10,495 karma · joined October 30, 2007
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 see our soil moisture data readings updated every 15 minutes so they can turn the drippers on very quickly as soon as the soil starts drying out rapidly.
It would just be too slow to rely on robots driving up and down the rows in those conditions.
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 number of plants per device. In that case you’re not optimizing to anywhere the specific requirements of each plant, you’re assuming (often falsely) that all the plants in that area have the same needs as the one you’re monitoring.
The lower the cost per device, the higher your resolution and precision of monitoring can be, and the more you can accurately provide for the specific needs of each plant.
[1] Very often that number is zero.
As I said in the previous comment, right now, high-value crop growers like wine grape growers pay $700-$1000 or more per site (including reader/comms module and sensors), and generally only install one monitoring point per block (I have a system running at one of Australia's top boutique/biodynamic wine makers and at current prices he can only cost-justify having one 10 monitoring sites over his 70 acres of vines).
So, whatever we can do to drive down the cost to $20 or less should deliver big wins.
> Maybe talk to someone at Nordic
Yep, we're working with hardware engineers who are well connected to people at Nordic.
I hear you that $20 is high - but the status quo in this business now is monitoring devices that sell for AUD $600+, and with LTE-M or LoRa comms modules that cost over AUD $60 alone.
I'm forever thinking about ways you could drive the cost down further. I'd love it if there were a way to get the on-plant modules under $1. Feel free to get in touch if you want to discuss further.
For the use case invoked in this subthread (an individual monitoring device on each plant), I don’t think it’s the best.
We’re currently working with Nordic nRF52xx/53xx/54xx modules, which have dual ARM cores and built-in 2.4GHz radio, so, support for protocols like Bluetooth Mesh, Zibgee, Thread.
That means you can have a single module that can handle mesh comms with neighboring devices, as well as sensor reading, machine learning and output control. You wouldn’t need a separate comms module to communicate back to a base station or a high post and antenna for long-range comms. So it offers big savings on the device production side and the installation time/cost side.
The thing about this field that I’ve learned over the decade I’ve been involved is that creating the tech is less than half the challenge; the distribution - building awareness, selling it, installing it, maintaining it - is a huge undertaking, and a lot of money needs to come from somewhere to make that viable.
[1] I’d like to have a RTOS to run on these devices that is as approachable and familiar as common Linux distros like Ubuntu, for people to install and customise themselves, with a full open source license.
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 mind is very low cost devices (sub-$20) with mesh radio comms, inputs to read from sensors and outputs to control irrigation, and TinyML running the devices to optimize everything in real time.
I have about 10 years experience working in the field (mostly with high-value crops like wine grapes, nuts, avocados) and several iterations of prototype devices and web software, but am keen to attract people who are excited at the idea of working on this kind of thing.
Anyone - particularly low-level programmers or hardware engineers - interested in working on it can contact me (email in bio).
It also doesn’t wrestle at all with the complexities and tradeoffs of how we deal with people in different scenarios. Be kind to bullies and assholes? There’s a way to do it, sure, but there’s a lot of technique and nuance involved, and this post doesn’t scratch the surface.
Of course these situations are always complex behind the scenes, with many factors and considerations at play.
But the no he must really just have been fired against his will claim just doesn’t pass the sniff test to anyone paying attention.
PG’s telling if it, and Occam’s Razer, support that version.
Many people here want to imagine that it was vastly more dramatic than this, or need to reinterpret the word “fired” to support the narrative that Sam is bad. I understand it can be fun to think that way.
For the record I’m no great fan of OpenAI and I think people who are convinced they are about to achieve AGI are, er, mistaken. I mostly just care about correct definitions of words and avoiding sensationalism.
So it was always something that was closely linked to YC and his involvement with it was generally accepted as being harmonious with his role running YC, until it became for-profit.
Details here:
https://www.wired.com/2015/12/how-elon-musk-and-y-combinator...
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).
It seems everyone accepted that things qualitatively changed when OpenAI stopped being a non-profit research project inside YC to becoming a for-profit venture, and they just had an adult conversation about it.
He left YC in March 2019. Worldcoin was formed in 2019.
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 claims being made. Really it’s just a giveaway that there’s no substantive point being put forward.
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 your own ideological animus. What does this even mean in any real context?
Even if anybody's true priority was for the rich to be as enriched as possible, any half-sentient politician, economist or rich person knows that the rich can only become richer if ordinary people have enough money to buy stuff from them, so, nobody benefits from impoverishment of the masses. Without that recognition, there's no hope of a sensible discussion about the topic of what economic approach will actually deliver outcomes that are the most efficient and fair.
It's fair enough to criticise free market/laissez-faire economic policies; they have their limitations and trade-offs, just like every other economic philosophy. But this article doesn't contain any serious economic commentary or insight, it’s a largely empty rant.
I do consume a lot of YouTube content as audio-only when driving or exercising.
I find video particularly satisfying for this topic and these figures, because much of the most valuable insight emerges through discussion and debate.
I’ve read Kastrup’s book “Why Materialism is Baloney” and found it very satisfying - but I was already amenable to his position; I don’t imagine it would be persuasive to an entrenched skeptic.
I mentioned YouTube videos because there’s a large volume of their content there, with many of the videos featuring in-depth conversations and debates, which I’ve found can be a particularly good format for discussion of a topic of such gravity and complexity.
But between these three figures there are also many books, academic papers, blog posts, and written media interviews.
I’ve long found that this is a topic in which some people are going to be standoffish and resistant and that’s fine.
My hope is only to help people who are looking to learn about the topic to know who I’ve found worthwhile to learn from.
All the best!
Whereas the three I mentioned all embrace discussions about the nature of reality and consciousness and happily engage in lengthy discussions and debates about it.
Appeal to authority is where you present a person's status or credentials as primary evidence that their argument is correct. I've done no such thing here.
That pigs are still treated with cruelty is a terrible thing, and I’d happily see more done to protect all animals against cruelty. But it’s a separate argument to what’s relevant here.
(As I was writing the comment I thought “ugh will someone chime in and point out that not all countries have strong animal protection laws? Do I really need to preempt that in my comment?”)
Mammals and other animals have legal protections not afforded to fish and insects.
(To be clear, I’m not here to argue about the topic or try to persuade anyone of any position – that’s a waste of everyone’s time).
I recommend seeking out discussions involving:
- Federico Faggin: inventor of silicon-gate technology and developer of the earliest microprocessors;
- Bernardo Kastrup: Ph.D. in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence), former CERN engineer at the LHC;
- Donald D. Hoffman: Ph.D. in computational psychology, professor in Cognitive Sciences at UC Irvine.
On YouTube you can find plenty of discussions involving these figures, some with each other, and plenty more with others.
I’d suggest it’s particularly important to explore these discussions as dispassionately as possible if you regard materialism as the only theory of mind that has any scientific credibility or validity.
As Christopher Hitchens reminds us in his legendary oration on John Stuart Mill and free speech [2], it’s only by thoroughly understanding the opposing view that we can thoroughly understand our own position on any topic.
It’s nothing to do with how well frequented your site is; any site that can be found by a web spider is going to get bot spam.
Of course you’re completely free to try it, and indeed it’s pointless to spend any more time debating it here. You really should just try it if you want to.
I guess what I’m saying is the reason most people find it best just to use a 3rd party platform is not because nobody can write “100 lines of code” to do it themselves, but because if they do that they experience the spam problem and just decide it’s not worth it. That was my experience.
That said, it may be easier to combat spam now with a classifier using an LLM or BERT.