How to grow almost anything

(howtogrowalmostanything.notion.site)

153 points | by car 14 hours ago ago

35 comments

  • 0xbadcafebee 8 hours ago ago

    Thought this was for plants, womp womp.

    We should have already made super-seeds that you can plant in concrete and grow all the tomatoes you'll need in a month with a single LED. Why be dependent on Big Ag or imports from Chile for tasteless nutritionless environment-poisoned overpriced veg if you could grow it in a closet? Saves water, saves power, saves the environment, tastes better, better for you, cheaper. We just need a lot of bio nerds (and a few billion $) to develop it.

    • theoreticalmal 2 hours ago ago

      How are you going to get more than an LED’s worth of chemical energy out of a plant that was fed only an LED’s worth of energy?

      Also, I find this goal equally as dystopian as big ag is currently. Just plant a garden and tend it

      • busssard 41 minutes ago ago

        i would love to have an app, that reminds me of when to water or fertilize my plants, depending on the plant species, weather and light conditions. maybe even automatically turning off and on the growlights. just to maximize plant health.

    • bravesoul2 6 hours ago ago

      Why not have the food grow in your stomach. Direct consumption. Put the LED there too.

      • nkmnz 33 minutes ago ago

        Why not have the food grow in your skin. Use the fusion reactor in the sky.

      • ponector an hour ago ago

        And a state-of-the-art AI-powered app for this!

    • dyauspitr 7 hours ago ago

      I mean there are considerations. Something like that would be insanely invasive and overrun most ecosystems in years.

  • faresahmed 13 hours ago ago

    Off topic, but Notion is a perfect example of how badly you can abuse web standards. This webpage, which is a document with some markup and links (the very thing the web was made for) takes ~600MB RAM, about 10 seconds load, and lags terribly. Just unusable.

    • AngryData 12 hours ago ago

      Wow it is horrible. I clicked on the link to load it, tabbed back to this comment page and read this comment, went back to the page to see how it was doing and got 99% blank page, scrolled for a solid 10 seconds and just as I was about to come back and say the page is broken for me it popped up a proper scroll bar for a window about 1/3 of my browser size. Scrolled through about 5-6 pages worth of that which still looked broken, then the window finally resized and images started popping in, but it still took another 7 seconds or so for those to load an actual image instead of just a placeholder icon while everything shifted around like mad.

    • crystal_revenge 7 hours ago ago

      Whenever I use Notion I can feel the PM working there being pushed to ship a new feature this quarter; you can almost hear the engineers asking “why are we building this?”

      A few years back Notion was excellent modulo a few small UX things that could be improved.

      Now those small things still haven’t been improved but there’s way more clutter worsening the UX notably over time.

    • Aurornis 12 hours ago ago

      Notion sites aren’t my favorite and this website has some annoying quirks (like scrolling to the top after fully loading)

      But if this is what it takes for someone to generously share so much information with us for free then I really don’t care if I have to wait a couple extra seconds for a page load or if a tab takes up 600MB of RAM. I know this thinking makes the web purists angry, but the majority of people who visit these sites to learn aren’t going to be impeded or even bothered. Even on my older iPhone on non-5G cellular it loads in a couple of seconds.

      • onoesworkacct 7 hours ago ago

        If MIT were responsible, sure! But Notion is a $10b company that shouldn't be shitting up my device's free memory just to show a basic webpage. Very much the same deal with FB marketplace which is probably the worst offender.

        Not everyone has a fast device also.

      • xnorswap 2 hours ago ago

        It's more than a few seconds. On a desktop with a stable fast connection, it takes up to 1GB of RAM and ~17 seconds to finish loading, including around 2.5 seconds of processing time.

        On the network side it makes ~650 requests.

        That's an exceptionally resource hungry way to load the content.

    • packetlost 12 hours ago ago

      Notion has really great ideas though, it's just so poorly implemented that it really hurts my desire to use it for anything unless forced to.

    • JimDabell 6 hours ago ago

      That’s Notion in a nutshell really. Nice UX when it works, but no attention to quality. I’ve lost count of the number of big, obvious bugs I’ve tripped over that they seemingly have no interest in fixing.

    • amelius 13 hours ago ago

      Also, my screen is 20 inches wide, yet the website uses only 25% of that width.

      • LargoLasskhyfv 2 hours ago ago

        On 24" it looks ok at 150% with vertical tabs to the side.

    • kogasa240p 12 hours ago ago

      Site doesn't even work on Pale Moon, and judging from your comment that's probably a good thing.

    • apt-apt-apt-apt 7 hours ago ago

      Wait till you see my React Native <TextInput> chew through 2 - 3.8 GB RAM for a 1 MB string..

    • Marciplan 12 hours ago ago

      hate Notion but also it took 2s to load on iOS safari

    • brcmthrowaway 13 hours ago ago

      What if you used the app?

  • dirkc an hour ago ago

    I like seeing courses created like this. I also wish there were more good tools to create rich/custom experiences yet are simple to host and durable.

  • mensetmanusman 13 hours ago ago
  • jonstewart 12 hours ago ago

    Oh, I thought there’d be some tips for my rhubarb.

  • the__alchemist 13 hours ago ago

    Warning to anyone who goes down this rabbit hole: If you set up a home lab, don't tell people who you're not close with. There's a very good chance they'll assume you're (if they're a normie) making coronavirus or meth, and (If they're a biologist or chemist) assume you're not disposing of reagents and cultures properly. I wish this wasn't the case, but as a society, we're not ready to talk about bio outside of institutions and universities.

    Also, the costs are deceptive, even with used or Chinese parts: I estimate $10k USD for a usable molecular bio lab, including equipment and reagents.

    • Aurornis 12 hours ago ago

      > There's a very good chance they'll assume you're (if they're a normie) making coronavirus or meth, and (If they're a biologist or chemist) assume you're not disposing of reagents and cultures properly.

      I don’t have a full bio lab but I do have a lot of various lab equipment and do things at home that aren’t typical hobbyist projects. I haven’t found this to be a problem at all.

      I also don’t mentally segregate the world into “normies”, which honestly helps a lot. In my experience people who develop a chip on their shoulder about their geek hobbies and start describing other people as “normies” bring a lot of these problems upon themselves. It helps a lot to just talk to people like peers and also know when people just aren’t interested in talking about your certain hobbies.

      • Teever 14 minutes ago ago

        That's a noble perspective for sure, but it won't help much when that nosy busybody from down the street Mrs. Smith notices you're bringing some sciencey looking stuff into your garage late one evening and she starts telling the neighbours that you're making meth.

        Not everyone is in an environment where they can rationally explain their non-standard hobbies to their neighbours without judgment and no amount of treating a person like Mrs. Smith as a peer is going to stop her from spreading the kinds of rumours that result in a police investigation into them.

        Unfortunately some people live in environments where others are just itching to recreate the Salem witch trials.

      • the__alchemist 11 hours ago ago

        Great points. I've heard the term used in different context, and don't consider it a pejorative.

        • OJFord 2 hours ago ago

          I don't think GP does either, other than 'self-perjorative'. At least that's how I see it - a sort of semi-self-deprecating acknowledgement that the speaker is not 'a normie' (whatever that means, really).

    • Nesco 5 hours ago ago

      Yeah, trying to create one right now to try to do some E Coli + Desnoyer’s style flower experiments.

      I really underestimated the cost

      • the__alchemist an hour ago ago

        The reagent shipping costs are a big one I underestimated! Or making sure the fuge you get does 10k g etc

  • gtsnexp 6 hours ago ago

    Here is where everything started: https://cba.mit.edu/classes/index.html

  • markdown 8 hours ago ago

    Damn, I thought this was going to be about tissue culture or horticulture in general.

  • adyashakti 9 hours ago ago

    dangerous knowledge in the wrong hands

    • PaulRobinson 6 hours ago ago

      All knowledge is dangerous in the wrong hands.

      Want to know how to secure your computer? In the wrong hands, that gives somebody information on how to break into insecure computers.

      Want to know how to slice an onion properly and safely? Oh, so now you want to teach people how to efficiently use knives, the most ancient of offensive weapons?

      I guess you want to teach your children how to play nice with other kids and have a healthy school environment? Well, some people are going to use that knowledge to understand how to emotionally abuse children. You're a monster.

      /s

      Focus on motivations and safeguards of the attack vectors, not limiting the spread of knowledge.