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.
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Here are some examples from CES:
8 years ago, I had a pretty bad cycling crash and broke my hip -- which, if you're not aware, means I broke the "femoral neck", or the narrow bit of bone between the long part of the femur and the "ball" that goes into your pelvis.
Post-repair, my x-ray looked like this: http://i.imgur.com/gRqg50J.png
Anyway, with that much hardware in a repair, you're probably starting the clock on needing a full replacement. I think they were hoping for 10-15 years, but I got only 8 before joint pain and bone loss forced the issue.
Last Monday -- so, 15 days ago -- I went in at 5AM for a total hip replacement.
Which was done on an OUTPATIENT basis. I walked out of the hospital (with a walker, granted) on the new joint, and was at home in a lounge chair by 5PM. By the end of the week, I was off the walker entirely and using a cane. By day 9, I was routinely moving around the house without even the CANE, though I need it for any meaningful walk.
The main thing I'm supposed to be doing is walking. I could manage a half mile within a week. Last night I walked 1.2 miles at a 30% faster pace than my first half-mile walk. I should be shut of even the cane in another week or two.
To me, this kind of objectively major SKELETON EDIT being effectively banal from a medical POV is pretty surreal. I mean, it's not "put Luke in the bacta tank" surreal, but it's a whole lot closer to that I realized was realistic.
(Now: I'm completely willing to note that the ease I've had with this is tied to a number of factors, including probably first the fact that I live in a top-tier city for this kind of medical attention, and I have excellent health insurance. But still.)
It's great that we're still making so much progress in these areas.
Granted, many of the best hospitals are indeed in the US, but I guess less people have access to the many great hospitals in the US (or can afford access rather) compared to hospitals in Europe.
My mother, in her working life, was a physical therapist, but she's been retired for 25 years. In her career, the hip replacement was miraculous but required a serious hospital stay, and had a higher complication rate. Improved techniques and understandings about the recover process have made ENORMOUS differences since then.
> I live in a top-tier city for this kind of medical attention
What city is that, if you don't mind?
nice to see you
We have shitty weather in the summer, and the landscape is so flat as to make pancakes look topographically interesting, but if you have cancer or need orthopedic surgery it's hard to find a better place to go.
A place that has hospitals the size of skyscrapers.
Houston is weird because of its lack of zoning (well, it's weird for lots of reasons, but that's one of them). This contributed to the fact that there is no single "skyline" here.
Certainly downtown has prominent towers, but there are also towers in the "Galleria Area", in the Greenway area, and of course in the Medical Center.
However, my actual procedure was done in a fairly short (4 or 5 story) dedicated orthopedic facility not in any of those areas, but associated with Memorial Herman.
I've seen a video of a knee replacement. And yes, it's very much like a carpenter working on a piece of wood. The hammering, the nailing, the sawing, it's all there. If someone was doing it to me, I would definitely be freaked out.
My initial break was complex enough that they needed to incisions. One of them is kind of the front of my groin/pelvis, and that site got infected and required some intervention to heal. It healed ugly, with lots of scarring.
NORMALLY, though, for a replacement that's exactly where they'd go in ("anterior approach"). My surgeon wisely demurred and opted for the older posterior entry, around the back of my left thigh and buttock, but that means a slightly more complex recovery with more restrictions for longer. Basically, if I bend too much a given way, or twist, or put too much load on it, I risk dislocating the implant, which would be VERY VERY BAD. Even so, the scar tissue & such presented too much of a risk of healing issues, infection, etc, so it's a trade we were okay with.
You, though, will probably GET the anterior approach, which doesn't have this risk.
There's now a screw in my humerus that's holding my muscles together. Also got a sick scar and a story to gross out people at parties.
Definitely wasn't worth $15k though.
I was under by 7am, and aware of enough to look at the clock on the wall in the recovery area by 1030 or so. Time is weird for a bit, but by 1230 I was in a room still a little dazed, but eating.
At that point it was a checklist party. I had to see several specialty providers -- PT, OT, respiratory person for the incentive spirometer lesson -- plus eat, drink, walk and pee. As I had been a very compliant patient the night before, and had peed BEFORE the procedure, it was the last one that took the longest despite drinking a ton of water.
It seemed clear there were several "offramps" that I could've needed that would have resulted in an overnight stay, like the postoperative nausea you mention, but I was fine.
Hey, if you're lucky, it'll happen to you, too. :)
(I'm 52.)
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...
I'm wondering if there's anything I can contribute to that field as someone with general programming capabilities.
I’m personally surprised we don’t have 20x as many people working in biotech.
In some way hubs are even more important in biotech than in software because of the massive startup cost.
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.)
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.
In the research field (my old field) most things don't work!
"If it always worked, it would be business. Let's go the pub." -- me to grad student after 12h of imaging cells that took months to grow up :)
Once that happens and the existing underemployed bio-scientists are printing money through wealth/value creation, you will get your 20x.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optogenetics
TLDR: Input the genes into a nerve cell and now you can fire the nerves with light pulses.
I just remember being awed by opto around a decade ago and now it's just a tool that labs have. Which isn't to say there's not cutting edge opto.
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.
It's certainly a neat step forward towards studying brain activity, but the idea that organoids are sitting there dreaming is a bit much.
Like when can I be a mad scientist making irregular beating sheets of chicken heart muscle in my basement?
Also, The Odin - https://www.the-odin.com/ - sells DIY kits and classes (and is just generally one of my favorite groups of weirdos)
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.
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/.
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.
how far along is yeast mutation?
I've fantasized about retiring to somewhere remote and starting a yeast radiation garden, to experiment with using those micro-machines to re-assemble matter for us
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/mini-brains-grown-...
This doesn't surprise me at all. Dr. Thomas DeMarse was training rat brain slurries (think brains thrown into a blender) to fly flight simulators in 2004. I've long suspected brain cells tend to self organize and in particular want to minimize change in inputs over time. (and yes this is a gross over simplification given that I know of at least a half dozen types of neurons).
Mapping neural outputs of some small network to some operation is easy since all you're concerned with is the output, not the actual operation and organization of the network. Scientists could get macaques to play Pong using electrodes (like what Musk demonstrated with Neuralink) since, iirc, the 80s. This is also the exact reason that neural nets tell us nothing about the actual function of the brain.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-clinical-t...
I believe everyone that was distracted by easy money flowing into crypto and B2B SaaS the last couple of years is looking at generative AI (rightfully so!), but the real opportunity in in BioTech/TechBio. VC cycle likely to follow AI for the time-being, but I'm betting a full career pivot on BioTech. Please email me if you are exploring or excited about the space!
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.You’re not wrong, but AI being passably good at bullshitting (while mostly keeping a rhyme/meter) is still mindblowing to me.
Subjectively incredible; objectively flawed.
That's chatgpt right now. To get it to confidently right will take years and years more
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.
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.
Very human I must say.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
It's not in the style of a psalm.
So I wonder if there was substantial fine-tuning for chatgpt specifically to reward it to generate poems, in a particular style.
And here, it's "over indexing" on that and still generating poems in that familiar style
https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/31/machine_learning_the_...
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.
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.
The sun will not harm you by day,
nor the moon by night.
My life is consumed by anguish
and my years by groaning;
my strength fails because of my affliction,[b]
and my bones grow weak.https://paperswithcode.com/paper/most-language-models-can-be...
Gwern cited it too!
but not always; And that's what makes it scary. You know people will use it and trusting it.
It's not a crystal ball, it's a mirror.
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.
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
This is just generic poetry with a sprinkling of "ye's."
Notice that it sometimes struggles to rhyme?
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.
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...
"Do X" is great. But "Now change X to Y in the style of Z" is what blows my mind.
I initially put in a prompt like "tell me a story about the hunting dog and the guard dog." and the results were pretty meh. I was interested to see if it was actually pulling in data from FB so I put her name in instead (she had an FB page yes). It did not seem to do much. So I put in some things like "the little hunting dog is always hungry." "the hunting dog is always looking to hunt" and then did a fuller prompt of "the hunting dog and the guard dog are going to the park. tell me a story about it" and finally got a very good fully fleshed out story about how the little dog was on the prowl for a squirrel while the guard dog watched out and it was really well written and made about as much sense as a fictional tale could. There was no awkwardness or other tells that would have made you think that this was written by anything other than a human.
Anyway, that is huge that it can do this. I do remember when I used to play with other chatbots that remembering past context was something they were unable to do, at least not well, but in most cases it seems they didn't even attempt to. ChatGPT has blown me away in many ways, but this is a very specific leap forward.
I was showing it off to my wife. I asked it to write a lecture for an intro to Latin American poetry with a focus on Pablo Neruda, including a background on Chilean history.
The first result was just 5-6 paragraphs with the most rudimentary 101 on all the above topics.
Then I told it to rewrite it as if the lecture was going to be given to grad students. Next, I told it to include examples of Neruda's poetry along with some analysis. I also asked it to flesh out the segment on Chilean history, with a focus on the independence movement.
The final lecture was good enough that you could walk into a classroom of college seniors and deliver it without any edits. The first one might have been good enough for 9th graders at most.
In fact, I'd submit that phenomenon as its own entry in the Weirdest or Most Surreal Tech Trend contest. People who, when confronted with a talking dog, say things like, "This talking dog is an idiot. It thinks 429 is prime, its painting looks like something from Bob Ross on acid, and the C++ code it wrote for me is full of bugs. I don't see what all the hype is about."
Some of this dismissiveness is just whistling past the graveyard, but much of it comes from people who genuinely think the human brain is something that operates by means of ethereal, ineffable, and unreproducible mystic forces.
Its just a mindset I don't understand. And on places like reddit there is definitely some astroturfing going on or at least some definite "camps" that don't like SDC technology, but on HN AFAICT its been genuine disdain. So weird.
Apparently Cruise and Waymo are doing much more impressive things, but they only get a fraction of the press.
Tesla refuses to publish this data.
Tesla operates nearly everywhere. The scale of what's happening isn't even comparable.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: one more thing ... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nsb2XBAIWyA
You pretty clearly don't know what you're talking about.
> Apparently Cruise and Waymo are doing much more impressive things, but they only get a fraction of the press.
They are doing objectively much less impressive things by relying on sensors that require much less intelligent analysis and will lead them to dead ends at the higher end of abilities that Tesla's approach won't.
GPT wasn't hyped much at all, in comparison. It just appeared. The next couple of iterations will be interesting to watch, since right now we don't really know what the rate of improvement is going to be. We might be fighting Skynet next year, or we might be in for another 50-year-long AI winter.
I think it's a good parable. It's something expensive and man made. Even though it's on average dumber than a typical human, people try to ascribe godliness to it. And so many judge whether it has achieved omniscience. For many of us, it's just a better tool, an IDE, but for some, it's an oracle or divination tool that they use to decide whether they should marry someone.
I think the term "artificial intelligence" makes it even more confusing.
1. We've learned that relu is a really good function to use for neural networks.
2. We've learned that regularization is essential to having large networks without overfitting.
3. We've learned how to scale models up and down so that you can train something on a giant cluster then run it on your phone.
4. We've learned how to apply this to lots of specific kinds of problems.
etc, etc, etc.
We do NOT simply do what we did in the 80s then throw more hardware at it. Instead we are getting better at making the hardware do something useful.
ChatGPT3 isn't really the definitive sign of the latter. Its just a stepping stone on the way. As soon as humans discovered differential calculus, that was the genesis to the eventual development of a general AI. Everything else along the way is an issue of optimization and spending raw compute time, whether its done by humans or machines.
I've seen so many pieces of incredible technology struggle to find a use-case. By contrast, ChatGPT almost has too many use-cases to catalog, and while it's far from perfect, it seems obviously, to me, to be a tipping point of sorts.
We're living in exponential times.
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.
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?
Reasoning machines who are actually pretty bad at statistics.
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
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.
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%?
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.
I think this has been conventional wisdom for a few years now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record
The methods matter less than that it's happening at all.
I don't know whether to believe people are so wasteful of their own time or whether this is just low-effort bot posting to build consensus. Combined with how harshly and instantly main subreddits like /r/politics and /r/news shadow ban accounts, it's basically impossible to dissent
I grew up using archaic, Jamesian English regularly (in a religious community), so it always sounds wrong when people use them incorrectly while attempting to be old-timey, which is a bit distracting and ruins the effect.
Apparently ChatGPT suffers from hypercorrection as much as any modern speaker.
(The meter is also dreadful, which is another thing that I think many modern English speakers don't often do precisely.)
There was an "ask HN" a week or so ago about knowing how your personal machine was or was not compromised ...
I am imagining training a model on all of the PDFs and email and receipts and contracts that I have spent the last 30 years protecting ... and then exploding my home directory with 2M parallel copies.
Now what ?
Which is the real correspondence ? Which contracts are real ? Which invoices and receipts ?
Could one construct a framework where all data at rest is worthless and only witnessed transactions and traffic have any surveillance value ?
On the other hand, note that you'd also need some way of distinguishing ... wheat from chaff ... for your own ability to track your correspondence, transactions, records, etc.
Otherwise, that is an interesting idea, particularly in a world in which storage is cheap relative to the size of documents. We're rapidly approaching an era in which storage capacities sufficient to hold the entire Library of Congress collection of books (as text) on a residential PC or server will be highly viable.
The larger problem is probably that your copy of that data isn't particularly important in most cases, it's what lies on others servers that's been generated by you / snarfed from your devices / activities. And that's far harder to chaff.
Another issue would be that any generated content that raises / matches suspicions could, in a regime with poor civil liberties protections, simply become more ammunition used against you. The old Cardinal Richelieu "six lines" dictum, though in this case, not necessarily in your hand.
I have a very good understanding of how deeplearning neural network work and language model like "Word2vec" that convert a sentence or a word to a vector space.
But I completely fail to understand how Given an initial text as prompt, ChatGpt will produce text that continues the prompt.
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!
https://store.dji.com/guides/dji-care-refresh-flyaway-covera...
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.
[0] - https://store.dji.com/guides/film-like-a-pro-with-activetrac...
The new DJI Mini 3 does look good too if you're on more of a budget.
I've flown the thing off the top of the volcano (at 3000 meters), and in heavy wind and clouds and was amazed how stable it is, how easy you can fly one and the 4k video it generates is breathtaking.
One thing I still want for this is to remove 500m ceiling and being able to pierce the clouds fast - not sure if this is possible anywhere since it's probably dangerous and illegal, but that would complete my childhood dream I think (short of actually learning to fly a real small plane or a glider).
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
https://google.com/search?q=lipsman+ALS+MR-guided+focused+ul...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4038976/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030156290...
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!
Ps: yes it runs doom:
I think I mostly need to rebuild with better structural design, better access for me and so on. A lot of the AI applications are taken care of here by 25Kg of motivated canine intelligence.
Especially in an urban setting if you don't have a compost bin in your building : it's not as ubiquitous as you seem to think.
Sorry for the cynicism, this was the case a few years ago, maybe not anymore?
I'm not sure what happens with the plastic in SE Asia, but we still send most of our plastic there.
https://de.statista.com/infografik/25368/wichtigste-abnehmer...
This statistic is listing the share of exported plastics that are exported to certain countries. But that's not "most of our plastic", because overall exports are around ~10%. So "most of our plastic" is either recycled or burned within Germany. (Not saying any of this is ideal, but it's not helping to spread false information.)
I meant something like: “The majority of plastic we export to other countries is still being exported to SE Asia”.
I think it happened that due to waste reduction, "normal" garbage is sometimes not enough to keep the furnaces running, so they take recyclable material from the yellow bags and burn it, to keep the temperatures stable...
The first is what happens with your regular garbage, the second is what happens (with some fraction) of the "recycled" yellow bag plastic.
I was not trying to say anything particular, just how "recycling" has become a form of gaslighting to avoid the tough question of how to produce less garbage in the first place.
That's really clever since it avoids needing to have separate trucks.
Will they also accept leaves and yard trimmings? These are much larger in volume, so I'm not sure if they could be handled, but maybe with large bags it's fine.
> sell to local farms/etc
My city sells to farms and also sells it in bags at retail stores. It's meets standards that are supposed to make it safe to use in your backyard garden.
Also, since it costs money to put stuff in a landfill, and since this diverts from the landfill, it saves a bit of money that way too.
(Further info: https://www.austintexas.gov/department/dillo-dirt)
Figure that actual physical expenses cost $18/mo, leaving $15/mo profit per household; on top of that, they'll have extensive marketing costs - let's say marketing & employee costs take another $10/mo, leaving $5/mo profit per household. That means they'd need 1.6 million households to subscribe for a year just to get their investors their money back, or about 1% of the potential market.
How did they possibly win over investors? If I could short this I would.
Low interest rates have shifted massive amounts of capital to vc. We’re talking trillions possibly, including sovereign funds and ultrabillionaire family offices.
Are those wealth and investment managers nuts? Maybe, but I’ve concluded the most likely explanation is that they know exactly how to play the vc game: place a number of wild bets and hope that one in a hundred pays off. They sometimes seem to barely do due diligence, perhaps for efficiency and speed in allocation, and because the vc portion of their otherwise well-diversified portfolio is tiny. You and I get to partake in the schadenfreude if these stupid ventures collapse but they’re wiping their tears with the returns they make on other asset classes - stocks back then, fixed income now, etc.
If interest rates go back to the “old normal” for a sustained period of time then maybe this ends, but maybe the new normal is here to stay. We’ve been told there’d be a big cleanse of stupid or otherwise unprofitable ideas (can we really cram more SaaS solutions into every single niche under the sun?) but I’m seeing very little of the sort, other than layoffs and downsizings which are not thus far commensurate with the fireworks we were promised.
But isn't a key point of this theory of investing that you invest in many companies that have a 1% chance of making a 100x return - rather than investing in companies with a 0% chance?
> Mill has partnered with two processing facilities that purchase and turn all this dried food into a chicken feed ingredient, filtering out any errant forks or inorganic materials that accidentally get tossed in the bin.
The bit about filtering out inorganic material seems a little too convenient to gloss over though.
As a grown up, seeing all the stuff people put into food waste I can understand it.
What I still can't understand though is how many people mistake food wrapping for food..!
It isn't mistaking, it is not prioritizing the cognitive load for the separation effort. When I was in Japan, I was impressed with the level of fastidious compliance I witnessed in materials separation. That convinced me the talk in the US about how mainstream households could not possibly support a comprehensive cradle-to-cradle materials handling infrastructure are really talking about culture and/or necessity and not logistics.
Diversity is neither bad nor good - it just has benefits and costs.
You witnessed one of the costs.
On the other hand, we invented jazz and snowboarding. Those are examples of benefits.
I prefer the diversity.
I am a compost consumer and I have no desire to plasticize my pastures and fields the same way we’ve filled the oceans with plastic.
You can see this for yourself: just go to Home Depot and buy a bag of dirt … it’s not even micro plastics … whole objects like ballpoint pens and so on.
What happens to the trash can if I stop paying the subscription fee?
(Fast forward a few years, and someone will rewrite the above as a postmortem.)
Main positive is as you mentioned, food waste smell is gone, and no rodents/animals in the trash either inside or outside.
Austin turn all that stuff into compost, and then give it away to the community (just turn up with bags) and I assume use on city run parks and so on.
Matt Rogers cofounded Nest. People will throw money at that without asking any questions. Winners often win twice.
Plus the hardware grinder/dehydrator could be used in either your own garden or picked up weekly/monthly and sold locally.
Plus it's Green and it actually makes sense to try and capture that waste. Something individuals can do to make a difference.
I agree $33/mo and a mail-back service is never going to get their $100M back.
In Europe many countries have specific trash bins for food waste, they're collected by the city and reused for compost and biogas. No subscriptions, no investors, no soon to be e-waste wifi and bluetooth connected trash can, no shipping dirt in box
I pay $0/m, I chuck my food scraps in the garbage.
OR
I pay $33/m, I fart around with some device in my kitchen, then send them by post to some company and get nothing in return.
And from an environment point of view, it is a device that needs high energy to produce.
I actually compost. It cost say $33 one off for the bin, which sits on soil, and can take probably couple years worth of waste. I am not in an appartment, but surely the solution there is a compost on common outdoor or rooftop area, where the cost is lower because it can be shared.
I think you also pay for the electricity the device uses, and for replacement filters. No idea what happens in case of issues (need of repair/replacement parts/etc.), i.e. if it is included in the subscription or if it malfunctions it is on you.
That being said, having a real compost in the garden is quite mind blowing. Every time I go there to throw the peels of vegetables and fruits I think - damn, almost full. Then, somehow, the worms keep eating it and the next time it's still at the same level. Nature is pretty smart after all.
Plant and animal body shapes (morphology) are determined from memories stored as voltage gradients) inside cells, not from the DNA. Just like neurons are good at allowing the body to navigate in 3D space (our world), other cell networks are good at creating 3D shapes (leaves, fingers, legs, livers, etc.)
You can decouple them, provide your own voltage gradients and get new body shapes using the same DNA.
https://www.xenobot.group/ https://www.drmichaellevin.org/ https://twitter.com/Kriegmerica
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.
Edit: one small quibble with your comment is that it’s too reductive to say that morphogenesis is all encoded in the DNA. It’s really an emergent property of the whole system. Like DNA is only a few billion base pairs, which is not nearly enough to store the precise positions of every cell, much less every protein.
I think my reduction and your quibble is really a matter of semantics. It's true that the genome doesn't contain explicit coordinates for every feature of every cell. But at the same time, if you start with the same DNA, you get the same morphogenesis, and if you start with different DNA, you get different morphogenesis, so i would say the morphogenesis is very much encoded in the DNA. It's just that it's in a highly compressed representation, and the decompression machinery includes the laws of physics!
Then how do you explain their creation of xenobots using only frog DNA?
That was the whole point of the experiment - to disprove your statement.
https://wyss.harvard.edu/news/team-builds-first-living-robot...
I’m usually pretty touchy about software analogies for biology but “decompression machinery includes the laws of physics” is a good way to frame it.
- 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.
Edit: nevermind it's a Versalife employee at a nearby bar/club, not in the offices themselves.
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.
To know if it suffers, first you have to understand what suffering is, in scientific terms, and make sure you detach your builtin empathy from an actual process, because it’s only yours own.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/43kned/i-remember-being-born
He "cured"(?) his lactose intolerance with CRISPR tech (for a few months but still very impressive).
That said, thanks for pointing the video out. I watched the update video and it's pretty incredible.
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.
people in the comments have no idea it's a deepfake. Without knowing beforehand, I wouldn't recognize it too.
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.
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.
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.
Of course, bridging the uncanny valley to make it even look passably human is another milestone entirely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB97hQWZ1Oo
I guess they'll regulate it to death. This one maybe will be more accesible:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gq_lvCdRRe4
Also this one seems to be old news, but it's dreamy:
It's just amazing
When can I finally buy some gecko gloves, damnit!
> 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://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.
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.
I suggest reading 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!
Do you by any chance have any info on this?
https://elitacwearables.com/projects/mission-navigation-belt...
Don't forget reversible too!
How many billions spent? How much e-waste was generated?
And that is unfortunate, because whenever I visit another EU country I find them very useful.
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.
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.
DC adopted a parking zone strategy for the scooters. Haven't been downtown in a while, but imagine that could work without dedicated docks.
People are selfish and will do anti social shit for convenience if they can get away with it.
Cars only go where they belong because the state can and will punish you with towing or fines, making the reward of being selfish and anti social not worth the risk.
Scooters do annoy me at times as a pedestrian but its mainly b/c city infra wasn't really designed for this middle ground, as cyclists can attest. Plus I am equally as hypocritical for sometimes zipping around on a scooter on sidewalks, so I don't complain too much. If I ever get a shot at building up a town/city this is one of my reqs.
Veritasium video https://youtu.be/vS0TuIPoeBs?t=640
Lot's of surreal stuff out there, but these two ... there is no question. Not one.
Living in exponential times.
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.
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.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-leona-helmsley-will-idUSN...
https://hms.harvard.edu/news/loss-epigenetic-information-can...
Running fans at 100% is slightly weirder, but also not unheard-of.
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.
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.
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.
Surprised to see that this is close to mainstream, can’t wait to turn on my monitors while at a bench by the river.
Also tried getting the enterprise Google Glasses but it's difficult getting them as a hobbyist.
https://www.emergingtechbrew.com/stories/2023/01/12/some-and...
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.
Either way, I appreciate the tidbit. Good reading inspiration.
does it mention the tx-0
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.
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)
It looks like a robotic receptionist, or a robotic concierge.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.gearpatrol.com/outdoors/a648024/coalatree-whistl...
https://hips.hearstapps.com/amv-prod-gp.s3.amazonaws.com/gea...?
One I saw in December called Container, I felt I was in the room with various scenes of realistic 3D people.
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
[1]https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/24/1067226/an-als-p...
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!
It started off with mundane stuff with a great message: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ54GDm1eL0
Then South Park guys, Trey Parker, doing absolutely hilarious deep fake video. They make Al Gore and Trump say poop. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WfZuNceFDM
But then basically the same time I saw deep fakes presented as true. Trump saying dumber things than normal. Biden appearing like he has late stage dementia. None of it true. As an outside observer of american politics... pretty damned concerning.
But then I read a real statistic. 95% of deep fakes... are to make fake porn. Women who have never done porn now have tons of porn made of them. Worse yet, you can't do anything about it. You dont own the copyright. There is no copyright infringement. You cant sue for royalties because they assert its not you and you never did porn.
So the USA/DHS decided they would try to police this. Try to get this all under control. They proceed to put a registered spy in charge of it who only policed 1 side of the aisle.
So this technology is destabilizing the USA and heading directly toward... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_American_Civil_War
Specifically:
Minecraft running in Minecraft https://youtu.be/-BP7DhHTU-I
or
Game of Life running in Game of Life https://youtu.be/xP5-iIeKXE8
Bonus: Digital clock implemented in Game of Life https://youtu.be/3NDAZ5g4EuU
Surreal because it makes it apparent that our universe could really be emergent behavior from a simple set of rules.
Edit: I remembered some more from the past:
- First Boston Dynamics Atlas videos.[0]
- First successful Falcon 9 landing[1].
- A video explaining how the Curiosity landing will be done and then watching the stream when it happened.[2]
- The concurrent landing of two Falcon Heavy boosters on land.[3]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANv5UfZsvZQ
My wild guess for the next 5 years is that we'll have Stable Diffusion with the ability to create NeRF scenes.
---
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
That first week of DeepDream images flooding the web showed me that someone had snuck a can of worms onto the table, and while they had graciously not opened it immediately, they had maybe cracked the lid just a bit
Disclosure: this is my own pet project. Discussed here previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33898421
* 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.
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!
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.
The only thing of interest recently has to be the EmDrive [1] - only because the rigorous testing it was put through finally put the mail in the coffin of backyard free energy nuts.
”The correct question would be: Who is Kryon? Kryon supports Humanity in many precious ways - not only by dropping hints about upcoming revolutionary technologies based on magnetism, such as (shallow depth) geothermal energy generation, (mass-scale) water desalination and magnetic engines. You are encouraged to tune in to the neverending stream of new free audio channellings.”
It seems a being from another dimension has blessed humankind with a perpetual motion machine. Where do I send my money?