tomhoward

12 ms·

61.
by tomhoward 2y ago
Yeah absolutely. You’d certainly need solar power on your devices, and the more data processing they’re doing the more battery and solar power you’ll need. So you’d centralize the more intensive processing on a unit with more power, and hav
62.
by tomhoward 2y ago
The other issue is the ability to respond to extreme heat quickly enough. We work with fruit growers in South Eastern Australia where temperatures routinely hit high 30s and even low-mid 40s (°C) a few days each year. Those growers want to
63.
by tomhoward 2y ago
Yes, that’s how it’s done now, but it’s a matter of the precision vs cost tradeoff. Right now it costs about $750-$3000 to set up each monitoring site, so growers can only afford to install a low number of devices per acre [1], thus a high
64.
by tomhoward 2y ago
Yep, mesh networking is the plan: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40740278
65.
by tomhoward 2y ago
Yeah I think that's right. It's a matter of trading off the water cost savings (and produce quality/yield gains) per plant vs unit cost per device, to determine the optimal density of devices. As I said in the previous commen
66.
by tomhoward 2y ago
Well I already have a firmware version that can run in a few KB, which my father developed in Motorola assembly and that ran most of the soil moisture monitoring devices sold to the big-volume wine grape producers in Australia (mostly in Ri
67.
by tomhoward 2y ago
LoRa gets talked about plenty for ag monitoring, and sure it can be great for certain use cases. Optional support for LoRa is certainly something we want to support (via device variants or plug-on comms modules). For the use case invoked in
68.
by tomhoward 2y ago
I’ve always been supportive of open-source and plan to make much of our tech open source [1], but I’m not seeing anything on their site that’s anything like what we’re doing (it alls seems to be large machinery, no microelectronics). The th
69.
by tomhoward 2y ago
In case anyone’s reading this who is interested in working on it: I’m building a company/platform that does a lot of this, particularly the “metering just the right amount of water for each individual plant” part. The thing I have in m
70.
by tomhoward 2y ago
The problem with content like this is it’s not realistically actionable for most people: it really amounts to saying (if you’re not already a temperamentally kind person), “fundamentally change your personality”, without offering actionable
71.
by tomhoward 2y ago
All you have to do is look at the fact that PG has been consistently effusive about Sam in his public comments and essays since the mid 00s through till the present day, for it to be clear that Sam wasn’t simply fired. Of course these situa
72.
by tomhoward 2y ago
Or the adult conversation was: you need to pick one thing to focus on, we’d prefer it was YC but obviously we can’t force you to choose YC. PG’s telling if it, and Occam’s Razer, support that version. Many people here want to imagine that i
73.
by tomhoward 2y ago
OK, it was independent but established with funding from YC Research and Jessica (among others including Sam himself and Elon) and initially operating from YC office space. So it was always something that was closely linked to YC and his in
74.
by tomhoward 2y ago
Fired means or at least connotes a specific thing, I.e., is against the will of the departing employee. Leaving the organisation by mutual agreement after an adult conversation to focus on exciting new project is a very different thing
75.
by tomhoward 2y ago
Right, so, no evidence that they had no problem with him running Worldcoin. It could all have been part of the “Sam now has too much on his plate to adequately focus on YC” conversation.
76.
by tomhoward 2y ago
> Sounds like they were fine with him moonlighting other projects Even that’s not quite right. OpenAI had been a research project inside YC. So there was no “moonlighting” about it (and Worldcoin started around the same time Sam left YC)
77.
by tomhoward 2y ago
> They didn’t seem to mind him running Worldcoin though He left YC in March 2019. Worldcoin was formed in 2019.
78.
by tomhoward 2y ago
Yep, I read the paper too, then spent quite some time Googling various combinations of “commercial paper”, “fed”, “reaganomics”, “trickle down”, and other more tenuous terms, yielding nothing at all of any substance. More fool me I guess.
79.
by tomhoward 2y ago
> Read up on commercial paper Ok, yep, it’s a common trick in these kinds of discussions to link to a vaguely-related article with a directive to “read up” on the topic but without any commentary on how it specifically supports any claim
80.
by tomhoward 2y ago
> So much simping for neofeudalism Nothing could be less true of my philsophies and my hoped outcomes for the work I've utterly exhausted myself doing for over a decade. > the rich are showered with cash This is the giveaway of y
81.
by tomhoward 2y ago
"Trickle-down economics" is not any kind of formal economic or political philosophy, it's a pejorative term designed to trivialise free market/laissez-faire economic policies. It's fair enough to criticise free mark
82.
by tomhoward 2y ago
To be clear, I don’t sit there for hours watching videos on YouTube (I have a busy career and a family so that’s not an option these days). I do consume a lot of YouTube content as audio-only when driving or exercising. I find video particu
83.
by tomhoward 2y ago
Hi there, my intention was to offer some names of people who have intelligent things to say about the topic. I mentioned YouTube videos because there’s a large volume of their content there, with many of the videos featuring in-depth conver
84.
by tomhoward 2y ago
If I were to mention a fourth it would be him but he's a bit embarrassed about all the controversy about his ideas on consciousness and doesn't really discuss them in depth in any videos I've seen, or wade into heated discuss
85.
by tomhoward 2y ago
It is precisely because their advocacy for metaphysical idealism is unusual for people with their academic qualifications that they are worth mentioning, and why its worthwhile to listen to them explain their positions at length. Appeal to
86.
by tomhoward 2y ago
Laws exist that ban practices that are - according to those who set and enforce the laws - excessively cruel to pigs. That’s all this discussion is about. That pigs are still treated with cruelty is a terrible thing, and I’d happily see mor
87.
by tomhoward 2y ago
Sure but this is nitpicking, as is your GP comment, and neither refute the point that the original commenter was making: modern/advanced societies have laws to protect conscious beings from exploitation and cruelty. (As I was writing t
88.
by tomhoward 2y ago
It has animal rights, which are broadly commensurate with the level of consciousness and agency it’s deemed to have. Mammals and other animals have legal protections not afforded to fish and insects.
89.
by tomhoward 2y ago
I’m writing this comment so that people who want to know more about alternative theories of consciousness (to materialism/physicalism [1]) can know where to go to find well-argued positions on the topic. (To be clear, I’m not here to a
90.
by tomhoward 2y ago
It may be of interest that the BBC’s style guide stipulates that for acronyms pronounced as a word (e.g., NASA - a bona fide acronym [1]) rather than spelled (e.g., BBC - an initialism, rather than an acronym), it should be printed in title

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