Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
What's an area that people think is up and coming? (e.g. like social networks were in 2004, mobile apps in 2010, or vlogging in 2014)
I've finished several projects simultaneously and I'm looking to work in an area with lots of users, but as yet few producers. Wouldn't even need to involve programming, but probably would need to be online, as I'm pretty introverted!
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 329 ms ] threadThe biggest issue/ liability with most 'AI'/'ML' is unsubstantiated/ irreproducible results that come from not being rigorous with ones experimental design.
Unfortunately I wasn't very fond of the textbooks I used in school and I haven't looked at any since so I can't give you any recommendations.
John did this because on his own work, he was constantly challenging his own assumptions. The result of this was that John 'appeared' to be far less productive; however, the results of his work were orders of magnitude more robust than our other colleagues at that time.
By incorporating a skeptics mindset, less becomes much more. A skeptic doesn't believe the internal error rates produced as a result of a model run, they take a long time to become convinced that a 'thing' is the truth. Don't believe, measure.
Lets take a small toy example from one that came up a few days ago, the model that could predict 'heart-disease' from one heartbeat. Their data set came from two different sources: their 'disease state' and 'null state' patients had their cardiograms recorded via different instruments. They did some statistical re-sampling to get the data to 'match', so, a skeptics flags should already be raised. Second major issue: without resampling, they had an effective N of 30; they made the decision to 'slice' every ones cardio gram into thousands of examples. The RNN (i think it was an RNN), obviously, will need thousands of examples to train. They then randomly sampled (according to their train/validation/test split) from this distribution of 'beats' to train their model.
So they didn't do anything 'wrong' according to what myself, and what I would assume yourself were told when we did this or that course in ML. But actually, from an experimental design POV, this is clearly going to overfit. Even disregarding the resampling of the original data (its own, very suspect issue), the slicing alone is enough to realize 'Ah. This is horse crap'. Think about it like this. Say its a 80:10:10 split. Take a random sample of n heartbeats, 3 heartbeats long, from n=100k heartbeats. What is the probability of a heartbeat in the training data set not being very close (in time proximity) to a heartbeat in the validation/ test set? I don't have the time to work it out on paper, but its most likely that anything in the test/ validation set will be temporally adjacent to something in the training set. The probability of anything in the test/ validation being very different from something in the training dataset (say, 3-4 beat sets away in either direction) is very very unlikely. The vast majority of data in the test/validation dataset will have two direct neighbors, both used in training, the next most populated class will have 1 neighbor in one direction, and the almost none will be separated at great distance (even 2-3 beats isolated from something in the training dataset).
This issue central here is the lack of independence in the experimental design. They've created quasi-independence in their sampling methodology, but at the end of the day, they've still only got an n of 30 (not 300,000-3,000,0000). I get it. For most cases, one almost always has to create a condition of quasi-independence in ones data. To get these algorithms to work, you need lots of data.
Knowledge of what ML is, how it works under the hood (a bit), and how to implement it (more imp. imo), all matter in this space. What matters more (imo), is the mindset that can be developed by doing science as an intellectual exercise. Its good science to remain skeptical and be adherent to the evidence rather than our assumptions.
http://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracinggems/unofficial_R... [33MB PDF]
It sheds light on some ray tracing techniques with the focus on the new RTX API with DirectX12
Real time rendering portal page generally my goto for checking out new stuff in graphics and now they have a Raytracing section https://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracing.html
I am on phone right now, and will try to put more material as soon as I get back to my workstation!
Edit: Courtesy Onion2k
Real-time raytracing is usable in games today. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/quake-ii-rtx-ray-t...
Instead, I think de-noising based on machine-learning will be the crucial factor for real-time raytracing, as Nvidia has been showing.
I think a coming advancement will be in dispatching rays based on ML too. That is, economically deciding where to cast rays, based on feedback from the de-noiser.
Maybe develop some split model, where assets are streamed over the network but gameplay and rendering are local?
Or do most things on the server, but stream a spherical color and depth map, so the client can handle rotating the camera with zero lag, and then you can perform some compensation if the camera translates (similar to how Oculus does motion compensation)?
The closest example right this moment is Microsoft's flight sim that'll download world data from bing maps as you fly around. Simply because they are using synthesized petabytes of map data. Guildwars and other mmo's download world data as you are playing to fill out areas you will visit in the future. It still uses a traditional game client and business model. There's a slew of games that run on nearly every bit of hardware. I don't see the advantage cloud gaming brings.
You could stream every mobile game that's existed as low latency is rarely a requirement for those games. Those games are still downloaded to memory and rendered on the client and use a conventional business model.
Vr is getting a valve style game soon that might well be a killer app for it, but the problem of movement remains.
There's a hell of a lot more to building and scaling voice and video than you think, and tons more parts of the world are going to "come more online" with higher-bandwidth telecommunications access in the coming decades.
* psychedelics as medicine
* gut/microbiome
psychedelics as medicine are finally starting to gain the traction and serious research which they will need to be utilized therapeutically. while imperfect, they're potentially curative therapies which are likely a quantum leap ahead of much of what psychopharmacology has had in its roster so far.
the gut/microbiome stuff is also starting to come to a head after about 9 years of intense research activity. clinical applications are right around the corner, and there's an entire universe to explore which we've only scratched the surface of so far.
i'd also like to add cannabinoid (CBD) therapeutics as an addendum to psychedelic medicines. while there's a tremendous amount of hype and folk science surrounding CBD, it appears as though the chemical does in fact have a massive impact in domains ranging from immunology to psychiatry to geriatrics. we're just at the very start of the research process, and there are already a cornucopia of compelling and empirically valid leads which need to be followed.
You realize what this is, right? High throughput sequencing + multiplexing makes it cheap as chips to start doing -omics on anything you can write a grant for. So everyone and their mother starts getting funding for doing the most boring possible experiments that are total fishing expeditions. The results: we see ... stuff! Isn't that great!? We've got correlations coming out of every conceivable orifice, must be something interesting there, right!?
It's great for writing shitty headlines, but piss-poor for doing any sort of science. Seriously, try talking to any 'microbiome' expert about microbiology. It's scary!
Here's what will happen; we'll get some minor insights into diet wrt health, a handful of treatments for some specific niche gut issues (e.g. fecal transplant), and some handwavy BS about inflammation that will only be meaningful with more work on good old-fashioned signalling from cell/mol. biology.
Of all the scam-y biotech startups (which is basically redundant), microbiome stuff is by far the worst.
I've been seeing a lot of companies in adjacent spaces making headway into the security domain as well—ML assisted intrusion detection and cloud-centric security tooling come to mind.
In a broader sense, I think more governments and regulatory bodies are starting to take cybersecurity much more seriously than they did in the past. GDPR and CCPA are likely the tip of the iceburg in coming year and—regulations aside—I think there is a real and pressing need for better privacy and protection in both consumer and enterprise contexts.
Security has always been a big deal, but in light of all the attacks we're seeing lately, there's likely going to be REGULATIONS involved, that may mean demand for these jobs skyrockets.
AR frameworks are a dime a dozen, but if you're an Apple person look into ARKit + Swift.
Unless the computer is itself capable of anticipating and satisfying your desires — which, I grant, is possible, but, I would argue, incredibly, incredibly dystopian — you will need to consciously articulate your thoughts in such a way that the computer serves your will. That conscious articulation is the bottleneck. Not the keyboard, not the mouse, and certainly not the typing speed.
This is, of course, assuming that the computer remains the servant rather than becoming the master.
ever have someone come up to you and say "Oh your the person who x"
just a thought on your last sentence
On the other hand, that would clearly be a step beyond today's smartphones to, as you suggest, potentially always on video and audio that's constantly communicating with and being analyzed by databases.
By contrast, VR seems to me to be a niche.
Apple also probably just has about as much brand permission as anyone to create a new category of consumer device and shepherd it through the first couple of versions that will doubtless have shortcomings.
There are a lot of challenges to get glasses right--both from a hardware and a usability/acceptability perspective. But people are already used to using their phones for things so it seems a very natural transition.
One should look at AR and VR as a spectrum. Eventually, you'll be able to mix and match with the same headset.
> Instead it's just been fits and starts for the past 26 years since I experienced that demo. Big tech has pumped huge money into VR the last 5 years and the uptake is just not happening.
This is incorrect. The Oculus Quest is super successful measured on any conceivable metric, outperforming (sales and retention-wise) any other headset that came before it.
One key barrier to adoption of VR (or any consumer tech) is convenience. The Quest is the first headset that makes it convenient to use VR, as you don't need a PC, no external trackers, but you still get the same level of immersiveness.
There are other areas that need improvement until it speak to a bigger TAM (such as improved resolution, more software, better performance, better ergonomics) - but those are all problems that have a more or less clear path of solution.
In 10 years, everyone will be working in VR headsets, not laptops.
TL;DR - rip the writeahead log out of databases and materialize not just SQL commands but events yourself, returning control to reality rather than systems.
The idea is that is possible to send "events" that are not necessarily "insert into table" or similar, just pure business stuff. BUT still possible to operate as always!
What I say is that RDBMS are too much of a blackbox. I want a way to use them alike legos (but without gettin INTO their source code!).
Imagine you wanna do a bloom index, but the RDBMS not have it. How you do it normally?
Put a handler/listener/event etc that intercept the calls and route if need:
Super high barriers to entry, governments are spending more and more but people are demanding better more efficient services and won't put up with waiting in line at the DMV forever. In defense, it's hard to see the applications and what to build from an outside view, hard to get contracts and permissions, and hard to compete with established co's like Boeing that have all of the relationships already.
This is a list of the current solicitations available. You can navigate around to the different departments. They have a calendar of announcements and due dates.
If you click on the DoD SBIR[0] it brings up the available topics. Each period has different areas of interest. You create a little proposal and then they announce "Phase 1" awards. They usually have different terms, but I think it's typical to get up to 100k for 4 months. After your demo you can apply for Phase 2 which is more money over a longer term, after that you can move to Phase 3, commercialization, etc.
The problem is that you have to work on it "full time" or at least the principal investigator has to work full time. The other problem is that they give you the topics of interest. There are so many over all of the departments. The biggest are definitely HHS and DoD. There are a lot of ML/AI, IT, sensors, etc.
Unfortunately, the current cycle mostly ends tomorrow for DoD.
[0]https://www.sbir.gov/node/1620805
At the moment most of the focus is around overlaying some virtual world in the real world, but I think that technologies like U1 chip being added to new Apple devices could be really interesting to allow objects in the physical world to better mesh with digital world.
Experimenting with live filters for Instagram could be an easy way to dip your toes into AR: https://sparkar.facebook.com/ar-studio/
* Tourism of any kind (think AR museum or city tours)
* Location and event discovery -- as of late there have been quite a few startups trying to capitalize on giving people things to do, but none successful. This is definitely on Snap's radar with their acquisition of Vurb[1] and Placed[2]
* Interactive public art -- Paris has something like this[3] and I really want to see these types of ARGs spread to other cities
* E-commerce -- superimposing clothing or furniture[4] onto the real world
Also, why are fun and games not valid applications? Epic Games, for example, is worth 4.5bn. Interactive media is finally being recognized by the mainstream, and it's just getting started :)
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/vurb [2] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/placed [3] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flashinvaders/id895180919 [4] https://www.amazon.com/adlp/arview
the construction industry will benefit hugely from AR.
It actually details how it’s used now to verify ships after construction to ensure that everything is in its right place. They do this by overlaying the schematics on top of the actual ship during inspection. I don’t remember the numbers (read the article a while ago) but the savings and accuracy gains by introducing this were significant.
You would probably use the same kind of applications, but you'll be able to have 1000 windows open at the same time, located all around your room, easily accessible (just turn your head).
All those gimmicky 'AR applications' are gimmicks. The real use case is replacing our tiny displays.
AR is literally real life holograms, there's amazing amounts of applications. Everything you do on your smartphone today can be blown up into AR applications.
You'll learn a ton of linear algebra as a side-effect of working with quantum computing, which is the foundation of lots of other fields of computer science, like graphics and AI. I'm confident that the pool of quantum programmers is effectively zero, and I wouldn't be surprised if AI spills over into the field and causes an explosion of demand for quantum programmers. By 2024, it might be a field where you can write your own paycheck.
We have been living in the golden era of software industry, thanks to Moore's law. We were able to afford RISC (= general purpose CPU arch), general purpose operating systems, general purpose languages, general purpose databases etc all because the hardware was going to evolve and get faster anyway.
Now with Moore's law showing signs of death, the future for better computing would be domain driven stack. A quick thought experiment will be that: cloud applications will be written with cloud-friendly languages, using cloud friendly databases, on cloud-ready operating systems and processors that are architected for heavy cloud workloads. Much like how gaming was relying on custom stack for performance (GPUs, play station, X-box, etc)
The advent of TPUs by Google is a symptom of this pattern too. Of course, personal computers with general-purpose-everything will keep existing, but the business industry will start shifting towards domain driven stack slowly and steadily for obvious reasons.
Because if it's the latter, that doesn't sound like a domain driven stack to me.
Only Nintendo bothers with writing custom kernels, and historically Sony with the PS2 having exotic "Cell" processor units.
Carefull, you invest your code base on a "cloud-friendly" language and clouds then could fall out of style. That goes for other components as well.
I'm not sure what that would look like. Mainframe-esque, perhaps?
I see your point, but we are already using specialized algorithms to solve problems on generic hardware (CPU). You can move to different generic hardware (GPU/OpenCL/...) which might be better suited (depending on the problem), or use/rent more generic hardware on demand (cloud computing).
What you're implying is already happening, using/programming "generic" FPGAs to act as specialized accelerators seems to be slowly trending (e.g. Xilinx UltraScale); and if that's working well, "larger" process nodes seem to be getting cheaper these days (e.g. >= 45nm ASICs). But as far as I am aware the tooling and ecosystem for all this is still pretty bad; especially compared to how C/C++ compilers came a long way, JS's ease of accessibility or python's trove of libraries. (Disclaimer: I am not working in that field, so I might be outdated).
So to refine you suggestion: Improving the eco system around hardware synthetization could be a thing?
However, that doesn't seem to be what user richtapestry was thinking of(?).
There's always another train, right up until the point where everybody assumes that there'll always be another train and world domination is assured. At that point, it's time to hop on another track.
we need our dollars to be made by governments, not basement dwellers.
Most governments are very young, and do not last very long historically. Central banking is a handful of decades old, cryptocurrency is one decade old.
Neither the maximalists nor deniers are right at this point. It remains to be seen when/whether cryptocurrency will replace fiat currency.
Also, gold is not inherently valuable. It will become a regular common metal once we shift extraction to the asteroid belt.
The truth is there really isn't much with "inherent" value out there, with the notable exception of potential energy.
An example might be in store retail analytics- a set up with a bunch of cameras that can detect what people are touching or otherwise interested in. It makes little sense to ship the video streams all the way back to a cloud provider, but orgs want the capability all the same.
/s (or maybe not..)
Because the one thing desperately needed in this world is even more surveillance?
One, perhaps naive, hope I have for edge based technologies is to enable scenarios that are actually more private. In my scenario, if the processing of the video stays at the edge and only anonymized or aggregated information is sent up to the cloud/ larger organization, then is much better then if the video is shipped offsite and processed.
It’ll take some interesting legislative efforts to really frame this well, but the Europeans (and the state or Illinois with their facial recognition law?) at least seem to be headed that way.
So you have edge, cloud, and you might also ponder the "fog", where there's an intermediate aggregation layer. Think leaf devices in some building (edge) with some medium smarts done on prem (fog) before clouding it.
This isn't as "up and coming" as all of the other items people are mentioning, but I'd put it on a "always increasing in popularity" trajectory due to an ever-increasing need. It's not really sexy or interesting, but there will always be a HUGE market for the things that I can do =)
I will warn people that "up and coming" tech is often fad-based and has boom and bust cycles, and personally I'd rather be working for a paycheck then waiting to win the lottery in this regard.
I know similar situations have to be all around us. The problem, as you say, is finding out about them.
Any time, a piece of paper is passed around or when people enter data manually you can either automate or improve the process. People are prone to errors.
Right now, I am rewriting a mission critical application, some trivial changes will save hours a week and improve the integrity of the information. It is not as exciting as writing algorithms but it is nice to see an application written by you used by 200+ people.
Off the top of my mind:
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/c/selling-on-amazon/... https://community.ebay.com/t5/Tools-Apps/bd-p/tools-apps-db
> Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good job, but you could make about the same money and be happier running a fast food joint. You're much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession. People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines.
https://learnpythonthehardway.org/python3/advice.html
In my limited experience, it's a mixed bag.
Good: you get special treatment/opportunities because of a unique skill set and increased visibility on the end results of what you do.
Bad: management doesn't really know what you do between software releases, you're paid the going rate for your industry while SWEs make far more, and in-house software quality standards might not be established/followed.
As a tangential bonus, I've accidentally converted my PhD research coworkers to strict git/markdown thanks mostly to typora (windows application). I showed one person what my work flow and version history look like for some internal documentation and now they do the same and convert to word/pdf as a last step. As far as I can tell, no one outside of the math/cs intersection has the patience for latex.
Source: in that boat.
Edit: In regards to market rates, that can be alleviated somewhat in follow up negotiations (6-12 months in or so). It's hard to convince someone what you're worth / what your value proposition is when they're not used to hiring software people. You need to demonstrate your business effect first, since they typically don't have a clear picture of it.
It's already a huge pain dealing with know-nothings inside of tech firms. Now imagine having to cater to know-less-than-nothings somewhere else.
But it's like math, if you know it well enough, you'll find ways to use it everywhere. If you don't, you won't. You have to be the type of person that likes to innovate. Its hard to sell to prospective employers, but its great for demonstrating value once you are with an organization. All of my previous employers fight over trying to get me back when I've found myself looking for work. ...Now I work for myself and make my own work and I've priced myself out of their offers, but that's not so bad.
I would be interested in thoughts from anyone with ML experience who has reviewed said course's materials?
Formally from school, I've only had 3 semesters of scientific programming in Fortran and a shitload of math. That and years and years of building models and massaging data in Excel.
Mostly I'm just really used to learning a new API/tool and applying it to new things.
A lot of the ML stuff hasn't been fancy ML, just basic things but applied in really clever and novel ways.
Granted I don't know anything about that business, a quick google search comes up with an article from 2015 saying running a McDonald's provides an average annual profit of $150k so it sounds about in the right ballpark range: https://www.mymoneyblog.com/mcdonalds-franchise-cost-vs-prof...
My source is from the McDonald’s franchise disclosure documents. The money blog mentioned in sibling comments claim it’s less.
Very possible I skimmed and may have read it incorrectly, accounting is not my thing. As I have now reached the maximum amount of effort I'm willing to put into a forum comment, I'm not going to dig any further. But if you can tease out better information, I'd be curious to know.
Average profit margin 26-28% Average gross sales 2.2 - 2.6M Average operating income before rent/tax: 570k - 716k
"The rent paid to McDonald’s will vary based upon sales and McDonald’s investment in land, site improvements, and building costs."
It looks like that rent paid to McD's home planet is somewhere in the neighborhood of 10% of that investment (yearly? I guess?) but it seems to average about 100k-150k.
1. you _won't_ be happier running a fast food joint - the work is gruelling, and it's so easy to go bust. And you won't bring home six figures
2a. people who _actually_ can code are scarce, even in the tech industry. Source: conducted over 300 interviews
2b. quite logically, your coding skill will be most appreciated and compensated at a Big Tech Co, not at a government department where they will be simply unable to see the difference
As a young person with an interest in software programming (currently studying chemical engineering but still write C code now and then), what do you look for when trying to find out people who can _actually_ code?
examples of simple things: DFS/BFS walks; simple Project Euler problems; or "write a simple game in terminal, maybe with some form of minimax search" (a bit harder), or maybe a parser for simple arithmetic expressions
There are tons of software "engineers" who try to escape fintech for FAANGs or even startups, coming from top tier firms like Goldman and McKinsey.
Likewise, bioinformatics generally pays a lot less than traditional SWE roles.
So what I have seen is the exact opposite in practice: people with minimum coding skills in other fields trying to jump into tech firms.
- more than 10 documents per day on year average, e.g a bank will receive new annual reports only in some calendar months but in massive scale
- average number of pages or lines of text per document, the longer the document the more mistakes will be made by humans, as they don't have the time to read everything in detail
- average pay of the FTE who is able to understand and process the document manually should be higher than the average pay of all employees in the company, to make sure the documents encapsulate business value
It's not a fixed set of KPI but helps us to sort out too narrow use cases.
By we I refer to the team behind my startup Konfuzio:
http://www.konfuzio.com/en/
Small payback : on your English home page under "Operation of the software" > "Information security", there's one too many sentences:
> We set the highest standards both when creating the software and when processing your data. Both when creating the software and when processing your data we set the highest standards.
(First one is better imho).
When I first saw it, I thought: this looks like a glorified Autohotkey or Automator. But companies like UiPath are doing very well selling this type of automation software.
It sounds mundane but for a company with lots of entry level staff, the paybacks are appreciable.
Coupled with cloud based OCR as a service offerings etc. a lot of data entry tasks can be automated.
Yep I've had to employ this software to get things done before. Also OCR doesn't need a cloud vs. a beefy computer - I do a lot of that too.
Can you elaborate on this?
Also, at large orgs, software updates can take _forever_. I know of some examples where updating to the newer version of a B2B software taking 7+ years.
And a lot of those automations will need things like OCR or NLP. Even just out of the box Excel integration is a huge time saver. UiPath has activities built in for that. It's more than just GUI interaction. There's a ton of partner technology with out of the box integrations, and you get frameworks to build your automations on, as well as all of the infrastructure and orchestration.
Disclaimer: I work at UiPath
Lots of times I have to measure certain things before I begin to fix a problem, and the above stated tooling (typically ran in Docker containers) has really really helped with that.
I have dashboards, warnings, circuit breakers, etc etc. that all help me monitor complex processes, and that help me react to ongoing changes (ex: when a 3rd-party website updates their DOM).
These are the things I need at my current role, and I'm woefully overwhelmed. Tying together processes spread out over multiple systems is a large portion of my role.
I'm having trouble tracking all the various scripts running on different versions of my own packages, and reacting to breaking changes on 3rd party sites. I definitely need a dashboard to tie all these automations together.
I'd love to chat if you're up for it.
> ever-increasing need
Not sure I'd bet on that -- the point of RPA is to eliminate the job you just described.
I work in a small, physical goods business in the Midwest (~30 employees), and the amount of time spent doing data entry is incredible.
Documents (often PDFs, sometimes excel) flow between buyers, shippers, freight forwarders and internally. These documents are often updated.
I'm looking into EDI for a solution, but there's so much value to be created from cutting out all this data entry. At least 1-1.5 full time employee's worth at our size.
Facebook and Co. get a bad rap for many things, which I agree with. But I credit these social platforms in speeding up tech adoption rates for the average person, who can now use this knowledge at their job.
However, the cost of training staff and implementation is often out of reach for SMBs, still.
Software solutions require ongoing work: ongoing maintenance costs of a customised solution could easily be higher per year than 1 cheap FTE.
More than the # of hours involved, it's the error-prone nature of the work and the lag between when the data should be entered vs when it's actually entered.
These three factors -- hours saved, errors prevented, time lag avoided -- make me think that it's worth automating.
You're right, however, it's not clear cut it's the right way to go.
That's the industry I'm currently working on... they're generally regressive and have shot themselves in the foot in regards to tech and ease-of-use for a lot of their solutions.
I understand that, like regular application programming, a lot of this kind of automation comes down to requirements-gathering and formal specification of workflow.
But, in theory, could there be some kind of sufficiently-advanced software wizard that does most of your job? Maybe by monitoring entry-level employees' interactions with the software-to-be-automated over some period, and using that as a training input to a workflow guesser?
I'm not imagining that you could be cut out of the loop entirely, mind you, but rather that you'd reduce the human-interaction man-weeks part of your job down to a few hours of pairing with a domain expert to clean up the output of workflow-guesser into a final model.
Nah - I'm going to be cocky for a second so please take this with a grain of salt... Automation is the only job that's safe from automation ;)
That being said, it's prime for development of tools... I've been working on taking a lot of my workflow out of Charles Proxy and moving it onto a more "man-in-the middle" model that can replay certain web traffic... PARTS of what I do, but automating the automating is probably the most difficult problem that I've had to solve (ie: building my own tools).
https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/30/uipath-rpa-series-d/?rende...
I've never really done the job board thing so no idea on that.
We had a whole slew of standard letters that we'd send out, most of the time requests would go to the typing pool (yes, this was a thing) that were basically "Do letter ABC for client XYZ", where letter ABC was a standard thing that always went to the same recipient.
I built a screen in our system that let you tell it to request a letter (only the simple letters, obviously), it would pull the relevant data out of the client file and write the request out as an XML file. On the other side of things, a VB6 program would watch a folder for those XML files to appear and go through OLE Automation (as it was called back then) to make Word fill in the letter, print it, print an envelope, and save the result in the client's folder.
This kind of thing is an absolutely incredible time saver.
Another "domain-specific mail merge" that I built was a tool to pull summary data out of the client financial records and populate specific fields in some off-the-shelf income tax software.
That was a terrible tool to write and maintain. The tax software's import feature didn't actually work correctly. I reached out to the vendor and the response was basically "Works for us", so doing it the right way wasn't an option.
Instead, I used VBA to blindly enter data into the program using SendKeys[0]. Maintaining the program was a case of tabbing through and counting the number of times I had to tab. Enter first name, tab, enter last name, tab three times, enter address line 1, etc. Next year when the forms in the tax software changed I'd have to add/remove tabs in the appropriate places, sometimes input stuff in a different order, etc.
As a program, it was horrible, horrible code. As a useful tool for the business, it was incredible. It saved a ton of time and the staff that used to do this by hand, in addition to doing actual work on the more complex files, were incredibly happy.
Overall, it was completely worth it.
[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/language/referen...
Holy cow why didn't I know about this 6 months ago =|
VBA is something I have had to reluctantly learn. It's a horrid/ancient language. Sorry if someone gets offended at that but to someone who uses a lot of modern development languages/tools it's just very very difficult with near-zero "nice to haves"... you just end up taking this huge lib of code around with you with functions like "inArray" etc.
> As a program, it was horrible, horrible code. As a useful tool for the business, it was incredible.
That's something that's rough for us engineers but can be hedged with great documentation, both inline and and otherwise =)
You have data in a database, you flatten it into a non structured document, send it, and then the other end uses data entry to add it to a database. What should be the realm of EDI/CrystalReports/Blockchain take your pick, instead everyone wants to interchange data in the pretty human readable format, as opposed to just rendering it that way for humans while also communicating the raw structured data.
Any advice about how to even get started doing this kind of work? What tools to study or learn? How to find work?
Don't move around all the dang time. I've lived in two places and have an incredibly strong network in both. I find people who are bouncing around 50-times-over usually lack the deep business relationships that it takes to establish trust to solve "big" problems.
As far as getting started - once you start, just never stop. Solve every dang problem you can get your hands on big or small, and continue to publish code every day.
Tools to study and learn - web web web. Also Microsoft Excel automation is an incredible need for lots of businesses. Puppeteer, and learning how to mimic what a browser can do without using a browser would be the two most useful skills I have personally. If you don't have a VERY solid background in webdev you need to get that going first, so much of what I do is reverse-engineering someone's website so I have to be very versed in the way that sites are built (all the way from ancient ones to the most modern of frameworks).
How to find work is network. Once you have the skills, you need to know people that have potential needs. I've already reached out to two people who found me through this thread and regardless of "making money", I genuinely want to help them, if even to just point them in the right direction (like yourself).
People are (*generally) awesome if you put aside your own ego, and I would be absolutely nowhere if I wasn't a sociable person. I love to learn about the world by making connections with people, and genuinely want to help them with what I can do!
My GitLab is my toolbox in so many ways and I've got a wealth of clean/documented code that I can re-purpose depending on the task at hand.
It's finicky technology that is hard to make sustainable, but a lot of companies are really interested in it because of the amount of work that could be cut out like you said.
This 100 times over. The only way I've been able to make it work is being one heck of a generalist. I've found that training on what I do is near-impossible and I don't even know if I could scale a real company in this beyond myself.
Maintaining & expanding the automation is a heck of a challenge though. Like, once you got the stuff deployed, make sure that it works without headaches, in the face of other software/ OS upgrades. The robots/automation services are essentially a "fleet of microservices" that you have to maintain for a customer whose strength is likely not IT, and who will change the infrastructure from underneath your "microservices". It's a hard problem, but I feel we're well positioned to tackle that, and if we do, the sky is the limit really. (disclaimer: I work for UiPath, though that should be obvious from the message)
Everything you're saying is 100% something I deal with on a day-to-day basis, and ongoing support is a huge struggle to workout with the companies I've implemented software at.
Looking at your product offerings made me chuckle - I definitely have versions of a lot of what you do! My robots are called workers, my orchestrator is called a broker, etc etc ha. Lemme know if you guys are ever looking for a remote automation engineer w/tons of cloud experience ;)
- Never use an RPA tool that doesn't generate plaintext-serialized scripts. You're going to have a bad time if they're binary locked
- Never choose an RPA tool that's been around fewer than 3 years. It's probably just a shim on top of MS automation libs, and can't handle the really gnarly stuff
- Never promise anyone you'll automate 100% of their workload. Never try to automate 100% of their workload. Never hesitate to tell a VP you're not going to automate 100% of their workload. There's value in 50%+, get the easy win and move on. Only come back when you've gotten all the easy wins
- RPA is fundamentally about target selectors (or match rules, or whatever else your tool calls them). Their robustness is the only real feature of an RPA platform, and a smaller toolset is going to result in some fragile, quick-to-break stuff
Ultimately, RPA is about one thing: creating a more tactically malleable layer on top of your existing software. Development and change speed is the biggest advantage.
It shouldn't ever be a core system, but it should be where you prototype functionality.
Taught me a big lesson about realistic messaging and never up-negotiating expectations.
(A) Selenium's UX isn't nearly where it needs to be to upskill an analyst to create their own automations.
(B) Selenium's Windows app compatibility is haphazard.
(C) Selenium doesn't have the kind of corporate support it would take to expand compatibility quickly enough to catch up with its competition.
The RPA space is the Linux desktop problem in a nutshell. Polish and niche compatibility are the final 10%.
Nobody on the open source side has the interest in making a VB6 app work. And nobody on the corporate side really wants to use it for more than what they're currently using it for.
I can't overstate the sheer number of bizarre situations a tool needs to be able to handle to be effective here.
Because being able to automate something 95% of the way to completion is usually a lot less valuable than 100% (note: talking about percentage of happy-path process, not of total incoming workload here).
At this point, I've been doing it for... about 7 years?
It's been an interesting ride.
Email in profile
Tl;dr - different target user & no corporate sponsor seriously incentivized to improve legacy compatibility
Would love to get the Selenium viewpoint though! Have always been curious, and I'm not as well versed in that side of the house.
Maybe - but how would one go about contacting you? (I have my email in my profile, should you wish to contact me).
This is a problem with almost any type of automation. I wouldn't say our software (I am only familiar with UiPath) is finicky. GUIs are finicky, but there are ways to deal with them. That's the stuff a good RPA dev can handle.
I was automating before I started at UiPath, and GUI interaction adds a new layer to automation, of course. But it is still maintainable when you implement them using best practices and CI/CD. I didn't have UiPath at my previous job but it would have made a lot of our automations more reliable and more maintainable. We're also making strides to address these types of problems easier.
I strongly believe that UiPath should a tool in any automation developer's toolbox, as well as GUI testing. UiPath is also pretty easy to use, so business users can automate simpler tasks on their own after going through the academy.
The industry is exploding, and good devs are in high demand. Salaries are high, and you can download Community edition and get certified for free.
Check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3B4Y_aUBWTM
It's a very simple automation. It just gets text from a browser and inserts it into notepad. But it's a 3 minute video that does something. Check out Selenium tutorials and compare how much you would learn from a 3 minute video. You don't have to dive into the HTML, you just click on what you want to click/type into/scrape and it knows what you want.
But it still has all the power a developer would want. You can create custom activities using C# and VB. The product itself is not open source, but it is very extensible and flexible. The workflows it generates are text files, which work well in source control. It has source control integration built in, which a custom diff tool. It enables code sharing and encourages code reuse.
The only downside I would point out is that it only runs on Windows for now, which might be a problem for linux only shops.
Charging for value can sometimes feel exorbitant... i.e. saving a $100+/hr person ~20 hours a month. Sure I can calculate out it on an excel sheet the customer ROI, but still feels crazy.
If you think about it - $35-40k for a 2-3 month dev timeline (which is what I'd say is my average) is worth it if you're cutting the salaries of 5+ people out of the equation, no need to pull out an Excel spreadsheet for the ROI that. All-in-all - you're not crazy, they're the ones who are crazy if they continue to sink money into human robots.
> Charging for value can sometimes feel exorbitant
Just get confident (this is hard advice I know). I'm incredibly confident in the problems I can solve and will put in the hours to get back on a timeline/budget if needed. Businesses aren't buying my "products" per-say, they're buying me.
Usually it's better for the business I'm supporting to document their own workflows before it's handed over to me for a lot of common sense reasons.
First, it was a massive waste of those 2 human's intellect, entering data over and over into a generic form from a proprietary business' website, in order to spam scientists. I started a ruby project to automate out all those processes, just using selenium to enter the data onto the web form for us. Before I could get very far, I got a huge promotion elsewhere and left that under-compensating journal.
It all gave me a depressing vibe though, both the ethics of what we were doing and the waste of time/life that those employees had to endure to do it.
This is usually the reality and it's nothing to be ashamed about.
At work, do what you're paid to do. In your free time, pursue interests (literally, things that are interesting to you).
Those systems are easy to sell with "This system will pay itself back in 2,5 years, taking into account your current labour cost".
Given all the AI/deep learning possibilities, lots can be automated still.
I often am not selling to middle management, I ideally sell at the exec and/or product level. Middle managers are a conflict of interest when it comes to what I do.
Most of my day is literally just getting one step further and one step further into a "process" of some sort, and then handling a metric boatload of edge-cases as they come up. Then the last portion of the contract is the actual integration into a business, and handling the "ninety-ninety" rule that always ends up happening when the rubber meets the road.
I take a complex, convoluted mess and turn it into a coherent "something", usually an API or web experience.
Instead, create software that allows 1 person to do the job of 5. You create massive business value without getting sucked down the hole of edge cases.
A simple probabilistic programming solution can work really well.
It grew out of consulting projects and is almost ready for beta testing if anyone is interested in playing with it and giving me some feedback - my email is in my profile :)
"Some people profess difficulty at finding applications to write. I have never understood this: talk to people. People have problems — lots of problems, more than you could enumerate in a hundred lifetimes. Talk to a carpenter, ask him what about carpentry sucks. Talk to the receptionist at your dentist’s office — ask her what about her job sucks. Talk to a teacher — ask her what she spends time that she thinks adds the least value to her day."
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/03/20/running-a-software-busi...
That's your job. Develop hypotheses about what the underlying problem is and ask them questions to try to falsify them. Develop hypotheses about solutions and build mockups or proofs-of-concept and have them try them out to falsify them.
No one will hand you a business idea on a platter. But problems to solve are the easiest thing to find in the world.
I meant to say 'Just Ask' and 'Problems to solve are easiest to find in the world' are very misleading things for a beginner.
Just asking won't lead you to a solution and identifying solvable problems are incredibly hard.
I don't think "just ask" is misleading at all. The fact that most people will happily complain about their business processes but won't have ideas to solve them doesn't make it "tricky", it makes it an opportunity.
There might be fields of endeavor where identifying solvable problems is incredibly hard, maybe in academia or politics, but business processes? Execution and, if you want to get rich, scaling up are hard. But identifying solvable problems with people's business processes is totally one of the "easiest [things] in the world".
See also: http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html
These things are really a big deal within large organisations.
Hit me up if you ever want to chat! ryan luma.im
What is the job title I should search for more information? Automator?
The Big Four consultancies and Accenture spring to mind. I think the likes of Fidelity and Citi have few roles too.
Note however that you'd be using off the shelf tools to do the automating - you wouldn't be developing the automation tools yourself.
What I’d like to do is fixed price for initial dev and then subscription based contract for support and minor updates, but this seems wholly unpalatable for buyers.
Personally this didn't match what I found online (they said it was not supported i.e. if it breaks tough luck) but what would I know. Money must be spent retrofitting other solutions now.
I joked we should pay a minimum wage high school kid to sit in a room and 'watch' the servers but I guess that's too low tech ;)
Total Microsoft play on that for sure - I've never ran into the same issue though.
You should trace the executable and analyze the function calls. Get a million samples then form a statistical model. The production model replays the function calls given some input. Doesn't need graphical memory anymore and it also has higher resolution inputs (function symbols, addresses) than coordinates on a screen.
Stop optimizing driving routes for food delivery, selling CPG products to poor people...start worrying about humanity! It may not pay amazingly, but at least you're doing something that has the potential to be looked back at as important as fighting Nazi Germany or Polio.
The problem is that it's a tragedy of the commons, so no matter how important it gets, unless governments really start putting money towards it there will continue to be little interest from the private sector.
I'm not saying nothing can be done about our environmental problems, just that it'd be tough to turn it into a career. Unfortunately.
if "governments really start putting money towards it"... that money comes from your paycheck first and foremost.
if you're going to advocate for a market based solution (and you are, if you're talking about putting money somewhere) then consider the hard work of pricing external costs (those costs to the commons, you're so fond of considering), that governments are truly good at.
we don't need governments spending our money. we need governments to help us coordinate prices for the consequences of our desires, which would otherwise not be priced at all (e.g. dumping billions of tons of pollutants, etc... into the shared environment).
Fantastic! I would love to help prevent a global catastrophe.
> if you're going to advocate for a market based solution (and you are, if you're talking about putting money somewhere)
I am not. I'm pointing out that this kind of problem is fundamentally impossible for the market to solve unless enormous, non-profit-seeking organizations (i.e., governments) artificially bridge it into the market via coordinated incentives. That's not the only way to solve it, but it's the only way businesses would have anything to do with a solution.
great, you can start by reading books written by folks that don't agree with you.
> I am not.
actually, you are...
> ... into the market via coordinated incentives.
but, like... it's kinda funny.
You’ve just deprecated Linux & C in the data center :-D
You’d need to reimplement a variety of layers and could leave out of a lot too.
Personally a rudimentary BIOS type system in hardware that can read/write to an OS layer would be the design I’d start with
The OS doesn’t need userland tooling then
But no one cares about the OS that powers everything being an archaic mess. Gotta fetishize where the profit is
Find everything that eats fossil fuels and electrify it. Find everything that requires stable land and predictable weather and put it in a shipping container. Find every infrastructure investment that requires decades to pay off and decentralize it.
Instead of water line pipes, pull water out of the air. Instead of copper and fiber optic cables on telephone poles, use solar and satellites. Instead of refrigerated transportation, grow food in your pocket or your stomach. Instead of roads, take to the air.
We won't fix the climate out of kindness. Warren Buffet invested $$ Billions into wind farms because it makes his wallet feel better. Tim Cook just yesterday gave a speech that Apple said "We don't see climate change as risk, but opportunity", that's straight from the world's first trillion dollar company. [1] Elon Musk announced that SpaceX Starship will be pulling its fuel out of atmospheric carbon dioxide on Earth, and on Mars [2]
We'll need to completely reinvent society. Sustainable transportation, vertical agriculture, solar/wind/nuclear energy, air mining, an all-electric economy.
Topics: Direct Air Capture, making products out of atmospheric carbon dioxide, carbon removal. Check out all the companies in the space here: http://airminers.org
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2019/10/22/tim-cook-talks-sustaina...
[2] https://youtu.be/sOpMrVnjYeY?t=3850
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-siberia-habitable-climate-ch...
We can see this from the low takeup of carbon offsets.
Any car running on that as fuel would immediately become carbon-neutral, and it could be produced anywhere on the planet. Almost overnight you could make the entire automotive industry carbon neutral (burning this gasoline would merely return the carbon into the air that was sequestered when the gas was produced) without needing to replace all the cars on the road.
Who would pay for it? Everyone. Individuals would buy manufactured gasoline to power their cars. Governments all over the world would subsidize its production both for environmental reasons (to meet Paris targets), and for energy security to reduce their dependence on oil imports.
That would be a license to print money and could probably produce a trillionaire.
Relevant quote on YouTube from Starship Update, queued up here: https://youtu.be/sOpMrVnjYeY?t=3850
Cheap fusion or safe cheap thorium reactors would also be great. But an awful lot of smart people have bounced off those problems without success.
Thermodynamics isn't the only thing to consider. There are parts of the world where spot electricity rates routinely go negative, because it's cheaper to pay a consumer to absorb excess electricity than it is to shut off a power plant. A process like this could absorb excess electricity when there's an excess of electricity.
You don't need to talk about fusion or thorium reactors when the cost of solar is low and falling, and we haven't _nearly_ saturated the planets capacity for generating electricity through solar. A combined facility that generated electricity through solar, then either sold electricity or manufactured gasoline (whichever is better in the moment)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel
Basically humanity has reached the point where we need to learn to regulate our global carbon emissions to keep the atmosphere at a steady state. We're just now starting to figure out how to down-regulate our carbon emissions; after that we'll need to figure out how to up-regulate it in a controlled way.
You pay no matter what.
Olivine weathering and ocean cloud seeding both seem like reasonably likely solutions that each cost on the order of 10's of billions. Major doubts that addressing carbon will be a big money maker.
But obviously the carbon economy is huge, so the renewable economy will at least that big.
Solar is starting to beat fossil fuel installations already, below $0.05 USD per kWh.
This was not predicted even by the biggest cheerleaders even 10 years ago: "In 2017, the solar industry achieved SunShot’s original 2020 cost target of $0.06 per kilowatt-hour for utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) solar power three years ahead of schedule, dropping from about $0.28 to $0.06 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)." [1]
Sunshot goal for 2030 is $0.03 per kWh.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/sunshot-2030
"New technology allows heated sand to generate electricity, presenting a viable new option for investors to focus on."
https://oilandenergyinvestor.com/acq/new-energy-from-sand-wh...
https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/project-profile-csp-energy...
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1183706-solar-holdings-final-tec...
Those things aren't going to zero anytime soon.
What other things do you think are never happening that are infact already happening?
But what is wrong about what I stated? It's obviously impossible for solar to approach $0 because of the large material costs inherent in manufacturing solar panels and transporting electricity. This is not contrarianism, it's realism. We probably use more energy per capita than is sustainable, and eventually we will have to change that.
Also solar panels wear out. I could see a case being made for the cost going to zero if you amortize it, but you can only amortize it over about 25 years, after which you have to replace the panels. This sets a floor on the price.
They're slow-moving, inherently massive and heavy, and travel relatively short distances per round-trip. So they don't care much about battery weight, size or limited range, and appreciate the massive torque from low RPMs.
It's kind of an ideal case for a battery-swapping BEV system. Just wait for the battery costs and energy densities to both improve and this will be a no-brainer. They can charge the drained battery on the grid from cheaper/cleaner sources while the other is busy hauling a load.
Of course if the terrain is such that the mine is on the top of a mountain ascended empty but descended full, you don't even need battery swapping, it'll recharge on the descent.
Nobody wants to spend money owning and operating those diesel engines if they don't have to. When the BEV option is available and makes business sense they'll switch immediately. They'll require little maintenance, and you don't need specially trained technicians to swap batteries and order new ones when they need replacing.
1) mines run on a 24/7 schedule. There is not enough down time to charge batteries in a shift and with how completely filthy machines get we need better solutions for battery swapping in mining before that becomes an option, and
2) because (like the mine I am at right now) a non-negligible number of mines are far from grids or clean power sources, a lot of battery power would come from fossil fuels burned near the mine.
There is interest, but most of the actual use seems fairly superficial (public image boosts).
What economics would it take for your mine to have its own solar or nuclear powered microgrid. What about when fossil fuel supplies are unreliable or interrupted.
For near zero? Where?
https://hackaday.com/2019/08/22/electric-dump-truck-produces...
Furnaces have been run off of solar (parabolic mirrors) for quite some time.
I wonder if a process similar to that used for molten salt batteries, using reflected, concentrated sunlight, could be used to melt sand into what is needed for more solar panels, electronics etc, and use the stored energy while it cools off, essentially combining the processes? And of course for other [s]melting processes powered by fossil fuels today?
Hmm, after doing a bit of research: the melting point for saltpeter (used in molten salt storage [0]) is only 550°F, while silicon's is 2,577°F... would a reflecting solar array be able to reach those temperatures? If I'm reading this [1] correctly, you could only practically get to 3,698.33°F (really close to your example of a 1,800°C furnace) if you collected all the sunlight falling onto earth. It's got to be much worse than that though in practice, because to focus all of it onto a single point would require beaming reflections from the perimeter a long distance through air, and also around the curvature of the earth...
So, we need to build this on the moon or in orbit? Oooh, Futurama actually showed us what could go wrong here [2].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy#Molten_sa...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power#Ideal...
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qksm5cRtcU
"Silicon processing: from quartz to crystalline silicon solar cells"
https://www.pyrometallurgy.co.za/Pyro2011/Papers/083-Xakalas...
Not with that attitude
I read that over and over, but it's like comparing apples and oranges.
Countries with significant lake hydroelectricity (not run-of-river) can "store" the solar power (no batteries needed) by reducing flow during the daytime (and increasing flow at nighttime if required).
This is because hydroelectric dams are essentially stores of electricity. No need for pumping or other expensive storage schemes, is your already have one!
Also the PV cells made mainly from China are currently manufactured using coal power plant. But what would be the price of photovoltaics if only renewable energies were used? My guess is it will be much higher.
Also, w.r.t. population, the way I see it our population is growing very quickly whether we like it or not (look at Africa). I think there's a good opportunity for us to support a population much larger than we have right now with improved sustainable energy tech.
(Solar panels are also getting cheaper, and will probably run around $0.02/kWh in the near future if iteration continues, and are probably capable of supporting us up to 20 billion people as well)
Can you give any clue on how?
The trend of solar and wind continuing the inexorable march downward seems much more certain.
· Waste management is easier since our waste will be ~5x less mass per kg fuel (~500x less mass per kWh energy), and also returns to natural radioactivity much faster (one or two centuries). We actually plan to sell most of the fission products as useful materials.
· As of now, our reactors are planned to be mostly stainless steel. Most of the lifetime mass-throughput of current GI-GIII fission plants is concrete and steel, of which we have basically none of the concrete and much less steel because no pressure vessel. So, decommissioning is much easier and probably will be internally profitable.
You're right about the last part, because solar will almost definitely get at least 2x cheaper than it is today, and within not more than a few decades.
My perception is biased (ofc), but in my view it's actually very likely that we will reach or surpass our goal, though, so I personally wouldn't bet on renewables.
I hope you manage it - though I tend to think we'll have a mix of sources rather than making renewables irrelevant. That may be reserve from having heard the "too cheap to meter" slogan a time or two too often. :) Even properly competitive nuclear will make decarbonising far easier, as I'm not at all convinced by grid scale battery, so I hope someone manages...
I think we will probably get fission to like 4/5 of the world energy supply and 95% of electricity within our lifetimes.
Solar panels are a great thing to have on your house if you can afford them and want the security in the case of some kind of grid problem. They're also good if you need energy in the middle of nowhere. We want to put fission reactors in most remote communities, even small ones, but if small enough groups of people are going out into uninhabited places it doesn't make sense, so solar panels are better.
I don't really see any utility in wind energy at all, other than in areas where solar doesn't make sense.
Batteries are a really environmentally bad idea for non-transport/device energy supply, because of density. So I think it's best we avoid intermittent sources for most of the grid power.
I'm more skeptical that we can support such a large population. Right now we make heavy use of fertilizer, which is produced from natural gas and by mining phosphates. Probably we could avoid using natural gas, but this would require using more energy, so I'm not sure how sustainable this is long-term.
Breeders however (whether you go with Th-U or U-Pu fuel) both should be able to take us to at least another 10,000 present-equivalent years on a wholly nuclear powered economy.
You're also right to suspect fertilizer, I feel the same way. I've seen some of the phosphate mines around the world and it's kind of horrifying, so I'm hoping asteroid mining can fix our metal extraction problem.
I heard C-Type asteroids have plenty of phosphorus, but I'm definitely not an expert on asteroid mining. If they do, though, it will likely be enough to sustain us for quadrillions of human-years (humans * years) because the asteroid belt is just so damn massive compared to the Earth's crust.
I think if there is an effort made (which there will probably have to be), it'll be something cheap and dirty, like stratospheric aerosol injection.
In the meanwhile, you have most nations around the world living and making progress peacefully. Nations that can be easily convinced by some form of aid or assistance to get on the bandwagon.
Don't be fooled by the news media. Most peoples of the world just want to live and let live. However, if the leadership of the US continues to be dominated by anti-science racist right-wingers, I am sorry to say, this won't happen. That is probably the biggest threat to any progress, not inter-government cooperation.
don't really know what race has to do with it, but big international banks are a bigger threat since they won't let any nation unplug from the global economy. follow the money.
This might be violent (everybody kills their neighbors, reducing the population and hence greenhouse emissions), or it might be economic (as fossil fuel prices rise, renewables become increasingly price-competitive, such that some people end up making a lot of money electrifying the world). Personally I'm rooting for the economic solution.
An impossibility because so called 'economic growth' (which is no more than global entropy increase) is coming to an end as degraded ecosystems worldwide fall into collapse. Climate change is only the most salient of literally thousands of distributed causes of this, but the overview is: the physical loans taken out on our global systems over the past two centuries are coming to maturity. It's payback time.
But solar panels seem to have a version or Moore’s law - and even a single doubling of efficiency from here would completely revolutionize our energy economy (and dramatically shake up world politics!). Two doublings and we have a green future. Three or more doublings and we suddenly have the biggest energy surplus in human history.
It might be a little slower than the computing revolution - but it also might not be. If this is 1980, and solar is at the Apple II phase, the next 30 years are going to be wild.
Solar cell record efficiency is 46%, that only gives room for 1.12 doublings theoretically, and thermodynamics is nasty in the real world so we probably cannot even get past 1 doubling from here.
Modern rooftop solar modules haven't even doubled efficiency from 40 years ago, but they have improved cost per kilowatt hour by more than 100x.
My personal philosophy about technological progress is based heavily on the idea that material science is the principle barrier to what we can accomplish. That's why humanity's progress is recounted in "ages" named by material.
So, I think solar panels can get maybe 2-10x more economical, whereas other options like new hydrocarbon sources, fission, and fusion can probably all get at least 10x more economical than the maximum possible with solar, purely due to the physical limitations of the technology.
It's easy to see how the manual selection process would work here - plant a bunch of trees, see how much O2 each produces and pick Top N and repeat. Of course, this needs thousands of years to run manually because the improvement with each generation would be minimal.
Is the issue that we don't know what gene(s) control photo-synthesis?
Remember that organisms can't just pull CO2 out of the air for free. Plants do it via photosynthesis, which requires the sun's energy. There is a maximum amount of energy falling on each organism, and I would guess that there is some theoretical limit to the efficiency of photosynthesis that is well below that limit.
Also I don’t know if plants are adapted to the high CO2 atmosphere yet so even if evolution optimized the ability of a plant to photosynthesize, given this happened in relatively low CO2 environments like forests and without man made climate change, it’s possible that human intervention can improve it.
Jurassic Park Effect.
Just because we can doesn't mean we should. CRISPR is pretty unknown and releasing man-made organism we don't know every little thing about could topple the ecosystem incredibly quickly. Not to mention how incredibly divisive it would be to do so.
Re: engineering biosystems, I imagine engineering native plants (if possible) has much fewer ecosystem wide chain effects) than using gene drives to eliminate mosquitoes or whatever.
Re: crispr, I see photos of glow in the dark monkeys and super muscular dogs, so as a layman it seems like cutting a gene and vaguely throwing the desired gene near the cut location seems to work. We don’t have as many ethical implications about rapidly iterating on plants as we do on animals, so it seems like if an experiment doesn’t work, just repeat 1000x until it works would do it. People talk about off-target effects etc. but you won’t really know unless you try I guess.
Maybe we don't actually need genetic engineering - maybe we can just build big algae ponds and feed them iron supplements. Basically build algae heaven, open source it and random groups across the globe can start doing it.
Just like the early socialists of 19th century wished.
Many of his suggestions are outright harmful, like pulling water out of air. Same thinking got us in this mess in the first place, hey just pull out oil of the ground and burn it.
Anyway, that's not much to do with my comment which was merely noting that disaster capitalists trying to make trillions from climate change may meet mass resistance.
As for my alleged blood lust - well I doubt the discontent will result in many billionaires being torn limb from limb. Though as many seem to think paying their fair share of tax would be pretty much equivalent, why not?
In her words, wealth equality is tied to a “climate justice” movement. Some points:
- If you tax the struggling lower middle and working classes to raise funds for climate action they will get justifiably angry that they’re being stressed when they didn’t really create this mess and have the lowest ability to pay. Eg. Frances ‘Yellow Jackets’ - The antidemocratic forces that are produced by wealth inequality have allowed fossil fuel industries to maintain the status quo despite popular support for climate action
I'm specifically referring to the disgraceful way workers are treated at Amazon shipping facilities.
Most blood seems to be spilled by those with money wanting more.
One could argue that the arms business spills more blood than everything else put together ...
You start off with a free lunch fallacy.
Open an led bulb sometime. You’ll find a large heat sink, at least one fiberglass circuit board, 30-100 electronics components with their own printing / cases / production footprints, ROHS-exempt parts have heavy metals like lead and mercury, you’ll find metal stampings and plastic coated wire, there will be plastic lenses and injection molded mounts, there will be LEDs themselves of course which have tens of thousands of hours time into their design that come from specialized facilities... all the production and shipping and testing and development that goes into each bulb.
... remember old light bulbs? Glass, a wire, a metal thread.
Remember the argument that LED bulbs will last 10 years? They don’t. Tell me... which one do you think will be better in a landfill?
I still think it’s the right move to go with LED bulbs overall - but I’ve been around the world, I’d like to think I have a sense of scale.
When I see people write “just make it electric” i think of things like but not limited to my bulb example and I’m confident that person doesn’t understand much on making things at scale.
> Elon Musk
There you go...
Never attribute to a changing world that which can be attributed to inflation.
I thought this story was put to bed a long time ago? [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVsqIjAeeXw
"A new device that sits inside a shipping container can use clean energy to almost instantly bring clean drinking water anywhere–the rooftop of an apartment building in Nairobi, a disaster zone after a hurricane in Manila, a rural village in Zimbabwe–by pulling water from the air."
https://www.fastcompany.com/90253718/a-device-that-can-pull-...
There have always been 'meta causes' of various kinds, and they didn't create billionaires.
If there were something very specific about the sector that created such conditions one might be inclined to agree, but I'm doubtful.
'Climate Change' is like 'AI' in that it will affect everyone, everywhere, in every industry, but there might very well be very few 'AI companies' that are huge, in much the same way there may be very few 'climate change' specific companies.
Consider that the 'climate change' movement is well afoot and has been for quite a long time ... and where are the billionaires?
Oil rights can be acquired at some scale, solar and wind, not really.
If someone advanced some nuclear tech, lobbied to get approval to build a lot of cookie-cutter plants built around America, had major subsidies, huge protective moats (i.e. $10B entry point to get in the game) tons of IP and know-how - like the 'Space X' of Nuclear - then maybe we could see a billionaire there.
But I don't see any companies or entities on the horizon, or on the theoretical horizon that would validate this claim. I think people might think it's true because the 'want to believe it's true' but that doesn't make it true or even more likely.
That said ... it's probably a 'promising area' to work in.