It is important for some company to make home buying better. Even outside of the pain of unaffordability, it is an utterly broken process. Advent of LLMs do give hope that this process can be imporoved signifiantly.
Fun fact: I met Raymond and Raffi a long time ago and discouraged from going into this area. But now, I am glad they did. Their conviction is inspiring.
If Turbo tax can make it possible for a person to file taxes, I am pretty sure a home can be bought online.
Best of luck to modern realty! .. and we should hang again sometime :)
> If Turbo tax can make it possible for a person to file taxes
Which is a 40 year old piece of software.
And during these decades we've had with NLP and basic rule engines the ability to answer questions about the buying process. So not sure what innovations LLMs are bringing to the table here.
I have been working on a AI "tutor" for kids (6-10) based on the constraints of - no websites, no apps, no ipad/iphone. But after this demo, I need to rethink my entire approach! Maybe these ideas I am holding on to, are just not relevant.
Just a heads up you have to scroll past two "order now" buttons linking to stripe before reaching the one with the message it's for early adopters only.
I made a device that lets my kids engage with chatGPT without eye strain [1] and parental controls. No need to give them my phone or laptop, no more worrying about them wandering onto the internet [2]. IMO it is incredibly useful to have kids interact safely with AI.
This is incredibly useful! Is it possible to make this into a simple (single page) shopping list? Where I type my shopping list, product recommends substitutes with lower sugar — and gives me distribution (histogram) of main ingredients for my shopping list.
This is definitely possible. I’m not sure if we’re going to have time for this as we’re occupied by work on Scraping Fish but we shared the code for scraping nutrition facts data from Walmart on github: https://github.com/pawelkobojek/scrapingfish-blog-projects/t.... Feel free to take it and build such app/website on top of it.
ICs are looking at problems through a magnifying glass, colored by the nature of their specialization. Managers are supposed to be looking at the state of their team/company i more broadly, making sure that ICs are motivated to do good work, and direct their effort towards the most high-impact things, which is hard to do if you don’t have full context or an overly specialized mindset.
Once a business gets large enough then it’s impossible for any one person to fully understand everything across the entire business and to have the mindset to make the best decisions. Focusing on the wrong things can waste up to 100% of the effort the IC expends, even if that IC thinks they’re being efficient. Make effective decisions is valuable.
Good corporate management can make a company many orders of magnitude more effective. Bad corporate management can do the opposite.
You work on a payments team for a online retailer. You want to fix the tech debt because spending 6 months would let you roll out a new payment system that would reduce manual processing by 50%.
The CEO looks at the business challenges and realizes that warehouse bottlenecks are limiting volume and sales. If you fix the payments, it fucks up inventory tracking, meaning they can’t increase volume and that’ll put next year’s growth at risk.
So your manager says “no, just keep doing the manual processing, I can hire more people if needed” and you think he’s an idiot because it’s so obvious a better payment system would “fix everything”
Hope you are well my friend. I smiled at this project and then saw it was made by you — it’s such a beautiful project that only you could have made :).
Tarantino mentioned Godard as an influence at the beginning of the Reservoir Dogs script (Here he is talking about it: https://youtu.be/F4DkfxEv7ZU). He says that the seminal moment when he recognized his key aesthetic as a director, was when he read Pauline Kael's review of a Godard film (A band apart), where Kael says in her review: "It was as if a bunch of movie mad young frenchmen had taken up a banal American crime novel and translated the poetry that they had read between the lines". Tarantino says that when he read that he knew that this was his aesthetic -- this is what he wanted to do as a director.
Tarantino called his production company "A Band Apart" (in my opinion) for that reason.
It's funny, because after I watched _Breathless_ for the first time I was struck by how modern it seemed - and how little directors like Tarantino have added in the intervening years; normally when going back to the early works of pioneers, one can see why they were important and meaningful, but they age in light of all that's been built on them.
Imagine if one were to launch a swarm of cubesats with cameras on them looking away from Earth —- what would you imagine those cameras would see? (Let’s say cameras allow very long exposure shots?) Another way to ask my question is: can cubesat be used as “mini-Hubbles” to get closeups of planets/moon in the solar system or nearby stars?
Second question (somewhat related to first) — can a cubesat stream video to a server on earth? (Or does one need a ‘big Sat’ to do video streaming?
So we are actually adding imagery to our satellite so I think I can answer these pretty well.
For question 1, I do think you could use it for astrophotography. You could probably capture pictures of the stars if you have stabilization on the CubeSat. However, the photos would probably be similar to the photos taken of space from the ISS. What I mean by this is you might be able to take photos of the stars, but it wouldn't be able to see anywhere as far out as Hubble. I know a bunch of CubeSats use smartphone quality cameras so you would probably get a decent photo that might make a nice desktop wallpaper, but it wouldn't really compare to a bigger satellite. It would show an overview of the stars, but it wouldn't be significantly different from existing images imo except maybe it being from a different perspective. As far as zooming in, that would actually be kind of hard due to space constraints. CubeSats are small, like really small (10 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm in some cases). So it would be hard to fit any substantial zoom lens system in there. That might make getting ultra close ups hard. Maybe as camera tech improves in the future what you are suggesting would be possible though. Aiming it at a specific planet also might be a bit of a challenge. CubeSats mostly don't have propulsion (although we are adding an ion thruster in ours). They can use reaction wheels to rotate though. However, accurately rotating it towards a tiny planet in the sky could be hard. However, I will say you could go for a really big CubeSat design and fit a good camera system in that. Then if you solve the aiming issue you could get some really cool images that are zoomed in on planets / stars.
For question 2, we actually considered trying this. I had the idea to live stream the satellite on Twitch. We discovered that livestreaming it was hard. If you are sending data from the CubeSat to earth, the data transmission is very slow. That basically rules out livestreaming. Maybe you could transmit it to a big communications sat in orbit which then sends it to Earth. However, I suspect the data transmission speed might still be less than ideal. Plus, using a communications sat network (like Iridium) could be expensive. Let's say though communication tech gets better and you can transmit directly to Earth at a fast speed. There is still are two major issues. Regulations and getting ground stations. Every single ground station (basically an antenna on Earth that gets data from space) requires you list it on your FCC application. If it involves ground stations in other countries (especially countries the USA isn't friendly with) it can get very messy from a regulations perspective. Also, getting those partnerships to begin with can be messy as well. There are some networks like SatNogs that do allow for receiving data from volunteer ground stations in other countries. Although, I don't know if they would really be practical for livestreaming due to coverage. I know Amazon has some offerings where they let you access their ground station network that might allow for livestreaming one day. However, I haven't really explored too much into it. I also haven't heard of any teams using AWS Ground Station personally though. Honestly, you'd be forced into using Iridium regardless due to coverage being shoddy for ground stations. Overall though, I think the data speeds just aren't there yet to livestream, at least not with LoRa (which is the protocol a lot of teams use for transmission).
Direct communication with ground stations is usually impractical for continuous communication for a couple reasons: they're over subscribed, and there aren't any stations where your satellite spends a lot of time.
Best bet is if starlink, oneweb, etc. provide a service for satellites to relay your data back.
Yeah that is also true. The CubeSats don't spend too much time over each ground station. You can technically get around this by swapping between ground stations and enable semi continuous communication, but it would require a ton of them to work well. Also, it wouldn't work over the ocean. There isn't really a way to partner with enough ground stations to get the needed coverage while over land. I don't think there are any ground station networks out there with enough coverage for this type of thing to be constantly swapping for near constant connectivity over land. We didn't actually need amazing connectivity. We were fine with just livestreaming occasionally, but the other issues I mentioned around data speed prevented it. I think if data speeds were better you could get live video temporarily (like 15 mins).
Also, for the satellite transmission via Starlink, I don't think Starlink / OneWeb offers that yet for CubeSats (might be wrong though). I do know Iridium allows for it though. However, as I mentioned earlier in the prev comment, the data speeds might suck still (could be wrong here too) and it costs a lot of money. I do think some ground stations would have wanted money too. We didn't actually need to livestream as it was just some fun PR trick. We ended up deciding it wasn't worth it in terms of cash / effort.
As far as over subscription, it depends. If you are using a public ground station network then its an issue. If you are partnered with no public ones then it's not as big of an issue. We were thinking of private ones only because public ones would not allow this kind of thing. So over subscription just didn't even matter for us really.
wow! Thank you so much for a detailed response! I learned a lot from your comment.
If I may ask another question: do you think the CubeSat ‘form factor’ (10x10x10 cm-cube) can have enough propulsion (combined with some gravtiy-assist) to be able to get into an orbit around another planet or another moon in our solar system? Meaning, can a CubeSat be sent to .. say Titan, as a probe (say a ‘mini-Cassini’).
(Just curious to understand whether cheap ‘CubeSats’ can be used as tiny probes for the entire solar system)
Oh yeah, forgot but to clarify you might be able to get something better than a smartphone camera with the right sensors and clever space saving in a 1U cubesat. It's just most of the 1Us I have seen don't use anything beyond smartphone level cameras due to their internals (e.g. reaction wheels, computer system, etc) taking up too much space and the fact they don't need something more advanced. Though if you were very clever about laying out the space and removing as many components as possible you could fit a small zoom lens in there and get something better quality. I suspect though there are people who have done this. I just don't think it would be anything super different from existing images taken from the ISS or other things in orbit. If you went for something bigger then maybe you could get something more substantial and get cool images of planets in our solar system close up. A 24 U might be able to pack quite a camera system, but as far as I know the general max size is 12U and anything past that is rare/theoretical. I know though at even a 2U you can get some pretty high quality images of Earth, but I don't know if that would really translate to anything super amazing of space given the distance most planets/stars are. I think those images would still look like they were taken with a high quality smartphone or maybe a dslr camera just due to the fact they are far out (even though technically 2Us pack way better camera systems than most smart phones).
As a whole though these camera system are mostly used for Earth as it's an easier target. Space images are more like astrophotography grade and not Hubble grade.
If you want an example of a good cubesat camera here are some. https://dragonflyaerospace.com/products/ I should note though that these would not generally fit inside a 1U given their smallest one takes up 1U worth of space.
There are CubeSats with various propulsion systems like ion thrusters and pulsed plasma thrusters in development. It's relatively new though iirc. These thrusters can last for an insanely long time. So maybe in theory it could reach a planet one day, but it would take ages. So in practice probably not practical and it just makes more sense to launch one from a rocket that is going to that planet.
I love hearing the stories from other comedians about Norm deliberately bombing, then saving, then ending with bombing a show, or variations on that, as a way of showing off to his fellow comedians. Or using uhms and ahs and verbal ticks, breaking up the flow of speaking, making things awkward, then tweaking a bit of a story and bringing it home with a punchline.
One of the strangest and most wonderful things to arise from the explosion of podcasts is the discussion among professionals of respected people in different fields. We all see George Carlin and Dave Chapelle and the major headliners, but that level of fame doesn't always accompany a high level of excellence.
I would never have known to pay attention to Norm as more than another good comedian without hearing his contemporaries and colleagues discuss his mastery and craft. I love that we're given a peek behind the curtains, that comics can point at Norm's genius and say "Look! Pay attention! This is special and beautiful and precious!"
Fun fact: I met Raymond and Raffi a long time ago and discouraged from going into this area. But now, I am glad they did. Their conviction is inspiring.
If Turbo tax can make it possible for a person to file taxes, I am pretty sure a home can be bought online.
Best of luck to modern realty! .. and we should hang again sometime :)