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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

I have a feeling that a lot of people today, confronted with the problem of designing a bowling alley, would go straight for a video camera, a robotic arm to pick up the pins and put them back in their spots, and machine learning to glue it together.

I wonder how the cost, reliability, and speed of that would compare to the mechanical solutions. There are a couple bowling alley rerack machine horror stories somewhere on r/talesfromtechsupport.

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Today, the focus seems to be on making sure that a product/system is easy to modify, integrate, or tear down completely instead of saying 'we need to build a system that can do x and only ever x really fast and cheap for a long time". We don't build three-decade systems in the tech industry, we build six-month systems.

What's crazy about that is that some of those 6 month systems, which were designed at the time to be a throwaway, just to get by, are still in production 26 years later and causing all kinds of problems.

That's because we predominantly build software, which has the distinct benefit that it can be changed. If ten-pin bowling goes out of fashion in favour of eleven-pin bowling, your three-decade system goes in the landfill. Your six-month gets an OTA update.

>I have a feeling that a lot of people today, confronted with the problem of designing a bowling alley, would go straight for a video camera, a robotic arm to pick up the pins and put them back in their spots, and machine learning to glue it together.

plus stuffing the pins with IoT sensors and WiFi chips, i.e. making "smart pins", "smart ball", ...

I wonder what stuff what is being done today (both kinds - known to public as well as classified) would look amazing in 2060.

I never thought I'd have to worry about bowling alley equipment DDoSing my servers, or having them mine monero

The IoTIMCC: Internet of Things Illegitimately mining crypto currency

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