Since I don't quite like LinkedIn , here's the direct video link [0] . Works with no authentication on browsers. Tried to do a wget but got a 403 forbidden.
This 'Wing' drone delivery is actually an Alphabet (Google) company, and they have "found success in Australian suburbs, recently hitting 100,000 deliveries milestone." [1]
Anyone from Australia care to tell how much it costs to deliver a (or multiple) cups of coffee using this service?
I am shaking my head. Is this the future we are entering? Drones delivering coffee? Super-annoying sound to further drown any hope of tranquility in the mornings. There are certainly many meaningful uses of drones, but delivering coffee is not one of them.
To be clear, the issue here is noise pollution, right? If the deliveries were silent, we generally wouldn't care how our neighbors were getting their coffee.
I think the distinction is important because that points us in the direction of the type of policy we want to focus on. We shouldn't aim for laws to ban drone delivery. Instead we should have rules to limit the amount of noise you can make in residential areas.
Noise pollution is one issue, but the loss of privacy is another. These must have cameras on board, and I'd prefer Alphabet/Amazon/whoever not be flying cameras over my yard all the time.
This is it right here. The 'no expectation of privacy in public' mantra is increasingly extending into places that I absolutely have an expectation of privacy.
It'd be continued progression of the services that are already on offer[1]. And I don't see aus enacting any legislation to curb this sort off cooperate surveillance without a massive shift in voters general apathy towards their privacy.
Not necessarily. Unless you live somewhere with a thriving wild bird population – like Canberra – you wouldn't understand the impact that these things might have on birds.
I live on the outskirts of the centre of Canberra (which, as a reminder, is the capital of Australia). The trees are teeming with birds this time of year. We have a family of Australian magpies raising their young in the tree directly opposite us. It's magnificent to watch. They'll often come and say hello and we're hoping they'll introduce the young to us one day.
Regular drone traffic would be an enormous disruption. Magpies swoop anything they see to be a threat. I already see how much effort it is to forage and feed 3 young. Spending extra time trying to ward off a drone because someone can't be arsed going for a walk and getting a coffee (or whatever) ... ridiculous.
I haven't seen a drone here but if they start to become a thing I'll join whatever movement is advocating for their banning.
Maybe the issue is people getting off their butts and making some coffee. We're turning into a species that's so fat and lazy that we don't even want to go to the store anymore to get our empty calories.
Maybe on paper silent drone deliveries are a great idea for people who can't get out of their homes but even then what we're doing is removing yet another chance for them to interact directly with another human being.
So I dunno. What actually is a positive use for drone delivery?
No doubt some fat and lazy people appreciate coffee delivery, but I think probably a lot of slim, highly motivated and productive people do as well. (Also, surely, a few serial killers and pedophiles.)
Adequate human interaction (modulo the ongoing pandemic) is indeed important (I think, at least for most people), but a wide swath of people probably have an overabundance of it, and wouldn't benefit from the additional interactions involved with physically going get their own coffee from some human in a coffee-vending establishment.
The positive use for drone delivery is the same for any other delivery service. The pros and cons compared to human delivery, animal delivery, wheeled robot delivery, etc. are debatable.
Personally, it's because I know other people. Having gone through artificial panics and unreasonable demand-based shortages based entirely on fear I know that my fellow human being is often irrational, selfish and short-sighted when left to their own devices. The _only_ solution to resolving those periods of irrationality I experienced were limits placed on their behavior like rationing of gasoline or toilet-paper or water or etc.
Another solution is to not worry about it. Rational people will have enough toilet paper to survive the shortages caused by panic buying of irrational people. You did have enough toilet paper, didn't you? Or were you short-sightedly assuming the shops would always have what you wanted when you wanted it?
If you don't have time to make coffee or go grab one, you're overspecializing and not working for the same humanity as I am. Your work output is never worth _that_ much. Go out, breathe in, take the time to accept time constraints of the physical world.
I can think of a few, but that was my first thought as well, how hard is it to make a nice cup of coffee at home? A semi-decent espresso machine and it'll be better than a tepid drone-delivered one any time, long as you have the coffee grounds/beans.
I'd probably use it for times I've run out of something essential I don't have at home though, if its quick enough. Tobacco after a few beers and not wanting to drive, exotic spices I can't find locally assuming the drone can fly far enough to other places, and also assuming its more environmentally friendly than getting in the car and burning petrol.
All legitimate concerns, but presumably delivery trucks / lorries are guilty of all of those right now? I would be unhappy if drone delivery made things worse, but there's also the possibility it could make them better (I'd rather be hit by a drone than a truck, for example).
Yes, but I'm thinking about what happens if a single UPS truck delivering 500 packages is replaced with 500 individual drone trips. One drone is probably better than one truck, but that's not the right tradeoff to consider.
The laws around noise pollution are surprisingly pathetic here in the UK, I imagine almost all countries are too.
It's perfectly legal to deconstruct scaffolding, with power tools and chucking metal poles in the back of the van at 8am on a Sunday morning for example. Right next to multiple residential block of flats with hundreds of residents.
And the number one issue if you poll residents of almost any large town is usually noise issues.
If you want to see one of the big disconnects between government and the people, it's a big one.
Saying it's already an issue that's under legislated doesn't mean we should allow it to get worse.
That sounds like a failure on the part of whatever authority licensed the scaffolding work.
Picking one from a quick search: Greenwich, for example, says that "Noisy work is prohibited on Sundays and bank holidays", and explicitly mentions "Erecting and dismantling of scaffolding" in its examples of "noisy work".
Presumably other authorities may have different rules, and they may or may not be effectively enforced. But in principle, at least, it's not a free-for-all.
In Germany, they are not that pathetic. You can theoretically be fined upto 50.000€ for mowing on Sundays. The two days before Easter, even dancing is forbidden in many federal states.
Also: how much power do they consume? Probably more than a truck if you amortize over multiple packages, since the poor thing has to fight gravity all the time.
A truck weighs three tonnes; a quadcopter weighs 3 kg. You can't amortize coffee delivery over very many packages because you have to deliver the coffee within a few minutes after it's ready; otherwise it gets cold.
Driving an entire coffee shop around to the house of whoever wants a coffee seems guaranteed to use much more energy than airlifting just the coffee itself.
Yes or just general disorder. If drones are delivering coffee, then we can expect to see 100s of drones in the sky at any time, at least further down the road. Is that progress of the better kind, or would we not at least want to discuss the pros and cons before we are there?
Yeah, I think noise pollution is the most egregious aspect. In my neighbourhood, there is one main thoroughfare that you can drive 50kph/35mph on, and all the remaining roads are intentionally narrow and uncontrolled, so traffic is naturally limited to around ~30kph/20mph. If you move into a place on the main road, you are implicitly accepting the noise that comes with faster moving traffic. Otherwise you have a reasonable expectation of quiet, especially because at 30kph road noise is quite low, so quiet vehicles like EVs/hybrids are almost silent. Drones that make noise everywhere will break those expectations.
Shall we start policing exactly what you're allowed to order through Uber Eats? No sandwiches, but a croissant is OK? What if I get a coffee with my croissant, is that allowed?
Coffee is mostly water and we already have far more efficient ways of delivering water to the home, so yes, it seems incredibly wasteful to me to switch from plumbing to drones.
Care should probably be taken when externalizing the costs. For example, the noise of drones (something new) versus the noise of roads (something that already exists). The people who didn't order the coffee have to listen to the noise. One could argue that this is unfair.
I'm not sure how the externalities work out in this case, but it might be something to keep an eye on.
Mate we have been in lockdown for a month, covid exposure sites are everywhere in my city, and we are in lockdown for another month yet. This is better than venturing out - and it is less carbon emissions than a car.
We haven't all survived, somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 million people have been killed by COVID. Obviously not all of them died from contracting COVID at a restaurant or coffee shop, but I suspect the number of deaths from trips to get coffee is significantly higher than zero (and that's before you take into account other factors like traffic accidents)
We have had several extended lockdowns of more than a month in the UK. I just ordered ground coffee beans and made it at home. Yeah, not as nice as real espresso, but it's not the end of the world.
We have a big espresso culture in Australia, so a lot of people have espresso machines at home anyway. Compared to coffee from the shops every day it's pretty cheap to buy and run a consumer espresso machine at home.
That said, part of the fun of coffee is the cafe experience; covid willing, I still go out to cafes as well. Best not to optimize all of the fun out of life.
there's a reason many municipalities have banned small gasoline engine leaf blowers. I'd be willing to bet the decibel level from a wing drone delivering coffee, two houses away, and a leaf blower might be similar.
Typical gas-powered leaf blowers use a 2-cycle engine. These in general are not efficient, and need oil combined with the gas to lubricate the motor. This oil is of course burned as part of the combustion, which generates a lot more pollutants than an efficient 4-cycle internal combustion engine (such as in your car).
These leaf blowers also don't have much of a muffler system (due to size / weight) and of course no exhaust gas recirculation or catalytic converter to further reduce emissions by-products.
Nit pick, apologies up front. Two stroke motors are actually more efficient than four stroke motors, they just emit a bunch of pollution due to the oil in the gasoline, which is a much dirtier combustion than gasoline.
A two stroke motor is considerably simpler than a four stroke, they often come in at around half the weight for an equivalent power output, and have less moving parts. This is why they are the default engine of choice for hand powered tools - almost no maintenance, very little warmup cycle, high power:weight ratio. The downside is dirty exhaust.
Modern two stroke dirt bikes have actually all started moving to fuel injection to help combat this. No premixed oil/gas, oil is injected at an optimal ratio given the load of the engine. Light cruise / idling, they run at 100:1, at heavy throttle they drop down to 50:1. Much more pleasant than something set to constantly run, via premixing, at 50:1 gas:oil.
There are different types of efficiency. I think you might be referring to power per weight, while the parent comment is talking about emissions per (unit of) power.
To dig further, you can also differentiate between peak and sustained power; MTBF, maintenance (and dollars of maintenance) per hour of operation, volume, overall environmental effect (due to lifespan and manufacturing), etc etc.
I am referring to both thermal efficiency, and power to fuel ratio. Meaning, for any given amount of work needed, a two stroke will produce more work for the same input of fuel as compared to an equivalent quality/design four stroke motor.
Your point is a good one though, but I think the common use case of the word efficiency, when talking about vehicles, if fuel required to produce a given amount of work (miles, horsepower, etc).
For some reason this confused me more than normal (just not the usual context I'm familiar with it in I suppose) - so just to be clear, you mean the same 'gas' that goes in your car right? Not that you can get, I don't know, propane leaf blowers or something?
They are noisy and smelly as hell, there was some going on just outside my window (not that I'd hired) recently, the operators wearing ear protection of course, but I was barely any further away. Do wish they'd use electric - can do it from a battery even these days. (And mitre saws etc. too, quite incredible.)
Yes, many of the gas leaf blowers use regular automotive gasoline, with a 50:1 mixture of oil added to the gasoline.
They do have electric leaf blowers, but those offer minutes of runtime instead of hours. So those might be suitable for a homeowner, but aren't very practical for professional lawn care use.
> They do have electric leaf blowers, but those offer minutes of runtime instead of hours
This confused me for a second, as the electric leaf blowers that came to my mind have 'infinite' runtime. I then realized you're referring to cordless electric leaf blowers.
Ah sure (mix with oil for 2 stroke right?) - it was just the US 'gas' terminology that threw me off. Somewhat used to hearing it for cars, but in this context my first thought was of pressurised cannisters of butane, propane, whatever strapped to the back of someone operating a leaf blower!
Those spoiled yuppies paying a 50%+ markup on coffee just to have it delivered by drone are the ones subsidising the research and engineering efforts that go towards delivering medicine to inacessible spots. If the market isn't there then the investment isn't either.
This feels like one of those feel good bullshit quips that is probably technically sort of true but only partially or some such. But I haven’t had my coffee delivered so I am not all there yet to figure out what the fallacy is.
I think this argument is true and it is easily demonstrated with GPUs. They were able to be financially successful products largely because consumers wanted them to play video games.
Now they are necessary for academic research in deep learning and other fields, which would not have gotten GPUs as advanced as they are without the market boost.
Of course that’s just a theory and it’s never possible to go back and see what would have happened. But it seems reasonable to me.
1. GPUs used to be much less programmable and had fixed-function graphics pipelines.
2. General purpose GPU computing was demonstrated a decade before the 2012 deep learning craze. OpenCL/CUDA was quite mature in 2012 and used by high performance computing.
3. Transistor scaling (Moore’s law) has been speeding everything up exponentially.
4. There are a lot of non-GPU solutions now.
If GPUs didn’t exist, someone still could have trained a deep model on a cluster of CPU, and then we’d end up with GPUs (or similar hardware) again. So it’s not necessarily true that gaming->GPU->deep learning implies that GPUs couldn’t be used for deep learning without gaming, because you could have had CPU->deep learning->GPU. I think this was much more of a case of the stars magically aligning than some preset goal by Nvidia/AMD.
In fact, there are plenty of cases where you had CPU->research->HW accelerator. One example (on top of gaming/rendering) is compression or parity coding, which was slow initially and then had add-on cards and/or CPU extensions.
> e.g. via taxes ... There is no need for the yuppie and the coffee.
The taxes are also paid for by the yuppies at a disproportionate rate to their income share.
See: share of income taxes as broken out by income segment, in most every developed nation.
One of the central defining characteristics of a yuppie is a well-paying job. That means paying higher, progressive tax rates in most affluent nations, including Australia.
See: what happens to California if you remove the tech yuppies pulling down $200,000 - $500,000, as well as their party buckets of equity compensation, the taxes of which the state rolls around in during the good times. California would become a formal second world disaster with no ability to fund anything. Illinois with nicer weather.
I meant no need for yuppies to pay for coffee delivered by done in order to accomplish the goal of researching how to deliver medicines in hard to reach places. They may coincidentally have to do with each other (emphasis on “may”), but not causally.
Now that we are getting the socialists back in power (they was the ones behind the last attempt) they've promised to have companies buy into it too instead of just using taxes.
It would be interesting to know why this is downvoted:
I consider myself fluent in Norwegian, did I still miss something?
Edit: to be clear, I don't care at all about those stupid point. For that matter dang should be free to reset them every day like he seems to do with his own.
I only care about them as an indication of whether what I said came across as wrong or something.
It seems to be bringing up an relatively off topic political dispute without doing the work to justify the relevance or the claims being made. This makes it easy for people to see nothing more than anti carbon tax, anti socialist political baiting. This doesn't tend to lead to productive conversations and thus is likely to get downvoted on a political basis.
A more productive comment would have talked about how the Norwegian carbon tax was intended to fund research and how exactly it failed to do that and instead just created profits for oil companies.
I don't have time to fix it now, but yes, this is my point:
I'm not against taxing pollution or using tax income to fund research, only against the part where we (Norway) literally gave money to companies without demanding results.
The response to this is normally the same as the response to trophy hunting subsidising conservation: namely, "yeah, that's true, but reality shouldn't be that way". I don't find that a very compelling argument, but apparently some people do.
We at .com are delivering medicines to poor people in this unfortunate country that has no infrastructure. (baby crying, dog being kicked away from table with flies on the food, and sad music playing)
Disclaimer: This was done one time for advertising purposes, and is not indicative of how our whirlybirds will be used.
(Off topic, but here goes. You know those drug commercials that state if you can't afford the medications, we a Whizzerbio will help out with costs because we are there for Everyone.
This is how it worked when I looked into it. You, and your doctor have to fill out a bunch of forms.
The meds are only sent to the doctors office. So you will need to go there to pick the medication up, and I imagine setting up another appointment. I have no idea why they don't deliver to the patient, or reimburse the pharmacy. I imagine they want it delivered to the office so the pharmaceutical rep can have a real reason to talk with doc?
Only one patient per doctor are allowed to participate in this promotion. Doc has 1000 patients, but only one poor guy gets the free med.
I looked into this ten years ago, so things might have changed?
Except time has shown that companies aren't taking on their real cost to their communities.
How are people chuckling about this video when this is clear signs this will have real environmental effects and costs that if we are,"lucky" might be a taking point to politicians/CEOs in a couple of decades after irreversible damage is done
What's the environmental effect? It seems like a clear improvement over current delivery mechanisms, since it's lighter and can be powered with electricity. Is your argument based on some assumption of induced demand, i.e. that it will encourage people to get more deliveries?
Are you sure? It doesn't seem believable that drone advancements have been significantly subsidized by coffee delivery, not even right now let alone over the past 10-20 years where huge advancements were made.
It's about the service existing going forward. If all these are gonna be used for is remote medicine delivery, then that's hardly any missions, thus hardly any money in it, and thus it wouldn't attract investments. The only reason these autonomous drone delivery companies exist is in anticipation of high demand, being as commonly used as Uber/Amazon/GrubHub.
I find it difficult to believe coffee delivery even now or "going forward" significantly subsidizes drone technology development. Even if you expand that to delivery of other frivolities.
Do you have any numbers? Or reasoning?
Drones have already long had the capability to do all this, lift and endurance, auto flying and navigation, GPS, even cameras and some autonomous visual recognition.
What drone technologies are being subsidized by coffee delivery?
You've literally stumbled into the answer yourself here.
> Drones have already long had the capability to do all this, lift and endurance, auto flying and navigation, GPS, even cameras and some autonomous visual recognition.
If that's the case (which it is, you're right), then why are we not already delivering medicine to remote areas with drones?
> Those spoiled yuppies paying a 50%+ markup on coffee just to have it delivered by drone are the ones subsidising the research and engineering efforts that go towards delivering medicine to inacessible spots
Really? Are spoiled yuppies ordering coffee a significant fraction of projected drone deliveries? I doubt it.
> This "delivering medicine in inaccessible spots" is simply not true. We can already deliver Coca-Cola everywhere on Earth reliably.
Your comment is so profoundly wrong, and yet so confidently written. You're comparing Coke, a long-shelf-life mass market product, with (often) emergency/low-latency delivery of products which would be impractical to stockpile in every remote village, even if they could affort it (e.g. certain types of medicine and consumable medical products, blood, etc.)
Coke doesn't need low-latency delivery - they can use high-bandwidth + warehousing. This isn't possible/practical for some types of products.
And still there is a way to reliably reach even the remotest areas where people live. Getting medicine there can, at least to a degree, piggy bag on that.
Unless it is a AI powered blockchain drone, that would be unbeatable!
Like the comment said to which you are replying, there isn't a fast enough supply chain for deliveries which 'go stale' far more quickly than Coca-Cola does. Therefore, no, they can't piggyback on that existing supply chain.
What are you actually getting at here? If I had to pessimistically guess, it sounds like you're trying to signal "I'm part of the group that can see through the drone marketing hype. They can't fool me."
Drones are much faster than cars at getting to remote places. There are many, many villages throughout the African continent that can take several hours to get to due to lack of paved roads (you need a 4WD, and it'll be a bumpy, slow ride). Sometimes the territory is dangerous to drive though. Drones can also be used even in more developed areas when roads have been completely washed away by a flood/hurricane/landslide/etc. The industry certainly has been hyped, and it's still early days, but your claim that they're not useful is absurd.
Zipline is delivering blood to 25 hospitals and clinics across[Rwanda] every day. Zipline is betting that transporting lifesaving medical supplies, which are often lightweight and urgently needed, will be the killer app for delivery drones.
Coca-Cola doesn't require a cold supply chain. The bulk of its weight/volume (water) can also be combined with a much lighter and smaller syrup or equivalent to be produced in a near-local fashion. It also has the benefit of scale.
Consider a rarely needed but life-saving antivenom that is expensive to produce, requires careful+chilled storage and is just not that abundant outright due to difficult production. A snake bite could happen anywhere, but its infeasible and potentially wasteful to have it stocked at every local facility. If a drone could be used to deploy it from a central facility to where its needed in a timely manner on-demand, that could save lives. In the developed world, roads make ground transportation a more suitable approach for this problem (in addition to everything else that makes the problem itself less frequent), but in many parts of the world the ground infrastructure is simply not there.
Wow. The amount of people here who would have wanted to ban cars when they were first invented is incredible. Luckily the world has plenty of inspired people actually doing novel things and these stuck-in-the-muds don't have much power.
This 100% ! I live not far from an airport (airplanes are like very big drones is you will :-)). And although the number of decibels is probably inferior to the one of the cars passing by my street, I can assure you it's a hell of a lot more annoying. First there are much more infra bass, second it lasts much longer than a car passing by, third, they like to fly at 5 or 6 in the morning where most of the car drivers sleep (side note: according to city's rule, they can't fly at that time but they just pay the fine to do so...)
> third, they like to fly at 5 or 6 in the morning where most of the car drivers sleep (side note: according to city's rule, they can't fly at that time but they just pay the fine to do so...)
"If a fine costs less than the crime pays, then it's not a penalty, it's a cost of doing business"
I think even ebikes would cause now pollution than this drone - microplastics degrading off the rubber wheels and other components, as well as fine brake dust from pads.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. You have a good point. I hate these vague accusations of "that's environmentally unsound" which get bandied around, without any evidence at all and in the full knowledge that they're as impossible to refute as they would be to prove, just because it's an unfalsifiable way of attacking something you dislike. No one ever calls them out on it either.
> But the switch to electric mopeds has been a blessing
In terms of noise pollution, yes. But it has meant some less spatially aware delivery riders flying silently around corners on pavements which is an annoying problem.
Children are quieter than cars and yet I hear them from the 3rd floor because sound travels in a direct line with nothing obstructing it. You don't hear cars 3 blocks away because of all the buildings between you and the cars. You'll hear a drone 3 blocks away because the air doesn't block sound as much.
Yup, a friend of mine gets his morning coffee delivered every morning. I felt like Marie Antoinette when I stayed at his house and he ordered me one ('you have a coffee machine right here! are you mad?').
I am not the OP, but I just checked what it would be for me. This morning I got two medium coffee's (Dunkin) which came out to about $5. The same order on DoorDash is $12, $15 if you included a $3 tip.
I'm a four hour drive from the test area but I tried to look into costs. It seems they do quite a few things beyond just coffee: https://wing.com/en_au/australia/canberra/
All the stores listed appear to only show their on-premises offerings, with some saying "download the app now" for a delivery price. The fact I apparently can't place an order or even see a price on a desktop has to hurt sales.
It almost seems that the original post is a humblebrag promo about the Wing delivery service, to get us aware about some newfangled product/service via some quirk or curiosity.
100k transactions is easy to hit when you've got funding. Which, given the amount of legal lobbying this drone stuff has rushed, doesn't seem like a problem.
Run discounts of 50% on first drone orders, or even just run discounts for first few months. People have proven that they love a bit of interesting fun for a high price. Look at shared scooters, most scooter usage is for fun and "I want to try them".
Just because a company is doing transactions doesn't make it a good company. This is just money at work, money can create "businesses" that shouldn't exist. Then people get too tangled up in the fake business that it's impossible to live without, all the while never actually earning profits you'd expect from a "good, large business".
> money can create "businesses" that shouldn't exist. Then people get too tangled up in the fake business that it's impossible to live without, all the while never actually earning profits you'd expect from a "good, large business".
like Uber, Lyft, Snapchat, DoorDash and many recent IPOs of terrible businesses that went public to make investors rich, while being terrible, money losing operations
Exactly. A lot of food delivery companies too. WeWork, etc. Lots of floating bad stuff that people are just too afraid to rock lest it fall over. But then one big gust of wind...
As someone who doesn't use these services due to how dodgy they are. I might be very biased. But I sure feel like we can do better than what this laziness achieves.
Some speculation into the pricing reveals that they are doing deliveries well below cost and perhaps free as an investment to get their number of successful deliveries up. Google is vying to gain license to be the de-facto ubiquitous drone flight traffic control service.
I used to work with small fixed wing drones [1] and had birds of prey remove the battery pack from the aircraft while in flight. I always wondered whether they knew or if they just instinctively went for the "head" of the plane and got lucky that the battery was right there.
There were also reports from customers in Australia where eagles would just shred the drone to pieces almost every flight. Putting big googly eyes stickers on the wings seemed to help to some degree.
Birds of prey are territorial. That drone looks like them and so it's not welcome. They probably messed with it a bit and found that removing the battery kills it. Birds are generally pretty smart, some are self-aware and have high level of intelligence and awareness.
Once a raven got ran over by a car near my home and sadly died. A group of ravens were "guarding" the body and not letting any human near it. They were exhibiting highly sophisticated social behaviour, it almost seemed like... a funeral?
Of course we shouldn't attempt to anthropomorphise animal behaviour, it was not a funeral but I would like to get an explanation from someone who knows about this topic. What were those ravens doing?
(Edit: it was very impressive they were doing a type of vocalisation that they don't usually perform, and they were close to the ground and near the body, not up among the trees where they usually spend most of their time).
(Edit2: the birds were not on the ground, but near the ground, on top of a low fence and on top of a couple of parked cars)
> 4) Why do crows gather around their dead? Certainly one reason is that the death of a crow can offer a “teachable moment” that other crows use to learn that the place and responsible party is dangerous. You can read more about this behavior here: https://corvidresearch.blog/2015/09/26/why-crows-gather-arou...
That act of communal mourning can also serve to reinforce social bonds among the living members of the group, at least in my estimation. I recently held a memorial service for my father (shakes fist at Parkinson's) but the thing that struck me was the younger members of our extended family experiencing some of that shared bond between the older ones, perhaps learning to appreciate their family members more. They hadn't known my father as brother or uncle but their parents and grandparents had.
A sense of belonging to something a bit larger than the individual experience... I have no scientific evidence to support these suppositions but it seems they must be real, to me.
Also, when we gather to share stories of a person's life (and circumstances of their death), we can gain valuable insights and motivation to help us live a good and long life ourselves.
This breathtaking ramble by lindybeige about covers it (I don't agree with a lot of what he says but he's well qualified and it illustrates the point):
Closer to a post-mortem. They apparently do a threat assessment so this particular cause of death can be avoided in future - though standing in a group on the road is maybe not the brightest idea.
> Closer to a post-mortem. They apparently do a threat assessment so this particular cause of death can be avoided in future
wow that's interesting I would love to read more about it if you have any links.
> though standing in a group on the road is maybe not the brightest idea.
They were not exactly on the road pavement but on top of lower objects e.g. a couple of nearby fences and a couple of parked cars just next to where the other raven died.
> though standing in a group on the road is maybe not the brightest idea
I wouldn’t judge ravens too harshly. Insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan were notorious for booby-trapping bodies in order to take out first responders - so humans are clearly not impervious to making the same mistake.
> Of course we shouldn't attempt to anthropomorphise animal behaviour
I'm not holding this against you in any way :), but I wanted to say I'm getting tired of this "don't anthropomorphise animals" trend. Some bird species are clearly highly intelligent, and I feel that this 'opposition to anthropomorphising' is used to downplay this fact, and animal intelligence in general.
Regarding the crows funeral or vigil, I suspect this has been observed a long time ago by humans, and is the reason for the association of crows with death in some cultures.
When I say don't anthropomorphise animals, I don't mean it in a diminutive manner.
I grew up on a farm. People who know next to nothing about animals are often quick to let me know that it's not humane for farmers to treat chickens that way or to treat sheep that other way, because "how would you like being treated like that".
Two examples of why this line of thinking is flawed: taking a sheep from standing position down to the ground, will have the effect of calming the sheep. Some types of fish that are used in aquaculture will calm down and decrease their stress levels if you turn off the lights.
If someone suddenly takes you down while you're walking down the road, or suddenly turns off the light while you are in a stressful situation, you will probably freak out. That's because you're not a sheep or a fish.
I think the complaint against anthropomorphism is usually about ascribing emotions, not intelligence. Nobody can deny that ravens exhibit complex behavior around their dead, suggesting some level of understanding of death and mortality. But if one starts to claim that the ravens feel "sadness" or "grief", that is a much less grounded or provable claim, that is more likely based in our human reaction to death than the ravens' understanding of it.
According to Wikipedia, European Magpies have been observed performing funeral rites (alas, the link to the study is gone). It's not impossible you witnessed a similar but undocumented phenomena.
I've seen grackles in Austin, Texas, USA do something similar around one of their own that had flown into a window and was badly stunned. It did seem to prevent any feral cats or other predators from being tempted to come by, and the noise might have been an attempt to wake up the stunned one (who wasn't there when we came back from lunch, so I assume survived).
I'm glad that awesome ballsy bird didn't get injured by the blades on that ridiculous noisy irritating gimmick. I mean, a cup of coffee, not even a pound of ground coffee so you can make your own and only force this intrusion on your neighbors once a week instead of every day.
Ravens are among the smartest birds out there. The fact that it was not injured is probably not a matter of luck. It most likely understood to some degree the danger of spinning blades.
They're also pretty skilled at flight. A wildlife photographer snapped a few great shots with a raven landing on an eagle's back _in flight_.
lately there have been a couple drones flying around my neighborhood and hovering in front of, and behind, houses. they instinctually feel creepy and intrusive. it seems we need to extend the legal expectation of privacy a little further.
Wait until one of the raven manage to actually shut down a drone. These birds are very intelligent and absolutely capable of sharing their attack strategy with each other. Even better if there is a big payoff (food) as reward.
I'm hoping somebody is staying on top of this because if it gets to the point the business model will get threatened, there will be pressure to "mitigate" or "solve" the problem somehow. I'm hoping the solution will be to tell the business (Google, in this case, apparently) to go do something else.
I used to live in Canberra, right now it's magpie season. They are super aggressive and are also super protected.
It's more likely the Raven will experience regulatory capture before the drone company does.
They've been seen using things as tools, I'm waiting for the next video where they realise they can shove a stick into the props to take the drone down.
I wouldn't be surprised if that already happens, and they're calculating a loss factor to 'environmental' circumstances. I wouldn't be surprised if they mass-produce these planes to a low price point because of the loss factor.
They'd more likely attack drones carying dry pet food, a favourite treat of corvids. We saw them steal the ice cream paper cup containing the cat's leftover lunch. That pretty much explained why we found paper cups tens of meters away from the feeding spot.
By 3000 BC, Egypt was using homing pigeons for pigeon post, taking advantage of a singular quality of this bird, which when taken far from its nest is able to find its way home due to a particularly developed sense of orientation.
Were we live the (australian) ravens move in in spring to raise their babies, they'll be here soon. There's something extraordinary about the way they look at you. It says : 'yeah we see each other. don't make me come down and smack you'
Average ravens know how to make tools out of wire and how to drop rocks into a bottle to raise the level of its water so they can drink it. I think that's more than your average human can do.
A human would be quite capable of constructing a tool out of wire. Humans figured out water displacement too, and ravens have culture and pass their knowledge on to their young just like we do.
The interesting thing isn't exact measurements of intelligence, though, but rather the fact that intelligence has developed independently. We know that we and our fellow primates are amongst the smartest animals on the planet. The thing about ravens is that they prove we're not the only ones.
I think you're giving the humans far too much credit. Some humans, and most larval humans, are capable of doing that kind of thing. Most of them just imitate. After puberty, almost all of them just repeat their previously acquired behaviors except when imitating. Instead of reasoning, they just rehearse past memories and fictional scenarios, unable to distinguish reality from fiction. Most of them can't remember what they ate for lunch yesterday or the license plate of the car that passed two minutes ago. They engage in complex verbal behavior that's ultimately incoherent, to the point that often even severe senile dementia in a human goes undiagnosed until its victim is in a new situation where their previous mindless habits no longer apply.
They aren't joking, based on their later comments. This "humans are stupid" trope is quite common. It usually becomes clear that it originates from thinly-concealed classism: "People like me can solve differential equations, but most people just sit around watching TV and playing the lottery. No, I haven't met those people, but I know that's all they do."
Oh, no, I wish I could except myself from these comments, but I can stupid right up there with the stupidest of them. In fact, right at this moment I can't remember what I had for lunch yesterday. And I'm talking to you. If I were sitting around watching TV, as I was doing a few hours ago, that would at least be pleasant and therefore somewhat rational.
I applaud your adroitness at self-deprecation, but I think it's pretty implicit in your comments that you hold yourself above other people, or else you logically should be simply imitating their views:
> I think you're giving the humans far too much credit. Some humans, and most larval humans, are capable of doing that kind of thing. Most of them just imitate. After puberty, almost all of them just repeat their previously acquired behaviors except when imitating. Instead of reasoning, they just rehearse past memories and fictional scenarios, unable to distinguish reality from fiction. Most of them can't remember what they ate for lunch yesterday or the license plate of the car that passed two minutes ago. They engage in complex verbal behavior that's ultimately incoherent, to the point that often even severe senile dementia in a human goes undiagnosed until its victim is in a new situation where their previous mindless habits no longer apply.
> . . . I think it's pretty implicit in your comments that you hold yourself above other people . . .
This is a common enough cognitive bias that it should be expected.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a hypothetical cognitive bias stating that people with low ability at a task overestimate their own ability, and that people with high ability at a task underestimate their own ability.
Me: I can read and write in English while knowing how to operate a computer.
The bird: Drops objects into a tube filled with water to get food.
In the human realm nobody gives a damn that I know English and can use a mouse and keyboard. People are so good at these skills they don't even realize they are skills, they are so abundant they count for nothing. The bird wins because of that.
I'm guessing you learned those skills before puberty? A Markov-chain bot also "knows English" and "can operate a computer", though probably posting a comment like yours would require at least GPT-2.
How does one signal a commitment to the falsability of one’s assertions and yet remain convincing?
Am I stupid to think that I am smart? Am I smart to think that I am stupid? If I think I am stupid and desire smartness can I fake it until I make it? Does the simulation of a smarter self developed to better attain smartness through faking it become real?
The Dunning-Kruger effect isn't actually the same thing as overconfidence effect or the superiority complex I'm manifesting here, although there's definitely a relationship. What Dunning and Kruger hypothesized was that sometimes people are bad at an activity, like being funny, because there are important things about that activity that they don't know. This impairs both their performance at that activity and their ability to assess their performance, as well as, for example, other people's performance. In their experiments, they did find the predicted effect, with the result that, while people who were really terrible at an activity had a lower self-assessment than people who were pretty good at it, the really terrible people overrated themselves by a lot. They also found that the more competent people underrated themselves by a little, which was not a prediction of their hypothesis, and is the opposite of what the overconfidence-effect theory predicts.
At least, that's how I remember it. Would I even know if I were misremembering it?
I think "How do [I] signal a commitment to the falsifiability of [my] assertions and yet remain convincing?" is mostly the wrong question. Convincing someone, like a salesman, is a different activity from collaboratively exploring ideas with them, and they are not only mutually exclusive with one another, but also with the kind of self-righteous dominance discourse samhw is engaging in upthread, where the object is to persuade other onlookers to side with you against your contemptible interlocutor (in this case, me). Projecting cocaine-like irrepressible confidence is often a very effective way to convince people of things, because they assume your confidence must be well-founded, but that effect is poisonous to collaborative exploration of ideas, which involves looking for their flaws as well as their merits. It can also damage their confidence in you over time, although fraudsters like Lacan and that delusional coke freak Freud often get away with it for more than a human lifespan, by virtue of carefully crafting their theories to be nonfalsifiable.
In cases where your beliefs are based on objective evidence, you can share that evidence, as Darwin did with his studies of finches and reflections on pigeon breeding and whatnot. This turns out to be very effective at collectively progressing toward the truth even when none of the individual people involved is very smart (and none of us are) or very detached from their beliefs. Semmelweis was eventually convincing about handwashing, for example, but not about the cadaveric-particle thing.
Unfortunately, without computers, this doesn't work for procedural knowledge; every generation has to learn it from scratch by practicing, so, for example, our jokes aren't any better now than they were in Sumeria 5000 years ago. And there are a lot of cases where our knowledge has a basis that isn't objective, so we can't put it into words and numbers, with the result that people who trust us believe it, while people who distrust us don't.
Anyway, so people often misunderstand Dunning and Kruger to have found that the least competent people rated themselves as being the most competent. While that does happen sometimes, that wasn't what they found. However, sufficient levels of overconfidence in your knowledge will totally close you off to new information, as happened to samhw in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28592769, so you totally stop learning, eventually making you the least competent. As I said, though, that usually also happens to humans when they go through puberty! In my case, my overconfidence stunted my learning about all kinds of things for many years and probably still does in areas I haven't noticed yet. And probably never will, since I'm apparently totally failing at actually thinking.
The "simulation of a smarter self" thing can actually work, because often what keeps people trapped is not a lack of intelligence but various kinds of mental formations they use to avoid discomfort. Doesn't have to be a self, or smarter; "what would Jesus do?" is a Christian reminder that a mental simulation of a more morally commendable person can be a useful guide.
I am simply imitating their views. I haven't got an original thought in my head, at least not one I haven't had for 30 years. And here I am sphexishly replying to you again like a sucker. Is there anything I could possibly be doing that would be less intelligent? Any raven would have long since flown away, or possibly pecked your eyes out.
How would that help? Wouldn't it just make the problem much worse? Instead of futilely arguing against the kind of scumbag that turned Twitter into the vile cesspool it is today and is now infesting HN, I'd become another one of them!
I mean, I do hold myself above you. But it's not because I think you're even stupider than I am, which would be quite a remarkable feat. It's because you're spending your efforts to try to hurt people and I'm spending my efforts to try to help them.
I’ve been flying all types of radio-controlled aircraft for decades. I’ve had two encounters with birds. In both cases it was while flying thermals with gliders. In both cases the birds went for the tail section.
The first was a hawk. I was going up a thermal on my own. The hawk came into the same thermal and decided it wanted to own it. It flew incredibly fast towards my plane and grabbed it from the latter quarter of the fuselage. This was a strong and fast kevlar/carbon fiber F5B competition class motorized glider, 2.4 meter wingspan.
The hawk could not destroy it but sure did with it as it wished for a few seconds. When it let go I went to full throttle and climbed straight up like a rocket (high power/weight ratio) to get away. After that I landed safely without damage.
The second case was a raven. Similar situation. It went for the tail and ripped it right off. All I could do was watch it crash.
Hehe, that's really funny. The value of what you can transport by drone is likely dwarfed by the value of the drone, why not go for stealing the drones themselves?
The Pact with the Ravens is conditional on them remaining the dominant aerial intelligence.
This necessitates the destruction, rather than the repurpose, of the drones.
I live in Logan, another test area in Australia. The drones are relatively quite. Surprisingly so. Generally can’t hear them inside the house. Sometimes I will notice them when they are a few houses away if I’m outside. I rarely take notice of them now and I don’t find them distracting. They seem to fly quite high too.
So you can sometimes hear them inside the house? That sounds possibly-OK in a sparsely populated area. But in more dense areas with lots of deliveries and people walking outside who can hear all the noise, I'm not sure this will scale well.
> Sometimes I will notice them when they are a few houses away if I’m outside.
> Generally can’t hear them inside the house.
Dude, I think they are very loud. I'm in an office nearby a busy street and I can barely hear the traffic (no special insulation, just regular windows).
The nest must be near. Instead of torturing the birds every single day because you want your coffee(or you just enjoy torturing birds) you can change your reception point 20 meters or so and probably the attacks will stop.
I have done speleology on things like old mines and had attacks from small birds to big ones like vultures and eagles that make their nest on the mine. I have marks on my helmet from that.
It is very interesting how small birds will pretend to have a broken leg or wing just to divert your attention from the nest.
I also have seen eagles attack friends' macaws in the open space or a group of magpies attacking an enormous eagle.
The animal world is not as peaceful as some people believe.
You can’t actually choose your landing zone - it’s assigned by Wing. And I have spoken to them and they are pausing operation for a few days while their bird expert gives them advice, they told me.
Honestly, the whole idea of delivering coffee by drone seems very inefficient to me. I guess that making my own coffee with an aeropress takes less time than going to the garden, picking the package, opening it, etc. It is much cheaper, and it releases far less CO2 to the atmosphere!
You're probably not getting coffee beans on a per-cup basis. I personally order a batch of tea leaves a handful amount of times per year. I think coffee beans are a bit more sensitive than tea leaves, but even they should be fine for months if stored properly.
Ideally you wouldn't keep them for months after roasting, but the difference between say one month and several is probably slight.
I get a bag a week delivered within days of roasting, and I've not tasted blind but I'm sure I can tell the difference if I've come back to one from holiday or otherwise let it go 'stale'.
Clearly you need to register each bean on a blockchain to be sure of its organic provenance; then you can grind, destroy, and turn them into a Non-Fungible Brew.
The predecessor (the percolator) was invented 150 years earlier and still has a dedicated following today, and then there is the cafetiere. Both of these do not have any waste other than the coffee grounds, which I think is a big point in their favor. Oh, and no DRM either, nor any subscription components. I guess for the manufacturers that is now a point against them.
That's kind of my point, you said it was a solved problem. This is obviously not about just making coffee, you were misrepresenting the problem being solved. Convenience is a thing. If this coffee could be made and delivered on the spot exactly when you want it then this service wouldn't exist.
I meant that the other way around from how you wrote it. As in: you probably can make coffee well within the time that it would take some service to make it and deliver it for you, and likely your locally brewn coffee would be hotter.
I keep seeing Australians online saying this meme that Australians care a lot about coffee quality, but when I lived there everyone I knew would make instant coffee at home. Then they were often highly critical of espresso at cafes. Odd
This is my experience in Australia too. Outside of the big cities, the coffee is almost undrinkable, Starbucks would be welcome. The coffee in Sydney and Melbourne was good but a city having good coffee is unremarkable
Actually, Starbucks operates in big cities, that's why it was not welcome until foreigners started actually supporting Starbucks, those cities were filled with coffee snobs and Starbucks was not worth it. (Yes, foreigners here means mostly North-East Asians and students) But the coffee quality of Starbucks from North-East Asia and the coffee quality in European Starbucks-esque chains could not compare to the good quality coffee and cheap prices of Australian small shops. Of course most people buy coffee in the city, and outside the city it's all instant coffee since it's perceived like wine. You're either a snob about it, or you just drink it casually (instant) cause you enjoy drinking any shade of it.
I live in Australia and Korea frequently, and one has independent chains with snobby, nice, hardcore coffee (Aus) the other has a bunch of shitty chains, and Starbucks that serve absolutely mediocre coffee.
Entire family drinks coffee in instant, but most work mates drink coffee with machines and cafes. You either care or you don't, but everyone enjoys lots of coffee. It's really not that surprising, the same thing goes for baked goods and fast food. The smaller the town, the worse the quality, but the more people are happy with what they're getting.
It's somewhat baffling to me that there's such a large pushback against getting coffee delivered via drone, and I don't see many reasons expressed as to why, exactly, this is iniquitous--could somebody explain this in greater detail to me, please?
I understand the noise in the video is fairly unpleasant; however, others within the thread with more experience with the technology have testified that they are not, typically, perceived as this disruptive. (Whether due to the rotors straining less when not countering a raven/crow, or simply due to the frequency band of the phone microphone exacerbating the worst qualities of the sound.) Many express rancor about the very concept of delivered coffee--not merely the practicalities of it, and this is intriguing to me.
I fly quads recreationally, though I'm far from an expert. I've flown a wide variety of fixed wing and multicopter drones, both payload/filming drones and FPV drones.
Drones that have payload capacity are loud, full stop. This one isn't especially loud as its payload is relatively light.
The comment I believe you're talking about mentions they can be heard from multiple houses away. That isn't quiet by any means.
They also state, however, that the drones are typically high enough to provide little disturbance prior to descending for the drop. Regardless, this doesn't primarily confuse me; rather, the hostility to the idea of delivery coffee writ large.
I am the guy who posted the video on my account, and I assure you I am just an avid user of the service. I’ve been in lockdown for a month and we will be in lockdown for another month, with exposure sites everywhere in my city, so this is a far better alternative than venturing out.
It absolutely is an advertisement. Look at the OP's posts in this thread, all he is doing is defending the drones and singing the praises of the company.
ravens are the neighborhood watch of the kind i like - they chase away falcons and eagles who occasionally venture into our neighborhood. The ravens would sit at the very top of the redwoods chatting up each other across the space. Though i haven't seen that much of them recently - we lost a lot of large trees to the new developments (Mountain View is more and more a faceless barrack dormitory for Google) - somehow building while preserving large trees (already growing in the developed areas and with each tree being a small bustling city of the birds and small animals) is believed to be impossible while cats/whatever will as usually be blamed for birds population decline.
Queensland has both Australian Crows and Australian Ravens. The tropical north and Western Australia has Australian Crows, and the south-east has only the Australian Ravens.
They're often confused, but this video is in Canberra so a Raven it is.
The confusion is made worse by the fact that the bird supposedly called a raven (though whether it’s Corvus coronoides or Corvus mellori or something else I can’t certainly say right now) is, at least in Melbourne and the part of western Victoria where I now live, exclusively called a crow. If you called it a raven, many, perhaps most, people wouldn’t know what you were talking about, because we simply don’t have any bird called a raven, though we might have some vague sneaking notion that they’re a northern hemisphere version of our crows or something like that.
I can’t confidently speak further than that, but I’m under the impression the same is true in Sydney.
If taxonomists call them ravens but everyone else calls them crows, I wish the taxonomists would accept the reality that usage defines language, not encyclopædia, and give up on trying to pretend they’re ravens and not crows.
That’s what scientific names are for. If the supposed “common names” is not what anyone calls it other than them, then that common name is wrong and should be retired.
Ahh those last few frames reminded me of just how sprawling Canberra's suburbia is and how large the nature strip/easement zoning is - no wonder it's such a good drone testing area!
Are they attacking the drones because they're carrying food? Ravens are incredibly smart birds so I don't imagine them attacking the drones for no good reason.
I suspect it's more of a invasion of territory thing. Around here both crows and magpies don't take kindly to other big birds coming too close during nesting season.
I think it's a proof-of-concept operation. Last thing I want is 5 minute old, bad coffee, left in the garden.
(Australians are generally very selective of their coffee, we like proper Italian style coffee. Melbourne (Aus/Vic) is quite proud that we're the only place where Starbucks went bust, gave up, and left - they tried but I think there's only one Starbucks left in the whole city, thankfully.)
Evil : God isn't interested in technology. He cares nothing for the microchip or the silicon revolution. Look how he spends his time, forty-three species of parrots! Nipples for men!
Robert : Slugs.
Evil : Slugs! HE created slugs! They can't hear. They can't speak. They can't operate machinery. Are we not in the hands of a lunatic?
I just don't understand how it makes sense to get coffee delivered by drone (or by driving to pick up) every day instead of just buying an espresso machine.
One espresso machine can make coffee for 30 people an hour; complemented by six drones, it can provide coffee for 60 people. That's a lot more capital-efficient than buying 60 espresso machines; the other 57 espresso machines' worth of capital can get invested in something that improves people's lives instead of useless stranded coffee production capacity. It's probably a lot less labor-efficient, though, because it means tying up some poor schmuck's life making coffee for other people instead of learning topology or writing poetry or something.
Seriously one benefit of covid had been hardly any noise on the flight path I live on. If you have 24/7 drone deliveries it would drive me crazy. Probably have to set up some surface to air defence against it.
[0]https://dms.licdn.com/playlist/C5605AQHVTN_fA4rRcg/mp4-720p-...
This 'Wing' drone delivery is actually an Alphabet (Google) company, and they have "found success in Australian suburbs, recently hitting 100,000 deliveries milestone." [1]
Anyone from Australia care to tell how much it costs to deliver a (or multiple) cups of coffee using this service?
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/25/22640833/drone-delivery-g...
I think the distinction is important because that points us in the direction of the type of policy we want to focus on. We shouldn't aim for laws to ban drone delivery. Instead we should have rules to limit the amount of noise you can make in residential areas.
[1] https://www.nearmap.com/au/en
I live on the outskirts of the centre of Canberra (which, as a reminder, is the capital of Australia). The trees are teeming with birds this time of year. We have a family of Australian magpies raising their young in the tree directly opposite us. It's magnificent to watch. They'll often come and say hello and we're hoping they'll introduce the young to us one day.
Regular drone traffic would be an enormous disruption. Magpies swoop anything they see to be a threat. I already see how much effort it is to forage and feed 3 young. Spending extra time trying to ward off a drone because someone can't be arsed going for a walk and getting a coffee (or whatever) ... ridiculous.
I haven't seen a drone here but if they start to become a thing I'll join whatever movement is advocating for their banning.
Maybe on paper silent drone deliveries are a great idea for people who can't get out of their homes but even then what we're doing is removing yet another chance for them to interact directly with another human being.
So I dunno. What actually is a positive use for drone delivery?
Adequate human interaction (modulo the ongoing pandemic) is indeed important (I think, at least for most people), but a wide swath of people probably have an overabundance of it, and wouldn't benefit from the additional interactions involved with physically going get their own coffee from some human in a coffee-vending establishment.
The positive use for drone delivery is the same for any other delivery service. The pros and cons compared to human delivery, animal delivery, wheeled robot delivery, etc. are debatable.
I'd probably use it for times I've run out of something essential I don't have at home though, if its quick enough. Tobacco after a few beers and not wanting to drive, exotic spices I can't find locally assuming the drone can fly far enough to other places, and also assuming its more environmentally friendly than getting in the car and burning petrol.
What is the problem to which this technology is a solution for?
Whose problem is it?
What new problems might be created by solving the original problem?
Which people and what institutions will be most seriously harmed by this new technology?
What sort of people and institutions gain special economic and political power from this new technology?
What changes in language are being forced by these new technologies?
It's perfectly legal to deconstruct scaffolding, with power tools and chucking metal poles in the back of the van at 8am on a Sunday morning for example. Right next to multiple residential block of flats with hundreds of residents.
And the number one issue if you poll residents of almost any large town is usually noise issues.
If you want to see one of the big disconnects between government and the people, it's a big one.
Saying it's already an issue that's under legislated doesn't mean we should allow it to get worse.
Picking one from a quick search: Greenwich, for example, says that "Noisy work is prohibited on Sundays and bank holidays", and explicitly mentions "Erecting and dismantling of scaffolding" in its examples of "noisy work".
(https://www.royalgreenwich.gov.uk/info/200205/pollution_and_...)
Presumably other authorities may have different rules, and they may or may not be effectively enforced. But in principle, at least, it's not a free-for-all.
Don't forget ridiculousness. That raven knows, and we should all be thankful for birds leading the protest.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-13/inside-th...
Spoilers: that's hard to do.
That's one, another is how difficult is it to make a cup of coffee in your kitchen?
I would also be happy banning k cups fwiw.
I'm not sure how the externalities work out in this case, but it might be something to keep an eye on.
That said, part of the fun of coffee is the cafe experience; covid willing, I still go out to cafes as well. Best not to optimize all of the fun out of life.
The Australian-designed/made Breville espresso machine is a gem.
I have no idea how I lived without it.
These leaf blowers also don't have much of a muffler system (due to size / weight) and of course no exhaust gas recirculation or catalytic converter to further reduce emissions by-products.
A two stroke motor is considerably simpler than a four stroke, they often come in at around half the weight for an equivalent power output, and have less moving parts. This is why they are the default engine of choice for hand powered tools - almost no maintenance, very little warmup cycle, high power:weight ratio. The downside is dirty exhaust.
Modern two stroke dirt bikes have actually all started moving to fuel injection to help combat this. No premixed oil/gas, oil is injected at an optimal ratio given the load of the engine. Light cruise / idling, they run at 100:1, at heavy throttle they drop down to 50:1. Much more pleasant than something set to constantly run, via premixing, at 50:1 gas:oil.
Other note: large ocean freighters are two stroke engines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%A4rtsil%C3%A4-Sulzer_RTA9...
To dig further, you can also differentiate between peak and sustained power; MTBF, maintenance (and dollars of maintenance) per hour of operation, volume, overall environmental effect (due to lifespan and manufacturing), etc etc.
Your point is a good one though, but I think the common use case of the word efficiency, when talking about vehicles, if fuel required to produce a given amount of work (miles, horsepower, etc).
Reading about just a little bit, this may not be the case... depending on what application you are talking about.
I would expect to be some differences between a 10-ton marine two-stroke on a ship vs. a 49cc two-stroke on a moped in terms of efficiency.
They are noisy and smelly as hell, there was some going on just outside my window (not that I'd hired) recently, the operators wearing ear protection of course, but I was barely any further away. Do wish they'd use electric - can do it from a battery even these days. (And mitre saws etc. too, quite incredible.)
They do have electric leaf blowers, but those offer minutes of runtime instead of hours. So those might be suitable for a homeowner, but aren't very practical for professional lawn care use.
This confused me for a second, as the electric leaf blowers that came to my mind have 'infinite' runtime. I then realized you're referring to cordless electric leaf blowers.
Like it or not as wages creep up relative to "things" these sorts of business models will become economically viable.
Now they are necessary for academic research in deep learning and other fields, which would not have gotten GPUs as advanced as they are without the market boost.
Of course that’s just a theory and it’s never possible to go back and see what would have happened. But it seems reasonable to me.
1. GPUs used to be much less programmable and had fixed-function graphics pipelines.
2. General purpose GPU computing was demonstrated a decade before the 2012 deep learning craze. OpenCL/CUDA was quite mature in 2012 and used by high performance computing.
3. Transistor scaling (Moore’s law) has been speeding everything up exponentially.
4. There are a lot of non-GPU solutions now.
If GPUs didn’t exist, someone still could have trained a deep model on a cluster of CPU, and then we’d end up with GPUs (or similar hardware) again. So it’s not necessarily true that gaming->GPU->deep learning implies that GPUs couldn’t be used for deep learning without gaming, because you could have had CPU->deep learning->GPU. I think this was much more of a case of the stars magically aligning than some preset goal by Nvidia/AMD.
In fact, there are plenty of cases where you had CPU->research->HW accelerator. One example (on top of gaming/rendering) is compression or parity coding, which was slow initially and then had add-on cards and/or CPU extensions.
The taxes are also paid for by the yuppies at a disproportionate rate to their income share.
See: share of income taxes as broken out by income segment, in most every developed nation.
One of the central defining characteristics of a yuppie is a well-paying job. That means paying higher, progressive tax rates in most affluent nations, including Australia.
https://www.ato.gov.au/rates/individual-income-tax-rates/
See: what happens to California if you remove the tech yuppies pulling down $200,000 - $500,000, as well as their party buckets of equity compensation, the taxes of which the state rolls around in during the good times. California would become a formal second world disaster with no ability to fund anything. Illinois with nicer weather.
It ended up with a big payday for big oil IIRC.
Now that we are getting the socialists back in power (they was the ones behind the last attempt) they've promised to have companies buy into it too instead of just using taxes.
I consider myself fluent in Norwegian, did I still miss something?
Edit: to be clear, I don't care at all about those stupid point. For that matter dang should be free to reset them every day like he seems to do with his own.
I only care about them as an indication of whether what I said came across as wrong or something.
A more productive comment would have talked about how the Norwegian carbon tax was intended to fund research and how exactly it failed to do that and instead just created profits for oil companies.
I don't have time to fix it now, but yes, this is my point:
I'm not against taxing pollution or using tax income to fund research, only against the part where we (Norway) literally gave money to companies without demanding results.
We at .com are delivering medicines to poor people in this unfortunate country that has no infrastructure. (baby crying, dog being kicked away from table with flies on the food, and sad music playing)
Disclaimer: This was done one time for advertising purposes, and is not indicative of how our whirlybirds will be used.
(Off topic, but here goes. You know those drug commercials that state if you can't afford the medications, we a Whizzerbio will help out with costs because we are there for Everyone.
This is how it worked when I looked into it. You, and your doctor have to fill out a bunch of forms.
The meds are only sent to the doctors office. So you will need to go there to pick the medication up, and I imagine setting up another appointment. I have no idea why they don't deliver to the patient, or reimburse the pharmacy. I imagine they want it delivered to the office so the pharmaceutical rep can have a real reason to talk with doc?
Only one patient per doctor are allowed to participate in this promotion. Doc has 1000 patients, but only one poor guy gets the free med.
I looked into this ten years ago, so things might have changed?
How are people chuckling about this video when this is clear signs this will have real environmental effects and costs that if we are,"lucky" might be a taking point to politicians/CEOs in a couple of decades after irreversible damage is done
Coffee wasn't on the agenda it seems.
I find it difficult to believe coffee delivery even now or "going forward" significantly subsidizes drone technology development. Even if you expand that to delivery of other frivolities.
Do you have any numbers? Or reasoning?
Drones have already long had the capability to do all this, lift and endurance, auto flying and navigation, GPS, even cameras and some autonomous visual recognition.
What drone technologies are being subsidized by coffee delivery?
> Drones have already long had the capability to do all this, lift and endurance, auto flying and navigation, GPS, even cameras and some autonomous visual recognition.
If that's the case (which it is, you're right), then why are we not already delivering medicine to remote areas with drones?
Also coffee is not being delivered to remote areas so I don't know what that has to do with anything.
Really? Are spoiled yuppies ordering coffee a significant fraction of projected drone deliveries? I doubt it.
50% markups may make it viable if it gets off the ground and becomes and ind operation but that’s not footing R&D.
This is probably news to a lot of VCs who regularly make investments in hope of an eventual market.
Your comment is so profoundly wrong, and yet so confidently written. You're comparing Coke, a long-shelf-life mass market product, with (often) emergency/low-latency delivery of products which would be impractical to stockpile in every remote village, even if they could affort it (e.g. certain types of medicine and consumable medical products, blood, etc.)
Coke doesn't need low-latency delivery - they can use high-bandwidth + warehousing. This isn't possible/practical for some types of products.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delivery_drone#Healthcare_deli...
Unless it is a AI powered blockchain drone, that would be unbeatable!
Drones are much faster than cars at getting to remote places. There are many, many villages throughout the African continent that can take several hours to get to due to lack of paved roads (you need a 4WD, and it'll be a bumpy, slow ride). Sometimes the territory is dangerous to drive though. Drones can also be used even in more developed areas when roads have been completely washed away by a flood/hurricane/landslide/etc. The industry certainly has been hyped, and it's still early days, but your claim that they're not useful is absurd.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/in-the-air-with-ziplines-medical-d...
Consider a rarely needed but life-saving antivenom that is expensive to produce, requires careful+chilled storage and is just not that abundant outright due to difficult production. A snake bite could happen anywhere, but its infeasible and potentially wasteful to have it stocked at every local facility. If a drone could be used to deploy it from a central facility to where its needed in a timely manner on-demand, that could save lives. In the developed world, roads make ground transportation a more suitable approach for this problem (in addition to everything else that makes the problem itself less frequent), but in many parts of the world the ground infrastructure is simply not there.
drones are quieter than cars
> delivering coffee is not one of them
perfect item to master the skill tho
"If a fine costs less than the crime pays, then it's not a penalty, it's a cost of doing business"
We'll get an aerial lawnmower to you real quick, just sign up on our page.
Pizza delivery / grocery motorbikes used to annoy the hell out of us. But the switch to electric mopeds has been a blessing.
Credit to Getir in London for standardising electric bikes across their fleet (at least where we are).
My ear-devices-pro+ record decent data and I submit that data as verifiable evidence in this matter.
In terms of noise pollution, yes. But it has meant some less spatially aware delivery riders flying silently around corners on pavements which is an annoying problem.
Children are quieter than cars and yet I hear them from the 3rd floor because sound travels in a direct line with nothing obstructing it. You don't hear cars 3 blocks away because of all the buildings between you and the cars. You'll hear a drone 3 blocks away because the air doesn't block sound as much.
People get coffee delivered by car? If that is so it is rather depressing.
All the stores listed appear to only show their on-premises offerings, with some saying "download the app now" for a delivery price. The fact I apparently can't place an order or even see a price on a desktop has to hurt sales.
But I could be cynical.
Run discounts of 50% on first drone orders, or even just run discounts for first few months. People have proven that they love a bit of interesting fun for a high price. Look at shared scooters, most scooter usage is for fun and "I want to try them".
Just because a company is doing transactions doesn't make it a good company. This is just money at work, money can create "businesses" that shouldn't exist. Then people get too tangled up in the fake business that it's impossible to live without, all the while never actually earning profits you'd expect from a "good, large business".
like Uber, Lyft, Snapchat, DoorDash and many recent IPOs of terrible businesses that went public to make investors rich, while being terrible, money losing operations
As someone who doesn't use these services due to how dodgy they are. I might be very biased. But I sure feel like we can do better than what this laziness achieves.
Some speculation into the pricing reveals that they are doing deliveries well below cost and perhaps free as an investment to get their number of successful deliveries up. Google is vying to gain license to be the de-facto ubiquitous drone flight traffic control service.
There were also reports from customers in Australia where eagles would just shred the drone to pieces almost every flight. Putting big googly eyes stickers on the wings seemed to help to some degree.
[1] https://www.sensefly.com/
Edit: Found the blog post about the eagles in Australia https://www.sensefly.com/blog/bird-drone-attacks-avoid-threa...
Surely you don't mean that they'd have an understanding what the function of a battery is, so I'm not quite sure what you mean?
Once a raven got ran over by a car near my home and sadly died. A group of ravens were "guarding" the body and not letting any human near it. They were exhibiting highly sophisticated social behaviour, it almost seemed like... a funeral?
Of course we shouldn't attempt to anthropomorphise animal behaviour, it was not a funeral but I would like to get an explanation from someone who knows about this topic. What were those ravens doing?
(Edit: it was very impressive they were doing a type of vocalisation that they don't usually perform, and they were close to the ground and near the body, not up among the trees where they usually spend most of their time).
(Edit2: the birds were not on the ground, but near the ground, on top of a low fence and on top of a couple of parked cars)
> 4) Why do crows gather around their dead? Certainly one reason is that the death of a crow can offer a “teachable moment” that other crows use to learn that the place and responsible party is dangerous. You can read more about this behavior here: https://corvidresearch.blog/2015/09/26/why-crows-gather-arou...
This is well documented in a variety of corvid species.
I think it's unfair to dismiss this as anthropomorphising. Our grief, too, has an evolutionary purpose.
https://youtu.be/WFxOxU9qQyQ?t=1170
wow that's interesting I would love to read more about it if you have any links.
> though standing in a group on the road is maybe not the brightest idea.
They were not exactly on the road pavement but on top of lower objects e.g. a couple of nearby fences and a couple of parked cars just next to where the other raven died.
From my son's favourite YouTube channel. These are American Ravens but probably similar to the Aussie variety behaviour wise.
You mean... a murder investigation?
It a sounds more like an occupational health and safety investigation, or am inquest.
I wouldn’t judge ravens too harshly. Insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan were notorious for booby-trapping bodies in order to take out first responders - so humans are clearly not impervious to making the same mistake.
Why not? Our behavior emerged from a primitive animal state. It's not crazy to think it can happen again.
The only mistake would be to pretend it's the definitive answer, but unless we got one, it can be one of the theories.
I'm not holding this against you in any way :), but I wanted to say I'm getting tired of this "don't anthropomorphise animals" trend. Some bird species are clearly highly intelligent, and I feel that this 'opposition to anthropomorphising' is used to downplay this fact, and animal intelligence in general.
Regarding the crows funeral or vigil, I suspect this has been observed a long time ago by humans, and is the reason for the association of crows with death in some cultures.
I grew up on a farm. People who know next to nothing about animals are often quick to let me know that it's not humane for farmers to treat chickens that way or to treat sheep that other way, because "how would you like being treated like that".
Two examples of why this line of thinking is flawed: taking a sheep from standing position down to the ground, will have the effect of calming the sheep. Some types of fish that are used in aquaculture will calm down and decrease their stress levels if you turn off the lights.
If someone suddenly takes you down while you're walking down the road, or suddenly turns off the light while you are in a stressful situation, you will probably freak out. That's because you're not a sheep or a fish.
European magpies (unlike Australian magpies) are actually related to ravens (family corvidae, whereas Aussie magpies are in the family artamidae)
Obviously I still need _my_ morning coffee.
They're also pretty skilled at flight. A wildlife photographer snapped a few great shots with a raven landing on an eagle's back _in flight_.
See: https://iso.500px.com/the-story-behind-the-incredible-photo-...
They might even put the entire business at risk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homing_pigeon
If they've figured out the drones drop food when attacked then they'll keep attacking, and teach others of their species to do it too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZerUbHmuY04
The interesting thing isn't exact measurements of intelligence, though, but rather the fact that intelligence has developed independently. We know that we and our fellow primates are amongst the smartest animals on the planet. The thing about ravens is that they prove we're not the only ones.
> I think you're giving the humans far too much credit. Some humans, and most larval humans, are capable of doing that kind of thing. Most of them just imitate. After puberty, almost all of them just repeat their previously acquired behaviors except when imitating. Instead of reasoning, they just rehearse past memories and fictional scenarios, unable to distinguish reality from fiction. Most of them can't remember what they ate for lunch yesterday or the license plate of the car that passed two minutes ago. They engage in complex verbal behavior that's ultimately incoherent, to the point that often even severe senile dementia in a human goes undiagnosed until its victim is in a new situation where their previous mindless habits no longer apply.
This is a common enough cognitive bias that it should be expected.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a hypothetical cognitive bias stating that people with low ability at a task overestimate their own ability, and that people with high ability at a task underestimate their own ability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
The bird: Drops objects into a tube filled with water to get food.
In the human realm nobody gives a damn that I know English and can use a mouse and keyboard. People are so good at these skills they don't even realize they are skills, they are so abundant they count for nothing. The bird wins because of that.
If you think they don’t, behave as if you can’t for a day.
Am I stupid to think that I am smart? Am I smart to think that I am stupid? If I think I am stupid and desire smartness can I fake it until I make it? Does the simulation of a smarter self developed to better attain smartness through faking it become real?
Tank, I need an exit!
At least, that's how I remember it. Would I even know if I were misremembering it?
I think "How do [I] signal a commitment to the falsifiability of [my] assertions and yet remain convincing?" is mostly the wrong question. Convincing someone, like a salesman, is a different activity from collaboratively exploring ideas with them, and they are not only mutually exclusive with one another, but also with the kind of self-righteous dominance discourse samhw is engaging in upthread, where the object is to persuade other onlookers to side with you against your contemptible interlocutor (in this case, me). Projecting cocaine-like irrepressible confidence is often a very effective way to convince people of things, because they assume your confidence must be well-founded, but that effect is poisonous to collaborative exploration of ideas, which involves looking for their flaws as well as their merits. It can also damage their confidence in you over time, although fraudsters like Lacan and that delusional coke freak Freud often get away with it for more than a human lifespan, by virtue of carefully crafting their theories to be nonfalsifiable.
In cases where your beliefs are based on objective evidence, you can share that evidence, as Darwin did with his studies of finches and reflections on pigeon breeding and whatnot. This turns out to be very effective at collectively progressing toward the truth even when none of the individual people involved is very smart (and none of us are) or very detached from their beliefs. Semmelweis was eventually convincing about handwashing, for example, but not about the cadaveric-particle thing.
Unfortunately, without computers, this doesn't work for procedural knowledge; every generation has to learn it from scratch by practicing, so, for example, our jokes aren't any better now than they were in Sumeria 5000 years ago. And there are a lot of cases where our knowledge has a basis that isn't objective, so we can't put it into words and numbers, with the result that people who trust us believe it, while people who distrust us don't.
Anyway, so people often misunderstand Dunning and Kruger to have found that the least competent people rated themselves as being the most competent. While that does happen sometimes, that wasn't what they found. However, sufficient levels of overconfidence in your knowledge will totally close you off to new information, as happened to samhw in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28592769, so you totally stop learning, eventually making you the least competent. As I said, though, that usually also happens to humans when they go through puberty! In my case, my overconfidence stunted my learning about all kinds of things for many years and probably still does in areas I haven't noticed yet. And probably never will, since I'm apparently totally failing at actually thinking.
The "simulation of a smarter self" thing can actually work, because often what keeps people trapped is not a lack of intelligence but various kinds of mental formations they use to avoid discomfort. Doesn't have to be a self, or smarter; "what would Jesus do?" is a Christian reminder that a mental simulation of a more morally commendable person can be a useful guide.
I may not be any smarter than you are, and I can't solve differential equations, but at least I can remain less of an asshole, and continue making helpful contributions like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28592961, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28591650, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28467260, or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28466492 instead of sinking this place further into chimpanzee dominance games by launching baseless calumnies at strangers as you're doing.
I mean, I do hold myself above you. But it's not because I think you're even stupider than I am, which would be quite a remarkable feat. It's because you're spending your efforts to try to hurt people and I'm spending my efforts to try to help them.
The first was a hawk. I was going up a thermal on my own. The hawk came into the same thermal and decided it wanted to own it. It flew incredibly fast towards my plane and grabbed it from the latter quarter of the fuselage. This was a strong and fast kevlar/carbon fiber F5B competition class motorized glider, 2.4 meter wingspan.
The hawk could not destroy it but sure did with it as it wished for a few seconds. When it let go I went to full throttle and climbed straight up like a rocket (high power/weight ratio) to get away. After that I landed safely without damage.
The second case was a raven. Similar situation. It went for the tail and ripped it right off. All I could do was watch it crash.
They own the skies.
So you can sometimes hear them inside the house? That sounds possibly-OK in a sparsely populated area. But in more dense areas with lots of deliveries and people walking outside who can hear all the noise, I'm not sure this will scale well.
Houses dampen the sound which animals don’t have the luxury of having. All that noise could be a real problem for them
> Generally can’t hear them inside the house.
Dude, I think they are very loud. I'm in an office nearby a busy street and I can barely hear the traffic (no special insulation, just regular windows).
I have done speleology on things like old mines and had attacks from small birds to big ones like vultures and eagles that make their nest on the mine. I have marks on my helmet from that.
It is very interesting how small birds will pretend to have a broken leg or wing just to divert your attention from the nest.
I also have seen eagles attack friends' macaws in the open space or a group of magpies attacking an enormous eagle.
The animal world is not as peaceful as some people believe.
I get a bag a week delivered within days of roasting, and I've not tasted blind but I'm sure I can tell the difference if I've come back to one from holiday or otherwise let it go 'stale'.
I live in Australia and Korea frequently, and one has independent chains with snobby, nice, hardcore coffee (Aus) the other has a bunch of shitty chains, and Starbucks that serve absolutely mediocre coffee.
Entire family drinks coffee in instant, but most work mates drink coffee with machines and cafes. You either care or you don't, but everyone enjoys lots of coffee. It's really not that surprising, the same thing goes for baked goods and fast food. The smaller the town, the worse the quality, but the more people are happy with what they're getting.
With 460 outlets in Australia and worse coffee than Starbucks they should start pretty soon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Jean%27s_Coffees
Drones that have payload capacity are loud, full stop. This one isn't especially loud as its payload is relatively light.
The comment I believe you're talking about mentions they can be heard from multiple houses away. That isn't quiet by any means.
Thanks for clarifying the noise issue!
Would it help if the drones where less noisy? If the birds don’t get them, the complaint from neighbors will.
https://www.environment.sa.gov.au/goodliving/posts/2017/08/m...
I'm more suprised to see the drone delivery. Didn't realise that had already started.
It will be interesting if the ravens soon determine the drone itself is no threat, but that drones carry food...
Maybe I’ve just become overly sensitive.
They're often confused, but this video is in Canberra so a Raven it is.
I can’t confidently speak further than that, but I’m under the impression the same is true in Sydney.
If taxonomists call them ravens but everyone else calls them crows, I wish the taxonomists would accept the reality that usage defines language, not encyclopædia, and give up on trying to pretend they’re ravens and not crows.
(Australians are generally very selective of their coffee, we like proper Italian style coffee. Melbourne (Aus/Vic) is quite proud that we're the only place where Starbucks went bust, gave up, and left - they tried but I think there's only one Starbucks left in the whole city, thankfully.)
A. Duckduckgo.
It’s a bit annoying I guess.
Robert : Slugs.
Evil : Slugs! HE created slugs! They can't hear. They can't speak. They can't operate machinery. Are we not in the hands of a lunatic?
I have got a coffee delivered before but I usually only do it if I'm working and I can't spare the distraction-risk of walking to a store.