Charles Brian Quinn

CEO of @GetGreenzie. Love automating things with software. @entrepreneurorg, @ypo. Let's go run or lift heavy things together.

[Charles Brian Quinn @SeeBQ]

Mower with our software working since June 2022. Mowing sites like this Kroger Distribution Center every week. Every DC in the US next.

[Charles Brian Quinn @SeeBQ]

@selfstoragestan @Michaelfiore Check out the @WrightMowers Autonomous ZK, it's gas-powered, 60" and 72" deck versions

[Charles Brian Quinn @SeeBQ]

@dsolpower @Michaelfiore This one in the pic is $100k+ but you can get gas-powered ones for $55k

[Charles Brian Quinn @SeeBQ]

@Michaelfiore @AuraicPulse Lots on instagram: https://t.co/Wv4CAPu4bS

[Charles Brian Quinn @SeeBQ]

@LastHumanNode @Michaelfiore Any of the @getgreenzie Powered Autonomy integrations with OEMs like @WrightMowers, Mean Green, Greenworks, and Bobcat have it. Network RTK has come a long way, but software that fuses IMU, wheel odometry and vision work really well. Check out @WrightMowers : best commercial RN

[Charles Brian Quinn @SeeBQ]

@cantpretendtoo @Michaelfiore They are. Look at @WrightMowers Autonomous ZK with @GetGreenzie Powered Autonomy

[Charles Brian Quinn @SeeBQ]

@TeslaPatriot @ClintFiore @Michaelfiore Plenty of self-driving if you count the more advanced Lane Assist, SuperCruise, BlueCruise, and other features as good enough.... Most gas-powered don't have drive-by-wire, but @getgreenzie does it for @WrightMowers

[Charles Brian Quinn @SeeBQ]

@MackerelMc @ClintFiore @Michaelfiore As long as you have drive-by-wire, which Hydro-Gear has nailed, and EFI on CANBus you're good. @getgreenzie does it for @WrightMowers and many other OEM brands. But yes, it's difficult, ask me how I know. ;-)

[Charles Brian Quinn @SeeBQ]

@RealPlantBrah @ClintFiore @Michaelfiore That's exactly what @getgreenzie does, we have OEM integrations with Wright, Mean Green, Greenworks and even Bobcat. More to come.... The Wright is gas-powered, been in production now for 6 years with hundreds of customers....

[Charles Brian Quinn @SeeBQ]

Took all three kids to get a strep test.

Did didn’t have to pay anything because of health insurance.

Get the bills, and they all had the same test, the exact same procedure, and two of the bills were ~$400 but of course my health insurance graciously knocked it down to $92. But one of them was $127.42. And it was the middle kid.

Same test same procedure same place same time and the amount is just enough that I’m not gonna contest it because why would I?

This is why I canceled our health insurance and signed up with crowd health.

With crowd health, I would have just paid for the $39.99 strep test at the time I actually had the test done.

@crowdhealth

[Charles Brian Quinn @SeeBQ]

The engineer in me hopes this is true. Makes me wonder where that data on product quality comes from? Is it Facebook groups? Reviews?

Consider a physical good used by contractors. Like a lawnmower….

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Assorted things I've been mulling over regarding agents in the economy:

• Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc. (Think, say, of some of the classic insurance upsells at the end of a booking process, which is typically priced substantially above what a regular policy would cost.) Herbert Simon introduced the idea of bounded rationality, and firms often end up benefiting from it. Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies.

• How exactly will outcomes change? Well, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don't). Taken across the economy as a whole, I'm not sure what the incidence of all of this will be.

• In corporate strategy, people have long debated the relative importance of distribution and product quality. Perhaps you've made something better, but does anyone know about it? Won't people just continue to buy the ACME Corp Mousetraps? Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. How would markets look different if individuals always spent at least 10 hours researching their purchases? On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good!

• It true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful. Today, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals. (It's often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That's obviously true, but I think there's a secondary way in which it's more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.)

• A big question is whether agents will increase superstar effects (rational agents all settle on the same product) or increase dispersion (because everyone has slightly different tastes and preferences, which agents are good at eliciting, finally overcoming the artificial clustering we've been subjected to).

• Many internet companies have monetized demand routing, which is in turn often predicated on short attention spans. "I'll click on the first thing I see." This has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It's not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it's not great. How will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don't know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big.

• Much of what I'm writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer's side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it's true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions.

Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine, and, taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they're proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.

[Charles Brian Quinn @SeeBQ]

@Jaredkotter We make gas powered autonomous mowers. You just need drive by wire. Check out https://t.co/l0ENOazKds for cars

[Charles Brian Quinn @SeeBQ]

@obie Count me in!

[Gossip Goblin @Gossip_Goblin]

Slow Down & Pace

[Charles Brian Quinn @SeeBQ]

@KennethCassel Our OEM partners at @GetGreenzie are in the hundreds. But we enable manufacturers that already build machines here in the US to make robotic versions, so we leverage their scale.

[Charles Brian Quinn @SeeBQ]

@eileencodes @rails @GetGreenzie Thanks for all your contributions to rails! Our entire backend for all our robots runs on it! Have Henry show you a few running around in the field while there!

[Charles Brian Quinn @SeeBQ]

@ggraham Space Force and the new Starfleet Academy

[Charles Brian Quinn @SeeBQ]

@darynakulya @bot @gowithquo Love it, I'm using the Quo connector to help bubble up support issues to the CEO that might need elevation.

[Charles Brian Quinn @SeeBQ]

@KennethCassel There are a lot but it’s not 10x yet.