I’ve heard they’re hurting nowadays because many of them outsourced delivery to Uber Eats/Doordash and are so fucking expensive now, you may as well go to a nicer pizza place.
Tech firms bombard us with hype and publicity. Understandable, since they want to sell —- but this is the other side of the coin. If they want attention on their products they can’t expect it all to be good.
Not sure if that's true, there's some frozen supermarket pizza now that's seriously good. If I ordered fast food and they delivered a freshly baked Crosta Mollica pizza I wouldn't send it back. Of course a fresh pizza is better, but imo you couldn't get a Crosta Mollica quality frozen pizza 10 years ago.
apparently they are "hand stretched" but I presume much of the other processes are automated in a factory. (prob not AI robots). A lot is about the quality of the ingredients. Those are wood fired and not frozen.
Those factories still have people stretching dough, while the bases travel along a big belt, because human hands are good for that task, and are widely available and easily repaired or replaced, and adapt to different shapes and sizes of product and other contingencies.
Are you talking about frozen pizza? That's always rather disappointing. Even chains like Dominos let alone good local pizzerias make their pizzas to order by people.
We already have this in downtown Houston but you don't get a Transit van.
Instead it's a little battery-powered multi-passenger buggy, covered with ads and limited to downtown.
>door --> van --> public transit --> van --> door
Still works like this but once you take the train or bus outside of downtown, then you're back on your own for the "last miles" except for a few other non-contiguous neighborhoods where they are beginning to add additional cells of this limited-area connector service.
This has been willingly subsidized by the major businesses in each service area, so it is free to use on its own, once you get onto the regular public transit though, then normal fares apply there.
Because some startup that's managed to cobble together a pizza-extruding machine that works when 20 technicians are standing around it carefully watching is not something whose future success you want to bet your business on?
Some of the greatest breakthroughs are when there is no financial incentive, or when unbridled ambition outperforms sometimes very significant runs for the cash.
There’s physics for one. The dough takes the temperature and time it takes to bake in the oven, the rocket needs certain ampunt of propulsion to fly etc.
I talked about rockets, not ”teleporters”. I also let aside that these systems do not learn, let’s pretend they do. What will it improve in? What does it mean to ”improve”? Ask yourself, what makes the difference between an amazing pizza and kinda ok pizza? How do you quantify that? Is it a binary value the way a mathematic formula either works or doesn’t, or how code runs or does not? Or is it more like poetry? kinda hard to srite into code when something that is literally a matter of taste is ”good”.
Maybe it doesn’t really matter, Marinara is pretty easy to make, 5 ingredients in an oven. Can we improve upen speed, like they say on the article? Up to a point yes, but there’s a bottleneck, the dough itself. It takes certain amount of time to make it into a oval shape, you can’t go too fast, since you break it. And then it has to be in the oven a certain amount of time, no matter what. That has nothing to do with automation, but the physical facts of the matter itself.
Now you have an average pizza that cost a fortune to make, but we accomplished it slightly faster than $10/h pizza chef. You see why those startups all fold?
I prefer when people employ their fellow neighbors and uplift their community with their enterprises.
This type of automation is inherently selfish and should be discouraged, im glad he lost 200k, that 200k could have been used to help employee a few college students who would go onto provide way more value to their community than a robot ever would.
Honestly if you see a company with robots like this, they hate their communities and are inherently selfish and greedy. Do not support them.
The article makes it sound like Lee Kindell is replacing himself, not employees: he "once made all his dough by hand – until an elbow tendon injury forced him to investigate using machines instead". Then he got two robots. But you might question why they had to be robots, that part is unexplained. Later on he suggests he can employ people serving the pizza instead and in this way get a higher pizza throughput. Though in fact his robots are broken due support vanishing vaporously so presumably at present he either does indeed employ some humans, or produces no pizza except imaginary future autonomous pizza, which is coming soon, just a matter of time.
Thousands of car crashes a day > not a news
A Waymo crashed > national news
Humans making shitty pizza is not a news. But robots burning a pizza is a news. It'll get better.