Those single crystal turbine blades and all the associated trickery are truly amazing.

"She had come to view the morning news as a toxic way to start the day, one that disposed viewers toward fear and distrust."

"Don’t start your day with the news,” Folsom said. “Because while you think it’s helping you be a better person, it’s actually killing you.”

"Folsom said her moment of epiphany occurred around 2021, when three things happened. A person close to her had a mental breakdown; she began reading writers on spirituality, like Alan Watts; and she stopped personally consuming the news in the morning, other than what she had to read for work. Starting her day without the news, she said, “f—ing changed my life.” She said moved through her days with a different, more positive outlook."

"At what point do we begin to grow tomatoes specifically for their harvestability"

This has been happening for hundreds of years already with every food crop.

Presumably they mean robot harvest-ability as opposed to human harvest-ability.

They're the same thing, in practice.

Edited to add the in practice part.

They are very clearly not. Humans are good at some things, like recognizing fruit in clusters. Robots are good at different things. Shifting from easy for a human to harvest to easy for a robot to harvest is both in theory and practice a radical change.

But the same things benefit both. And often "human" harvesting just means humans driving farm equipment, which are now basically totally automated.

Things like growing crops in rows. Things like grape vines being trained into rows. Things like nut trees bred so they shed their nuts when shaken by a mechanical shaker.

These things are the same, it's just how automated we go.

I've spent over a decade in the agtech/robotics space here in Norcal and everyone seems to have an opinion, until you actually go out to where our food is grown and find out it's already highly automated, robotic, etc. It's just not sexy in the VC tech way we need it to be to be cool to talk about.

Go to a modern farm, see how intertwined tech, farming, biology, all is. It didn't get this way overnight.

Put another way. What improvements to plants to benefit human harvestability can you think of wouldn't also improve robotic harvestability?

I spent many hours playing this, C&C, Red Alert, over null modem cables and kali with my friends growing up. One of the most satisfying things is to hit the unit limit!

Kali was awesome!

I had a lot of fun using Cases Ladder to find matches.

I know the game was horribly unbalanced against humans once bloodlust showed up, but I still quit after they "patched" bloodlust years later in Battle.net. Felt sacrilege, like patching the queen in chess. Yeah, the queen is imba, but that's chess. Beating an orc player as a human was a fun flex.

In America, Europe, etc.

Bummer, growing up we had a Micron computer. There was a time where they made whole computers. Now they don't even make memory.

I had to check, I'm at 8 years, stay awesome HN'ers!

This is my favorite HN comment of the year. Thank you.