We are in the South Pacific with our sailboat, and are using Meshtastic every day to talk between ourselves and with various buddy boats. The boat has a solar-powered repeater (CLIENT_BASE) on the mast that increases communications range significantly.
This all works great with no local SIM cards or other subscriptions or infrastructure needed.
We plan to run experiments with Reticulum when we stop for the cyclone season. Reticulum would open a lot more possibilities with both LoRa and internet-based comms. The Columba app seems to do a lot to bridge the usability gap, but work will need to be done to integrate Reticulum with our boat systems the way we have with Meshtastic (alerting, telemetry, digital switching control).
A few boats, yes. But it is still a "new thing". Before leaving Panama I ordered a stack of cheap Heltec V3 Meshtastic boards so we can give some to our buddy boats
The salaries are indeed lower, but you get so much more for the money. Better healthcare, better food, livable cities. Lots of major cost items like a car (or three!) are things you can simply skip.
> a person working with a bunch of agents is a lot more productive than just a person
[citation needed]
I try LLMs for something every couple of months, and I have yet to see them produce anything actually correct. Calling non-existing library methods, confabulations, etc.
But sure, they produce a lot of stuff in a short while. The utility of any of that another question.
> I try LLMs for something every couple of months, and I have yet to see them produce anything actually correct. Calling non-existing library methods, confabulations, etc.
That's too pessimistic, the productivity gains are real and substantial.
OTOH, the hype train is out of control. It is nowhere near perfect and requires a lot of handholding and guardrails to avoid going sideways.
You need to adopt it to stay relevant, but don't fall for the excessive hype. At the end of the day the limitations are significant.
I ask in honesty, have you used LLMs? Seems to me the productivity gains are obvious.
As for my source, it is my experience at work for both myself, and my direct reports, and my peer teams.
Tiny example: a certain recurring task we need to do to help other teams which requires somewhat tedious analysis but rarely a lot of high level thinking, plus a bit of decision making. A year ago I'd do maybe 2-3 per day because each one took about 30 minutes so I had to find slices of uninterrupted time between other work to complete them.
Just tonight as I was wrapping up the day I did 19 of these in an hour while also catching up on email. I let the bots do all the research in parallel, as each one completed the research I'd either tell it "ok, do it", or if it was asking me for a decision I'd decide and tell it how to proceed.
I count myself as an AI skeptic, in the sense that the hype is way above reality. But that doesn't mean there isn't a huge amount of real gains.
Now, I think the author would consider it "solutionism", but the other day I spent a bunch of time browsing Reticulum's NomadNet sites (using the Columba mobile app).
And while aesthetically it was more early 90s than 1999, it filled me not only with nostalgia, but also with some optimism for the future of the Internet. Something I haven't felt in a while...
Somebody gave him a synopsis of Moon is a Hard Mistress that went something like "AI organises a libertarian polygamous utopia on moon after seceding from earth using mass driver as the threat"
It is kind of funny how most of them scapegoat that Dye guy (who was poached by Meta). As if a single person was responsible for all that bad design, and it isn't a failure of the whole organisation.
This thread is going to be very contextual. I'm currently sailing on a small sailboat, and hence the items will be quite different than what would be useful ashore:
* Wacaco Nanopresso - manual espresso pump. Great coffee anywhere off-the-grid. We also have their grinder but that's not listed as it is above the $100 threshold
* Klean Kanteen insulated water bottle - fill up from watermaker
water, stays nice and cool
* Seeed T1000-e: waterproof Meshtastic radio that allows me to communicate with our boat and crew also when out of cell coverage
* Shelly 1: WiFi/Thread relay that makes it easy to automate navigation lights and other circuits
* Ruuvi Tag: waterproof battery-powered Bluetooth temperature/humidity/pressure sensor. Battery lasts arpund two years. We have a few of these around the boat, including one in the fridge
I should get one of those Ruuvi Tag...I use a similar cheap Xiaomi sensor currently but the battery doesn't last anywhere as long (probably because it has an LCD screen and isn't made to broadcast via BLE continuously).
This all works great with no local SIM cards or other subscriptions or infrastructure needed.
We plan to run experiments with Reticulum when we stop for the cyclone season. Reticulum would open a lot more possibilities with both LoRa and internet-based comms. The Columba app seems to do a lot to bridge the usability gap, but work will need to be done to integrate Reticulum with our boat systems the way we have with Meshtastic (alerting, telemetry, digital switching control).
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