What are /r/Automate's favorite Products & Services?

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http://www.scoop.it/t/concentration-of-wealth-existential-risk

There is no way in hell to retrain people for new jobs. People who are laid off simply don't have the ability, and there are no suitable jobs in most cases. Retraining was still feasible for most in the 80s. It will be completely unviable in 1-2 decades.

This description for this commercial orange peeler says:

> The peel is like a rope, can be used for commercial use, such as making preserved peel, jam and pectin

If you by virtualization mean a more advanced, digital process in manufacturing then the benefit is that production can be re-configured more easily, more easily automated and therefore much more efficient with lower start up costs. Fixed costs become variable costs and this has tremendous impact.

I recently wrote about this: https://medium.com/the-present-future-of-work/490be02202a4

> Watson and driving cars are both pretty darn impressive

If we're talking about getting to "Jarvis", Watson is the best well-publicized example of how far we've come. But even so, on my Jarvis=Siri v10 scale, I'd put Watson somewhere between v5 and v7.

The self-driving car, while impressive, is not that far removed from the "run of the mill" automation we've been doing for decades (and on that topic, I'd highly recommend Sebastian Thrun's two free online courses that focus on self-driving cars. It's really amazing what complex behavior can come of some very simple logical and statistical operations (and the man is a truly awesome lecturer - his love for the subject is infectious).

What we don't have - and are really nowhere near having - yet is even a rudimentary AI that can hold an intelligent general conversation. Siri/Watson are proof that we're getting better at devices that can answer questions. The Google car (and Roomba, for that matter) are proof that we're getting better at devices that can handle non-rote tasks. But we're still closer to Eliza than Data.

Of course, we're making progress. And I do believe that we'll get there someday. But my person opinion is that we've got more than 10-20 years to go before someone creates an AI that can reliably pass the Turing Test.

Excellent post. Please consider submitting this in the opinion section of major newspapers- this perspective needs more exposure. Pick up a copy of the book The Decadence of Industrial Democracies, Volume 1: Disbelief and Discredit - I find the following quote to fit with what you said above:

"Proletarianization of work as loss of individuation: The worker once was the technical individual, instead of the slave of the tool bearing machine. The reality of proletarianization is the workers loss of knowledge, and the move towards a pure unskilled labor force and lacking any motive besides the need to subsist."

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12338132-the-decadence-of-industrial-democracies-volume-1?from_search=true

I think what you are looking would be a Cellophane Bag sealer and amazon also sells bags for it and only $25. But I have no personal experience with these. https://www.amazon.com/Impulse-Sealer-Cellophane-Bag-sealer/dp/B000UVMKO8

Regarding traffic info, my old company, INRIX basically already has that up and running. They combine speeds from satellite-communicating fleet vehicles, sensors, crowd sourcing apps, etc. to make a pretty comprehensive and accurate view of what traffic is like at any one time. Also they have pretty sophisticated Bayesian models of what traffic will be like on a given day of the week on a given minute of the hour, taking into account of stuff like weather forecasts, historical patterns, sports events, etc.

Here's an answer to that question, by someone who works at a cloud services company and sees the effect every day:

https://www.quora.com/Is-cloud-computing-killing-the-IT-support-jobs/answer/Randall-R-Schulz?srid=OyM&share=78976411

It depends on the type of automation. A lot of the stuff in this sub is the robotic automation of manual labor, which would probably require some sort of engineering degree. There's also the automating of business processes through the development of software, for which you could get an engineering degree.

As far as pay, it depends on your local economy. There are various cost-of-living calculators online where you can compare the cost of living from one area to another. Also, there are salary calculators, like this one that tell you how much a certain title pays on average depending on city. For example, a Software Engineer in Salt Lake City, UT makes about $92,000 while a Software Engineer in Seattle, WA makes bout $111,000. These are ballpark numbers, but there are many resources online that can get you your answers.

I wonder if peels it to standard size or if it perceives how big or thick the peel is to determine how deep to peel it...

from the description here it says the sizes of oranges can be up to 3 time the size of the smallest both in diameter and height, so seems like it somehow gages the size and determines how much to peel, instead of resulting in all finishised product being the same size and varying the waste; otherwise on the largest oranges it would waste most of it in the peel.

There are already companies providing "smart driving" features as aftermarkets for a wide variety of vehicles.

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/05/how-to-update-any-car-with-forward-collision-and-lane-departure-warnings/index.htm

I'll likely need to convert it to electric, maybe even use an entire drive train from a manufacturer, and add a bevy of sensors but I would wager where there is a will there will be a way.

I prefer to use https://www.automationanywhere.com/products/automation-360 for Robotic Process Automation (RPA). It is super easy to use! I deployed around 60 bots over the last year with it.

I've had good results with PDFTools api as well as GhostScript.

GhostScript is especially good for the whole text-extraction thing.

Here's some quick and dirty example-age: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6187250/pdf-text-extraction

And, of course, you can find more at https://www.ghostscript.com/

The point is valid yet the concern now is the learning curve that the jobless society especially what Gary Marcus of NYU had mentioned in this video from Yahoo via CNBC http://finance.yahoo.com/video/robotics-revolution-replaces-workers-202900536.html

> While many computers have a comparable storage capacity

1.4 x 10^26 atoms in a brain. Times that by however many states.

Vs what, a machine that maxes out at 128 x 10^9 stateful objects in it's ram?

The way AI is discussed is illogical.

also adhd-haver: i don't have a 100% solution for you, but my latest fixation is clickup, web + phone apps, integrates with everything (discord, ms todo, make, toggl) and has so far been pretty intuitive. i don't know if i'd do any of the paid tiers yet.

https://clickup.com/

You got me curious so I did a google and found this, multi-clipboard: https://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2018/05/11/windows-10s-new-clipboard-takes-the-pain-out-of-copy-and-pasting/

Alternatively, you could script something in selenium or C#.

Holy moly you don't need to teach me, I'm not senile or tech avert. Just found the coincidence of a product bashing ad that mobs about ecars being silent and also says who they could drive you over before an ecar advertisement is suboptimal.

If I had the spare, I would buy nothing else other than a Tesla. But that music paired with that ad may influence other people negatively.

/rant Yes I got an ad! I'm on mobile and haven't installed an adblocker here yet, don't think you're special just because you know howto install uBlock origin. I use the Reddit Flow android app and there is no ad-blocker on mobile yet, but I will install the opensource DNS66 app. I can't reproduce the ad, I tried, however another one loads each time until it disappears and gets replaced by a banner ad that's somewhere in the first quarter of the video.

Yeah, second this. I run my own company and over the years have built a text library full of form emails, FAQs, miscellaneous descriptions, etc. Nine times out of ten I can fire off a quick shortcut, pop in the client's name, and send the email within a few seconds.

I'm a Text Expander subscriber and would recommend the service for ease of use, though it is subscription based. For a free version, I'd check out Espanso

Not too sure about what to learn for personal projects but the controls I work on are a combination of setting machine parameters which you would have to be trained on by the OEM and you can write custom modules in Python. If you know Python you would still have to be trained on their API which is part of the same class.

I did find this for making a control with a Raspberry Pi that also runs Python.

There are certain commercial tools, such as Sapling or TextExpander (as u/jontelang mentioned) that offer predefined messages that you can customise with the name and amount, which should save you quite a bit of time already. To me however, this is akin to having a separate file with some preexisting responses and you manually fill in the blanks which won't save you too much time.

If you want to take a stab at writing something to accomplish your task in Python, here's what I'd do (I'm sure there are much neater ways):

1. Write a dictionary containing your templated responses e.g., {"refund": "Hi {1}, we have successfully refunded you ${2}...", "signature": "Hi {1}, your signature is required on the attached file..."}.
2. Write a script that reads each alert (you can use pyOutlook for Outlook emails, for example) and use that to populate the format strings in the appropriate dictionary entry.
3. Draft an email with the templated response!

I would definitely keep the output as a draft, at least in the first few weeks/months of the script being around as you don't want to confuse your customers! There are also other considerations such as repeat offenders being sent another email or alerts of an unknown type being sent.

Best of luck!

I've not tested it out but check out the iftt Facebook integration - https://ifttt.com/facebook

Or zapier - https://zapier.com/apps/email/integrations/facebook-pages/3832/send-email-messages-with-new-facebook-page-posts

IMHO MP3Tag's powerful tag-automation more than makes up for its relatively simple handling of album art.

For example, a lot of metadata lists track numbers as "1, 2, 3, ... 10, 11, 12" or "1/12, 2/12, 3/12 ..." or "01/12, 02/12 ..." etc, when what I want is "01, 02, 03, ... 10, 11, 12". MP3tag lets me write, test and apply a formula that it uses to examine the existing metadata and replace the track number with the correct format.

Album art is one area that I would be very cautious about automating, as AFAIK there are no comprehensive databases that are properly indexed. Art changes from region to region, release to release, so I'd want to go through and get it all done manually.

EDIT: having said that, IIRC the ripping program Exact Audio Copy includes tools to automatically download metadata and find album art for your CD rips.

Thanks!

Udacity's AI course covers some Bayesian stuff too so given I have to revise that anyway it could be fun (also Norvig) and some professors from my department are doing a MOOC on AI Planning so I guess I could try that.

I take back what I said, the article has the wrong link. They do actually have a community edition! AA HAS FINALLY SEEN THE LIGHT! https://www.automationanywhere.com/lp/rpa-editions-comparison?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=social-owned&utm_campaign=Welcome_Community_Edition&utm_term=Community_Edition&utm_content=LP_CEComp

I take back what I said, the article has the wrong link. They do actually have a community edition! AA HAS FINALLY SEEN THE LIGHT! https://www.automationanywhere.com/lp/rpa-editions-comparison?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=social-owned&utm_campaign=Welcome_Community_Edition&utm_term=Community_Edition&utm_content=LP_CEComp

Starting from here:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_succession#Forest_succession

> https://www.amazon.com/One-Straw-Revolution-Introduction-Natural-Classics/dp/1590173139

The core idea is that, for the project to implement long-term food production and other resource productions, extracted from a forest with rich biodiversity, the earliest stages requires the heaviest human intervention, with the possible need to import fertilizers to the land, and as the system evolves to a climax forest, the system no longer needs imported fertilizers to sustain itself, and human intervention becomes less blunt and more surgical

We can use all currently avaliable tools and technologies for humans to monitor and intervene, and for harvesting resources from tall trees, we can use drones . The great diversity of resources here allows us to be self-sufficient in several different ways

I think a good question would be--how do we perceive automated news stories we were told are automated, vs ones we weren't? The book Automate This talked about computer-generated symphonies. When people just listened to the music, they were deeply moved by it. When they were then told that it was created by a computer, their assessment changed retroactively and they could "just tell" that it lacked something, soul, the human touch, whatever. If they were told beforehand, they couldn't enjoy the music, and found it cold and mechanical. So we're dealing with that psychology. That people think they can tell the difference doesn't mean they actually can.