4 ms·

A lot of people are criticizing this product. Does anyone know what "best in class" small-scale farming or gardening projects are? Very curious! Also any commun

by cl42 2y ago

A lot of people are criticizing this product. Does anyone know what "best in class" small-scale farming or gardening projects are? Very curious! Also any community recommendations would be great.

lucideer 2y ago
> Does anyone know what "best in class" small-scale farming or gardening projects are? I think you're misinterpreting the criticisms. It's not "this particular product is a bad implementation compared to other one-size-fits-all tech-solutionism products", but rather "a one-size-fits-all tech-solutionism approach to this problem space doesn't make any sense" This is a very typical tech-industry "everything looks like a nail" type issue: going into an area you don't understand with a solution to problems that don't exist. A small subset of problems here: 1. A robot should automate things you do often/regularly - developing complex machinery do to one-off seasonal steps steps like seeding & pulling is immensely wasteful - that's going to raise the cost of the product a lot just in order to automate tasks you rarely do. 2. It doesn't do those tasks well: the pulling examples are contrived & the failure rates look high. 3. The watering mechanism is developed to suit the robot design rather than designing the robot around optimal watering strategies - this completely ignores generations of optimising watering approaches. The watering mechanism is actively harmful to many crops. 4. Very unadaptable to different plants' needs. TL;DR: There is no best of class product in this area because only someone who doesn't understand the problem space would try to develop a product to do this.
- cl42 2y ago
  This is incredibly helpful, thank you! If you have resources I can read or learn from about all this, please share them. You've clearly got wisdom in this space!

4 ms·

A lot of people are criticizing this product. Does anyone know what "best in class" small-scale farming or gardening projects are? Very curious! Also any commun

by cl42 2y ago

A lot of people are criticizing this product. Does anyone know what "best in class" small-scale farming or gardening projects are? Very curious! Also any community recommendations would be great.

lucideer 2y ago
> Does anyone know what "best in class" small-scale farming or gardening projects are? I think you're misinterpreting the criticisms. It's not "this particular product is a bad implementation compared to other one-size-fits-all tech-solutionism products", but rather "a one-size-fits-all tech-solutionism approach to this problem space doesn't make any sense" This is a very typical tech-industry "everything looks like a nail" type issue: going into an area you don't understand with a solution to problems that don't exist. A small subset of problems here: 1. A robot should automate things you do often/regularly - developing complex machinery do to one-off seasonal steps steps like seeding & pulling is immensely wasteful - that's going to raise the cost of the product a lot just in order to automate tasks you rarely do. 2. It doesn't do those tasks well: the pulling examples are contrived & the failure rates look high. 3. The watering mechanism is developed to suit the robot design rather than designing the robot around optimal watering strategies - this completely ignores generations of optimising watering approaches. The watering mechanism is actively harmful to many crops. 4. Very unadaptable to different plants' needs. TL;DR: There is no best of class product in this area because only someone who doesn't understand the problem space would try to develop a product to do this.
- cl42 2y ago
  This is incredibly helpful, thank you! If you have resources I can read or learn from about all this, please share them. You've clearly got wisdom in this space!