Archive of posts with tag 'Automation'

Weekend Reading: Robotic Bricklaying, Medici and Thiel, and Airtable, Roblox of the Enterprise

August 13, 2021 • #

🧱 Where Are the Robotic Bricklayers?

Brian Potter wonders why work as taxing and seemingly-mechanically simple as brick masonry is difficult to automate:

Masonry seemed like the perfect candidate for mechanization, but a hundred years of limited success suggests there’s some aspect to it that prevents a machine from easily doing it. This makes it an interesting case study, as it helps define exactly where mechanization becomes difficult - what makes laying a brick so different than, say, hammering a nail, such that the latter is almost completely mechanized and the former is almost completely manual?

Even with the number of problems we’ve solved with machines and AI, something as basic as handling mortar still requires the finesse of human hands, a task which, while actually very hard to learn (it’s why masons are still skilled artisans millennia after its invention), can be taught and repeated on autopilot by masons. It turns out non-Newtonian materials are hard for machines:

There seems to be a few factors at work. One is the fact that a brick or block isn’t simply set down on a solid surface, but is set on top of a thin layer of mortar, which is a mixture of water, sand, and cementitious material. Mortar has sort of complex physical properties - it’s a non-newtonian fluid, and it’s viscosity increases when it’s moved or shaken. This makes it difficult to apply in a purely mechanical, deterministic way (and also probably makes it difficult for masons to explain what they’re doing - watching them place it you can see lots of complex little motions, and the mortar behaving in sort of strange not-quite-liquid but not-quite-solid ways). And since mortar is a jobsite-mixed material, there will be variation in it’s properties from batch to batch.

💶 On Medici and Thiel

Rohit Krishnan makes the case for more Genius Grant-style programs.

📊 Airtable: The $7.7B Roblox of the Enterprise

Will Airtable become the “Metaverse for the Enterprise”? In this detailed analysis, Jan-Erik Asplund dives into the bear and bull cases for what could become of the unicorn spreadsheet successor.

The world Airtable is imagining is a world where knowledge workers no longer have to assess different vendors’ offerings when they want to build a new functionality or experiment with some new type of workflow. Instead, Airtable argues, workers should be able to spin up their own tools using building blocks as simple, but capable of as much complexity, as a set of legos.

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Workflows in Fulcrum

August 25, 2020 • #

Fulcrum’s been the best tool out there for quite a few years for building your own apps and collecting data with mobile forms (we were doing low-code before it was cool). Our product focus for a long time was on making it as simple and as fast as possible to go from ideas to reality to get working on a data collection process. For any sort of work you would’ve previously done with a pen and paper, or a spreadsheet on a tablet, you can rapidly build and deploy a Fulcrum app to your team for things like inspections, audits, and inventory applications.

For the last 8 months or so we’ve been focused on improving what you can do with data after collection. We’re great at speed to build and collect, but had not been focused yet on the rest of a customer workflow. Since the beginning we’ve had an open API (even for SQL, what we call the Query API), code libraries, and other tools. In July we launched our Report Builder, which was a big step in the direction of self-service reporting and process improvement tools

This week we’ve just launched Workflows, which is all about providing users an extensible framework for adding their own business logic of events and actions that need to happen on your data.

If you’re familiar with tools like Zapier or Integromat, you’ll recognize the concept. Workflows is similar in design, but focused on events within the scope of Fulcrum. Here’s how it works:

A workflow listens for an event (a “trigger”) based on data coming through the system. Currently you can trigger on new data created or updated.

When a trigger happens, the relevant record data gets passed to the next step, a “filter” where you can set criteria to funnel it through. Like cases where I want to trigger on new data, but only where a “Status” = Critical.

Any record making it through is passed to an “action”, and at launch we have actions to:

Send an email
Send an SMS message
Send a webhook (man is this one powerful)

We’re excited to see what users build with this initial set of options. There are plans in the works for a lot of interesting things like custom SMTP (for high volume email needs), geofencing, push notifications, and much more.

This is just the beginning of what will become a pillar product. Our Workflow engine will continue to evolve with new actions, filters, and triggers over time as we extend it to be more flexible for designing your business data decision steps and data flows.

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Weekend Reading: Human Leverage, Alan Kay, and Mapping the NBA

May 4, 2019 • #

🏋🏽‍♀️ Finding the Point of Human Leverage

Automation is penetrating every industry, but still heavily reliant on human behavior and feedback to make it effective. In this piece, Benedict Evans talks about identifying the point in a workflow where the optimum point of leverage sits for human interaction:

This means that a lot of the system design is around finding the right points of leverage to apply people to an automated system. Do you capture activity that’s already happening? Google began by using the links that already existed. Do you have to stimulate activity in order to capture the value within it? Facebook had to create behaviors before it could use them. Can you apply your own people to some point of extreme leverage? This is Apple Music’s approach, with manually curated playlists matched automatically to tens of millions of users. Or do you have to pay people to do ‘all’ of it?

🎓 Lunch with Alan Kay: How to Become Educated Enough to Invent the Future

This is a great account of an extended conversation with computer scientist Alan Kay. It’s amazing how certain brains can be on such a higher level than the rest of us.

For the few computer idealists among us, we are so lucky to have the legacy left to us by Vannevar Bush, J.C.R. Licklider, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Perlis, John McCarthy, Edsger Dijkstra, John Backus, Ivan Sutherland, and Alan Kay. And those are just some of the names I personally know – I am now ashamed I don’t know more of our history. It’s hard to imagine now because they were so effective, but so much of our world’s computing prosperity today is due to these people. They imagined the computer as a personal device, a communications device, a device to lift off the burden of tedious mental tabulations. Douglas Engelbart imagined a tool that would aid humanity in dealing with the increasingly-complex problems it faces around the world. We’ve only seem a glimpse of that vision, but we need it now more than ever.

So practically, what does this mean for me? Alan also said at lunch that one problem young people make is “having goals.” It’s too early to have goals that “consume one’s horizons,” because young people don’t even know what they don’t know. I think this kind of epistemic modesty is a great idea. I can probably benefit from shifting the focus from my overly-specific goals to “more meta” goals, such as becoming “educated” in a broader sense than I previously thought was possible. The more perspectives I can acquire, the better I’ll be at not fooling myself, and the more I’ll be able to appreciate the richness of the world.

🏀 Kirk Goldsberry and His NBA Maps

Kirk Goldsberry’s new book Sprawlball looks fascinating, covering his work on basketball analytics and his famous hexbinned shot charts showing how the game has changed in recent years. But most folks that have followed his ESPN career probably don’t know about his background in geography and mapmaking:

At its heart, “SprawlBall” is a book of maps. It’s a geography book.

During his junior year at Penn State, Goldsberry took an introduction to cartography class on little more than a whim. “I remember the census data and this software [Graphic Information Systems] that basically links databases to maps,” he said. It was this perfect balance of art and science, and I devoted the next 15 years of my life to it.”

He switched his major, got a cartography degree and then moved to Washington to make flood maps for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. After a stint working for a software mapping company in Maine, Goldsberry got his master’s and PhD at UC Santa Barbara, focused on the intersection of computer graphics data visualization and cartography.

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Weekend Reading: CAC, Alexander Hamilton, and Flow

November 10, 2018 • #

🛒 What is Customer Acquisition Cost?

This is a great overview of the importance of CAC in a SaaS business.

One of the enjoyable things about SaaS is how much you can modify and optimize what you’re doing by measuring various parts of your process, especially in SMB-focused SaaS. Marketing, early-stage sales, late-stage sales, customer success — it’s like a machine with separate stages you can tweak separately to make incremental improvements.

📜 The Legacy of Alexander Hamilton

On the similarities between Hamilton and Edmund Burke:

“There are several significant points of contact between the two thinkers. Both Burke and Hamilton used historical experience as the standard for judging the validity of ideas and policies. They rejected appeals to ahistorical abstraction, disparaging metaphysical and theoretical speculation. Historical circumstances were paramount in their prudential judgment. Consequently, they avoided ideological rigidity in their thinking because they understood that a priori rationalism could not account for the particular circumstances in which statesmen had to navigate the ship of state.”

🚰 Microsoft Flow

I didn’t realize Microsoft had an automation service akin to Zapier or IFTTT. Will have to check this one out and see what it can do with Fulcrum.

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Link Queueing with Shortcuts

November 9, 2018 • #

Most reading on my iPad happens in Reeder, Instapaper, or a browser. I wanted to come up with a way to save URLs in a text file for easy access for new link posts and archive purposes. This seems like a great candidate use case for trying out Workflow again which Apple has renamed Shortcuts.

I use Ulysses for most note-taking and writing purposes on the iPad. It syncs with iCloud between desktop and mobile, has good organization support, and is a good Markdown editor. it also is integrated with Shortcuts.

First I set up a sheet in Ulysses called “Link Queue” where I’d keep a running list of URLs to save for later. After that placeholder is there, I pulled up the Share view on that Sheet (by sliding left to see more options), then tapped the “Copy Callback Identifier” option to grab the Sheet ID. That’s what’s needed in the action used in the Shortcut.

Ulysses Share Sheet

In Shortcuts you only need a couple of steps. I set the shortcut to accept Text or URLs (in case I also want to append selected text blocks to the same file) and pass that to the “Add to Ulysses Sheet” action. This is where the ID copied above is entered. That’s all — link appended to the end, with a new line after, ready for the next in the queue.

This has already been a handy, quick way to keep URLs saved in a place where I can get them later.

Every time I mess around with Shortcuts I feel like I’m missing out on some handy automations. I need to keep it in mind when working to think through other repeated activities to streamline.

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Fireflies and Algorithms →

October 30, 2018 • #

This is an interesting piece from OpenCorporates on tech disruption in corporate infrastructure:

Companies are nothing more than legal constructs. They are artificial persons created by states or courts, and given the power to enter into contracts, own assets, take on debt. You can’t see or touch them — though you can see the things they make, or the offices they own or rent — they only exist in the legal world.

As the article points out, it is remarkable that this manual machinery can still underpin a process as important as company creation. It’s worrying how easy such systems can be twisted and defrauded in an era of so much data and automation everywhere else. This is one of the most interesting cases for blockchain & smart contract technology to upset a long-standing hierarchy of regulatory structures.

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