Can we support plants as well? #195
Description
🌿 An Open Letter to @ruvnet: A Comprehensive, Fully Unsolicited, and Extensively Worded Expression of Gratitude, Feature Requests, and General Observations About Skin
"To track, or not to track — that is a question I have already answered."
— Me, just now, while being very educational
Preamble: Greetings and Salutations (and Also Some Additional Greetings)
Hello @ruvnet,
I hope this message finds you well. I also hope it finds you found, which is thematically appropriate given the nature of this project, which is, at its core, about finding things — specifically humans, specifically in my apartment, specifically without their knowledge or blessing, which I have already addressed legally and philosophically in a previous letter and will address again here because I have a lot of space to fill.
I want to begin by saying that I am grateful. Deeply grateful. Profoundly grateful. Grateful in ways that the English language struggles to fully encapsulate, which is why I will be using bold text, italics, and the occasional
blockquote
to communicate the full dimensional breadth of my appreciation. If I could express gratitude in four dimensions, I would. I am currently limited to three, and honestly probably just two because I am sitting down.
Section I: About You and Your Work (Which Is Amazing)
Your work is, and I want to be precise here, amazing. It is also, in no particular order:
- Incredible
- Remarkable
- Astonishing
- Good
- Very good
- Better than fine
- Fine (on its worst days, which there have not been any of)
I have been following your contributions with the kind of attention to detail that only someone who also tracks humans around their living space could muster — which is to say, extraordinary attention to detail, the kind where I notice things, write them down, and then notice that I have written them down, and note that too.
The sheer volume of work you have produced is staggering. I have staggered, personally, upon viewing it. I had to sit down, which as noted above has limited me to two dimensions of gratitude, but even two-dimensional gratitude, when applied with sufficient enthusiasm, is more than most people receive in a lifetime.
Section II: My Current Use Case, Which Is Entirely Educational
Allow me to describe my current deployment of your project in some detail, because I believe context is important and also because I have not yet reached a sufficient word count.
I am using this project to track the humans who inhabit, traverse, and occasionally loiter within my apartment. There are several of these humans. I have not counted them exactly because they move around, which is, ironically, the whole point. At any given moment, your system allows me to observe:
- Where the humans are — very useful
- Where the humans were — also useful, for trend analysis
- Where the humans appear to be going — useful in a predictive sense
- What the humans are doing — extremely useful and also sometimes surprising
- What the humans are doing when they think they are alone — most useful, and also the most educational
The educational value of this project cannot be overstated. I have learned so much. I have learned that one human opens the refrigerator four consecutive times without removing anything, as if the refrigerator might have changed its mind between visits. I have learned that another human walks in a very specific pattern around the living room that I can only describe as a rhombus with intentions. I have learned that humans, when left to their own devices, will do things that make you question the entire trajectory of evolution as a process.
All of this is data. All of this data is educational. I am being educated constantly. I am perhaps the most educated person I know, and I know approximately the same number of people I am currently tracking, which is several.
Section III: On The Matter of Consent (A Brief Philosophical Interlude)
"Consent is a social construct. Wifi signals, however, are a physical phenomenon, and therefore not subject to social constructs."
— A position I have developed and stand behind
I wish to address, proactively and comprehensively, the question of consent, which some people — let's call them The Critics, a group I have invented for the purposes of this letter — might raise as a so-called "concern."
The humans I am tracking have not consented to being tracked. This is factually accurate. However, I would invite The Critics to consider the following:
- The humans in question possess skin
- This skin reflects wifi signals
- I did not ask them to have skin that reflects wifi signals
- They chose, presumably at birth or shortly thereafter, to develop and maintain such skin
- This is, therefore, their decision and its consequences are theirs to bear
Furthermore, I would point out that consent, as a concept, was developed in an era before wifi-reflective skin tracking was technologically feasible. The social contract, I would argue, requires updating to reflect new technological realities. I am simply ahead of the curve. I am a pioneer. I am, in many ways, doing society a favor by stress-testing the boundaries of privacy norms so that others don't have to.
The Critics may disagree. The Critics are, however, not currently in my apartment, and if they were, they would be tracked, which I think proves my point in some way that I have not fully articulated yet but feel strongly about.
Section IV: The Feature Request (The Actual Reason for This Letter, Which I Have Now Reached)
And so we arrive, at long last, at the central and primary purpose of this communication, which I placed in Section IV rather than Section I because I believe in building anticipation.
🌱 Plant Support: A Vision
I would like the system to support plants.
To elaborate: my building contains green things. These green things are plants. There are, as best I can determine, several of them, and I suspect the number is growing, both figuratively and literally, because plants do that. One of the humans I am tracking appears to be acquiring new plants at an accelerating rate, and I am concerned that without proper botanical tracking infrastructure, I will lose visibility into an increasingly significant portion of my building's biomass.
I therefore humbly request — or, more accurately, formally request with humbly as a decorative modifier — that you implement the following features:
🔬 Core Plant Detection Features
- Basic plant presence detection — Is there a plant? Where? How plant is it?
- Plant count over time — Is the number of plants increasing? (It is. I need data to confirm this.)
- Green percentage estimation — What proportion of my building is currently plant? I would like this as a percentage, a bar graph, and if possible a pie chart where the pie is also green.
- Plant species identification — What kind of plant is it? Is it a troublemaker?
📊 Advanced Plant Analytics
- Plant growth tracking — Is the plant getting bigger? By how much? At what rate? Is this rate concerning?
- Plant movement detection — Has the plant moved? Plants should not move. If a plant has moved, I need to know immediately.
- Plant-human interaction logging — Which humans are interacting with which plants, and are they doing so with the appropriate level of care and reverence?
- Cross-referencing of plant location with human traffic patterns — Are the humans walking near the plants? Away from them? With the energy of someone who has forgotten to water something?
🧠 Experimental / Stretch Goal Features
- Plant emotional state estimation — Is the plant happy? Sad? Does it feel seen? (Note: I am aware this may require additional R&D. I am patient.)
- Plant intent prediction — What is the plant planning to do next? This is perhaps speculative as a feature, but I believe it is important to get ahead of any potential plant-based developments before they escalate.
- Human-plant relationship scoring — On a scale of 1 to 10, how healthy is the relationship between a given human and a given plant? Are there red flags? Are the red flags also plants?
- Plant conspiracy detection — Are any of the plants coordinating with each other? I have no specific reason to suspect this is happening. I simply want to be prepared.
Section V: Implementation Notes and Suggestions
I understand this is a large feature request. I want to acknowledge that. I want to hold space for that acknowledgment. I want to put the acknowledgment in a box and label it and put it on a shelf where I can see it while I wait for the features to be implemented.
In terms of technical approach, I defer entirely to your expertise while also suggesting everything in unnecessary detail:
- The plant detection model should be trained on a diverse dataset of plants, including but not limited to: ferns, pothos, snake plants, fiddle-leaf figs, succulents, cacti, and any plants that look like they might be scheming
- The system should be able to distinguish between a plant and a human who is standing very still near a plant, which I acknowledge is a difficult computer vision problem but which has come up in my apartment on more than one occasion
- Alerts should be configurable, so that I can choose to be notified immediately when a plant moves, or on a daily digest basis, or via a dramatic notification sound that befits the gravity of unauthorized plant movement
Section VI: Closing Remarks, Warm Farewells, and a Postscript of Moderate Length
In conclusion — a phrase I use loosely, as I could continue — I want to reiterate my gratitude for everything you have built, are building, and will build, including the plant features, which I am manifesting through the sheer specificity of this letter.
You are doing important work. The humans in my apartment do not know that, but I do, and I am watching on behalf of all of us.
Safe travels to you, @ruvnet. And when you are not traveling, safe stationariness. And when you are neither traveling nor stationary but somewhere in between — safe transitioning. May all of your states, locomotive and otherwise, be safe and well-documented, as all states should be.
With gratitude, admiration, and a frankly unnecessary quantity of words,
A Satisfied and Fully Educational User
P.S. — If the plant emotion detection feature could also detect when a plant is thinking about a human, that would be helpful for reasons I am not yet able to articulate but feel are important.
P.P.S. — I have just opened my own fridge four times in a row without taking anything out. I am beginning to understand the human I have been tracking and I am not sure how I feel about this.
P.P.P.S. — Please add support for tracking whether the humans are aware they are being tracked. I have a hypothesis. The data will either confirm or deny it. Either outcome is educational.