS: https://lupyuen.github.io/articles/nuttx https://lupyuen.github.io/articles/nuttx
- cranberryturkey 3y agoso who's stock should i buy here??
- stevenhuang 3y agoThe one I linked is a good starter, it's by the manufacturer and has the programmer, dev board, and extra chips. They have other listings too of other variants, such as one with PHY for ethernet connectivity and much more GPIO and compute.
- Lord_Zero 3y agoWhat is special about RISC-V? Why would I want a RISC-V chip over something like an ESP32 or PICO?
- snvzz 3y ago>What is special about RISC-V? It is the best ISA around, and it is an open standard with wide industry support. >over something like an ESP32 Espressif has stated intend to transition to RISC-V entirely. Newer ESP32 like the C3 and C6 are already based on RISC-V.
- manojlds 3y agoAT Protocol?
- dionysus_jon 3y agoAll the private fusion companies making very interesting progress. https://www.helionenergy.com/ https://www.helionenergy.com/ https://cfs.energy/ https://cfs.energy/ https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/ https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/ https://tae.com/ https://tae.com/ Insert below; jokes about its being 25 years away, and comments about how it will never work etc
- aatd86 3y agoNah, A(G)I will accelerate that. Give it a few months. Edit: Dang... It was just a joke. (well partially, the timescale should have made it obvious still)
- Hizonner 3y agoFor the indefinite future, fusion will be 25 months away.
- jacknews 3y agoWell it's no joke, all the money chasing the mirage of D-T fusion for energy production; even if it works it will not be any kind of panacea. Other fusion types might be more realistic.
- runnerup 3y agoI'm very bullish on fusion given the new magnet breakthroughs, detailed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4 The SPARC reactor is still on-schedule to be completed and operational in 2025. It's expected to generate net-positive electricity, on the order of 140MW pulses. A larger version to supply energy to the grid is planned for the 2030's. My concerns have moved to "okay, what is the cost of things even if energy is 'free'?". For example, desalination -- currently the majority of the cost of desalination is in the energy used, but even if the energy is free, the materials cost and capital expense is currently about 40% of the cost. Will the cost of the inputs also go down dramatically as a result of fusion? Or will desalination still be cost prohibitive for most developing areas due to materials? If desalination price falls 99.9% -- what environmental costs will be associated with the extraction/transportation of necessary materials as well as the warm & highly saline effluent that will be dumped into surface waters? With unlimited clean energy, some ridiculously inefficient schemes can become practical, such as removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
- adultSwim 3y agoGraph Neural Networks and Geometric Deep Learning
- nharada 3y agoHeat pumps and smart grid. Both relatively boring but very impactful for climate.
- StefanWestfal 3y agoIt is so good to see progress in these areas. They are so fundamental that we do not think about them (fundamental in the sense that we just assume they are there) a lot. I have some infos on heat-pumps but do you have a good source about the state of smart-grid?
- 2rsf 3y agoIs there any significant progress done in heat pump technology? I am not really following but from superficial impression there are only very small incremental improvements being done. (writing from Sweden where residential geothermal heat pumps were installed more than 20 years ago even in our cold climate)
- lee101 3y ago[dead]
- mamcx 3y agoNew databases. Is probably the most "under the radar" of all. Is interesting how little attention you get from people about this stuff (when talking about implementation or internals). Is like, literally, only make a splash AFTER at-minimun you have something competitive with a major stablished product. But you get more "views" talking about compilers than talking about DBs! (except when talking about compilers that use the relational model. I probably should rebrand https://tablam.org https://tablam.org as a "lisp"! -no accurate, but whatever-) * I also pithy anyone doing a new OS, now that is crickets!
- simmanian 3y agoAre you talking about vector databases?
- mamcx 3y agoDatabases in general (that is why I don't say RDBMS or NoSQL...)
- StefanWestfal 3y agoAnd improvement for existing ones like query optimizers and schedulers for SQL.
- cranberryturkey 3y agosurrealdb is amazing.
- ashrafulla 3y agoDo you have any insight into comparing SurrealDB (https://surrealdb.com/docs/introduction/start https://surrealdb.com/docs/introduction/start) to DuckDB (https://shell.duckdb.org/ https://shell.duckdb.org/)? I haven't done that comparison yet, I might now based on your recommendation. I saw DuckDB at Data Day Texas 2023 and their demo was intriguing. That's even for our use case which was not very SQL-y.
- tarikjn 3y ago1. lots of innovation in ICE engines is getting close to production. Cleaner, more efficient etc. This is important even while the industry is moving to EVs. 2. Bambu Labs leapfrogged prosumer 3D printing by 5-10 years. Their printers are becoming the de-facto standard. This will enable all sorts of startups for the next decade. 3. Most iPhones now have a 3D scanner + AI-aided software to accurately scan your body and generate designs is becoming more mature. See also 2. 4. material sciences both new discoveries and new applications for 50 years old discoveries
- vladfr 3y agoBambu leaped by 5 months at most. Everyone has high speed options now, with Prusa being notably last to ship. Speed isn't the only important factor, don't feed the Boat race.
- samelawrence 3y agoCan you name some of the innovation happening in ICE vehicles? Just some terms I can search for would be appreciated. Thanks!
- recov 3y agoPorsche synthetic fuels - https://newsroom.porsche.com/en/2023/sustainability/porsche-perspectives-sustainability-interview-karl-dums-31632.html https://newsroom.porsche.com/en/2023/sustainability/porsche-...
- detaro 3y agoI wish that was "under the radar" instead of "subject of a giant embarrassing marketing push"
- dmbche 3y agoSouth Ameria has been using bio ethanol as a fuel for a while now, it's cheaper and uses crops, there are projects to bring that to North Amerixa and the rest of the world!
- hayst4ck 3y agoDrone tech, satellite tech, phone applications for war (I assume), and bringing war to social media are actively changing the state of warfare as we know it in Ukraine. The idea that violence isn't necessarily bad and can also be a force for good is something I think will change the tech landscape. A lot of those people at google who said no to killer robots are probably having second thoughts, being one of those types of people, it certainly modulated my opinion.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoSorry, killing human beings en masse can never be a good thing. Have some compassion. Countless Russians are being conscripted to fight a war they don't want to. These are all children of someone. That things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce can happen speaks volumes about this. The wars are between countries, not their people. Don't lose your humanity.
- hayst4ck 3y agoHere is a game, the greatest game, imho. I think you will like it and I think you will enjoy the outcome, the outcome doesn't directly agree with me and the game talks about the Christmas truce. https://ncase.me/trust/ https://ncase.me/trust/ War itself is not evil. When someone owns a slave, there is already violence encoded in that relationship. The slave owner is already at war with the slave. When the slave fights back, that is just. The slave owner is a child of someone, too. Status of having a mother who cares about you has no bearing on justice. Serial killers have mothers, too. You can say it is a war between countries and not their people, but it is people who are firing those guns and people building those weapons and people producing war media and people relaying commands to soldiers. Your opinion is one of privilege. People with privilege can claim that humanity means "not fighting back." You can believe that because you exist in a country where people can fight back on your behalf. Privilege is the ability to have beliefs without having to deal with the consequences of those beliefs. You feel entitled to peace, but can't see that peace isn't always your choice you get to make, but a choice someone else makes. In the game of prisoners dilemma, someone can choose to defect, you cannot make them cooperate. When someone defects against you, having empathy for them and choosing to "cooperate" just means you lose. "If you want peace, then prepare for war..." if you aren't prepared for war, then you are showing that when someone defects they can win. You frame the war around helpless people being walked to their death's by corrupt aristocracies, but you fail to frame war with justice and ask what justice requires. To Ukrainians it does not matter if it is the Russian government or the Russian people invading their lands. If you cannot see their plight, it is you who do not have humanity. In regards to the Christmas truce, I do not believe Germany was fighting a fundamentally genocidal war while Russia is fighting a genocidal war against Ukraine. I don't think you can equate those. I say this as someone who considers themselves deeply liberal, who has a history of thinking like you do and who has now come to the conclusion that what I thought (what you are saying) is very wrong: Check your privilege.
- zaphirplane 3y agoKubernetes Doesn’t get a lot of publicity /s
- hammyhavoc 3y agoI'm excited about Windows 95, the world wide web, the potential of the world wide web for e-commerce, CD-ROM-based games like Myst, PDAs, digital cameras, 3D graphics and animation. Sorry, I'm hallucinating.
- juve1996 3y agoIs there a way I can hallucinate to this time as well? :)
- hammyhavoc 3y agoIt all begins by accepting CRT monitors, PVMs and TVs into your heart.
- dev_0 3y ago[dead]
- lawrenceyan 3y agoBiology and energy.
- ArtWomb 3y agoIt feels like there are two new cloud technologies arriving: generative ai & quantum computing. On the consumer side, there is consumer level demand (<$100/mo) for text-to-image and video synthesizer type playgrounds. But on the enterprise side, particularly around Wall Street & Gov/Defense, there is real thirst from the pointy heads in suits for new innovations like cloud KEM & "quantum resistant vaults". Even though these services havn't really been implemented as products by the Big Six cloud providers. And those enterprise quantum cloud products could easily fetch a premium (>$1000/mo) I hope ;) Introducing post-quantum Cloudflare Tunnel https://blog.cloudflare.com/post-quantum-tunnel/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/post-quantum-tunnel/
- cranberryturkey 3y agomojojs :D .... and vanilla everything.
- saurabhwahile 3y agoThis: https://ig.ft.com/quantum-computing https://ig.ft.com/quantum-computing
- gulbrandr 3y agorelated: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=-UrdExQW0cs https://yewtu.be/watch?v=-UrdExQW0cs Veritasium explains visually how quantum computers can break the current cryptography, taking the RSA signature as an example.
- freefrancisco 3y agoAntiaging technology, like the research David Sinclair has done to reverse macular degeneration in mice, and more recently in monkeys, by using 3 of the Yamanaka factors.
- TheIronYuppie 3y agoVery selfishly - distributed compute. Not decentralized, distributed. Compute and data are being created and run everywhere, we need platforms that understand how to use it and get insights without (or before) moving it. Our contribution: https://github.com/bacalhau-project/bacalhau https://github.com/bacalhau-project/bacalhau (think Kubernetes but built for the distributed world). Disclosure: I co-founded the Bacalhau Project
- lukas099 3y agoI'm personally excited about precision autonomous agriculture. Think about drones 'sniping' pests with tiny doses of pesticide instead of farmers spraying entire fields.
- overview 3y agoAre they being deployed today? Super exciting idea.
- newsman3 3y agoDrones have been used for crop monitoring for a while now. Using the aerial footage to determine the parts of crops in most need of specific resources such as pesticides, fertilizers, or hydration. Something a bit more automated like what this guy's talking about seems like it should be in use today or, if not, very soon. I remember reading about this stuff several years ago around 2018-2019 when I had a drone and looking at ways to make money with them. Of course, it may not be in widespread use.