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Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

charmindustrial.com

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Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#161

Post by munk-a »

Raidion wrote: post #133
colechristensen wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They just needed one farm kid who became an engineer. They talked about taking seven weeks to figure out a conveyor, put me in the middle of Kansas and I could have told you how to solve that problem in seven minutes, give me a truck she a credit card and i can buy you the parts in an hour. Bay Area engineering tends to be very sheltered, large groups of people with zero experience invading a domain. Sometimes it cre…

I think solving an "easy" problem is a good step on the way to a hard one, as long as the tool is set up to allow you to get out of a local maximum. Clearly there are locations where self driving is a smaller problem space than others, and I don't think it's bad to solve for those locations first. I don't think it would be a fail if self driving cars were able to only operate in sunny locations with good roads. The c…

So build a covered test road for your initial trials - then unleash them on real road situations. I'd be much more ready to trust a self-driving car that was born and raised on Boston streets than one in the wide, luxurious and pristine SoCal streets.

I'm not saying you need to teach your kid to swim by throwing them into the sea with weights tied around their ankles - you can ramp up to that... but you need to start exposing things to real world conditions pretty early on in development lest something, like a LIDAR censor close to the road surface in the front of the car, force you into a huge redesign when you discover that sheets of slush and road salt will liberally coat every front-facing surface of your vehicle driving in Boston in the winter.

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#162

Post by jfim »

colechristensen wrote: post #86
hinkley wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We talk about this at least once a week here, usually in the scope of software, but it’s a problem that exists in other domains (though VCs and us are constantly pushing for more businesses to run like software, which is nuts considering how not in order we know our own house to be). Ageism and cultishness are how you end up with simple oversights that anyone who has been around the block a few times would either pre…

They just needed one farm kid who became an engineer. They talked about taking seven weeks to figure out a conveyor, put me in the middle of Kansas and I could have told you how to solve that problem in seven minutes, give me a truck she a credit card and i can buy you the parts in an hour. Bay Area engineering tends to be very sheltered, large groups of people with zero experience invading a domain. Sometimes it cre…

If you want a laugh, you can always check out Zume pizza, which was this startup that made pizzas with robots.

They burned through several hundreds of millions in VC funding, even though a cursory look at their robots would show that they had no idea what they were doing. See for example https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-13/inside-th...

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#163

Post by iancmceachern »

hinkley wrote: post #73
gammarator wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tone of this comment is unduly negative, but I agree that they should be hiring folks with relevant experience. Ag mechanization is a well established degree, combine harvesters and augers exist, etc.

We talk about this at least once a week here, usually in the scope of software, but it’s a problem that exists in other domains (though VCs and us are constantly pushing for more businesses to run like software, which is nuts considering how not in order we know our own house to be). Ageism and cultishness are how you end up with simple oversights that anyone who has been around the block a few times would either pre…

And change/difference for the sake of change/difference

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#164

Post by dbcurtis »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #22
rexreed wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If corn stover is a critical importance to your business and business model, wouldn't it be more effective, efficient, and beneficial to your business to be where the critical resource and information and experience is? Basically why not move to Kansas instead of stay put in California?

Come on. No one wants to live in Kansas. And it's extremely difficult to build in a rural setting. You try prototyping an experimental cutting-edge technology in the middle of a corn field 2 hours from the nearest Home Depot or metal fabricator.

Oh for heaven’s sake. You can find a whole bunch of talented mech e’s and ag e’s all over the corn belt that already live there and like it. John Deere in Waterloo is just one name of many. My nephew works at Ag Leader (he’s an EE). There is a lot of ag engineering talent in the midwest, it is silly to try to recruit it here in Sili Valley.

This is like the joke about the drunk looking for his car keys under the street light because the light is better than whete he dropped them.

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#165

Post by mixmastamyk »

colechristensen wrote: post #135
a_c wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On self driving car, I think we are solving all the problems caused by cars like air pollution and congestion with "better" car. First we have electric car, then we (will) have electric self driving car. Public transport seems boring enough that no one talks about. Is there anything foundamentally wrong with buses and trains (and bike too) compared with cars? While we moved pass the faster horse era, we are now searc…

>Is there anything foundamentally wrong with buses and trains It's slower, a round trip I could make in 30 minutes in a car would take careful scheduling and two hours on a bus. Sometimes it's cold outside and I'd have to walk half a mile to and from a bus stop. The local transit authority is experimenting with reducing the number of light rail cars so they'll be better covered by transit police in cars because viole…

The problem here is your dysfunctional city, and has little to do with trains. I hear you however, mine is too.

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#166

Post by majormajor »

nebula8804 wrote: post #147
hinkley wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A similar story happened with digital cameras. A few of the film companies practically went out of business before the electronics got sorted out and what differentiated the good from the bad cameras circled back to the mechanical parts, which the incumbents had locked down ages ago. The pure digital play companies faded and some were acquired, and one day Nikon or Canon had the best DSLR system.

Thats unfortunate. What if there are certain aspects to existing cameras that are only there because a lesson was learned in the past but is no longer ideal in todays context. If there are no new comers that have the cash to burn to 're-evaluate' how everything is done today then we are missing out on potential innovations. This process is like re-factoring old code but in real life.

That's how Sony ate up a bunch of marketshare recently, actually, post-DSLR, by doing mirrorless early and well.

They were involved already in the industry as a component supplier, and then expanded to take advantage of the incumbents moving slowly.

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#167

Post by RosanaAnaDana »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #117
RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever their answer they'll need to account for the fuel cost of the trip to a facility, lifecycle cost of the instrumentation, and fuel cost of a return trip for where ever the whatever is going to go. I can tell you right now having done experimental LCA previously, its not gonna pen out. The cost of moving massive amounts of 'stuff' to do 'something' with it when its an extremely low margin, low value add produc…

Couldn't the bio-oil generated by the process be used to power the transport and supply lines? Or don't the maths work out? I don't know any of the numbers here...

You have to drive the 'stuff' to 'somewhere' to turn it into 'whatever'.

The stuff costs more in CO2 to drive to the place than you get from turning it into 'whatever'.

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#168

Post by abracadaniel »

jfim wrote: post #162
colechristensen wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They just needed one farm kid who became an engineer. They talked about taking seven weeks to figure out a conveyor, put me in the middle of Kansas and I could have told you how to solve that problem in seven minutes, give me a truck she a credit card and i can buy you the parts in an hour. Bay Area engineering tends to be very sheltered, large groups of people with zero experience invading a domain. Sometimes it cre…

If you want a laugh, you can always check out Zume pizza, which was this startup that made pizzas with robots. They burned through several hundreds of millions in VC funding, even though a cursory look at their robots would show that they had no idea what they were doing. See for example https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-13/inside-th...

I imagine the frozen pizza industry has had that long figured out, and at scales far larger than they were hoping for.

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#169

Post by com2kid »

colechristensen wrote: post #135
a_c wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On self driving car, I think we are solving all the problems caused by cars like air pollution and congestion with "better" car. First we have electric car, then we (will) have electric self driving car. Public transport seems boring enough that no one talks about. Is there anything foundamentally wrong with buses and trains (and bike too) compared with cars? While we moved pass the faster horse era, we are now searc…

>Is there anything foundamentally wrong with buses and trains It's slower, a round trip I could make in 30 minutes in a car would take careful scheduling and two hours on a bus. Sometimes it's cold outside and I'd have to walk half a mile to and from a bus stop. The local transit authority is experimenting with reducing the number of light rail cars so they'll be better covered by transit police in cars because viole…

> It's slower, a round trip I could make in 30 minutes in a car would take careful scheduling and two hours on a bus.

That isn't a fundamental problem with buses, that is a problem with your local implementation.

A proper mass transit system gets to avoid all or most street traffic, including signaling and such.

Traveling through the streets of a city, you are lucky if your average speed hits 15mph. Mass transit can easily beat that if implemented well.

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#170

Post by gumby »

jandrese wrote: post #153
gumby wrote: post #104

This is such a great article, the summary of which is “I/O is hard”, which every programmer surely knows (and if they don’t, they haven’t tried). Ok, it’s a great article for other reasons too.

Everything works great until the real world gets involved.

Also that pure functional code? “Side effects: can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em”. And that’s all inside the machine.
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