I plan on sort of following the path of the OP, but in an automated way.
Longer comment on Reddit[1], but the goal is to make a climate controlled greenhouse that houses a heavily automated aquaponics setup along with backyard chickens for eggs and eventually meat. I may take on a couple goats for milk but that would follow later. As part of this I also want to setup solar and vertical axis wind along with evacuated tubing for heating to cut down on energy dependence at the same time.
Once you realize how much of your working time is going to just provide food, shelter, and energy, it makes you question if you could manage to provide those basics in another way than money. With the tech we have now and the rising costs of food taking a bigger cut of your paid time I think we very soon could find that the cost/time investment to DIY will become less than the time investment to purchase from someone else.
This is all of course ignoring the upfront capital requirements but the idea is that if I can reduce the portion of my pay going to those things, I could either a) have more money left over for other things, or b) reduce the amount of time I work equal to the reduced expenses and have more time available for other things. Either way, less external dependencies = more degrees of freedom.
There's still one left (I just got one). The pricing model of the Retina MBPs is just craziness to me. To get larger storage sizes you have to jump entire model lines to get it, you can't just upgrade storage on them.
I just tossed my Macbook Pro across the room the other day by accident (didn't check that my backpack was closed...). It did indeed bend the metal a bit, and the display cracked in the corner, but having seen plastic machines make the same tumble I think it would have fared significantly worse if it weren't aluminum. The force that bent the metal would have surely cracked the plastic into pieces and the display would have taken more of the shock and cracked way worse than it did.
I had posted a discussion to Reddit[0] about a year ago that touched on a similar idea. Its a model for AI using a community of simple IA that as a whole becomes the AI. It injects social behaviours into the IA to govern how they interact with the community and to allow bias to develop among groups, and domain proficiencies to develop within individual IA. Because I envision the model being distributed, the proposed implementation includes a blockchain-like ledger of points of confirmed knowledge. I'm really not all that knowledgeable on the subject of AI but given the relevance and knowledge of HN I figured I'd toss it here to see if anyone wants to read a wall of text and give feedback. I have a backlog of books on AI I want to read, so if there's anything you'd like to add to my reading list after skimming through the idea I'd appreciate any suggestions :)
There was an article[1] from a few years ago about Cloudflare's infrastructure and from the sounds of it they can't link customers to data. Data does exists because that's the nature of a cache, but its defined with an undefined timestamp and is purged regularly in order to have enough disk space.
>Unlike most database applications, the cache stored at each CloudFlare facility has an undefined expiration date—and because of the nature of those facilities, it isn't a simple matter to add more storage. To keep the utilization level of installed storage high, the cache system simply purges older cache data when it needs to store new content.
>The downside of the hash-based cache's simplicity is that it has no built-in logging system to track content. CloudFlare can't tell customers which data centers have copies of which content they've posted. "A customer will ask me, 'Tell me all of the files you have in cache,'" Prince said. "For us, all we know is there are a whole bunch of hashes sitting on a disk somewhere—we don't keep track of which object belongs to what site."
I actually wrote a tumblr post about that a while ago. It also included a user engagement aspect that would allow users to subscribe to topics of interest to receive a curated feed of changes that could each have a dialogue/poll emerge. I hadn't really thought through the specifics but its awesome to know that something like this is already started to some degree. Thanks for that!
Though I do agree that the current generation of developers are incredibly fortunate and most of us wouldn't be able to do the same job 20-30 years ago, the line "there’s no shame in standing on the shoulders of others and building on their work" pretty much sums up the way this should be perceived. Its basic DRY.
Or how about the employment rates and mean income of both drop outs and graduates since "running a company" isn't something that is on everyone's todo list. I'm positive that study has been done.
Longer comment on Reddit[1], but the goal is to make a climate controlled greenhouse that houses a heavily automated aquaponics setup along with backyard chickens for eggs and eventually meat. I may take on a couple goats for milk but that would follow later. As part of this I also want to setup solar and vertical axis wind along with evacuated tubing for heating to cut down on energy dependence at the same time.
Once you realize how much of your working time is going to just provide food, shelter, and energy, it makes you question if you could manage to provide those basics in another way than money. With the tech we have now and the rising costs of food taking a bigger cut of your paid time I think we very soon could find that the cost/time investment to DIY will become less than the time investment to purchase from someone else.
This is all of course ignoring the upfront capital requirements but the idea is that if I can reduce the portion of my pay going to those things, I could either a) have more money left over for other things, or b) reduce the amount of time I work equal to the reduced expenses and have more time available for other things. Either way, less external dependencies = more degrees of freedom.
1 - http://www.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/2yovsq/canada_risks_...