New Super-Hot Intriguing Technology (S.H.I.T.)
Welcome to NEW S.H.I.T. (Super-Hot Intriguing Technology.) In this periodic feature, I’ll introduce you to a few cool new pieces of technology being discovered or deployed to make the future a little brighter. Stay Bright.
Mill - A Bin for Kitchen Food Waste
Turns out a huge % of landfills are home food waste. That’s bad news because they release methane gas which accelerates climate change.
Composting is good, but there are higher-value uses of that food waste, which is still full of nutrients. The Mill Kitchen bin takes your food waste, then dries and grinds it overnight. Over 2-3 weeks you can put LOTS of waste into it, which it de-stinks and compresses into a valuable, high-nutrient substance called “Food Grounds”
Then you ship food grounds back to Mill, and they’ll use it as an input to creating animal feed. It’s a brilliant way to solve multiple problems at once: reduces landfills, reduces climate impact, and lowers the cost of feeding animals–while de-stinking your trash.
The bin is beautiful too – as you might expect when the founders are the co-founders of Nest.
Cruise - Fully Autonomous Taxi Service
Full self-driving is finally here. Cruise is currently operating robot taxis in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Austin. There are limitations, but truly – they are available to the public now. (Here’s a youtube video with passengers on roads.)
You may think this was a given, or that it was never going to happen. I include this because it’s funny how quietly this happened… no big fanfare. So quietly that people are still shouting about how we should give up because it won’t happen. A recent Techcrunch headline: “It’s time to admit self-driving cars aren’t going to happen.”
Congrats and golf-claps to the regulators rubber-stamping the future!
It’s reasonable to expect that operations will improve, widen, expand, and continue to decrease in cost. Very optimistic about this future of transportation – and not just for Taxis, but what it means for fully-autonomous trucks. Which are going to be an even bigger deal.
@chaseilten sent me a post with more magic from Cruise: “In Austin, we went from zero (no maps, charging facilities, or test vehicles) to fully functional driverless service in ~90 days, MUCH faster than we launched SF."
“Our system is almost entirely ML-based. Adapting to a new city is mostly data collection, mining, and model retraining. It took just a few weeks to collect data to retrain our models. This process is increasingly automated, in some cases requiring no engineer intervention.”
The even EVEN cooler thing about @Cruise is how the entire fleet learns updates based on any individual accident. Over time, this kind of iterative improvement should make autonomous cars unbelievably safe compared to human drivers.
Guess that means the legend John Carmack won this bet.
Rewind - Search anything you saw, said, or heard on your Mac.
Imagine having a perfect memory. Amazing. Terrifying. But… our computer could have one, right? Why can’t you search through anything that has ever crossed our screens or speakers?
Well… that’s exactly what Rewind built. It’s a bananas concept. Reminds me of the Black Mirror episode: “The Entire History Of You.” But way less tragic and haunting. Seriously, Black Mirror, get some chill.
Just started using Rewind myself, so it’s early to feel like it’s a life-changer, but I rest easy knowing that I can search back through every word that has crossed my screen – visually or sound. So I don’t need to record meetings, because the transcripts of them are searchable.
Common uses: refresh on meeting contents, track down an article I closed, never lose info created offline, watch yourself do processes from before that you forgot… very cool. (And yes, this is all stored locally, so, your secrets are safe… whatever they are.)