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Anyone have good, in production, examples where equipment has gotten smaller than before because a human no longer needs to operate it?
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Uhm.....I'm pretty sure my family has been plowing fields(and I do mean fields, not hobby gardens) with our trusty old Ursus C330[0], making a whole 30 horse power. Not sure why 70hp would be a problem. https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursus_C-330
American fields are larger, so American farmers can take advantage of larger plows for better efficiency; however, larger plows require more power from the tractor.
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This thing isn't meant to pull your 8-bottom plow attachment. It isn't the tractor a large-scale wheat or corn farmer is going to use to work the fields. Those tractors generate hundreds of horsepower and cost $250k. But there is plenty of market for a small utility tractor, and the people using those aren't all hobby farmers. You don't use your massive 500 hp John Deere 9630 to stack hay bales or cultivate your row…
Autonomy is the game changer here. For $250K you can buy 5 of these little tractors and draw 5 12ft cultivators rather than a single 60 footer. Drive one manually to mark the headland and let the other 4 fill it in.
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Its definitely a factor, most people I know out here who bale run multiple tractors so they can handle one or two in the shop if it's during a critical time. We've got a Kubota CUT, when rats chewed out the writing harness we were 4 weeks before we had it up and running even with insurance + dealership. Personally I'd love to see someone come in and clean house. Weight and torque are the two things you want in a trac…
I doubt anyone will come in and "clean house" - especially not from a VC-funded startup. The (oft-subsidized) money is just too good to "leave on the table". The best we can hope for, are solid Right-to-repair laws that make DRM illegal/possible to bypass to at least allow custom firmware
If I had the option for either a pure-electric or diesel-electric I would have seriously considered it. At least in our case the workload is a lot of hauling, intermittent groundwork and field mowing(Also all the JD DRM stuff only applies in the larger 100hp+ market. In the SCUT/CUT/Utility Tractor market there's a fairly robust set of companies(Kubota, LS, JD, Mahindra, Yanmar, etc).
Once John Deere starting DRM’ing their tractors it just screams entrenched monopoly. But where’s the barrier to entry? AI is going to dramatically alter this competitive landscape and John Deere’s DRM is not going to to stop it. Honestly, I love watching these companies drive nails into their own coffins. I was on the Google homepage today on my iPhone and was getting popups advertising Chrome (on the homepage!) and…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
American fields are larger, so American farmers can take advantage of larger plows for better efficiency; however, larger plows require more power from the tractor.
American farms rarely plow in the traditional sense of a plow. No till is cheaper and better for the soil. It is tricky to get into, but it is not new.
Once John Deere starting DRM’ing their tractors it just screams entrenched monopoly. But where’s the barrier to entry? AI is going to dramatically alter this competitive landscape and John Deere’s DRM is not going to to stop it. Honestly, I love watching these companies drive nails into their own coffins. I was on the Google homepage today on my iPhone and was getting popups advertising Chrome (on the homepage!) and…
Barrier to entry in Ag is the dealerships. Deere has the best US dealership network for heavy equipment outside of CAT. It is Ok if your Tesla is in the shop for a few weeks getting fixed, but for Ag equipment, even a few hours at the wrong time is super painful. Deere has parts for 20yr old equipment and their own freight trucks, don't overlook this advantage.
Once John Deere starting DRM’ing their tractors it just screams entrenched monopoly. But where’s the barrier to entry? AI is going to dramatically alter this competitive landscape and John Deere’s DRM is not going to to stop it. Honestly, I love watching these companies drive nails into their own coffins. I was on the Google homepage today on my iPhone and was getting popups advertising Chrome (on the homepage!) and…
> AI is going to dramatically alter this competitive landscape and John Deere’s DRM is not going to to stop it. I would love this state, but getting there is not simple. DRM is just one facet of it: companies selling machinery have worked on hardware for decades, making their systems physically robust and able to take lots of abuse. This raises the barrier to entry a lot. My 2c.
Once John Deere starting DRM’ing their tractors it just screams entrenched monopoly. But where’s the barrier to entry? AI is going to dramatically alter this competitive landscape and John Deere’s DRM is not going to to stop it. Honestly, I love watching these companies drive nails into their own coffins. I was on the Google homepage today on my iPhone and was getting popups advertising Chrome (on the homepage!) and…
It’s not enough to exist. You actually have to perform at least comparably, which DDG doesn’t unfortunately.
I’ve tried to replace Google with both DDG and Bing. Both of their results are frankly terrible compared to Google’s. Google’s transition to its current hybrid Ask-Jeeves-style question/traditional query search engine, along with its inline answers above the result list both blow its competitors out of the water. Google also does a much better job of letting the user know the freshness or up-to-dateness of results with its inline last-modified/updated time stamps.
Both of those things have made it impossible for me to switch off of Google without immediately having problems quickly finding relevant, up-to-date information on the web. I do desperately want to switch, though.
I also especially despise AMP. It constantly breaks websites and itself, especially on iOS.