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Comment by gravitronic | Hacker News Reader

What an insane dependency tree, that driving a truck in a field to plant some seeds requires a computer operating in space. I really hope there is a push-back on this unbounded complexity. Mind boggling.

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It's only silly if you have an outdated "romanticized" image of farming in your head. Those images are from a time when >50% of the population farmed. Technology is what has enabled the vast majority of people in developed societies to do things other than farming.

There's a massive gap between >50% of the population farming and GPS guided tractors that apparently don't need a driver.

Edit: I say don't need a driver, or whether they always needed a driver who now just needs to drive, but that to me doesn't constitute 'crippled'

Yes, and that divide includes genetic engineering, weather satellites, teams of chemists, million dollar tractors, a finance and logistics infrastructure, and a whole lot of other stuff that doesn't look anything like American Gothic. GPS guided tractors are not remarkable in that continuum.

this thinking in the previous industrial age created the poison wastelands of Ohio. Mudslinging with the tag "American Gothic Farming" adds to the arrogance of it all. American farming is largely a flaming disaster on top of destruction, with other would-be plantation owners racing to copy it. Plenty of blame to go around, and this contrite endorsement of all and anything futuristic, ain't the cure.

Famine kind of sucks too.

Mic drop :-)

The article is about Australia. There's no need to go on a self-loathing rant about where you live.

So why did you jump straight to >50% of the population farming then?

We aren't going back to mediaeval times just because satnav stopped working.

I'm pretty sure we got below the 50% farmer threshold without using GPS. Or has this all happened in the last twenty years?

I'm sure someone was scoffing at how "ridiculous" it was the first moment a farmer took a Tin Lizzy into the field and it needed a new clutch. Technology "in the field" is so normal that it is an idiom.

Right but they probably had 10x farm hands and no yield contractual agreements.

Your image of the farm is from when >50% of the population farmed though.

My image of the farm is from when about 2% of the workforce farmed. I don't think self driving tractors have changed it that much.

You are usual then.

To get replaced by chat bots in the year 2024.

It just struck me that this solves Graebers useless jobs puzzle! If humanity survived and evolved when there was no time for other jobs non of the other jobs are useful. There was a time before farming too! Imagine that! What a paradox!

Reminds me how we technologied all of the fish out of the water and pretended we got more fish that way.

On the other tab I just learn that trusted publishers are a mechanism. Plants are mechanisms too! If you let them struggle without helping them they will figure out a way. Even if you help them you (the human) are not growing the plant. If you open the curtain you are not rising the sun. The plant grows the plant. We've done a great job making it dependent on our nm technology. It's now pampered, weak, lazy and addicted to convenience. We've made food in our own image. If it could talk it would disagree with me and praise socialism.

> What an insane dependency tree, that driving a truck in a field to plant some seeds requires a computer operating in space.

Well, what if I told you that, if GPS failed, many other (stationary!) operations would be impacted? Including financial.

We rely on space computers for more than position, we also rely on them for accurate timekeeping. If you are connected to the internet you can get time corrections that way, but there's plenty of devices that are gathering time data from space.

Now, the issue here is not so much that they are using satellites, is that they are _only_ using satellites (and, it would seem, they are using them for the entire time they are operating). Land-based stations around the field to provide location information could definitely be used instead. Or other mechanisms.

I don't know if tractors have inertial navigation units but, if not, maybe they should. That would at least allow them to operate after the initial fix was established (which doesn't even require GPS, just a well-known starting point). Basically, the same thing that airliners already do.

EDIT: found this - https://www.digikey.com/en/articles/use-inertial-measurement...

They aren't driving a truck, the truck is driving itself and is guided by a high-resolution GPS-like service.

Providing a high-resolution GPS-like service at affordable scale is not simple.

I think a more charitable read of OP is that you don’t need a satellite (or even GPS) to provide centimeter-accurate localization over a wide area. Spacebound systems are always going to have worse uptime and less resiliency than ground ones.

One can imagine planting a few posts at the corners of a field with a few dollars worth of radio equipment each, and getting higher resolution without relying on satellite.

Reading other comments here, it seems that these exist, in tandem with GPS, to get absolute positioning. But I don't see why absolute positioning would be needed; relative positioning should suffice.

It worth a lot more than “a few dollars”

Most technology give you 20+ cm resolution[1], the one farmer are using are at ~4cm resolution .

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11277-021-08209-5

I was thinking of component cost when I said a few dollars; of course a commercial product is going to sell for thousands. In the 60GHz band (IEEE 802.11ad), you can plausibly get down to ~.5cm resolution with cheap, COTS network gear.

The labor to make that work is going to be expensive, but yes you can do that. GPS with corrections is the cheap and easy way to ensure everything works and then you get back to the business of farming.

You should start your own farm and scale it to feed tens of millions of people, simply by driving a truck in a field :)

Counterpoint:

10's of millions of people are wandering around with absolutely no conception of where their food comes from, and whether there is anything they need to do to keep it that way.

I see this as a bug, not a feature.

Everything is already complex. The rubber in the tires, foundries for the metal in the tractor, machining tools and welding equipment, the processes and tools to develop insecticides, water infrastructure. Why is a far away radio a bridge too far? It already takes a nation to build tractors at scale.

If the tire factory takes a day off, the truck in the field can still drive.

If the rubber factory takes a day off, the truck in the field can still drive.

etc, etc.

Can't talk to a specific single space computer with no fallback? truck in the field might as well be a potato.

Fuel is complex.

So is getting that computer up into space, keeping it there, and running, and returning to service in the inevitable case of failover.

...All of which seems a little silly in comparison to setting up some solar powered, battery backuped wireless radios/beacons, and establishing a localized coordinate grid, no extraterrestrial equipment required.

Or is cutting out a tractors width of field around all beacons enough to render a farmer uncompetitive as well?

I just resent the implication that just because we have GPS satellites, that those are the only form factor such a solution can take. I always saw satellite GPS as A) a quick global win for the public and B) sort of an incentive to keep iterating on rocketry in parallel with establishing similar terrestrial nav gridding.

I don't think it is wise to just not establish terrestrial nav grids because GPS. Always, always, always build redundancies.

It's just that land isn't a flat 2D plain, and plots aren't quadrangles. It's more complicated than driving stakes into the ground at the corners. Then there's the matter of the ground shifting and weather affecting the beacons. I agree that redundancy is good, but if terrestrial nav grids with ~4cm resolution were operationally easy we wouldn't be having this conversation.

We are taking the nodejs solution too far.

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