In my kitchen my Google home unit is a very advanced timer, unit conversion device, and picture frame.
When Americans dreamed of kitchen computers (2021)
31–40 of 62 posts
Re: When Americans dreamed of kitchen computers (2021)
#32The article's “Honeywell, an early computer-maker that would later help power the Arpanet” is a journalistically muddled version of a more specific fact: the ‘Kitchen Computer’ was a Honeywell 316 in a pedestal case, and the 316 was also used for the ARPANET Interface Message Processor (i.e. router).
Re: When Americans dreamed of kitchen computers (2021)
#33I think this is a general pattern: since the beginning of the industrial revolution people have been dreaming about robots doing things for us, replacing entire tasks. The reality is that putting computers into existing devices makes a lot more sense as mechanical household devices are already highly optimized. Sewing machines, kitchen appliances, cars, power tools are the result of decades of engineering so we repla…
> since the beginning of the industrial revolution people have been dreaming about robots doing things for us
The dream is much older than that, I suspect. There are references to self-weaving looms, self-playing musical organs, self-grinding mills in classical literature, often in descriptions of some sort of idealized utopia or afterlife. But I think some in antiquity would have considered them quite possible in this life, if only their construction and the underlying principles were understood. That work, in the physics sense, can captured and redirected by machinery is an ancient realization. Around 20 AD a Greek poet (Antipater of Thessalonica) made a passing reference to how machines had already freed people from the toil of grinding grain by harnessing nature's power:
> Hold back your hand from the mill, you grinding girls; even if the cockcrow heralds the dawn, sleep on. For Demeter has imposed the labours of your hands on the nymphs, who leaping down upon the topmost part of the wheel, rotate its axle; with encircling cogs, it turns the hollow weight of the Nisyrian millstones. If we learn to feast toil-free on the fruits of the earth, we taste again the golden age.
Re: When Americans dreamed of kitchen computers (2021)
#34I think this is a general pattern: since the beginning of the industrial revolution people have been dreaming about robots doing things for us, replacing entire tasks. The reality is that putting computers into existing devices makes a lot more sense as mechanical household devices are already highly optimized. Sewing machines, kitchen appliances, cars, power tools are the result of decades of engineering so we repla…
> since the beginning of the industrial revolution people have been dreaming about robots doing things for us The dream is much older than that, I suspect. There are references to self-weaving looms, self-playing musical organs, self-grinding mills in classical literature, often in descriptions of some sort of idealized utopia or afterlife. But I think some in antiquity would have considered them quite possible in th…
Wonderful, from now on I'll be imagining nymphs powering anything that moves on its own. Thanks, Demeter!
Re: When Americans dreamed of kitchen computers (2021)
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fantastic app suggestion! I've been manually copying and pasting recipes I liked into Notion so they are all largely formatted the same—the download recipe functionality in Paprika is magic.
I'm a huge fan of Paprika, their app is slick, they have apps on iOS/Android/Mac/Windows, and it all syncs. They have a ton of features under the hood that I don't even use (like meal planning, pantry management, etc) but I do love their shopping list feature. Just click the shopping cart icon on a recipe and it will let you add all the ingredients to one of your lists. You can easily uncheck all the things you alrea…
This sounds great, and I’m ready to download the app, but the problem is that most of my recipes come from Facebook groups, YouTube, Insta, and Pinterest, and while some of them have corresponding web pages for the ingredients lists, many of them do not, which would make the web import feature non-functional, if I’m not mistaken. I wish there was a way all of these sites could share metadata for ingredients that the app could read.
Another future feature that would be nice and convenient is to add in-house aisle shopping directions to the smart grocery lists for selected (or default) grocery stores. I know stores like Safeway share this info with apps like DoorDash (possibly UberEats as well), and both Home Depot and Target apps have aisle by aisle directions too, so it’s not beyond the realm of the possible to include this feature. Being able to view a smart grocery list in my kitchen and then to go to the store with aisle by aisle directions is a dream of mine.
Re: When Americans dreamed of kitchen computers (2021)
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. I've worked in manufacturing automation long enough to know that the equipment needed to generate the huge variety of food even a mediocre cook can prepare would fill multiple kitchens. Automation equipment that's safe and reliable tends to be very big in relation to the items it operates on.
One could imagine something like an industrial robot arm that can swap implements being able to manage a relatively large variety of recipes given some staple ingredients in a limited amount of space, but it would be tremendously complex to build and cost more than an industrial robot arm. Keeping it clean and well maintained would be a nontrivial effort, even if the arm includes programming to clean up after itself.…
I'm thinking here of ill-fated robot kitchen startup Zume's pizza robots. You can probably still find videos of them in operation on YouTube. The things that most struck me when I watched one were how slow they are at what they do, how much space they took up, and how much human intervention they required to operate.
Re: When Americans dreamed of kitchen computers (2021)
#37I would pay a lot, perhaps even give up my second car, for a Ghost Robotics or Boston Dynamics quadruped that could successfully and safely navigate my home, child put away dishes & fold laundry.
Re: When Americans dreamed of kitchen computers (2021)
#38Sorry for posting a comment unrelated to the article, but that site is broken. The cookie settings dialog, provided by a third-party company, doesn't work as promised.
When I opened the page, I saw a cookie banner, untoggled all toggles that were togglable and clicked "Reject all cookies". The cookie dialog said that there will be only functional cookies and they won't contain any personal information. How nice, I thought, Internet is changing for the better. I also can enjoy the privileges of EU citizens.
But then - just out of curiosity - I decided to see what cookies are left in my browser. Imagine my surprise when I saw 6 (six) cookies. Those included:
- an UUID with name 'stripe_mid' expiring in a year
- OptanonConsent, which, I assume, represents chosen settings and contains UUID in 'consentId' field. This UUID is set when the page is loaded. I guess they store your preferences on the server and not in cookies as I thought. Obviously, you can be tracked with this cookie as the identifier seems to be unique.
- user_geoip_fallback and user_geoip, both of which contain an IP address
To check that the dialog indeed doesn't work, I deleted all cookies except for cookies related to the consent dialog, and reloaded the page. Stripe and geoip cookies have been set again.
It turns out that you shouldn't trust cookie dialogs from that third-party company which you often see on different sites. They are either broken or intentionally deceive a user.
Re: When Americans dreamed of kitchen computers (2021)
#39Sorry for posting a comment unrelated to the article, but that site is broken. The cookie settings dialog, provided by a third-party company, doesn't work as promised. When I opened the page, I saw a cookie banner, untoggled all toggles that were togglable and clicked "Reject all cookies". The cookie dialog said that there will be only functional cookies and they won't contain any personal information. How nice, I th…
By the way, I think that tracking the grocery is possible with today's technology, you just need to install several cameras in the fridge, so that you can connect with a smartphone and see what is missing. Maybe one could train a neural network to recognize kind and amount of products, but as there are so many of them, and so many different types of packaging, I think that this would be difficult.
Re: When Americans dreamed of kitchen computers (2021)
#40I think some people are trying to automate the wrong domains, there are easier challenges to solve around the house first, besides, people love eating out or getting a take away. If corporations thought there was some money in automating the kitchen, all the fast food chains would get together and build an automated kitchen which can be retro fitted into your existing kitchen and serve you up all your favourite take aways, but it aint happening, at least not for a decade.
There are better low hanging fruit to be had in the automation/robot domains, if you think about it.