uuilly

Difference is you can't "hold in" a pre-term birth b/c you're afraid of covid.

The total deal with Uber was worth about 20M upfront. The rest was milestone driven. Milestones didn’t happen bc Anthony got fired and there was a fatality that shut the program down.

Lidar is solidly worse than the human eye in dust, rain etc. Waymo has struggled w/ dust devils in AZ. Cruise has struggled w/ steam vents in SF. I work at a John Deere subsidiary and we are quite interested in dust performance for field work. From our tests Lidar is low on the list for seeing through small particles.

Lots of things could fix this, less beam divergence, custom signals processing on multiple returns. But out of the box, it’s this statement does not hold true.

Hey! We’re moving it to row crops to save herbicide. I miss Salinas but stoked with what we’re doing in the Midwest.

http://www.bluerivertechnology.com/

Now owned by John Deere. Goal is 10x reduction in chemicals while doubling yields. We’re deep in ml & robotics and our creations scale across the deere fleet touching most of the arable land in the world.

There are a lot of variables and these events don't happen that often so rules are hard to come by. That said being, I've been through three acquisitions and it really depends. How valuable are you personally to their strategy? If you're not, you're likely not going to enjoy it. IE: if you're in accounting and it was an engineering talent acquisition, then it's probably not good. If you are valuable to their strategy, then expect things for you personally to stay the same or improve. The big thing that happens is the company will likely become unbundled and they'll take the parts they like.

My latest has substantially improved the company. We're still very independent, employees made great money and now we have a strategic rudder and a patient investor that we didn't have before. In this case, our tech is very critical to their long term strategy.

I haven’t read your link bc your title is incredibly presumptuous. You don’t know who I am or what problem I’m solving.

I used to work for Anthony at 510 systems. He tried to hire me for Otto as well. Watching this whole thing unfold from, obscure story in 2011 to the Waymo Vs. Uber trial to federal charges and national news is rather surreal. Anthony is one of the most creative, energetic thinkers I've ever encountered. If he stopped taking shortcuts he'd probably be the next Jobs or Musk.

John Deere / Blue River Technology | CV/ML - Software (robotics / embedded) - Full Stack | Full Time | Sunnyvale, CA & San Francisco, CA | ONSITE

For the last 100 years John Deere has been giving farming equipment power in the form of diesel engines. The next 100 years will be about giving machines eyes. If machines have eyes, they can do better work. If they can do better work people get higher yields.

Email me at: willy dot p at bluerivert dot com

You know how in war movies when the guy leaves the trench only to come back and find that all his friends have been killed?

In the valley you leave the trench and come back to find that all your friends are rich.

No words can alleviate that regret. But if you’re having near misses like this you’re actually really close to something good.

Blue River Technology (recently acquired by John Deere) | SW & CV/ML | San Francisco & Sunnyvale | Onsite

Come make smart things in big machines: http://careers.bluerivertechnology.com

https://agfundernews.com/blue-river-clear-leader-john-deeres...

Many stories. Will blog soon :)

Yup. A few days ago we (60 people) got bought by John Deere for $305M b/c our machine reduced herbicides by 90% using CV/ML. Our only moving part was a solenoid. Would not have survived if it had been more complicated. You clearly get it.

Blue River Technology | Sunnyvale, CA or SF, CA | Onsite | Full Time

Agricultural Robotics. Hiring all types of SW Engineers at all levels especially those with the willingness and aptitude to delve into machine learning. We made a machine that reduces herbicide usage by 95% and dramatically lessens the necessity for GMO's.

Write SW for machines that are 50 feet wide and learn to drive a huge tractor while you're doing it. You'll save farmers a lot of money and keep the rivers blue while you're doing it.

These listings are suggestive but Python and / or C++ preferred: http://careers.bluerivertechnology.com

Cheers, Willy

Thank you. I work in Ag and it seems crazy that someone should be able to buy a machine like those Deere sells and be able to modify the controls SW. Can United Airlines update the controls SW on Boeing 747? I'm not sure how tractors are any different.

From the article: "It presents a large corpus of 1,627 articles that were manually fact-checked by professional journalists from BuzzFeed."

At first I thought this was an onion article. It turns out they're serious.

Relative to HN I'm probably an expert in ag. Relative to people who grow things I'm far from an expert. I was employee 3 at Blue River Technology and I've been there for four years: http://www.bluerivert.com

The way the Valley generally thinks of ag is completely broken and I highly recommend avoiding Valley people if you want to learn about it. "Fully automated" is a thing people who've never farmed before assume is possible and assume people who farm want.

There is a lot of value on the table in ag tech. Depending on what your objectives are, I recommend having as many face to face / dirty boots meetings w/ growers as you can. Understand the realities and nuance of their day to day and find a place where you can make their lives better. Ignore the sensational articles. Most "ag-tech" companies are comically detached from the realities of their intended customers.

If your goal is to grow things then follow the above advice w/ 10x the emphasis. Happy to help further. Contact in profile.

Yeah, after being a "dozen rides a week" Uber user for the last year, I switched to Lyft. There is just no reason for this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Blue River Technology | Sunnyvale, CA | Onsite | Full time | Full Stack Developer / Robotics Engineer / Computer Vision / Deep Learning

http://careers.bluerivert.com

We are building machines that will reduce chemical usage in agriculture by an order of magnitude. Join us.

The main reason to avoid any sort of mechanical kill is time. Even if you could deploy and retract a puncher in 100 ms, you'd travel 10 inches during that time. The slowest operation in row crops is about 6mph. Same principle applies to microwaves & lasers. All require time over the target. Chemicals are nice b/c they do their work after your machine leaves and its easy to get a solenoid that opens and closes in 5ms.

There are other issues w/ exploding seed head making the problem worse and w/ making reliable complex moving parts in the horrible ag environment.

Happy to chat. Contact in profile.

GMO + broadcast applied herbicides is a long term loser. For years cotton growers in the South Eastern US applied Round Up from planes. The chemical would dissipate on its way down and apply half doses to weeds. Some of these weeds could metabolize the Round Up while others would die. But the next year all that was left were the weeds that had some resistance. They bred w/ e/o and on it went. The annual selective pressure has created some pretty impressive weeds, most notably Palmer Amaranth. Growers I've talked to say, "Round up just pisses it off." It can grow over an inch a day, it has over a million seeds in its bud and once it has grown past 4 inches, no selective chemical can kill it. You can kill 98% of it one year and its population will be bigger the next year. Once you get an Amaranth population, you more or less can't get rid of it. It's a one way ratchet. As such, Palmer Amaranth is spreading.

The Dicamba story is quite interesting. Monsanto is selling Dicamba resistant seeds even though the chemical is not approved for use on those crops. As Dicamba is approved for other uses, growers can buy the Dicamba ready seeds and illegally apply it. Dicamba is finicky. In many weather conditions it volatilizes and drifts to a neighboring farm. If the neighbor doesn't have Dicamba ready seeds, he could lose his crop and have very little legal recourse. Today two growers got in a dispute about Dicamba drift and one shot and killed the other. The drift problem is forcing growers that don't use Dicamba to buy Dicamba resistant seeds as a defense mechanism. It's pretty nuts. I feel like the herbicide resistant weed problem is like a "Global Warming that nobody knows about."

More interesting is the fact that it takes decades to produce a gene / chemical pairing and get it approved for use. The weeds evolve faster than the GMO / chemical companies' ability to deliver new products.

The startup I work for, Blue River Technology, is going after this problem. We make machines that detect the crop, detect the weeds and apply non-selective chemicals to just the weeds. Because we target selectively we can use non-systemic, contact herbicides will kill resistant weeds no matter what. The grower saves on chemicals, put orders of magnitude less poison in the ground and gets better weed control.

The problems w/ this article are numerous. The guy clearly spent more time looking at UN stats than he did walking the fields and talking w/ growers. Somehow he missed the rather obvious fact that GMO + roundup is more cost effective regardless of yield. Regardless, he brought up some interesting points and I'd rather be talking about it than not.

-- Disclaimer -- The company I work for is partially funded by both Monsanto and Syngenta. Not that anything I said is defending the status quo :)

You're spot on. You could use human labor to control weeds very effectively. It would just be extremely expensive.

My biggest problem w/ modern DSLR and mirrorless cameras is that critical controls are buried in menus or they are assigned to dials whose behavior changes. Photography is very much a flow / muscle memory thing for me. I just can't get in the flow when I'm questioning whether this dial is assigned to ISO or exposure compensation or was it shutter speed? Worse, I'll probably pick it up and shoot something quickly not realizing that the settings are totally wrong. With the Fuji I can tell what state it's in without turning it on.

Fuji took a UX worked for decades on film cameras and applied it to digital cameras. The result is that I'm having a lot more fun taking pictures.

Edit-- just got an XT2 w the 90mm F2.

I worked w/ Ben through our google acquisition. This is all accurate. He's a fun, talented guy. Funnily enough he was only the 4th or 5th strangest bird of the 50 or so employees at 510 systems. Good times...

Thanks! I'll try it.

I've been using chrony to sync 18 CPUs in a realtime application. I've found it to be a mixed bag. Once it gets syncing, it's really good. I've got it set up so I'm accurate to w/in a few microseconds on my LAN. But getting the initial sync fast is extremely unintuitive, impossible, poorly documented or some combo of all three. I don't think it was designed with the thought that the machines would get rebooted every night -- which is our case. I had to write some upstart scripts to perform the initial sync and then let chrony take over from there...

Another option that has been around for a number of years is: http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtconcurrent-index.html

One's fear of robots taking over the world is usually inversely proportional to the number of times they've debugged a brownout.

I really enjoyed the analog world analogies like the work order.