BUT, come on folks, refugees are not your fucking PR opportunity. I can't imagine how insulting it must be to need food, shelter, and a source of income, and some clueless techbro from across the globe sends you a malfunctioning Raspberry Pi grow tent. How disconnected from reality does one have to be to think this is a good idea.
https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/117189568344985600... https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=industrial%20growth%20...
I really can't stand the elite university system. It's not that these schools are bad, just that many others are also good but don't have the brand.
Or are you just saying that low-end growth chambers also exist that don't include "food computer" features?
But this "food computer" is what happens when you think smart people are smart with everything or that they know everything. They aren't and they don't.
"MIT Built a Theranos for plants" is a headline that's true in a lot of levels (further down in the thread)
(Not to mention all the stuff about reputation laundering)
Now, most of it is proprietary, expensive, and the control systems are fairly basic, so there is scope for an open source project, for improvement, for openness and usability.
Unlike Engineering, there is no Board of Engineers to hold you (or your company) to account for lying about the capabilities of your core product or whether its actually working for the vulnerable people used in a company's marketing :c
We know categorically that hand cranks do not work, although I think Thad Starner (also from Media Lab) had already proven that when the project started.
They were trying to make them homogenous, when probably a pair or trio of devices would have worked better and had higher survivability.
I hope someone more sober tries again.
This is exactly the ethos of move fast and break things that will make the right things happen. They shipped to real customers in real environments. They used technology to address problems. They iterated on the design. All just like you're supposed to do for any successful product.
Where they screwed up is claiming to "make the world a better place" before they really did it. They're still in product-market fit phase, not techbros save the world phase.
Or, they wasted fuel, energy, manpower and hopes.
> They used technology to address problems.
Except they didn't, beyond noticing the problem exists.
> They iterated on the design.
Everyone does that.
> All just like you're supposed to do for any successful product.
The first rule for a successful product is, or at least should be, that it does something useful. The second, that it does it economically in context of available alternatives.
"Make the world a better place" is cringe-inducing, but reducing the message slightly is still bullshit marketing. For me, this already ruined any trust I had in the past in MIT ML, TED talks, and countless of startups "saving the world", "improving lives", etc.
(Also, a thing I learned from observation: if you want to improve the world, you probably don't want to take VC money.)
It's absolutely disgusting to make a living for yourself by pretending to help refugees and lying about it.
Using refugees to push your nonfunctinal product is slimey to say the least.