Would it be sufficient to just have a cheap BLE pressure sensor that you could place underneath a potted plant and look for cyclical variations of pressure to determine when to water? I would think that any sensor in contact with the soil is going to have a much shorter lifespan than one which is kept dry and in a less reactive environment.

Here in the Netherlands symmetrical speeds are not common at all. I pay €30 per month for 100/30. I could get faster download but not significantly faster upload

> all I really want is a slug laser

Even better: a slug-hunting robot powered by fermented slugs:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~eli/tmp/slugbot.html

The project is from circa-2000, I remember being impressed by the idea at the time, and I'd have thought slug-hunting robots would be more of a common thing by now - turns out robotics for agriculture are hard.

I think the reality is regardless of what we want, that at most companies the people who write docs are the people who write code. That doesn't mean it's the best way but it does make it the way we have to deal with a majority of time. That's why building tools to help engineers be better documenters from high level through to the low level is I think in the interest of everyone.

In my last company before I jumped, I architected and implemented our full data infrastructure along with one other engineer. Which means I was responsible for high level conceptual documentation and low level documentation all the same and while I've written documentation before and for years I'm not formally trained in it so it was all still basically winging it. Since then I've actually taken a few short courses on writing better technical documentation since I felt it was a weak spot and having tools to assist in making that easier would have been great.

Documentation is hard and has been neglected but man does it have major underlying costs to getting it wrong.

Everything from on boarding being slow to misunderstandings that cause expensive bugs and everything in between. The root cause is developers have a hard time understanding complex systems and we as an industry are really hit and miss on writing the documentation that would make that understanding easier.

Are panic buttons a US thing? I never saw one on a fob in Europe?