I've noticed a naming issue that keeps cropping (heh) up. No-till. Organic. Free range. The confusion is caused by information asymmetry (or word fuzziness). I think organic means one thing, farmer thinks it means another (or, as is frequently the case in capitalism, maybe they know what I think it means, but that I won't be checking closely, so they can get away with it being "technically organic").
The thing I'm noticing too is that people on HN are way worse at systems thinking than their confidence makes them seem. People on HN are always looking at food systems in isolation. It's weird because they're observing the systemic effects of these systems.
As an example, you don't have to use farmland to make up for that "productivity loss" (very narrow to look at these systems as just their food output in the first place). In the US, we have 40 million acres of grass lawns. The most useless thing to grow ever because the vast majority is non-native grass (some NPC will say "erm it gives us oxygen", which like... yeah so does literally anything else and nature isn't here just for breathing). For cropland, we have 328 million acres.[0]
40/328 ≈ 12%
And like sure, we can't use 100% of the lawns to grow food, but the idea that the reduced yield + needing 20% more makes organic "bad for the environment" because obviously that means taking the existing natural land and turning that into farmland is so unimaginative and lazy. We have a lot of ways we can make up for that 20% "loss". [1] Of course, there are always master mental gymnasts who will say weird things like "growing food on the streets? it'll get polluted!" (I regret to inform them that many farms are right up next to highways, so they should be upset at ICE cars) and "eww it's going to make a mess and there will be bugs" (ok, go live in a hospital and eat IV nutrition if you want to live a sterile life, we need bugs to survive, sorry). Although a question for me remains how much land is actually necessary to provide food for the US without imports.
But there is still so much to be done to make organic farming better (beyond just doing the bare minimum for the certification). Incorporating intercropping, trapcropping, agroforestry, covercropping, crop rotation, no-till and so on. I'll even let a few "weeds" like goosefoot pop up. I guess really, one must qualify organic farming by prefixing "regenerative". The first thing I thought of when I started thinking about how I would farm in an ideal world is how the majority of land would be dedicated to nature - prairie and forest must be 2/3 of it. (Oh no it's unproductive! Not! Tons of stuff to eat out of a well-managed prairie and forest.)
Yes this stuff becomes more labor intensive, but isn't the promise of AI that it will write all the "it's this, not that"s while I do the work that matters - feeding people?
It's obvious what any sane society should do in this case, what actual safeguards would be. A sane society would have a social safety net so that being jailed for 3 months and subsequently released innocent wouldn't ruin your life. Not only did he get punished by having to spend 3 months in jail, he also now has to go and find housing, a job, and go through the civil court system, which is even slower, to ... still be made less than whole. I won't be surprised that the police argue and win with a qualified immunity defense.
To make matters worse, mugshots get people prejudiced from jobs regardless of an HNers ability to discern between a charge and a conviction.
True criminal justice, true innocence until proven guilty would have had his obligations to pay rent/mortgage/bills paused, his employer barred from firing him for missed work, and so on.
(I had to keep editing my post - I just want to say I think it's ridiculous that this dude had to be in jail FOR 3 MONTHS)
The article says the cops used "AI" to find a suspect then the victim identified them in a photo lineup. That provided the probable cause to get a judge to sign a warrant.
"Competition" is too ambiguous a term to be something to strive for. It needs to be qualified further to remove the domination mindset that many competitors have. I just don't get the mindset of living in a society where you know you have to cooperate with others because they have skills you do not have, but also of the mindset that, if push comes to shove, they must be homeless so that you don't have to be. "Why aren't there any clothesmakers?" the person who made the clothesmakers homeless asks.
I wish billionaires were competing on how many people they've lifted out of homelessness or how many people they've fed without making a profit (with the additional caveat that it is a carbon negative, sustainable production). And not in the fake way where they use creative language to obfuscate the harms they've done, but in an actual tangible way where when you look at it, it actually shows a genuine desire to be participant in society, not a dominator of it. All the "good" that billionaires do these days comes with caveats or over representation.
Of course, this stuff all gets rationalized away by people. They will ask stupid questions like "why don't you open your home up to homeless people then" or the classic "do you know what capitalism has done for you you ungrateful little shit? you better do 5 hail Bezos prayers right now before I report this to Palantir", because why would you try to understand a metaphor? Things have to be this way! There are no other options. We have to fuck people over to survive.
You can buy it if you use discernment. Obviously you'll run into compatibility issues in certain situations - like you aren't going to be able to use a library coupled to Phoenix 1.3 functionality in a Phoenix 1.8 project, but I continue to be surprised at how I can add a package like https://hex.pm/packages/deep_merge, which is 6 years old and it works just fine.
Phoenix is the exception to the usual rule. It's the only Elixir package where I've encountered substantial friction during upgrades.
Unfortunate, since it's one of the flagship Elixir packages, but I think the upgrades are worth the trouble. Better to improve something than to leave it broken solely for the sake of legacy compatibility IMO.
I LOVE density. I still live in the same place I grew up and they are "trashing" our location. I know this because that's what all the people age 50+ who live here are saying (it's actually just a subset of the 50+ people, but mostly in that demographic). Takes forever to take a left turn now and they HATE it. They hate sitting there waiting for 4 lanes (2 lanes in both directions) of traffic to clear so they can speed off to work out of the Bojangles parking lot.
Growing up here, I hated how walking places took a whole hour to go anywhere fun, had to walk on medians on a highway to get to the movie theater.
We finally have enough demand due to increased density that they're building out a bus stop within walking distance. I already can walk or bike to get groceries and the pedestrian infrastructure is good enough that I can walk to a few different places, adding the bus route gets me to the train station and even the airport. I experienced the tyranny of the car, first in my childhood, without a car, now in my adulthood, with a car, but soon a closer step free of that tyranny with increases in these kinds of transit services.
Not that I don't think the urbanization is perfect. One of the bigger ones I've noticed is everyone has sterile landscaping, dead grass lawns (even when not in a drought) and other stuff that provides little wildlife value. At least we have serviceberry trees in our neighborhood...
Thing is, even in rural areas, the landscaping will be messed up or sterile too. I even saw someone with a HUGE thicket of bamboo, easily a quarter acre, maybe more, I could only see it from the road. Now that trashes a location!! Not moving anywhere close to that! Yet, the rural life affords more space for less money, which allows, in the correct non-trashed location, the ability to create a valuable space for wildlife.
I find it a really hard choice to make. I'd have to live in a smaller house in a rural area accounting for the fact that I would absolutely go the cheapest I could get, down to a single wide. And giving up the nice infrastructure! I mean, I don't think density is perfect, there are tradeoffs, but I do find the version that I'm experiencing to be enjoyable. I think the only thing that would make it unbearable is if they started rolling back the transit/pedestrian/bike infrastructure progress we've made.
I do think there's an argument against over development, but that's still a "building up" problem. Build up tall, but with bigger green space - like 2-3 acres at least.
I couldn't believe how shitty ClickUp was when I was demoing project management software because it came highly recommended. Actually most of them were shitty. Monday, Asana, and all the others I can't remember. Just absolutely dog slow. I am so confused at how people are productive with these apps. By the time things had loaded, I had already forgotten what I was trying to do.
We settled on Basecamp and it is a joy to work with. Super fast keyboard shortcuts and easy navigation to projects. I'm glad we don't need the more exotic features in the other project management software, but if we ever do, it will probably be OpenProject, which was the runner up.
One really annoying example of YTM's algorithm is it (or whoever works on it) doesn't understand that a genre can have diverse sounds and instruments, so it will recommend songs that all sound the same.
Like if I start listening to house music, it will just recommend 100 songs that have organ 2 [0], even though house music is more diverse than that. Then it forces me to thumbs down the music, which also isn't what I want to do, because I have no idea what effect it's having on my recommendations. Is it just going to stop recommending house music altogether? Is it going to stop recommending songs with organ 2? Is it smart enough to understand that I just want less and not none? I do like organ 2, I just don't want to drown in it when I'm trying to find new music.
Or I will thumbs up a phonk song and it it just floods me with phonk remixes of pop songs.
Last.fm, on the other hand, seemed to have some way of towing a line of different enough without going too far. Both YTM and Spotify algos just do cookiecutter similarity.
> Then it forces me to thumbs down the music, which also isn't what I want to do, because I have no idea what effect it's having on my recommendations.
I feel this. Social media algorithms can be so complex and opaque now that I have to consciously consider what repercussions my interactions have. I have so little idea what interactions affect recommendations on e.g. Instagram that it almost feels random.
That I would so well internalize the "big brother is always watching what you click, what you hover, what you rewatch, what you comment on, what you pause to read longer than average, what you favorite, what you thumbs-down, etc" default experience provided by facebook/amazon/youtube/streaming platform/short form video platform/etc
that when I stick my head back into 4chan from time to time (to see what the motorcycle thread is talking about these days, or get idea for a show to watch) it's a like a physical weight lifts off me as I realize that no one and nothing gives a toss about what threads I open, or what posts I respond to, or what images I save or post. It won't change any feeds in opaque ways. It won't pollute my recommends (jokes aside about how how the choice of website already polluted matters enough). It won't do anything.
Blew my mind when I put my finger on what I was feeling and realized how pervasive this sort of thing has gotten in most every big tech online product.
One of the most infuriating things about recommendations engines is the way they handle non-English music. Maybe it's not with every language, but as soon as I listen to a Dutch song; the engines will recommend me ALL Dutch music, regardless of genre.
The thing I'm noticing too is that people on HN are way worse at systems thinking than their confidence makes them seem. People on HN are always looking at food systems in isolation. It's weird because they're observing the systemic effects of these systems.
As an example, you don't have to use farmland to make up for that "productivity loss" (very narrow to look at these systems as just their food output in the first place). In the US, we have 40 million acres of grass lawns. The most useless thing to grow ever because the vast majority is non-native grass (some NPC will say "erm it gives us oxygen", which like... yeah so does literally anything else and nature isn't here just for breathing). For cropland, we have 328 million acres.[0]
40/328 ≈ 12%
And like sure, we can't use 100% of the lawns to grow food, but the idea that the reduced yield + needing 20% more makes organic "bad for the environment" because obviously that means taking the existing natural land and turning that into farmland is so unimaginative and lazy. We have a lot of ways we can make up for that 20% "loss". [1] Of course, there are always master mental gymnasts who will say weird things like "growing food on the streets? it'll get polluted!" (I regret to inform them that many farms are right up next to highways, so they should be upset at ICE cars) and "eww it's going to make a mess and there will be bugs" (ok, go live in a hospital and eat IV nutrition if you want to live a sterile life, we need bugs to survive, sorry). Although a question for me remains how much land is actually necessary to provide food for the US without imports.
But there is still so much to be done to make organic farming better (beyond just doing the bare minimum for the certification). Incorporating intercropping, trapcropping, agroforestry, covercropping, crop rotation, no-till and so on. I'll even let a few "weeds" like goosefoot pop up. I guess really, one must qualify organic farming by prefixing "regenerative". The first thing I thought of when I started thinking about how I would farm in an ideal world is how the majority of land would be dedicated to nature - prairie and forest must be 2/3 of it. (Oh no it's unproductive! Not! Tons of stuff to eat out of a well-managed prairie and forest.)
Yes this stuff becomes more labor intensive, but isn't the promise of AI that it will write all the "it's this, not that"s while I do the work that matters - feeding people?
[0] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/111436 [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1720760115
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