gumby

28 ms·

541.
by gumby 2y ago
$20 is a lot (I assume that’s the customer price buying them in volume). You have to save a lot of water / increase yield enough to justify that. That suggests a BOM well under a buck, probably less than $0.50. I spent some time in t
542.
by gumby 2y ago
I wonder if in a large farm it will be worth running hoses and deploying a frob next to each device vs having an electric robot with a refillable tank walking the rows. Such a robot is still SF today, so deploying a frob with each seedling
543.
by gumby 2y ago
Not the way farms are run today, sure. But if it’s worth it, farms will adapt.
544.
by gumby 2y ago
Non-subsistence farming is basically all cap ex at this point. Farmers have Ag Ec degrees and think about cap ex first. With the price of energy on a secular decline, imagine a world with ubiquitous renewables. The robots can go to a cha
545.
by gumby 2y ago
That’s a failure of imagination. Hordes of people used to do all the work, and Industrial Age engineering (thinking) replaced them with a combination of large, specialized devices and large, specialized farm layouts. It was more efficient
546.
by gumby 2y ago
But it doesn’t help us, and the robots are for our benefit. Make the robots go the the extra effort.
547.
by gumby 2y ago
This is so great. My long term dream is that robotics take over farming, individually plucking each weed or weevil, and metering just the right amount of water for each individual plant, so that all the crops are organic. Most of the chemi
548.
by gumby 2y ago
But in the sequel it's not a goose but a chameleon.
549.
by gumby 2y ago
> The odd thing is, we seem to be choosing to do none of them. 9/11 killed a month's worth of road fatalities, and in response we invaded two countries. I guess it's understandable: if we invaded two random countries every
550.
by gumby 2y ago
Seems like a good application for the Apple Watch to remind you to breathe. Serious comment, not a joke. Although it seems like your body will automatically trigger a breath when the blood pH gets low enough. Otherwise we'd hear abou
551.
by gumby 2y ago
IIRC, Symbolics' "Dynamic Windows" window system (later CLIM) was originally called Y windows.
552.
by gumby 2y ago
> By contrast Lambda only costs money while your code runs. There is no fee for uploading it, only a fee for executing? In that case could I upload a function that only disgorges a static payload? Then I could store a multi-GB file for
553.
by gumby 2y ago
That was probably his whole name. The IBM Fellow Mohan sometimes adds an initial “C” to avoid this kind of confusion (“C Mohan”) Also see https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... , for
554.
by gumby 2y ago
> It would be ideal if US allies would spend more on their militaries, but the last time a US President insisted on that he was mocked mercilessly. I think the mockery was over how he transactionally framed it rather than the principle i
555.
by gumby 2y ago
Egypt, on the other hand, has a huge fleet of tanks that they just keep in storage (at their own cost). They basically are taking the military aid in the hope that the US would help them should a war develop.
556.
by gumby 2y ago
The NREL data implicitly control for that
557.
by gumby 2y ago
What’s a “bot” in the context of the essay? I suspect a large amount of that “half” could be useless telemetry (data collected but never used), billing (friction on human activity) and the like.
558.
by gumby 2y ago
Most “foreign” aid, especially military aid, is is spent within the “donor” country. Japan is the most extreme in this regard, followed by the USA. And, like maintenance: foreign aid can avoid local problems, e.g. stabilizing countries in
559.
by gumby 2y ago
I love this article: it starts out saying that proteins are great and I nodded my head, thinking, “oh yeah, that makes sense”. Read down a bit and my intuition as to why turns out to be bogus.
560.
by gumby 2y ago
Seems clear to me, but I read a lot of NYT articles. Supposedly both labor and business are satisfied. The article does mention how it’s different: more of the penalty goes to those affected but someone can no longer sue on behalf of so
561.
by gumby 2y ago
> I feel like Jobs would be wielding the axe over this, … for flubbing the release of the Vision Pro. Every time someone brings him up I remember the time he staged a press event in the flint auditorium and god up on stage to announce…an
562.
California moves to modify law letting workers sue employers(nytimes.com)
40 points by gumby 2y ago|21 comments
563.
by gumby 2y ago
Were you replying to my note? The point, as I noted, is not to say "just stick them where the roads are" but rather as a sort of Fermi estimate -- the cost of deployment is demonstrably quite feasible. Whether people want to do
564.
by gumby 2y ago
They made sure you’d get an error rather than subtle and confusing bugs. They deserve plenty of kudos for how they decided to move forward.
565.
by gumby 2y ago
The amount of land required isn't that high. Nate Lewis at Cal Tech once told me that "the amount of light falling on the numbered highways of the USA can generate more power than the US's entire generating capacity. Of cour
566.
by gumby 2y ago
The article said there was no finding that the primary author did anything wrong but that the original photos were no longer available so the paper could not be corrected. NOTE: I DON'T FOLLOW THIS WORK CLOSELY: I am not sure that ther
567.
by gumby 2y ago
Indeed. The op ex of nuclear is surprisingly high (esp when compared to wind solar), then on top of that is the cost of financing the very long build. Also, nuclear plants in France are starting to suffer from water shortages; since an ove
568.
by gumby 2y ago
Shades of the 1968 Minsky tentacle arm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuXQPdd0hjI It had 12 joints, though each had a hydraulic actuator rather than a tendon mechanism (i.e. not three muscles lke this model). But as an u
569.
by gumby 2y ago
> You don't really heal. You can recover,* yet at the same never actually do so. You can laugh at jokes, go on a fun trip, yet at the same time the sense of loss is everpresent. The whole heaven myths, IMHO, are less to give us re
570.
by gumby 2y ago
> It's noticeable how few computer wargames simulate any of this, instead allowing for frictionless high speed micromanagement. Games are entertainment, and as with a novel or film, the authors pick and choose to get the level of ve

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