An account of the fire that killed a five-person firefighter crew. Minute by minute of the fire itself, plus the investigation and the trial of the arsonist. 4/5
The unexpected connections between creativity and mess. Lots of examples although as one commentator noticed most of them were from people already masters not beginners. 3/5
A book on how the most famous and successful are often there because of their upbringing, practice or chance events pushed them to the top rather than just raw talent. 4/5
How the latest research that reveals the extent to which behaviors once thought exclusively human are also found in other species. Spoiler: except Culture. 3/5
The author is thrown into the war as a 19 year old officer in command of 4 tanks 5 days after D-Day. Very well written and lots of detail of the good and the bad. 4/5
Lots of examples of how people are wrong about usually crime rates or levels of immigration. Divided into topics with some comments on why and how to fix. 3/5
A how-to on rebooting civilization following a worldwide disaster. The tone is addressed to a present-day person rather than someone from the future which makes it more readable. 4/5
Almost solely devoted to America it devotes sections to major events around the metal including it’s demonetization, government and private price manipulation and speculation including the Hunt Brothers. 3/5
About half the length of the other books in the series and published posthumously. Laura and Almanzo try to make a success farming for 4 years. Things don’t go well. The book is a bit more adult than some of the others 3/5
Interesting how close it is to the 2006 Movie. Also since it is set in ~1951, World War 2 looms large in many places & most characters are veterans. Very good and fairly quick read. 4/5
An account of the failed airborne operation. Mostly a day-by-day & sources including interviews with participants. A little confusing without maps. 4/5
“The definitive history of American policy on nuclear war”. Lots of “War Plans” and “Targeting Policy” with back and forth between service factions. 3/5
“Combines elements of memoir from Johnson with the history and science of attempts to discover life on Mars”. I liked this book a lot, very nicely written and inspiring. 4/5
Each year I do the majority of my Charity donations in early December (just after my birthday) spread over a few days (so as not to get my credit card suspended).
I also blog about it to hopefully inspire others. See: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015
All amounts this year are in $US unless otherwise stated
My main donations was $750 to Givewell (to allocate to projects as they prioritize). Once again I’m happy that Givewell make efficient use of money donated. I decided this year to give a higher proportion of my giving to them than last year.
Software and Internet Infrastructure Projects
€20 to Syncthing which I’ve started to use instead of Dropbox.
A series of short chapters arranged in seasonal sections on Paris, People, the Author’s life and the French Revolutionary Calendar. Plenty of Interest. 3/5
Covering Laura’s short time as a schoolteacher (aged 15!) and her courting with husband-to-be Almanzo. Most action is in the first half of the book though. 3/5
In depth chapters on things the Walkman, Game Boy and Hello Kitty traces Japans rise first in hardware and then in cultural influence. Excellent story 4/5
A conflict-reporter memoir of her life and career. Based mainly in Moscow, Baghdad, and Beirut she especially goes into detail of her missions into Syria during it’s civil war. 3/5
Various incidents with 15 year old Laura now studying to become a school teacher while being courted. The family farm progresses and town grows. 3/5
Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years (1972-1986) by David Hitt and Heather R. Smith
Covering up to and including the Challenger Disaster. Largely quotes from astronauts and people involved. Interesting seeing how missions quickly went to routine. 3/5
A history of the forces that led to the Atlas program from the end of the War to 1954. Covers a wide range of led-up rocket programs, technical advances and political, cold-war and inter-service rivalries. 3/5
A memoir of the author’s life and career from 16 to her mid 20s. Mixture of story, information about meat (including recipes), the butchery trade and meat industry. 3/5
A history of the iPhone and various technologies that went into it. Plus some tours of components and manufacturing. No cooperation from Apple so some big gaps but does okay. 4/5
Lots of examples of where Maths went wrong. From Financial errors and misbuilt bridges to failed game shows. Mix of well-known and some more obscure stories. Well told. 4/5
I’ve been using Keda a little bit at work. Good way to scale on random stuff. At work I’m scaling pods against length of AWS SQS Queues and as a cron. Lots of other options. This talk is a 9 minute intro. A bit hard to read the small font on the screen of this talk.
Outlines some new stuff in scaling in 1.18 and 1.19.
They also have a fork of the Cluster Autoscaler (although some of what it seems to duplicate Amazon Fleets).
Have up to 1000 nodes in some of their clusters. Have to play with address space per nodes, also scale their control plan nodes vertically (control plan autoscaler).
Use Virtical Pod autoscaler especially for things like prometheus that varies by the size of the cluster. Have had problems with it scaling down too fast. They have some of their own custom changes in a fork
Could increase addon manager polltime but then addons would take a while to show up.
But in Minikube not a problem cause minikube knows when new addons added so can run the addon manager directly rather than it polling.
32% reduction in overhead from turning off addon polling
Also reduced coredns number to one.
pprof – go tool
kube-apiserver pprof data
Spending lots of times dealing with incoming requests
Lots of requests from kube-controller-manager and kube-scheduler around leader-election
But Minikube is only running one of each. No need to elect a leader!
Flag to turn both off –leader-elect=false
18% reduction from reducing coredns to 1 and turning leader election off.
Back to looking at etcd overhead with pprof
writeFrameAsync in http calls
Theory could increase –proxy-refresh-interval from 30s up to 120s. Good value at 70s but unsure what behavior was. Asked and didn’t appear to be a big problem.
The author was a senior manager in the booster team who cooperated more fully with the investigation than NASA or his company’s bosses would have preferred. Mostly accounts of meetings, hearings & coverups with plenty of technical details. 3/5
A quick tour though the rise of various financial concepts like insurance, bonds, stock markets, bubbles, etc. Nice quick intro and some well told stories. 4/5
An authorized book from the Queen’s dresser. Some interesting stories. Behind-the-scenes on typical days and regular events Okay even without photos. 3/5
A writer takes up competitive sailing after a gap of 15 years, training on winter ponds in prep for the Nationals. A nice read. 3/5
Spitfire Pilot by Flight-Lieutentant David M. Crook, DFC
An account of the Author’s experiences as a pilot during the Battle of Britain. Covering air-combat, missions, loss of friends/colleagues and off-duty life. 4/5
A Chapter on each species. Usually information about incidents they were involved in (see “Tigers”) or the growth, decline, comeback of their population & habit. 3/5
The family move into their store building in town for the winter. Blizzard after blizzard sweeps through the town over the next few months and starvation or freezing threatens. 3/5
I got this email from Linkedin this morning. It is telling me that they are going to change my location from “Auckland, New Zealand” to “Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand“.
Email from Linkedin on 30 August 2020
Since “Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand” sounds stupid to New Zealanders (Auckland is pretty much a big city with a single job market and is not a state or similar) I clicked on the link and opened the application to stick with what I currently have
Except the problem is that the pulldown doesn’t offer many any other locations
The only way to change the location is to click “use Current Location” and then allow Linkedin to access my device’s location.
By default, the location on your profile will be suggested based on the postal code you provided in the past, either when you set up your profile or last edited your location. However, you can manually update the location on your LinkedIn profile to display a different location.
but it appears the manual method is disabled. I am guessing they have a fixed list of locations in my postcode and this can’t be changed.
So it appears that my options are to accept Linkedin’s crappy name for my location (Other NZers have posted problems with their location naming) or to allow Linkedin to spy on my location and it’ll probably still assign the same dumb name.
The basically appears to be a way for Linkedin to push user to enable location tracking. While at the same time they get to force their own ideas on how New Zealand locations work on users.
At the start of 2011 Uber was in one city (San Francisco). Just 3 years later it was in hundreds of cities worldwide including Auckland and Wellington. Dockless Electric Scooters took only a year from their first launch to reach New Zealand. In both cases the quick rollout in cities left the public, competitors and regulators scrambling to adapt.
Delivery Robots could be the next major wave to rollout worldwide and disrupt existing industries. Like driverless cars these are being worked on by several companies but unlike driverless cars they are delivering real packages for real users in several cities already.
Note: I plan to cover other aspects of Sidewalk Delivery Robots including their impact of society in a followup article.
What are Delivery Robots?
Delivery Robots are driverless vehicles/drones that cover the last mile. They are loaded with a cargo and then will go to a final destination where they are unloaded by the customer.
Indoor Robots are designed to operate within a building. An example of these is The Keenon Peanut.These deliver items to guests in hotels or restaurants . They allow delivery companies to leave food and other items with the robot at the entrance/lobby of a building rather than going all the way to a customer’s room or apartment.
The next size up are sidewalk delivery robots which I’ll be concentrating on in the article. Best known of these is Starship Technologies but there is also Kiwi and Amazon Scout. These are designed to drive at slow speeds on the footpaths rather than mix with cars and other vehicles on the road. They cross roads at standard crossings.
KiwiBotStarship Delivery RobotAmazon Scout
Finally some companies are rolling out Car sized Delivery Robots designed to drive on roads and mix with normal vehicles. The REV-1 from Reflection AI is at the smaller end with company videos showing it using both car and bike lanes. Larger is the Small-Car sized Nuro.
REV-1Nuro
Sidewalk Delivery Robots
I’ll concentrate most on Sidewalk Delivery Robots in this article because I believe they are the most mature and likeliest to have an effect on society in the short term (next 2-10 years).
In-building bots are a fairly niche product that most people won’t interact with regularly.
Flying Drones are close to working but it it seems to be some time before they can function safely in a built-up environment and autonomously. Cargo capacity is currently limited in most models and larger units will bring new problems.
Car (or motorbike) sized bots have the same problems as driverless cars. They have to drive fast and be fully autonomous in all sorts of road conditions. No time to ask for human help, a vehicle on the road will at best block traffic or at potentially be involved in an accident. These stringent requirements mean widespread deployment is probably at least 10 years away.
Sidewalk bots are much further along in their evolution and they have simpler problems to solve.
A small vehicle that can carry a takeaway or small grocery order is buildable using today’s technology and not too expensive.
Footpaths exist most places they need to go.
Walking pace ( up to 6km/h ) is fast enough to be good enough even for hot food.
Ubiquitous wireless connectivity enables the robots to be controlled remotely if they cannot handle a situation automatically.
Everything unfolds slower on the sidewalk. If a sidewalk bot encounters a problem it can just slow to a stop and wait for remote help. If that process takes 20 seconds then it is usually no problem.
Starship Technologies
Starship are the best known vendor and most advanced vendor in the sector. They launched in 2015 and have a good publicity team.
The push into college campuses was unluckily timed with many being closed in 2020 due to Covid-19. Starship has increased delivery areas outside of campus in some places to try and compensate. It has also seen a doubling of demand in Milton Keynes. However the company has laid of some workers in March 2020.
Kiwibot
Kiwibot
Kiwibot is one of the few other companies that has gone beyond the prototype stage to servicing actual customers. It is some way behind Starship with the robots being less autonomous and needing more onsite helpers.
Based in Columbia with a major deployment in Berkley, California around the UCB campus area
Robots cost $US 3,500 each
Smaller than Starship with just 1 cubic foot of capacity. Range and speed reportedly lower
Guided by remote control using way-points by operators in Medellín, Colombia. Each operator can control up to 3 bots.
In July 2020 announced rollouts in Atlanta, Georgia and Franklin, Tennessee, but still “initially be accompanied by an Amazon Scout Ambassador”.
Other Companies
There are several other companies also working on Sidewalk Delivery Robots. The most advanced are Restaurant Delivery Company Postmates (now owned by Uber) has their own robot called Serve which is in early testing. Video of it on the street.
Several other companies have also announced projects. None appear to be near rolling out to live customers though.
Business Model and Markets
At present Starship and Kiwi are mainly targeting the restaurant deliver market against established players such as Uber Eats. Reasons for going for this market include
Established market, not something new
Short distances and small cargo
Customers unload produce quickly product so no waiting around
Charges by existing players quite high. Ballpark costs of $5 to the customer (plus a tip in some countries) and the restaurant also being charged 30% of the bill
Even with the high charges drivers end up making only around minimum wage.
The current business model is only just working. While customers find it convenient and the delivery cost reasonable, restaurants and drivers are struggling to make money.
Starship and Amazon are also targeting the general delivery market. This requires higher capacity and also customers may not be home when the vehicle arrives. However it may be the case that if vehicles are cheap enough they could just wait till the customer gets home.
Still more to cover
This article as just a quick introduction of the Sidewalk Delivery Robots out there. I hope to do a later post covering more including what the technology will mean for the delivery industry and for other sidewalk users as well as society in general.
