Biologist123

No, didn’t do a thorough check. Will do it again and report back!

I run an operation which provides an open source loan tracking tool. I had a play with ChatGPT 4.0 to see if it could recreate its functionality using a natural language interface rather than our current UX.

I fed ChatGPT a bunch of dummy savings and loans transactions and then asked it to compile loan tables for named borrowers.

It worked and I was impressed. For me, this felt like a move from programming to curation. I give the AI the data, and it organizes it for me and outputs it according to what I ask for.

I appreciate there is higher order programming, but for simple needs like the one I described, maybe this is not the beginning of the end for programming, but at least the end of the beginning.

I’d give this comment more upticks if I could. The hidden internal costs of the modern farm is the unit scale example for all our environmental problems. I’d add that many of these costs exist beyond the discount horizon and are therefore not factored into land-use decisions.

I received a message from ChatGPT on Friday telling me about Enterprise access, where restrictions on text entry are unlimited. No price quoted sadly.

There is still a tradition of very small family-owned travelling circuses in parts of Germany, where tents seat about 40-50 people, and all acts are performed by circus family members. I wondered who the performers were and what there origin was. They definitely spoke good German, but the circus names don't seem 100% Germanic. At one I attended 3 or 4 years ago, the ringmaster threw daggers at volunteer spectators, missing them and pegging a wooden board behind them. Are the owner/operators Yenish?

If anyone knows more about this tradition, I would be keen to know.

TL;DR: this article is mainly about Shell rowing back on its offset development targets, not for the oil it produces, but for its operational emissions.

Having worked in the sector, albeit not with Shell, my guess is that the board were advised that offsets increasingly carry massive legal jeopardy, including director’s liability.

This is an interesting summary of the problem:

https://www.clientearth.org/media/nq4jnyww/ce-offsets-legal-...

Stop producing carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse) emissions.

I once worked in the sector, and left once I realised that the scam is that sellers of offsets characterise a complex system as a simple system.

This review is kinda misjudged. Like a Master of Wine reviewing a bottle of moonshine: dude this wasn’t made for you! Writing does seem a little like a start-up these days: write, assess the market response, adjust accordingly. This writer has done just that, including a freemium tier, with no cost books, and has shifted 20k units. Highbrow it’s not, but that’s a different market with very different gatekeepers.

I’ve started to wonder whether zombies are metaphors for bad ideas that refuse to die, as they become wired into culture and belief. A few examples: crypto, carbon offsets, some might say certain religions. Other examples welcome for my own filing system.

Is this methodology different to alternate wetting and drying?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_wetting_and_drying

If not, the practice is already a requirement of the Sustainable Rice Platform Standard: https://winrock.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/SRP-Standard-...

The principal constraint to sustainable rice production in many contexts is cost of land leveling, which context dependent, costs about USD 1,000/ha. The status quo assumption is that farmers should finance this cost through debt, which they are reluctant to do because whilst the costs of change are real, the benefits are speculative: yield may go up, water use may go down, but you might just as well be wiped out by the market.

So the big challenge here is social: how to derisk the investment for the farmer, and who pays.

Thank you, interesting story.

Lend with Care.

Information is power, as they say.

Some brand name not-for-profits pay surprisingly high salaries to their senior executives, some in the range of USD1M/year. It’s led me to believe that whilst not-for-“profit” in the technical definition of the meaning, they are certainly run as “for-the-benefit” of their management.

There are many which do not play this game - apparently not Kiva - and seem truer to their charitable purposes. Some will say: does it logically matter - if higher salaries win improved achievement of charitable purpose? The answer then is why not structure as a business rather than not-for-profit?

Edit [additional point]: microfinance is a high cost, high risk business. Organisations at the sharp end of loan management need to charge interest rates which cover costs, including defaults, currency hedging etc. I find that fair enough.

What irks me is a management hiding behind a not-for-profit status to enrich themselves without taking risk.

Layman here. I was hoping this would be an AI tool which turns user stories into a web app.

Seeking input from experts: how long until that day? Or is this that tool…?

The final sentence of this comment requires at least two underlying assumptions to hold true:

1. Investors invest for speculative returns, not predictability or risk minimisation.

2. Free enterprise is possible within existing political-economic frameworks.

I’ve started to wonder whether pollution is the right word and whether we should say it how it is: plain old-fashioned, ugly “theft”. If someone takes something from you without your permission - including the ability to fish for your supper or drink from your spring, then that fulfills to me the definition of theft. And the penalties should be commensurate.

Magical thinking generally is alive and well in certain strata of British life. UK politics generally seems to be a game of make believe, with a broad failure to grasp that decline is now baked in.

Nice :-)

As a lay-bystander to the climate debate, I get a little spooked when I see comments like this. Like 99.9% of people, the science of complex climate systems is beyond me as are the de facto black box models that project climate change. Instead I use “appears in a credible journal” as a basis for trusting the apparent direction of travel and I’m disconcerted when I see that proxy challenged. I also, I am somewhat sorry to say, likely to discount anonymous comments as credible as there is so much propaganda in this space. That’s not to say I don’t understand the challenge of modeling complex systems, but want to point out that one of the most frustrating things about the climate debate is that the battling sides require us to take on trust what they tell us for some very big changes. It’s difficult.

Question for the community: how does one navigate such uncertainty?

I don’t know man, farming in most of the world is a totally risky activity.

I know some Hadza. I told them a little while ago they’d be able to sell their bowel movements to westerners for cash. They didn’t believe me.

> The fundamental purpose of bank loans is to enable measured private risk-taking by leveraging a small amount of bank equity (from risk-taking investors) with a larger amount of risk-adverse deposits. Sometimes the risks are opening a restaurant or buying an apartment building in an up-and-coming neighborhood; here the risk was a crash project to build charitable medical infrastructure during a crisis.

This is central to the author’s defence of the social importance of banks. And if only it were true, banks really don’t finance small businesses in a meaningful way anymore. At least not in the UK.

There’s some interesting ideas here of the type I’m interested in. Can you eleborate a little further?

I wondered at that too.

The AP article you linked to doesn’t actually name the providers of the grants.

This is undoubtedly the best-written essay I’ve read this year. Fascinating too. Thanks to the poster and writer.

A subscription to KiwiCo.

https://www.kiwico.com/

I’ve no connection to the company.

Well done Italy. Firmly closing the stable door several years after the horse bolted.