There is indeed absolutely no reason to do this - and I'm personally anti-lawn (I prefer a nice naturally overgrown green space outside my home). But even I can get on the "this is awesome" train.
I'd put the voyager probes as more lonely. Not to mention any number of defunct spacecraft that are still operating out there. They don't have off switches. Somewhere out there is a space probe periodically trying to phone home only to discover we are no longer listening.
""The oldest one I've seen is Transit 5B-5. And it launched in 1965," he says, referring to a nuclear-powered U.S. Navy navigation satellite that still circles the Earth in a polar orbit, long forgotten by all but a few amateurs interested in hearing it "sing" as it passes overhead."
This reminds me of the article "What football will look like in 17776?" a short story about football from the perspective of space probes. https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football
Fortunately this is opt-in. Imagine being that guy managing a fleet of these things mowing a giant golf course and three times a day just stop for no reason and start singing.
Sounds fun and all, but mark my words - after a year or two we will see some bug reports about lawn mowers randomly singing "Happy Birthday", and no one will know why.
I'm not that commenter but I'm also prone to tangential dot connecting in situations like this. The only explicit connection in that comment to this post is the word lawnmower, yes. The implicit assumed connection is that we all know what Oracle is, and who Larry Ellison is, and the behavior of those two parties, and that further we may be amused by an anecdote about them containing the word lawnmower that the commenter remembered.
My understanding is that this type of tangential comment is in general tolerated, or even celebrated on HN in the spirit of being open to intellectual spontaneity, especially when the article is "light" in content and there's not much folks want to discuss about it. This is kind of a fluff-y marketing piece by Husqvarna so, might as well share general lawnmower related content of amusement.
OK. My own personal take is, it confused me-- did I click on the wrong article? Does Ellison have some connection to this vendor? Then, I find out it's just a joke bringing up a topic that annoys me (and evidently annoys the person posting) in what would otherwise be an innocuous fluff piece.
I like tangents, but this is an awful tenuous excuse to inject an 11 year old rant about Ellison into the discussion.
My point was to compare how far in only 11 years lawnmowers have progressed towards being more anthropomorphic and human like, flexibly upgrading their abilities and learning new behaviors and skills, joyfully singing together in support of their relatives who've inspired humanity by exploring distant planets, while in that same amount of time Larry Ellison hasn't become any more human, or even remotely anthropomorphizable, or grown spiritually, or improved itself in any way, or sung a song of celebration of anyone else's life but its own, or contributed to humanity by one iota, and is still exactly like an old soulless antique gas powered lawnmower that it was so aptly compared to 11 years ago.
If it annoys you so much for me to remind everyone not to fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison, just because actual lawnmowers have evolved so much, then you've already fallen into that trap yourself and need to be reminded more frequently than every 11 years not to waste your empathy on a lawnmower that has none.
Speaking of "results that fall short", its own "Ellison Foundation" bullshit charity web site doesn't even have a valid https certificate. Why can't a lawnmower care enough to simply hire some real humans to maintain its own self aggrandizing pseudo-charity web site, at least as well as its minions maintain all those other web sites that actually make it money?
>www.ellisonfoundation.org Issued by R3. Expired: Tuesday, May 31, 2022 at 02:16:03 Central European Summer Time. www.ellisonfoundation.org certificate has expired
>Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest people, asks for a second chance at charity
>$60 billion hangs in the balance.
>“Good motives are rarely enough,” Ellison writes on the website of his charitable foundation, which he relaunched a year ago next month. “Good philanthropy needs the ambition to make sustainable change and to not be satisfied with results that fall short.”
>The founder of Oracle says he wants to be judged on his results at the Larry Ellison Foundation. But he must also reckon with the fact that for all his success in the world of making money, he has not succeeded in the world of giving it away. He has basked in positive publicity for promises to donate millions and then retracted offers with little explanation; sunk hundreds of millions into moonshot projects like life-extension research before suddenly pulling funding; and made public promises about charitable giving that he appears nowhere close to fulfilling. Nothing has quite worked out.
>And so Ellison’s recent decision to reboot what could be a $60 billion charity amounts effectively to a do-over after years of wandering in the philanthropic desert. And it offers him a second chance to make right on a record blemished by erratic cancellations, unusual legal maneuvers, and unmet pledges. A year after its relaunch, however, Ellison’s foundation is doing nothing publicly about the once-in-a-lifetime pandemic that has created a crisis moment for philanthropy. His company, meanwhile, has built a coronavirus database that critics see as junk science.
>Recode’s review of Ellison’s charitable record reveals how the longtime Oracle CEO has used his charity money to pursue everything from backing idiosyncratic pet projects to smoothing over disputes with angry shareholders.
>And the personal leverage Ellison has often gained through his philanthropy challenges the broader theory that exempting the : -wealthy’s donations from taxes actually helps solve the world’s problems. There is new pressure across th...
36 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 85.7 ms ] threadNow I want to look at a new robomower!
Me too. And then I saw the price (of the higher end Husqvarna at least). Ha! Nevermind.
https://www.npr.org/2020/04/24/843493304/long-lost-u-s-milit...
""The oldest one I've seen is Transit 5B-5. And it launched in 1965," he says, referring to a nuclear-powered U.S. Navy navigation satellite that still circles the Earth in a polar orbit, long forgotten by all but a few amateurs interested in hearing it "sing" as it passes overhead."
No. This was and will always be Marvin the Paranoid Android getting stuck on Sqornshellous Zeta for 1.5 million years.
Is it just because there's "lawnmower" in some past offtopic comment quoting a video that you felt the need to try and derail conversation here?
That's 10 minutes I'm not going to get back.
My understanding is that this type of tangential comment is in general tolerated, or even celebrated on HN in the spirit of being open to intellectual spontaneity, especially when the article is "light" in content and there's not much folks want to discuss about it. This is kind of a fluff-y marketing piece by Husqvarna so, might as well share general lawnmower related content of amusement.
I like tangents, but this is an awful tenuous excuse to inject an 11 year old rant about Ellison into the discussion.
If it annoys you so much for me to remind everyone not to fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison, just because actual lawnmowers have evolved so much, then you've already fallen into that trap yourself and need to be reminded more frequently than every 11 years not to waste your empathy on a lawnmower that has none.
Speaking of "results that fall short", its own "Ellison Foundation" bullshit charity web site doesn't even have a valid https certificate. Why can't a lawnmower care enough to simply hire some real humans to maintain its own self aggrandizing pseudo-charity web site, at least as well as its minions maintain all those other web sites that actually make it money?
https://www.ellisonfoundation.org/
>www.ellisonfoundation.org Issued by R3. Expired: Tuesday, May 31, 2022 at 02:16:03 Central European Summer Time. www.ellisonfoundation.org certificate has expired
https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/8/24/21369773/larry-ellison-...
>Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest people, asks for a second chance at charity
>$60 billion hangs in the balance.
>“Good motives are rarely enough,” Ellison writes on the website of his charitable foundation, which he relaunched a year ago next month. “Good philanthropy needs the ambition to make sustainable change and to not be satisfied with results that fall short.”
>The founder of Oracle says he wants to be judged on his results at the Larry Ellison Foundation. But he must also reckon with the fact that for all his success in the world of making money, he has not succeeded in the world of giving it away. He has basked in positive publicity for promises to donate millions and then retracted offers with little explanation; sunk hundreds of millions into moonshot projects like life-extension research before suddenly pulling funding; and made public promises about charitable giving that he appears nowhere close to fulfilling. Nothing has quite worked out.
>And so Ellison’s recent decision to reboot what could be a $60 billion charity amounts effectively to a do-over after years of wandering in the philanthropic desert. And it offers him a second chance to make right on a record blemished by erratic cancellations, unusual legal maneuvers, and unmet pledges. A year after its relaunch, however, Ellison’s foundation is doing nothing publicly about the once-in-a-lifetime pandemic that has created a crisis moment for philanthropy. His company, meanwhile, has built a coronavirus database that critics see as junk science.
>Recode’s review of Ellison’s charitable record reveals how the longtime Oracle CEO has used his charity money to pursue everything from backing idiosyncratic pet projects to smoothing over disputes with angry shareholders.
>And the personal leverage Ellison has often gained through his philanthropy challenges the broader theory that exempting the : -wealthy’s donations from taxes actually helps solve the world’s problems. There is new pressure across th...
On the other hand, I feel I would be insulting Curio-chan.
(E.g. here's the Star Wars theme[1] played by the Floppotron, from the inventor's YouTube channel[2]).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppotron
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KS02q0BUnY
[2] https://www.youtube.com/user/sh4dowww90/videos