Ankur Banerjee

Ole Lehmann Verified account @itsolelehmann · 5d

we have a winner for the most absurd AI startup ever

this Peter Thiel backed company uses AI robots to stab fish in the brain so they taste better and last up to 3x longer

it's called Shinkei and it modernizes a centuries-old Japanese technique

dozens of Michelin-star restaurants are already lining up to buy the fish

here's how it works:

> the problem is when a fish gets caught, it usually just suffocates on the boat

> that stress floods the meat with hormones and lactic acid, which hurts the flavor and texture

> the old Japanese fix for this was spiking the fish through the brain right after the catch, which stops all that

> but doing it by hand is impractical for most American fishing crews

> so Shinkei built a fridge-sized robot that sits right on the boat's deck

> the crew feeds in a fish and AI identifies the exact species, so it knows exactly where the brain and gills are

> the robot then drives the spike through the brain and cuts near the gills in about 7 seconds

> the fish goes into an ice slurry so the blood drains out

> so the fish doesn't sit there stressing out, and that tasty flavor and texture is preserved

example number 5,392,417 of how AI can be applied to literally anything

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kaereste.gwei 💗🦇🔊 Verified account @kaereste · Nov 4

ETHBEAT Michelin guide to projects serving you best CROPS in town

ethbeat.org/crops

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Ankur Banerjee Verified account @ankurb · Oct 30

This takes me back to when I was working for banks on core banking related systems. The security process they had in place were extremely defensive and we need more of that thinking in the crypto industry:

- No engineers, ever, had long-lived elevated or write permissions. Elevated permissions would only be given for very short windows using TACACS/RADIUS etc. Modern DevOps layers many layers of independent MFA but fundamentally trusts the person. Bank policies would not assume that trust by default.
- Little to no automation, and then each granular change step checked four-eyes. This slowness/speed annoyed me a lot (“why can’t we one-shot this in minutes with automation!”) but the goal I understand now was to deliberately slow everything down so that no change was rushed.
- Everything would be scheduled to happen within a change window of a few hours max., with half the time or more dedicated for backing out the change if it didn’t succeed.
- Insane levels of circuit breakers and cutover redundancy in the infrastructure to fail over fast to working/non-compromised systems.
- “Defense in depth” of logging, auditing, and monitoring tools, where there would be multiple tools from independent software vendors monitoring and auditing the same layer. Modern DevOps shuns a lot of this (not unusual to have a single monitoring/auditing system at a layer, e.g., “just whatever AWS has”)
- A *lot* more focus on “human factors” like is the change at a time when people are at peak focus (or get enough rest before), too many engineers on holiday (as backup if things escalate). Everything had a Plan B, C, D, E.

We were always asked to think of the headlines in the newspapers the next day if a new feature/rollout went wrong: “if this rollout goes wrong, this is how much the UK GDP would tank by tomorrow”.

Many of these “slow down” policies frustrated me at the time when fintechs/neobanks were shipping faster and lapping traditional banks.

But there are lessons and practices in there which will become increasingly relevant for crypto.

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