Ask HN: What upcoming technologies do you find most promising and intriguing?

- Smart Contracts (Financial collaboration on a global scale without the need of a legal system)

- Array Programming (The most effective way of thinking about complex algorithms, the next stage/repalcement of mathematics in the 21st century age of the computer)

- Nym Mix Networks (generally the sphinx packet format & loopix). Better than Tor anonymous message parsing over the internet. Fast & effective.

- LoRa WAN. It is going to be extremely cheap to build a global telecommunications network. Maybe 10,000x cheaper.

Fusion reactors, zero knowledge proofs, machine learning

AI/ML being used as part of enterprise. There is potential in this space, everyone has their recipe. A common platform would be good. The higher-ups and C-suits in the enterprise are only talking about how AI/LLMs can help generate more revenue.

3D printing:

- Build your own custom machines, print the motherboard from a spec, eventually print a CPU

- Build your own house. Doesn't have to be fancy, a small shipping container with printed plumbing and cavities for electrics and heating. Of course, land values would skyrocket...

Water Desalination:

* If this could work at the local level, water companies and soda corps would have to change their predatory tactics.

Anti-aging:

* Again, if available everywhere for cheap, this would greatly alleviate strains on the healthcare system in general. People might adopt a more carefree approach to life, knowing you can make later instead of having to do so right now.

HTMX

Edit: I'm really not joking. The amount of resources - people, time, enterprise - pumped into front end frameworks is quite horrendous when most applications are CRUD, and most others are CRUD 80% of the time.

If we can mix AI/LLM with quantum computing to pilot CRISPR, that will be intriguing ;-)

GPT-4.5

I want to get a feel for the trajectory of how much more these large language models can improve.

Locally run LLMs, specifically being able to run them on your Phone.

Cancer vaccines, precision fermentation (simple molecules + energy + microbes -> food or -supplement), solid state batteries, sodium batteries, RISC-V, on-site ammonia synthesis, fusion power creeping closer to reality

PV cells and efficient/cheap batteries.

- LLMs/Deep learning in general - People have no idea how powerful the abstractions grown inside an LLM are. They could be many times more powerful that the output, as the output function could be lossy, and we'd never be able to tell from outside the black box. It's entirely possible that there are signals in there that do "theory of mind" far better than humans ever could.

It's like applying a billion years of directed evolution at Earth, just to get a small set of ejecta to hit Mars. Sure, we've shipped a ton or two of stuff to Mars, and colonized it with robots... but we've done a few other things along the way.

The fact that I can run trained models on my laptop and desktop without issue is amazing to me. Like my VAX 11/780 running VMS 7.3, I eventually hope to run an LLM on my cheap smartphone.

- Capability Based Security - I lived through the era in the 1980s when you could just buy a stack of floppy disks full of programs, and try them out on your PC, with no worries at all. The only way we'll ever get back there is if we finally get Capability Based Security built into our Operating Systems.

Keeping WASM free of the POSIX virus is a close second, but not as generally useful.

- MIMO Software Defined Radio - $30 SDR dongles are amazingly useful, but I look forward to being able to build a passive radar system that can detect EVERYTHING in the sky overhead, no matter how stealthy, for my own amusement. I'd like to be able to do moonbounce communications from a <$1000 flat panel MIMO array mounted on my garage roof.

- NanoVNA - these little things are freaking amazing, and dirt cheap. Quite handy for building an intuitive understanding of the otherwise black magic of RF design.

- Quantized Inertia - A new theory of physics about to get flight tested in space[1] It would be good to see some advancement towards making the human species Interstellar

- BitGrid - my own hallucination of the simplest possible Petaflop performance CPU. I'm stuck in analysis paralysis and need a shove. It's just a sea of 4x4 LUTs and latches, so it's slower than an FPGA, but it's massively parallel, so if you can spread your algorithm across it like peanut butter, you can put data in one side, and get a stream of a billion answers/second out the other side.

Imagine being able to run GPT-4 spread across 1000 of these things.... it might take a second to get a token out, but you could have millions of simultaneous sessions going

[1] https://celestrak.org/NORAD/elements/graph-orbit-data.php?CA...