91–100 of 130 posts
What a nice job this person did. Coincidentially I'm working on something similar at the moment only with an order of complexity that is several magnitudes larger than the one on display here (39000 different shapes, several 10's of possible colors). But my contraption doesn't nearly look as nice as this one and definitely is not ready for any kind of production. I've been working on this for the last two years or so…
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There's also the 'story' of the Japanese firm who included 10 broken 'X's' with the delivery of X, since the contract stated 10 broken X's per 10000. I think you'll find neither story is true. Like most Urban Legends it's a bit silly, people are people whatever the culture. They have common sense.
In the Google SRE book they say that if a service has reliability much better than the stated SLO they artificially introduce errors to get closer to the error budget. This is to prevent over-reliance on the measured SLO rather than the stated SLO in upstream services.
Why ride the line? It'd take one major issue then you're way over you error budget?
For testing/simulations I can see why you'd introduce the errors.
Here's the commercial version.[1] This machine is sorting peas by color. Peas. Individual peas. Each individual pea is examined by cameras for size, color, and looking like a pea. Rejects are kicked into the reject hopper by an air jet. There are machines like this for most fruit. Typical throughput is a ton per hour. Most fruit and berries go through such machines today. That's why the fruit at the supermarket is so…
Long ago I visited a company that made agricultural sorting equipment. They were trying to develop a new machine for sorting ears of corn. Among the requirements, the machine had to be capable of rejecting a dead rat. My partners and I were bidding to design the machine... we didn't get the job.
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There's a similar issue, IMO, with new home construction. There's a minimum legal quality limit for having a home be sellable, and anything past that basically doesn't get done. It's made worse by the home evaluation metrics - square footage, bathrooms/bedrooms, and location are most of what matters for getting a mortgage (and thus for bidding on and pricing a house). Like, if you look closely at a 100 year old house…
I don't really think this has to do with legal limits; you could probably sell a hut as a "house" in most places if you wanted to, as long as it was compliant with the building codes. The problem isn't that the government won't let you call it that, the problem is that nobody will buy just a hut, they want an actual house. While it may or may not be the case that 'house quality' has declined over the decades, that's…
Huts aren't compliant with building codes - and regardless, there's specific criteria you have to fulfill to get various statistics (square footage, bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen). Plus there are zoning restrictions on minimum building sizes, on top of regulations on minimum room sizes.
>do house buyers want to pay 1.2x or whatever for those extra details?
Even if they do, they often can't. If the bank appraises it as a $200k house, that's often going to mean that the buyer can only ever get a mortgage for $180k with $20k down. If the buyer wants to pay 1.2x, that means that they have to come up with $40k in cash.
>I would conjecture that home developers are not stupid, and that they have tried adding those (presumably expensive) details, and found that they were unable to recoup those costs in an increased price.
They aren't stupid, and they have tried adding details. What you wind up with are granite countertops, because that sort of thing impresses average home-buyers (and is an easy thing to point to for getting your appraisal adjusted).
The big issue is that American homebuyers, as a class, have lost the ability to distinguish good home design from bad. "Why" is a long essay, but the "just trust me on this" is that the vast majority of home-buyers have little to no experience in the sort of work that goes into building a home.
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There's a similar issue, IMO, with new home construction. There's a minimum legal quality limit for having a home be sellable, and anything past that basically doesn't get done. It's made worse by the home evaluation metrics - square footage, bathrooms/bedrooms, and location are most of what matters for getting a mortgage (and thus for bidding on and pricing a house). Like, if you look closely at a 100 year old house…
A list of which would make for an interest design book.
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In the Google SRE book they say that if a service has reliability much better than the stated SLO they artificially introduce errors to get closer to the error budget. This is to prevent over-reliance on the measured SLO rather than the stated SLO in upstream services.
This sounds very very odd? Why ride the line? It'd take one major issue then you're way over you error budget? For testing/simulations I can see why you'd introduce the errors.
Now that green skittles have changed from "lime" to "apple" (my lawsuit regarding calling the flavor assortment "original" will be filed any day now), I need a machine like this to sort the green ones into the trash where they belong.
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> But it doesn't just reject every bad seed, instead it will optimize to keep within legally accepted limits. This is just... I guess the emotion you feel when reading the last paragraph defines you as either technical guy (outrage / resignation, depending on your age and experience) or managerial guy (pure delight). I am guessing there is a switch that makes it sort properly, you know, for VIP?
Well, kind of both. As an engineer I applaud the fact that it optimizes for maximum usage while remaining in-spec. I'd still hope they preferentially discard the really nasty stuff. A few slightly discoloured grains per kg is much better than an entire dead mouse every 100kg.
Turns out that unrefined sugar is kept in gigantic open barns, and moved around with bulldozers --- not a clean process. Of course, birds and animals get in, and frequently die there, and then the sugar does... sugar things... to them.
As a result there is apparently a legal limit as to the maximum permissible number of crystallised parrots per tonne in Australian sugar.
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That doesn't sound like a very nice thing to do. I wonder if capitalism is to blame, as I would certainly blame capitalism, or good old fashioned egotistical rivalry that I'm told was common in many areas of life then between the USSR and the US. I'd say that feeding humans or even livestock is more important than profits. Or at least, it ought to be.
A good compromise would have been to put a small bag of sand in the bottom of the container.
Also, diplomatically, this might be more difficult to defend. Although allowing this would've been in the best interest of both nations. Cue the human condition :)