I like this fyi.
1,541 karma · joined October 29, 2016
To a limited extent as an individual. One can't simply remake the entire world they were born within.
I caught myself recently explaining something like "resize the top element 30% and move the bottom element up 10%" (except it was slightly more complex).
After a few iterations of that I thought "what are we doing here? I could adjust a single value in the CSS instead of writing complete sentences!". The problem was, then I'd have to go dig up the values and see how it was laid out, which might take more time then writing the sentences. Its still crazy though.
On the other hand, the basic layout was done in 2 minutes instead of half a day so there was that.
The main issues seem to be glazing that sibling mentions and also it seems to play a bit loser with facts and reality and makes up more stuff.
That isn't to say this might not be the best solution for many people but I still wonder.
I'm an agronomist by training (turned software dev 16 years ago) and worked on a number of kinds of farms early in my career.
I've always gardened but during COVID really ramped it up and grow about 1/3 of my own food.
I grow organically with a full spectrum of minerals in primarily rich diverse compost I make (and buy as needed).
I feel and look better than I did 10 years ago and will be 56 this coming spring. Seriously, I get looks from much younger women when I'm out and it always surprises me because I'm an old man. My skin glows. I have a lot of energy. That didn't happen as much before I started eating like this.
This has caused me to take soil depletion and "growing stuff too fast" very seriously and think it may be the root cause of a lot of problems we see around us.
Knowing these things might not really be needed going forward, but it was a good workout, and I'm grateful I got a chance to go through that even if it becomes largely unnecessary.
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.