The thing is, you can now find good all year grown tomatoes in shops, just not in Croatian shops unfortunately. (speaking as a Croatian living in Denmark)
In Denmark, even Lidl now has premium tomatoes that have good taste and smell. They are "pricy", so they are on average x3 the default tasteless, unripe ones.
Considering they are properly ripe, part of the price is certainly just to cover much greater waste due to them going bad or getting bruised.
Can anyone knowledgeable comment on if farming insects, like grasshoppers that are apparently very efficient in turning feed to protein, will become a viable alternative for salmon and tuna farms?
Insects are efficient, but not significantly more efficient than chicken.
Of the currently known methods for producing proteins, the one that has the potential to be significantly more efficient than raising chicken or insects is the culture of genetically-modified strains of the fungus Trichoderma, which produce either ovalbumin (the main protein of egg white) or beta-lactoglobulin (the main protein of whey).
These egg-white proteins or whey proteins are identical to those of chicken eggs or cow milk and they have an excellent amino acid profile.
They could easily satisfy all the protein needs of a human. Such proteins are water-soluble powders, looking the same as the whey protein concentrates that can be bought now.
Used alone, they would be bland, but they can be an essential ingredient for cooking various kinds of tasty food, from savory dishes based on various vegetables to sweet creams, e.g. with cocoa or vanilla.
I am currently using whey protein concentrate for cooking and I would like very much if a fungus-produced alternative would become available at a decent price. I prefer very much such a protein powder, which can be used to enhance both the taste and the nutritional value of any food, instead of fake meat.
Yes, this is being seriously investigated. It was already approved for commercial use by the EU in 2017. Specifically the industry is looking at places where there is both waste biomass and low-grade waste heat available nearby, and close proximity to fish farms, in order to produce fish feed from farmed insects.
AFAIK the black soldier fly (BSF) larvae and the yellow mealworm are the two species which are in focus. For BSF larvae I believe they have some extremely convenient biological urge to migrate once they have reached maximum size, so it's possible to set up systems where they "collect themselves" at the optimum size for processing into meal.
Insects aren't any more efficient than chickens though, especially American chicken. Some insects, for example, mealworms can be more efficient than chickens on certain diets, but I think the complications, i.e. that they're so small and thus harder to deal with mean that it's not going to be worth it.
But I don't want to characterise myself as knowledgeable on this topic, so this isn't the answer you and instead something which you can hope will provoke somebody to give you the real answer.
Yes there are large farmers in Norway that are using black soldier fly protein meal and its being produced in large scale in e.g. NL and France. But so far only a fraction of the feed has been replaced due to cost and availability of the meal. Consumers typically think insects are icky and would rather not have their food eating insects even if its their natural diet. There are also great progress on terrestrial epa and dha omega-3 in plant oils but its gmo so again people dont want it
There is a boom in this field in recent years, specifically for laser texturing using femtosecond lasers. What were 10 years back laboratory lasers are now being put on standard CNC machine gantrys.
Unfortunately, what I see lacking in high end laser CNC machine market is software and no separation between CAM programming and execution that exists for milling machines. There is no equivalent to G-code that can be generated on w/e software and then run on different machine. There are cases where this is impossible as due to the way it's done, it would quickly overload even large RAM memory capacities.
I'm working in the laser marking/engraving field, we actually discussed G-code internally but in the end decided against it as it was not suitable for our product. (Too many laser parameter and "dynamic" stuff like QR codes)
I don't think there is a problem per-se, it's just that G-code tends to be rather static so if you're doing things like nesting and engraving of variable text going through and extra G-code conversion step can get a bit tedious.
I'm old school enough that I can program G-codes by hand (and by heart), compared to normal programming it is super simple, you can pick it up in an afternoon. But for complex graphical work the automatic conversion to G-code from a drawing tool is a real time saver. CAD/CAM software tends to export in some 2D format for laser cutting, usually either a 2D DXF file or SVG. You then convert on the fly to G-code in the laser driver software.
I grew up with a father who is/was an owner and director of a company that produces manufacturing printing rollers (gravure printing), mostly for packaging industry. He always competed against others on quality and flexibility as he couldn't on size, so having the best kit was important. The technology, even though the product is a discardable piece of packaging, is on NASA/CPU manufacturing level.
Even though, I myself was never involved directly in it, nor am I today, I know from him there were several trends:
1) Printing companies in Europe and elsewhere got bigger. What use to be 10 printing companies, now it's 1.
2) Equipment manufacturers for that industry got bigger. What use to be 4,5 equipment manufacturers in EU/USA, now there is one.
3) Lasers. Lasers got to a level where they can compete and surpass mechanical removal on quality and speed. This is true also for industry I'm in.
There is nothing wrong with 2 datums, the issue is that during machining this is not "a part" but an assembly that moves.
There are so many failings from my POV in the manufacturing process and verification of the part, which is summarized nicely by the following quote:
. Furthermore, initial inspections at the start of the production run were supposed to verify that the manufacturing process was creating products that satisfied the “design intent,” but the initial products were checked against the manufacturing drawings, not the design drawings.
I just went over a list of "upcoming RPGs 2024". For my POV, all of them look the same and this is without dismissing the quality of graphics, gameplay possibilities, art ect. It might because I'm a gamer who puts a lot (too much) emphasis on story and how unique it is. I miss games being more "punk", having humor, being serious, being less serious, angering moms without being perverse...
Exactly. That game has raised by expectation on what a game could be in this day and age. This is coming from a huge fan of Fallout I,II, NV, Planescape Torment, old adventure games ect.
The trailer is a deliberate choice of the authors on what content to put in order to sell the game and present "the idea of the game". Not only that, but a lot of trailers are in form of a presentation with audio or text (more common) by the authors, where they deliberately emphasize what they think are strong points of the game. So in fact trailers, even very short ones, can tell a lot more than it's immediately obvious.
Could a 1m30 trailer of your favorite book be made in a way that conveyed that it's well written? There's style and world building, small aspects of which can be conveyed in small formats, but there's drama composition and significant aspects of style and world that cannot be compressed into a format so small. I think almost all high capital "artistic" projects are conservative in their design, so as to be a safe investment, which basically means having a trailer that will sell. The question being asked, I think, is "if a given element of the production can't make it into the trailer, does it even have a return on investment?".
I think we strayed away from my original comment and criticism, which was more aimed at lack of uniqueness of the games on the list, as judged from the trailers, than the quality. Additionally I'd like to point out that I read descriptions of every game on the list besides watching a trailer.
Of course, here I'm opening myself for a valid criticism which might be constructed as "even if a game uses elements of previously told stories and settings, it might do a different spin or do it on a such a new level of excellence (story wise) that it becomes incomparable with previous attempts".
You could also point out that trailer can be manipulated in such a way by a talented director, that would make the game appear new and unique.
Try a combination of taking screenshots and GPT4 image input. You would be surprised how good it is in analyzing part even without prompting. This is one of the things I'm investigating if it makes sense putting effort in. Just basic company process/rules following (for our own internal products).
Anything else, we are talking about computational design + AI for interpretability.
I haven't checked all the examples in the link posted, but I know AutodeskAI Lab has some seriously impressive papers out. (code too)
Questions to the author whom I see is reading the comments:
- What is the plastic used for the part (ABS, PC)?
- What was the material for core/cavity (tool steel)?
- What was the lowest tolerance on the part?
- Were US/EU manufacturers considered at all?
