I've pulled a few thousand cups of long espresso from this guy since we bought it two years ago. Much, much nicer and lower maintenance than a boiler machine. If one wants, you can go deep down the rabbit hole of heat control, etc. but even as a "just boil water and make espresso" machine it works great, with no fuss.
Unfortunately, after buying this thing I can't justify buying other coffee objects that are beautiful but would probably make worse coffee than the robot, e.g., the Moccamaster and other drip machines.
This is a bad take. The article makes it clear that most of them will lose money on the venture, and the reason the prices are high are due to status-mining chinese elites and traditional-medicine paranoiacs in vietnam. It's a pretty dismal situation.
If everyone lost money nobody would do it. Are they losing money because it's fundamentally unworkable or because it's illegal which makes it hard to do in a "professional" manner and therefore incurs efficiency penalties?
Your average 22yo isn't doing something like this with his buddies. Between the equipment, expertise, consumables, etc, etc, it's clearly the kind of thing that's organized and financially backed by someone (i.e. like most small business). So while most may lose money, we don't know if it's a "send out three teams and one winner pays for two losers" type situation.
The way I see it these mammoth bits are far more likely to be preserved if used as home decor or whatever somewhere in China than if they wind up rotting away when (let's be real here, probably not an "if") the permafrost melts or in some mine's tailings pile when some other industry comes through. If this was all above the table there'd be more ancillary industry around it too. Sure the tusk might be cost prohibitive but why can't every highschool biology department have a "worthless" femur or jaw or backbone segment? Oh, because it's illegal so "less profitable stuff" (i.e. same reason the cartel doesn't move low density product) like that gets discarded, that's why.
This is a very real worry for the AI rollout for the general population. But are folks here using AI to blow smoke up their asses as a sibling comment stated? I'd like to believe we're using it to ask questions, prototype, and then measure... not just blow smoke up there...
Napkin math is how you avoid spending several weeks of your life going down ultimately futile rabbit holes. Yes, it's approximations, often very coarse ones, but done right they do work.
Your question about what degree of parallelization is unfortunately too vague to really answer. SSDs offer some internal parallelism. Need more parallelism / IOPS? You can stick a lot more SSDs on your machine. Need many machines worth of SSDs? Disaggregate them, but now you need to think about your network bandwidth, NICs, cross-machine latency, and fault-tolerance.
The best engineers I've seen are usually excellent at napkin math.
Or if you do want a manicured plot, just cut them with a lawnmower?
The bane of my young life was having the job of cutting the grass around the house - we lived in the country at the time and had about 1/2 an acre of lawn as well as fruit trees, plants, vegetables, etc.
We never considered using weedkiller - I just can't see the need. Isn't it just as easy to pull the weed out of the ground as it is to spray round-up on it and wait for it to die, before presumably anyway pulling the remains of it?
Ignoring the health implications completely, I can see some "value" of using round-up in a commercial environment where your dealing with 100s of acres or more but fail to see what benefit it provides in a domestic setting when the number of weeds is small enough that it would just takes minutes to remove them physically and toss them into a compost heap.
Digging weeds and their roots up one by one by hand out of cracks in concrete/asphalt is much slower than spraying. Also much more physically challenging, which is a metric I didn't care about when young and able bodies but nowadays is very relevant to me. I'm not saying roundup is good, but there are plenty of reasons for it to be appealing. I haven't tried the boiling water method yet, it seems like it'd be easier than digging but harder than spraying, unless perhaps one has a mobile, outdoor source of boiling water.
What is the point of removing weeds from those cracks in the first place? Do they cause some kind of physical harm to creatures or objects that move on that concrete or asphalt surface?
I rarely use weed killer on poison ivy to avoid coming into physical contact. Lawnmowers work fine for flat yards, but for steps down a steep embankment you really need a weed eater and weed eater + poison ivy is a major hassle.
In my area, some weeds will absolutely take over and choke out everything else while also spreading throughout the neighborhood to the delight of all.
But roundup isnt much of an option when the weeds are next to the nice stuff. My compromise is to pull the weeds when I'm motivated to and call it a day.
I weed whack acres, it is a huge sink of my free time. But there are areas where I don't want to mow, I want to eliminate growth, like on my gravel driveway, and the area adjacent to my house. I should probably install concrete instead of gravel, but that's telling myself to just eat cake since I have no bread.
I agree about with your claim, but the answer to your question is that “weeds” is a set of species that contains both invasive, ecologically harmful species, and crucial native annual and perennial forbs+grasses.
From the universalizability principle, if everyone merely let “weeds” propagate, because of the ecology of invasives that are in that set, we would be MUCH worse off for the next few millennia than we are now. Until the ecosystems healed and the “invasives” become “keystone species”. Not sure how long that would take but we won’t see it :)
Even then, spraying cancer causing chemicals into the land is beyond stupid. Killing yourself and the humans around your land for having a bit less work, one can't be more antisocial.
Herbicides are useful, they certainly help prevent invasive weed species from taking over native plants and grasses. I'm Kentucky I'm always fighting Johnson grass, thistle and Japanese knotweed in my bluegrass
What if I want to do something on my land that will poison the ground water for the area? What if I want to raise an invasive species on my land that will likely escape and devastate local wildlife? Should society be permissive and wait for the damage to be done before stopping me, instead of being proactive and stopping me from doing so before the fact?
No, this is HN where we voraciously advocate for the libertarian ideals of "I do what I want" then pontificate about the tragedy of the commons from an ivory tower when it inevitably all goes wrong.
Fire hazard and native wildlife, mostly. Over here, anything called a weed is invasive. Native birds and insects like their native species, and invasive vegetation brings in invasive species.
We don't mow one part of our lawn and have sowed it with wildflowers) which some people might call weeds) to attract insects. Some wildflowers prefer poor soil, so my wife scythes it at the end of the season and removes all the cuttings. I'm hoping we might get some native orchids eventually.
Do you know of important real-world use-cases where cache-oblivious data structures are used? They are frequently mentioned on HN when relevant discussions like this one pop up, but I would love to hear about places where they are actually used in production.
You may not encounter a situation where cache oblivious structure is needed, but the knowledge that some algorithms are cache oblivious can help.
For example, if you represent a set of values as an ordered array, you can perform many set operations with the (array) merge algorithm, which is cache oblivious one. You can avoid pointer chasing, etc, but your structure becomes static instead of dynamic as with, say, red-black trees. This is already a win because you can save memory and compute if at least one of your sets does not change much.
But, if you apply logarithmic method [1] you can have dynamic data structure (over static one, a sorted array) and still perform most of operations without pointer chasing and with cache oblivious merging.
Giuseppe, any interesting comments from inside the tent? From the outside, spending 100M+ on a single researcher seems like a wild idea. It's also not clear what spending that much money on people at the top of the leadership stack really brings that Meta does not already have in its existing leadership. Surely what is needed are strong hands-on researchers? Are they paying 100M a head for such people? If so, the times are truly wild.
It looks like just a wrapper around the data from plasticlist for now. One can fund other products, but I searched and could not find any others that were funded as a result of this project. Some transparency about the cost seems critical for successfully running such a crowd-funding project.
I've pulled a few thousand cups of long espresso from this guy since we bought it two years ago. Much, much nicer and lower maintenance than a boiler machine. If one wants, you can go deep down the rabbit hole of heat control, etc. but even as a "just boil water and make espresso" machine it works great, with no fuss.
Unfortunately, after buying this thing I can't justify buying other coffee objects that are beautiful but would probably make worse coffee than the robot, e.g., the Moccamaster and other drip machines.