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NASA should not do what businesses do, because by definition their job is to do what businesses cannot or will not do.

They should not adopt spacex practices, they should adopt spacex lift vehicles (once proven).


> It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale

No, it never seemed that way to the realists, but it was said to seem that way to the makerspheres.


I personally wouldn't trust the 3D-printing community. The pre-bambu lab days were pretty bleak.

Print quality is everything when it comes to 3D printing. The printing quality must keep increasing if 3D prints are to be used as finished products. People should stop printing STL artifacts into their prints. Layer lines must fade away into invisibility. Top surfaces must be impeccably smooth without any stepping. New coatings need to be developed for texturing 3d printed parts and the parts need to be ready for coating right from the print bed.


> Layer lines must fade away into invisibility.

The layer lines are much less pronounced when you use a 0.25 mm nozzle with an appropriate layer height instead of a 0.4 mm nozzle (the possible quality is even on the brink to satisfy people who use 3D printing for producing miniatures). The prize you need to pay is of course the print time.

> Top surfaces must be impeccably smooth without any stepping.

In the last years there was a lot of progress on ironing features in slicers, which mitigates this issue:

> https://help.prusa3d.com/article/ironing_177488

Another very recent addition to mitigate the perceived problem is the recent addition of "fuzzy skin" features in slicers, which by making the surfaces look "more rough" hides the imperfections of the FDM printing process.

--

Another solution is to simply use resin printing instead of FDM printing for finished products if feasible.


Definitely a fantasy land ideal. Much like pitches from the Free Software Foundation of a world without copyright and IP. It's just never going to exist because reality just isn't that way.

> Much like pitches from the Free Software Foundation of a world without copyright and IP.

If there exists no copyright, you cannot force an entity to release the source code of their software.

A world without copyright and IP is for sure an interesting thought experiment, but very different from the FSF vision:

In such a world, there would be much more reverse-engineering and monkey-patching of existing (non-open) software that gets copied around very liberally.

On the other hand, because there exists no enforcable copyright, companies would of course invest a lot of ressources into developing hard to crack copy protection schemes. Similarly, freedom-loving hackers would invest serious ressources into cracking such copy protection schemes.


> Much like pitches from the Free Software Foundation of a world without copyright and IP.

Didn't the big AI vendors kinda bring that to fruition?


Wrote my PhD thesis on tracking invasive fish.

Not only was what we built essentially, a scout-to-kill drone, it was also built on a ton of tracking literature which was basically built to track things to kill. No matter how far back you go, the military has always been a huge player (supply or demand side) in R&D.


Potential issues from new tech aside, an open-source endowment is a pro-social idea, that absolutely deserves its day.

Now, setting aside ethical issues for a moment, open-sourced knowledge, writing, history, data, Q&A, and tech is essentially a prerequisite for a data-driven technology like LLMs, and if those turn out to be a net win for humanity, then we can directly trace the routes to initiatives like this one that can curate humanity's best contributions.


Great writeup, that is all

Regardless of the future you have to plan for the worst and hope for the best.

I don't have time to post significantly about it but I'd love to trade thoughts and figure this out.

Email?


What's your payload? Where are the seeds? How are they deposited?

Recommend going to a farm right now to see how this works in production. For the most part, you can autonomously sow using GPS. But the farmer just rides along.


Payload is whatever you (or your startup) want it to be.

For me personally mechanical between row weeding is step one, then laser in-row weeding.

1. These on some linear actuators: https://www.getearthquake.com/products/fusion-drill-powered-... (they work surprisingly well)

2. Beyond that for in-row weeding a engraving laser on a Delta: https://github.com/Agroecology-Lab/Open-Weeding-Delta/tree/m...

Or if I'm feeling rich by then this third party weeder looks pretty good https://github.com/Laudando-Associates-LLC/LASER

3. For Seeding my salad crop https://reagtools.co.uk/collections/jang

4. Harvesting my salad crop https://reagtools.co.uk/products/quick-cut-greens-harvester

I live on a farm, I have sold salad commercially, these are largely tools I already use and own, just moved about by motors rather than muscles.

This is a smaller scale thing than arable. We're talking a step up from manual horticulture (which is actually what still feeds much of the world)


There's something alien about pages like this. Seems like ramblings of an artistic that is vaguely tech themed but it's of course possible it contains deep insights. I just rarely get through one of these enough to learn what those are.

They're an interesting set of people. I highly recommend reading some of the rest of their pages - you may not agree with everything they put forth, but they are clearly thoughtful people with a coherent if alien ideology.

I think about collapse more after encountering their writing. What it means for us, what it means for the people after us, what we owe them.


Permaculture is the art of picking words that sounds logical and smart, make studies with n=1 to determine what is better, erect rules to follow based on that, and the communities that group around that. This is the same thing for computers.

No, it's not. It's Permanent Agriculture. Designing and growing sustainable food producing ecosystems.

Permaculture is a contraction of permanent culture.

No, it's not. It's Permanent Agriculture. It's a farming methodology.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/permaculture

> Blend of permanent +‎ agriculture, coined by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in 1978.


A friend and roomate of mine had his first break after a night like this.

He overindulged on his first use, slept it off, and woke up a paranoid schizophrenic. Paced around the house talking to himself and accusing me of things.

Perhaps unrelated but I find it hard to believe. His parents came and were very mad at me, took him away and I never spoke to him again. His father suffered from it as well I later found out.


Given that we have nuclear weapons why bother making anything?

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