Has anyone here actually worked on a farm at all? I did briefly when younger and seem to know a fair bit more than most commenting with snarky comments. And I know almost nothing relatively.
1,613 karma · joined October 4, 2020
One big issue is that a fair number of tractor code faults are emissions control faults on these machines which are super annoying as the emissions system is sensitive especially as it ages. That may be in part a problem with overly strict emissions controls. So deleting emissions controls is popular in this space. And yes, dealers actually do help with this on tractors.
If you need to be able to hack your stuff in this way - lots online here: https://machinery-tunes.com/john-deere-dpf-egr-def-scr.html
They see more margin in this cloud based revenue, the same way Microsoft does with its push into the cloud. Eventually it's probably going to migrate to essentially power by the hour type models that are already out in other higher end equipment. Their powerguard stuff is trending that way (all costs included for $100 deductible).
It's going to be some other company (Kubota?) that could do the open firmware / open source version. There should be some market for this, not sure how commercial it will be.
2) Don't they sell original, reman and alternative parts? https://www.deere.com/en/parts-and-service/parts/
3) Don't they have a major dealer network - 3,000 dealers in the US alone? At least where I am there is a ridiculous number of deere dealers. Is the complaint that farmers cannot fix things themselves vs not get repaired at all?
4) Isn't a lot of this hacking around getting features you didn't pay for - license key gen stuff and getting around speed limiters etc? I'm not sure I count that as "repair" though I know it's super annoying and everyone wants to turn off stuff, turn off features.
Same thing with DPEF deletes and bypasses on diesel equip in US (also rampant) and a lot of the tuning. Plenty of folks "hack" their equip with a tune or to do a DPEF delete, then submit a warranty claim (at least in cars) when they burn something up. But major demand is not around repairs, a lot of the black market demand is around this other stuff.
5) The integrated combine stuff is not simple software, there def is a major investment in the tech stack for some "farms". I might call it ag engineering now? 3 cm accuracy season to season, active yield management (ie, monitors how settings affect yield, can map yield, tweak settings etc etc).
Mine: Option to do format with commas for thousands separator, only do dollars (no cents) for monthly and longer time frames.
If you pay 29 or 100 per month you get very good support - it HAS too be a loss leader.
If you need it you can pay more and get more
One good solution - turn on adult content blocking on firewall. Saved me once or twice if you typo, missearch etc. I'm usually like huh when it blocks? Then oh...
They've been adding some really more edge / line noise type features. Consider the walrus operator? You can do pretzel magic with this which make figuring out scope and what happened to what difficult.
I love the old way.
with open(…) as f: for line in ...
And I wish they'd just made more things iterable maybe or fixed some of the regex match stuff?
Go got this right. If you want to read code, contribute to a large code base, folks will be using the features of the language, including the weird ones. Go has kept things very simple (relatively) in terms of core language. Some things were beyond basic (error handling? no generics?) But boy did it make it easier for contribute and understand code.
def Hi() = "hi" Hi() Hi
Yes, those two variants both work?
So very commonly now - let's say you have a bunch of kids ridding on the wrong side of the road, or someone with two off leash pitbulls bite someone, you get immediate claims of racism or similar if anyone suggests anything other than total understanding of the folks acting in what might be called an anti-social way.
The folks outraged and labeling others do drive down participation. I certainly no longer participate - despite being a significant donor to dem causes, a phone banker for what used to be traditional liberal issues etc.
Nextdoor: How fast can someone be offended by what someone else says - is probably the more correct title
In other words, I'm pushing down a path of simple, broad based, WORKERS rights, rather than pushing down union rights. Workers rights helps everyone.
Some on my list if interested:
1) Raising minimum wage - with a geo cost of living factor.
2) Absolutely raising minimum wage to be exempt from overtime - this is a no brainer and criminal that it is not higher.
3) Consider ending employer based healthcare and replacing with universal offerings covering part time, poorly paid and basically everyone (still using private insurance is fine).
4) Dramatically simplifying retirement plan choices, limiting the top hat, nonqualified deferred and other plan types that execs use to take huge amounts tax free, and trade that for better benefits on lower end of income scale.
5) Being much more aggressive about classes of work with clear worker abuse. So while uber makes the news, the door to door sales kids being sexually harassed, stuck far from home, ripped off, told to scam others etc etc - I've been very active in some of these abusive industries to try and get some more accountability into them - which would be TRIVIAL to do if anyone had any backbone - but it's MUCH easier to beat up on amazon. Not to get into sob stories, but whole classes of folks are just trampled on without any consequence, and it would not be hard to clean up substantially (elderly, young etc etc).
There is a lot more - but yes, AB5 and before that the removal of reserve accounts for schools (also union backed) along with the tendency to keep horrendous workers on at all costs (police, medical malpractice situations, teachers etc) soured me on unions a bit unfortunately.
However, I used to do some other work where I was on longer but thought less. In this other job I'd put headsets on and just listen to podcasts and music while working, and when I was done, I was DONE. Any problems were someone elses to deal with.
One problem I have with office work is that it can be hard to leave "at the office" when you are behind. People expect problems to be solved, and if you don't solve them they wait for you the next morning. This has really impacted me badly at times (trouble sleeping etc).
My dream scenario - 4x10 and then somehow have no risk of stuff hanging over me to get done the next week!
4x10 shifts are not a new concept. This article makes it sound like what is pretty standard warehouse stuff is a new diabolical amazon plan to create the soul crushing "megacycle".
And working nights is not new. Anyone who has had to deal with 24x7 staffing (police, guard, nursing, flying etc etc) has had come up with approaches for night shift work (which is definitely terrible). Heads up, the non-megacycle night shift is also no fun for a lot of people.
That said, night shift work is miserable. No question there!
4x10 is amazing. Your work days are your work days, but the extra day off is amazing. You can actually go do stuff.
My own view - everyone should switch to 4x10 or at least have it as an option.
Now I'm working crazy hours so all a dream anyways these days.
Note 4x10 shifts are not new in warehousing (or even in mfg).
AB5 - union drafted, is an absolute unworkable travesty.
A key tell - for a "principled" law - they had to keep on adding so many carveouts and exceptions (and there are lots missed still).
I know folks - who are actively trying to do the right thing - tearing their hair out over AB5.
AB5 has really soured me on some of the labor rights stuff. AB5 is in no way a model solution - I hope other states can come up with more practical approaches - with some thought to the folks who just want a simple way to do the right thing without endless carveouts and classification arguments.
In particular, for pedestrians, bicycles, other vehicles, maybe even children running in street, is the limited resolution enough to still substantially increase safety?
Where I got with this - hitting a brick is bad. Hitting a person is much worse. A fair number of never hit type items seem to still be picked up with Lidar.
But all good points.
Net income $40B for the year through 12/31/2020.
The growth in revenue at 20% is impressive given these players are already so massive.
One big takeaway, AWS is CRUSHING GCP on the financial side. There is basically a 50%?? delta here? Ie, AWS is +28% margin, GCP -30% margin? Still GCP is growing briskly though much smaller.
In short, AWS could do a lot more to compete on price if they wanted.
We are so committed to LIDAR being useless that we're dumping our LIDARs for cheap! Buy them and start your own Self Driving Car company!
https://twitter.com/comma_ai/status/1197323020852793344?lang...
I can find plenty more.
What you propose means that if facebook doesn't like the anti-tracking rules, they can go around them. If your cable company doesn't like the anti-location awareness features to target ads to you if you stream their show, they can go around that. If a biller doesn't like that users can ask for a 30 day heads up on subscription renewals, they can do their own app store.
It is only because Apple (as a whole) as enough market power that - my subscription show notifications prior to renewal. That all of a sudden I can sign in to a bunch of apps with an apple sign in THAT DOES NOT RELEASE MY EMAIL. That all of a sudden privacy labels are appearing next to apps. And the list goes on. NONE of this would happen if these other folks were in charge, there is much more money in exploiting users.
So yes, apple is using its market power to push back on behavior they don't believe makes sense for their average user base. You are a power user, able to navigate all options - jump on andorid, root it, and do what you want.
My own guess - a bit of a niche product not super easy to scale do they set a rediculous price. If the governance wins are there - they may still sell some - they rarely do stuff w out customer demand. At least in govt contracting - if you are willing to jump through all the hoops, some insane markups exist.
If you want that fair enough - plenty of android phones allow you to root them and do whatever (and of course the carriers use these open API's to do the same). I know some lifeline phones came with Android/Trojan.HiddenAds. and Android/Trojan.Dropper.Agent.UMX and plenty of other phones use these open api's for "enhancements" many of which are not removable.
Apple does not have any open API, and so distributors, carriers etc cannot "enhance" the phone. That turns out to be something that people are paying EXTRA for. The margins on apple's phones are nuts as a result - they charge FAR more for the same spec as another provider - because you can trust that phone through the supply chain FAR more than you can trust any other phone provider currently. Similarly, you can be an older phone, you can give them to your kids, etc and the quality is there. Resold iphones hold value much MORE, not less, then the more open phones from others (which often have a trash battery installed just before sale which dies in a few weeks).
In your open API world would facebook have to follow app store policies on data collection, user permissions, single point of cancelation?