• 202 Posts
  • 3.55K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 7th, 2023
  • just_another_person@lemmy.worldtoFuturology@futurology.today•A new vertical farm, with a footprint of less than an acre, can produce 1.8 million kg of fruit annually.English
    6·
    7 hours ago

    Could be, but isn’t, which is where some regulations probably need to come in. I’m familiar with the systems Plenty uses, and it’s all automated.

    Prime > start > feed > dump once dead

    I’ve not seen another of these large scale startups doing anything different as of yet, which does make sense cost-wise. Any crop you grow won’t ever use an exact amount of nutrients at cycle end with a completely neutral byproduct, and trying to reuse what is left would require a lot of expensive lab efforts which they don’t care to invest in.

    Example: say you start with a 9N-12P-34K solution, and after a month it degrades to 0-0-12. You can’t just refill the nutrients with that same mixture you started with, or you’ll damage or risk killing the crop with too much Potassium. You’d need to analyze the loop nutrients to know what level you’re at for each nutrient, and adjust to get the mixture right to recharge properly. Currently all these systems just dump and recharge because it’s cheap (for now) and easy, but these high concentrations of the various components just end up saturating an area the same as farm runoff. Even if you filter, that filtered medium needs to go somewhere.

    There are fancier methods of nutrient filtration extraction and recapture just starting to become more feasible, and we should be looking at making sure these are being used for these large operations.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.worldtoFuturology@futurology.today•A new vertical farm, with a footprint of less than an acre, can produce 1.8 million kg of fruit annually.English
    19·
    9 hours ago

    I really do want to like the idea of vertical farms, and hydroponics in general as there are lots of benefits versus wild growing, but whenever I see some article claiming sustainability or a reduction in climate impact, it’s total bullshit.

    All of these systems require massive amounts of nutrients to keep the plants alive and producing, and that essentially means all kinds of mining. The byproducts of these facilities are also toxic, and there is no regulation about how they have to manage that…yet. Essentially they are just taking the farm runoff problem and moving it from rural areas where it’s already bad, and transplanting it to denser urban areas.

    If they could find better ways to streamline the acquisition of the fertilizer components needed for these facilities, and also the treatment or or disposal of the byproduct, these would be a much better idea.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.worldtoFuturology@futurology.today•Startup Says It Can Make a 100x Faster CPU Flow Computing aims to boost central processing units with their ‘parallel processing units’English
    7·
    9 hours ago

    So these people have been out here since earlier this year with this idea, and I think they raised a bit of money. There are a few problems that make me immediately hesitant to believe this is useful at all though:

    1. they have been incredibly vague about they intend this to work
    2. they’ve said they’ve shipped this around already, and are still looking for a partner to test with
    3. whatever the solution actually, it’s not a drop in
    4. it would not only require a custom compiler, but a rewrite of any existing software
    5. it’s process-oriented and can’t be patented (at least in the states), so any chip maker could just take the idea and do their own implementation

    Best possible case is that it works, and their compiler and tooling can help with simplified refactoring of code, making that part the actual product that makes them a useful company.

    Worst case is it’s a total BS idea. Hesitant to say anything like that until we hear what the downsides are from a tested proof of concept

    Whatever the outcome, it just isn’t that big of a draw when you’re thinking about very specific workloads that can function in this type of parallelism. As they’ve already mentioned, they’ve mocked this on an FPGA, so why wouldn’t devs just build and run this specific work on something like AMD’s FPGA chips in a DC setting and get even 75% of the way there?

  • just_another_person@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•Network SwitchEnglish
    17·
    2 days ago

    Have run hundreds of these and never had an issue. Never even had to do an RMA out of the box.

    If you’re seeing packet loss on switches, you may need to pay attention to what “port speed” and total “switch fabric” speeds are these days. You can have a 10 port 1Gb switch, but the total fabric only does 6Gb.