261–270 of 326 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's faster than flights on short (<3 hour) routes because you don't have the whole security theatre thing. Also train stations are in the city center usually and airports are in the outskirts.
On more actual security concerns side, you will have a hard time hijacking a train and jet into the side of a skyscraper.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If only there were swarms of self replicating autonomous systems that can heal, recharge and defend themselves without input and adapt to new situations, while being stress tested for free for millions of years. But I'm dreaming, certainly if it would have existed humans would have tried to leverage them a long time ago.
Snark aside, as useful as the birds and the bees are, they've got their own goals, and those goals aren't always aligned with ours — hence the use of pesticides and insecticides, or indeed scarecrows, in the first place.
It used to be our fav tools, now we just don't go in that direction much anymore.
We could study, teach, bread, terraform, integrate and so on at a much larger scale and with better tech. It's just... It doesn't look like a product.
This is an improvement within the current paradigm of "big ag", but IMHO tech is opening the possibility of a completely different way of doing things. For example, this comment which is below the linked video imagines a robot-maintained food forest, I think it's on point because I, too, believe that the future is swarms of small robots rather than a few big tractors: > Imagine, a few years down the line, applying th…
Reading the comments in this thread reminded me of "Silent Running" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running ). Droids (albeit 70s-style), agro-tech, and post-apocalyptic sci-fi. It's dated but enjoyable.
And very, very sad.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On more actual security concerns side, you will have a hard time hijacking a train and jet into the side of a skyscraper.
The far more common scenario - a bomb in a bag - is very devastating in closed spaces such as trains and buses.
Can this happen in developing countries like India?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is spot on. I work in this industry (contributing architect of https://nelsonirrigation.com/products/twig-wireless-controls... ). We dream of lots of fun things. And even try some of them. But not a few days go by that we don’t once again mutter “power is king” To each other. Everything we do revolves around the constraint of power budgets.
How about having an induction recharge state every few meters? They could be rolled out as the same type of infrastructure as water piping is now. At scale, induction chargers can be manufactured very inexpensively.
This is an improvement within the current paradigm of "big ag", but IMHO tech is opening the possibility of a completely different way of doing things. For example, this comment which is below the linked video imagines a robot-maintained food forest, I think it's on point because I, too, believe that the future is swarms of small robots rather than a few big tractors: > Imagine, a few years down the line, applying th…
Yes, the current ways of doing intensive farming are hard on the land and ultimately very wasteful. If you look at the progress in pesticide free organic farming and indoor/vertical farming, what they have in common is that they leverage a more data driven approach where you simply don't need to pre-emptively correct problems if you can manage the environment in which you grow plants better. Avoiding the conditions t…
By what measure is vertical farming more efficient?. I've heard the contrary regarding green house gas emissions, it is still less efficient in most crops, it consumes too much power and that overcompensates any efficiency gained in other areas
It's interesting that this conclusion can change drastically if electricity becomes 10-100x more efficient
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This could simultaneously absolve the need for autonomous vehicles, because whenever you need to go somewhere, you could just make the giant arm put you there.
That's called a train. It's great. You can read a book while you are transported, it uses very little power to get you there, it can be 0 emission, there are no traffic jams. Sadly it's not fashionable cause you can't show off how wealthy you are by using it.
https://www.amtrak.com/privately-owned-rail-cars
There was even some hn post on it where someone detailed how much it costs and what you get
Seems like it should hoe each weed instead of spraying it. I guess that's a little harder to do. Maybe a lot harder. Two other things I thought were interesting in the video. One, the idea of mapping the whole field is pretty cool. There must be useful things you could do with a millimeter-scale 3D map of an entire field. Two, this is happening in California, just a few hours' drive from Silicon Valley. I hope some o…
I saw on one of the illustrations that the spray is made of acetic acid. Pretty natural product, aka vinegar at low concentration. Well targeted as they seem to do, I guess it is a good product to preserve the soil and wanted plants with no harmful residues.
I wonder about the effects of acidification after long term use. Perhaps some alkaline filler can be added to balance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the future is swarms of small robots A key problem with small autonomous robots is their energy supply and mass. Batteries have low energy density. Actuators have bad power to weight ratios too. Living things are enormously more efficient. So much so that the intuition apparently offered by watching animals usually does not apply. This is extremely true for swarm robotics, inspired by ants, termites, etc. Swarm cri…
This is spot on. I work in this industry (contributing architect of https://nelsonirrigation.com/products/twig-wireless-controls... ). We dream of lots of fun things. And even try some of them. But not a few days go by that we don’t once again mutter “power is king” To each other. Everything we do revolves around the constraint of power budgets.
Make a square of tensioned cable (or rigid rail) boxing in some area of garden/food forest/farmland at a height above the plants. Have 4 modules which maintain position on opposite sides and holds a tensioned wire between them, making a tensioned wire along the x and a tensioned wire along the y. At the intersection of these wires there is a powered doohicky that can act like a spider and drop down onto the plants below and do its work. The power to the doohicky could be cable from either axis.