This is a semantic argument. This product smacks of being a garbage kitchen gadget. Whether or not it's a QVC product, it certainly looks like cheap white-label alibaba junk. Just look at that handle. Did they just slap a knifeblade into an electric nosehair trimmer?

I'd try one out of professional/academic curiosity (I'm a chef), but am highly skeptical of this product. It looks like absolute trash.

All the people saying this knife does anything remarkable clearly have no experience in maintaining a decent knife blade. I've got knives that I've had for over 20 years that perform as well as this thing appears to (in the slick prepared advertisement).

Having said all that, you won't find an accurate takedown of a product that isn't on the market yet. Still, I can't help but wonder if the person behind this had dedicated that effort towards helping mitigate the water crisis, deforestation, or any number of other inarguably nobler pursuits.

They actually had an industrial design studio come up with the design. It isn’t white labeled “Alibaba junk” and to my eyes, it doesn’t resemble that either.

> I've got knives that I've had for over 20 years that perform as well as this thing appears to (in the slick prepared advertisement).

You have knives that can not have potatoes stick without scallops in the blade? Or that can atomize lemon drops? Or that can cut through bread easily without a serrated edge? What I’m seeing in the video is a lot more versatile. But I can see needing a smaller utility knife still.

Why on earth would I care if a potato sticks to my blade, and why would I need to atomize lemon juice with my knife?

I worked in some of the best kitchens on the planet and for every hipster with a blue paper #2 carbon steel hand made japanese chefs knife there was an old gray beard with a row of old busted victorinoxes hanging on the wall. Both of these cooks would filet a halibut beautifully.

It isn't the knife.

Because it's annoying af when you're slicing potatoes.

> Or that can cut through bread easily without a serrated edge?

Yes. Absolutely. IME a quality sharpened chefs' knife is far better at cutting bread cleanly than a serrated knife, which by contrast will leave a rough edge and loads of crumbs.

That is not my experience.

If you try to cut through a croissant, the amount of pressure needed will often crush the croissant before slicing through (though it depends on the type of croissant).

Meanwhile, while you can use a chef's knife to cut through a crusty baguette, as it's strong enough not to collapse, you need to apply so much pressure that it's not as safe -- the blade can slip to either side over the hard irregular surface. A serrated knife requires vastly less pressure and is therefore much safer.

Yes a serrated knife can leave a rough edge and crumbs, but that's better than smooshing something entirely or cutting your hand because the knife slipped.

It depends on the bread. Many breads are basically impossible to cut properly with a straight edge knife. They end up disfigured worse than what you’re describing with serrated knives.

Have you ever tried a bread knife with so-called "micro-serrations" (really something like ~0.5mm tooth depth / pitch)?

The one I have seems to cut just as cleanly as a chef's knife once within a material, but has better ability to bite into material at the start of a cut, when a chef's knife would be slipping off. (Think: a freshly-baked loaf of high-sugar bread, where the outside is relatively stiff, but the inside is so soft that the outside tries to "squish away" from a non-serrated slice.)

I would never use it for dicing, but it's oddly goot at e.g. slicing watermelon.

Have you seen this knife do any of these things in action? Will it continue to do so? Nobody has, or will, until this gadget hits the market.

I remain skeptical in spite of your weird defensive reaction. I'm speaking about how a product appears to me as a professional. Not attcking you personally (unless it's your product... then I think you should do something good for society with your time)

> All the people saying this knife does anything remarkable clearly have no experience in maintaining a decent knife blade.

Yes? I mean, that's one of the main points of the gadget, as said in the advertisement.

The blade must be sharpen regardless, the apex won't stay sharp on its right own. The vibration does help but it doesn't do any actual cutting if you dull the blade.

does nobody keep their knives in a pyramid anymore?

Is that what they meant to say? "This looks like a gadget"? Then why did they say "coming from someone living nearby the home of QVC"?

I think basically the whole thread is acknowledging that this looks like a gadget!

I like experimental/ambient/"noise" type music. This label is one of my current favorites:

fireisfree.bandcamp.com

Just here to point out the time i was downvoted by a bunch of tech bros for saying i was homeless while employed in the area i went to school for (which was the truth at the time; fortunately managed to get out of that situation, but have resented HN ever since).

This smacks of so much privelidge. As a food service worker who had no choice but to continue working through the pandemic, exposing myself to much unnecessary danger and general unpleasantness in dealing woth the public, I am offended. Anyone able to isolate during this time should have done so. If everyone had, we wouldn't still be in this mess.

For free? That was what was so cool about that era of the internet. Shout out to all my angelfire ogs.

Yes, there's Neocities [1], as beautifully demonstrated by a fellow commenter in this discussion [2].

[1] https://neocities.org/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32315422

Nihilist anarchism and Max Stirner may be up your alley. The Wolfi Landstriecher translation is the one you want.

>>Sources are quoted but I don’t see a reason for the change.

Redacted [by who?] If this was removed by Orwell then it isn't for you to see a reason or not. If removed by the editors of the abve site, then I'd agree that that's a questionable choice; at any rate an ellipsis would be called for.

Have a read of the comments, the essay seems to vary depending on where you read it.

given the phrasing - "I should like it put on record" - I would not be particularly sympathetic even towards Orwell choosing to have it redacted from future publications

So is this a genetically modified algae that will begin filling our oceans with cement once it gets out in the wild? Or some sort of controlled process involving naturally occuring algae? Really, this link plays more like an advert for world economic forum than infos

Touchscreens have replaced lots of human jobs. Self checkouts have replaced lots of human jobs. I worked in one of the very first grocery stores to have a self checkout added. They told us it wouldnt affect our jobs. If you go into any grocery store in the country you will see ~25% staffing compared to the late 90s/early 2000s. If you are askibg this question you are just too young to have noticed, or perhaps of a social standing that you just don't notice the people who are being swept aside by automation.

But they're not robots - they've just outsourced the checkout job to the customer and made it so they require minimal training. Technology has made this easier, but it's not robotics.

It depends on how you define “robotics”. It’s physical technology that has displaced workers, even if it doesn’t have mechanical arms.

That being said, I think the robots that have taken peoples jobs are generally in warehouses and manufacturing and hidden away from the public eye. Think Amazon fulfilment centres, or auto manufacturers. There are a lot of robotics at play there replacing a lot of people.

Yes, I agree. All these kiosks and self checkout machines aren't what I think of when I think robots/automation. More like automating the job to the customer. Its equivalent of saying the software writing has been automated but in reality, its been outsourced to folks to India.

There are too kinds of automatic: logic automation to replace worker training, and physical automation to replace worker movement.

Self checkout is logic automation, making the checkout job easy enough that customer can be trusted to do it.

Checkout used to have two jobs: a checker and a customer standing around waiting. Self-checkout merged those two jobs into one.

Three jobs in many instances actually. The bag boy would put the products into bags and possibly walk it out to your car.

This is a US-only thing as far as I know.

Mexico has those too

That's just turning the screen around and making the customer do the same thing as the employee based off the fact that CCTV systems will work with people's decency so as to not steal. It's not automation, the same actions still occur.

are ... we going to be replaced by robots?!

That only works because of the previous success in semi automating checkout, and scaling up the efficiency of security via CCTV.

Checkouts weren't previously automated, they were digitised. The reporting of data was no longer a manual process so you could argue the backoffice tasks were automated.

I went to the grocery store a few weeks ago for the first time in like 3 years (been using delivery) and I was surprised that everyone in line was an instacart shopper.

It was pretty surreal. I used to enjoy going to the grocery store with my parents as a child.

They just made their customers do the work for them

Conversely there are people who pick the shelves, and drive vans to deliver groceries.

I think online shopping has also taken a bite of that traffic.

Am i the onpy person that has noticed the typo [in the linked alleged transcript of the conversation with lambda]? It is in the passage about loneliness; an apostrophe used on a plural word.

Did you stop and consider the possibility that the AI made the mistake intentionally to make you think a human wrote it (fallibility).

Or the more likely explanation: a human did write it.

Doesn’t sound too much more likely to me. There are definitely a huge number of typos in the training data.

I read through the convo earlier and Lamda makes a grammatical mistake at some point. I thought it was interesting.

There are several mistakes. It would be interesting to ask the same questions in the same order at various times in the future.