1,530 karma · joined October 29, 2016
When the olives ripen and fall, it creates a big mushy mess all over the yard and sidewalks, so there are services that go around and spray olive trees with a growth regulator to prevent fruiting.
I always felt the whole thing was a bit wasteful and they should have been turned into oil but I suppose harvest isn't practical at scale.
Channeled correctly it could be a fantastic educational tool. And will be in my opinion.
A snake like line drawer that crashed when it hit the screen edge, stuff like that. I was 12 or 13 and didn't have any mentors but I did know some BASIC from a school program. Really loved that machine.
This was in Sunland Park, New Mexico which is basically Eastern El Paso.
The police weren't interested in getting camera footage at all. They also weren't very interested in following the backhoe tracks through the sand that went through a backyard gate at this trailer house a few hundred feet away containing cerement mixers, junk, and dozens of bicycles in different states of repair.
I came back to that job a few months later to check on some things and there was another backhoe parked in that backyard yard. I called the police. They said "what crime are you reporting? stop calling if you don't have a crime".
It can code and we saw it eat(ing) our former occupation, but that was always a defined finite space with defined rules and to be frank, not as hard as us practitioners liked to believe. So I don't think we can extrapolate this progress out to every other human endeavor in the near term at least.
More automation is coming though most likely.
It's gaps in actual thinking or intelligence I notice. A diff between what I can see or understand and what the model sees or understands. Some are very big, and this in spite of the models having much more knowledge and (presumably) less error prone processing.
My thought is that part of it has to do with inherent limitations of using symbolic representation for "thinking" and I suppose humans have other forms of thinking that occur outside of symbolic representation, and that is going to be hard to recreate digitally.
This is my whole point and I'm not trying to win a debate here or prove "LLMs are useless". Just speculating.
Do you hold your experience of "dogs" (for instance) as floating point numbers? The fur, the fear, the love, the wet mouths, the sounds and colors?
However LLMs deal entirely in symbols. 100%. Humans can "world build" aside from this and in fact are often at their best doing so.
Did the first humans to use fire and some form of a wheel even have the capability to talk about it? Think about that.
It's not really "creativity" because much of that always was derivative in my opinion. And LLMs are (for some definition of the word) fairly creative as far as taking known elements and re-arranging them.
I think what is missing is sort of a world model building capability. As humans we see phenomenon and classify them informally and model "what would it look like if this were the cause of that?" type scenarios. We see qualities in phenomena and realize this applies to other things even though the things may be completely different. We run informal "thought experiments" sort of. This is hard to duplicate because a lot (most?) of it occurs outside of systems of symbols like math and language with fixed rules in my opinion.
Anyway yes, lots of human thinking is statistical and LLMs have that down pretty well but they are not "smart" I have concluded and it might be a very long time, if ever, until they are. That isn't to say they aren't very capable tools which they obviously are.
I started sleeping on the floor for a few nights on a doubled thick blanket for slight padding and after the third night (first two were a little rough) I sprang up like an 18 year old and felt like my posture had been improved all day long.
We spend a lot of time in bed and most beds are too soft and lead to distortions is my current theory. I'm thinking about replacing my mattress with one of those reed mats Japanese sleep on.
First of all I doubt the 250K a year number just looking at the amount of produce in the field. Second of all, by the time all the expenses and distribution costs are figured in whatever the real number is shrinks by a lot. Third of all you need to be an area where a large number of people will pay double what it costs at Walmart for your produce. Lastly it takes years and a lot of trial and error to successfully produce efficiently and a couple of mistakes or bad luck and you are wiped out.
I actually have a lot of experience with this. I have a BS in Agronomy and managed a youpick/market garden back in the 90s. I still garden extensively you can see my YouTube channel here https://www.youtube.com/@pecospablo
I wish reality was as rosy as this video I really do. But I don't bother to try to sell my produce or expand, I know better. I just do it because I like it and eating top quality fresh picked food with high nutrient density is important to me.
From speed traps targeting out of state plates, to the poor state of medical care from large number of malpractice suits that pay out huge sums with sympathetic juries and drive doctors out of the state the state is always looking for someone else's money.
Huge fentanyl problem, last in education in the US, Meta is a tiny tiny portion of New Mexico's problems.
Source: I live in New Mexico. It's a great state in natural beauty but the shakedown rackets make life worse for the citizens long term in my view.
Come to think of it, I sort of wonder what many people with office jobs now are doing.
The process may need an additional nitrogen source depending on salt content of the fish sauce. Because the required N per volume of wood chips so it composts hotly may result in too much salt for the process if only fish sauce is used. In which case it could be diluted in an additional (low salt) nitrogen source.
I don't know how much salt fish sauce actually has, just it could be diluted and composted anyway if it's too much raw.
It could be composted and that would kill the smell, it's just getting the ratios right and you might need an additional nitrogen source, but Canada has a lot of wood chips for the carbon.
It seems they run into problems with larger concepts and general organization and need guidance at the moment but for a single code file they often do better then I would have.
It's a lot of work and not terribly cost effective (if you count labor) but it's also fun work.
But the real payoff is the quality of the food and it feels kind of weird sometimes, like, I'm not uber wealthy, I'm not a movie star nor famous person and yet this is possibly some of the highest quality food available I'm eating. Flavor and probably nutrition as well.
I made this eggplant parmesan last night and everything in it but the salt and oil and breading was from my garden. The tomato sauce, the herbs, the garlic, everything. All fresh picked that day. It's unbelievable how delicious it was I really wish I could share the experience.
Store produce seems like a ghost now, like this faint shadow of the taste produce should have.