ckrapu

The article reads like slop, to be honest.

The part of American agriculture which employs illegal immigrants is clearly not mechanized; they are not driving combines and are tending vegetables by hand.

Types of food really are discretionary. Beans are an excellent vegetable and can be raised completely without manual labor. Trading salad greens for them would not be an overall nutritional loss. Perhaps the true market price for a head of lettuce should be 1.6x in a properly labor regime.

To draw the distinction more clearly, suppose we had zero illegal immigrants working in the field and someone said “let’s reduce the price of some vegetables by a third and create a permanent underclass”. Does that sound reasonable?

Conversely, the question should be "Who is preventing American agriculture from mechanizing?"

Or, if you are such a pessimist in America's can-do attitude, instead take it from the point of view of market efficiency. If a good cannot be produced cheaply enough for the market to sustain it, the solution is not to modify the social contract and undermine the value of labor for the sake of the good.

We have always solved problems by innovation. The surest way to prevent innovation is to continually provide cheaper and cheaper labor. The Roman empire is an excellent example of this.

Undoubtedly, these issues are more complex. However, this is such a tired old canard. Wages make labor, scarcity makes innovation.

The outputs for the first example aren’t showing up for me.

With all due sympathy and wishes that he can continue his career in America, I have to say that a medical fraud billing charge is unfortunately going to make it much harder for him to fight the legal battle.

Ironically, reads like slop.

That might be true in practice but also 1) completely incompatible with global notions of fairness and justice, and 2) not an especially compelling political argument for getting countries to open up their markets.

I am quite happy to see such a successful outcome for this team. When looking at the landscape of AI-adjacent startups, rarely do you see such a nice balance between following the hype and providing a sufficiently useful and general service that makes technology more accessible to all.

Well, an American farmer cannot sell his grain in India. That also seems to be discrimination simply because he is in the wrong place. Are you arguing that all protectionism is flawed and wrong?

A country's first responsibility should be to its citizens.

This looks like mostly AI slop.

If it is satire, bravo.

If sincere, congratulations.

They're a bit late to the party.

This is a classic!

Very cool. Excited to try this out sometime!

Isn't this way more expensive?

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/capacityblocks/pricing/

I think you dramatically underestimate the number of motivated, trained people who find the current societal conditions on Earth untenable.

By the way, this is not just a cheap shot at the Trump administration. The issues are much wider than that.

As you pointed out, the viable area with a sufficiently cold winter is probably shrinking every year. Perhaps the better solution is the one proposed by Yablonovitch et al in which they suggest using deserts instead, though I think that is about as risky, and also a tremendous risk for fire.

Deep down, I have the gut feeling that in a century's time, people will think we were clinically insane for not trying to stockpile as much carbon as possible in whatever means we have, since it is clearly the foundation for biology, and widespread synthetic biology will use it (and N, and P) by the gigatonne. I really don't see any fundamental physical reason why we won't be growing entire cities made out of wood with the right genetic engineering and sufficient feedstock.

Thanks for taking a look at that article! In short, you're right on the first item; only a fraction of that total arable land actually experiences subfreezing winter temperatures.

Given your word choice, I suspect you hail from Britain or a commonwealth country and your (appropriate) definition of township differs from mine. I should have defined it as "survey township" which is a USA term for a grouping of land parcels six miles tall by six miles wide. Again, the number presented is a ballpark estimate, as though we may not have as many nice villages and hedgerows in the Dakotas and other Plains states, we similarly do not farm every single literal acre--though many act as if we should, animals and people be damned.

It'd be nice if you just wrote the article yourself instead of using ChatGPT. I know it's a lot of work, but I would be much more inclined to finish it.

I think that there's a major difference in the resulting mindsets that the two types of experiences form, though.

The first learn that nature is always present and doing its best to kill you / wreck your harvest, and that it is only through man's intelligence and social bonds that we thrive. I would argue a corollary of this is that one cannot tolerate malicious or grossly neglectful people around.

The second group learns that other people are a liability and that bad actors are just a fact of life to be tolerated and worked around.

Both approaches are clearly optimal for their respective environment. The former seems like a stronger foundation for building a civilization on, though.

I can tell you wrote the article with ChatGPT. I’m out as soon as I pick up the smell. I don’t dislike the usage of AI, I just don’t trust. It if you haven’t written it yourself.

I expect it will be popular to dogpile on this article and point out how it's wrong in all sort of ways. I don't mean to do this and appreciate the writing, but a core difference is that software engineering always strives to avoid catering to the idiosyncrasies of the time and place while civil engineering is virtually all about the quirks of the site.

I think this results in quite different cultures.

My point is not that oil fails to generate revenue. Clearly it is a lucrative business. Instead, my claim is that the state economy was remarkably robust, productive, healthy, and well-optimized for middle class quality of life pre-2007.

Does it sound surprising to you that it was perfectly normal to rent a perfect acceptable two bedroom apartment in a safe town on the interstate for $300 a month and still easily find dignified, decent paying jobs without 1000 applications?

I've lived in many cities and work in tech now, and I can confidently say that, as it concerns the professions and jobs that unambiguously sustain and improve life, no community on the planet was more productive than my home state. There is more to the story than some shale.

With all due respect, I disagree.

I loved the winters. I loved the people. I loved how its natural beauty was subtle and rewarded the patient, unlike El Capitan or the Black Hills. The economy was fine before oil appeared.

I don't like this article. In particular, this section is especially poor:

> Block 1: We couldn't calculate fast enough. Solution: The GPU.

> Block 2: We couldn't train deep enough. Solution: Transformer architecture.

> Block 3: We can't "think" fast enough. Solution: Groq’s LPU.

#2 is outright wrong. Deep networks were made viable from residual layers and their refinement. #3 is also incorrect; "think" = compute so this is the same statement as #1.

Also, the "limestone" analogy is pretty weak.

I originally tried to do this on my own server but my GPU is too old :(

I wanted to let an LLM be able to grep and read through it.

I wasn't aware of dots when I wrote the blog post. This is really good to know!! I would like to try again with some newer models.

A thought I often have - older millennials and younger Gen X have a unique obligation to fix certain parts of society because we are the youngest generation old enough to remember how to operate in and enjoy a world that wasn't A/B tested into a gray, lifeless background hum.