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Comment by throwawawathrow | Hacker News Reader

There's a tweet from some prominent agriculture researcher pointing out that the fabled Food Computer is in fact a rehash of agricultural techniques used circa 2000. Forgot her name but the remark struck me.

There should be a periodic reminder for tech-minded people to reread Ecclesiastes 1:9 every once in a while.

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You're thinking of Dr. Sarah Taber, an ag tech and food safety consultant with lots of past exposure to startups as well. The relevant twitter thread: https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/117189565787294105...

This is... not the clever revelation that she thinks it is. She worked with "room sized versions of thse back in 2001"? Well yes of course. I looked through all the documentation, etc back when this story broke and the whole original purpose of the Personal Food Computer project was to take those big room-sized setups and shrink them down to small, standardized, well-documented boxes that could be racked up and used to carry out a bunch of experimental runs in parallel quickly and cheaply. The whole damn point of the thing was that it was like those only smaller and easier to replicate. (And a few people did replicate them and grow plants in them.) I presume that was where the name came from; it was meant to be the PC to the metaphorical mainframes of the existing setups.

Part of Taber's point was that it's harder to scale up than down. This is solved technology, and their failure to make miniaturized versions work at all is a further indictment of their project as a harvester of investor funding rather than an agricultural game-changer.

Sounds pretty much like the Theranos pitch?

Her point is that this tech was outdated in 2001. Her point is that the people funding and supporting this research were mislead across multiple ways:

* misled about state of the existing tech

* outrageous and unsubstantiated claims of its performance

* literally faking results in front of investors and stakeholders

Further info Taber links to this account[1] from Babak Babakinejad, an MIT Media lab research scientist who describes an environment of research based on clear fabrication, and one in which the lies extended to the director colluding with MIT Health and Safety to actively mislead Environmental Protection Drinking Water Program officials about safety checks.

> What horrified me the most was that Mr Harper, as director and operator of the permit, actively worked with senior staff at MIT Health & Safety to mislead the Environmental Protection Drinking Water Program officials about his team’s activities.

The behaviour described in these threads demonstrates repeated, rampant, widespread violations of R&D integrity, without which MIT loses its capability to perform research and development at all.

It is not dramatic to say that if fabrications are allowed to to be called research, and a conspiracy of lies can dismantle safety checks, the whole lab is in dire jeopardy.

[1] https://twitter.com/flypolitics/status/1175099839236886528

Some small blame has to be on the people funding this, doesn’t sound like an elaborate fraud but a seeming utter lack of due diligence.

There's a small industry already making plant growth chambers.[1] There are little desktop ones, refrigerator sized ones, and bigger ones. You can get LED lighting, temperature, humidity, airflow, water, and C02 control, networked computer interfaces, and data collection software. Basic tool in ag R&D. They look a lot like the "food computer", but with better environmental controls and insulation.

Not usually used for production; once the desired conditions have been figured out, the production system can be simpler.

[1] http://www.conviron.com/

It, ah, looks like Conviron's smallest unit is still a little larger than a typical full-height fridge - and that one's really new, having only been announced in April this year. (Reverse osmosis system not included.) Doesn't look as well insulated as your typical fridge though. All the other ones are even bigger. They're not really comparable - or doing the same thing, given that the PFC was hydroponics-based.

Thanks for sharing this thread.

(Fwiw: I got curious about openag’s efforts/papers last week and made a comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20937105 )

For those of us less well-versed in the Bible:

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”

"All Of This Has Happened Before And All This Will Happen Again"

- related by the Lords of Kobol ?

Not to be confused with:

   PROPHECY DIVISION.

   PERFORM LoopBody VARYING Day

       DISPLAY "Same shit"

       MOVE Cow TO CowsHome(Ncows)

       ADD 1 TO NCows

     END-PERFORM.

  UNTIL AllCowsCameHome USING CowsHome

-- Lords of Cobol

The word is about, there's something evolving,
whatever may come, the world keeps revolving...
They say the next big thing is here,
that the revolution's near,
But to me it seems quite clear

thats it's all just a little bit of history repeating.

- The Propellerheads, History Repeating

Sure, and self-driving cars are just horses all over again right? And ancient Egyptians were already using tablets.

Self-driving cars aren't real. And ancient Egyptians were using tablets, I don't know if you chose this word on purpose.

When Ancient Egyptian tablets had been carved, the Babylons/Hitites couldn't remotely wipe them.

https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/117189565787294105...

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