The "theory" of a program is supposed to be majority embedded in its identifiers, tests, and type definitions. The same line of reasoning in this article could be used to argue that you should just name all your variables random 1 or 2 letter combinations since the theory is supposed to be all in your head anyway.
Indeed, it's quickly obvious where an LLM is lacking context because the type of a variable is not well-specified (or specified at all), the schema of a JSON blob is not specified, or there is some other secret constraint that maybe someone had in their head X years ago.
>While Hadland says it would take a lot of repeated heavy use of nitrous oxide to see these effects, over time such use could also cause permanent neurological issues.
This is not a could. Repeated abuse of nitrous, perhaps as little as daily use over 2 months, does cause neurological issues, including spinal cord damage and paralysis [1].
There's a lot of really bad anecdotal horror stories about B12 problems from chronic NO2 use. You don't want it to happen to you. If you absolutely want to try N02, don't use it more than a couple times a month.
Other risk factors for low B12 are opiate use, alcohol use and finally eating vegan. The biggest risks are stacking any of those lifestyle choices on top of Nitrous Overuse.
"Abuse" is such a vague term. For context, the amount is 100+ canisters/day
> Most patients also had psychiatric symptoms. Nearly every patient estimated using 100 or more canisters of nitrous oxide per day in the months before being seen. Four
patients also reported engaging in B12 supplementation (both oral and parenteral), aiming to circumvent the harmful sequelae of prolonged nitrous oxide misuse.
100 chargers is not an enormous amount. That’s two normal sized boxes and when each one gets you high for 20 seconds it’s not hard to understand how you can rip through a box. Not trying to be dramatic here, I don’t consider people doing a couple whippets at a festival a public health issue, but from a harm reduction perspective the difference between occasional bouts and regular use of nitrous is somewhat distinct compared to other drugs.
The thing that “doesn’t work” about converting an existing full-time employee to a contractor, and why there wouldn’t be a process for doing so, is that it can make it look like the company is trying to dodge taxes associated with employing someone by “misclassifying” them as a contractor [1], or otherwise skirt around laws associated with employment - even laws considering layoffs: he might trust you individually but if you convert 20 employees to contractors then let them go later probably there’s going to be at least one who says that the contractor conversion was just a ploy to lay people off without notice or severance.
If you really think the market is saying you can make $150 freelancing, you can do what your manager is suggesting (which is actually pretty gracious, not sweating you about freelancing elsewhere affecting your work there), eventually quit the job and see if they’d hire you back as a freelancer in a few months.
If you have a clean, well-documented API that can be understood in under 30 minutes by a decent software engineer, congrats: you are MCP ready. I wonder how many discussions there will be about "adding MCP support" to software without this prerequisite.
You could say the same thing about almost any protocol, e.g. HTTP, which runs on arbitrary streams of bytes over TCP; and the headers, methods and status codes are just illusions on top of that.
Even for the first person described in the story, her search for a doctor is not primarily described a search for medical care, but a search for someone who can create a paper trail to ensure her child's eligibility for benefits.
It’s more about keeping minerals on the field. A big one is reducing erosion, which practices like no-till and cover cropping help. Tons of soil being washed away is a lot of nutrients being lost.
If you look at a regenerative certification program like [1] you’ll see that you’re allowed to apply synthetic fertilizer but it has to be no more than the rate removed by harvested crops. This means, hopefully, that you aren’t losing much to erosion, runoff, or volatization, and that good soil structure is keeping them available.
Most agricultural land is not double-cropped, in the US less than 3% of farmland was double-cropped in 2015 [1]. You actually have it backwards: when possible, cover crops or double cash crops are a key regenerative practice because they prevent erosion and keep living roots in the ground which can enhance soil health in other ways [2].
This is a tempting story to believe, but the actual trend is that global agricultural land use is almost flat over the past 30 years and land under cultivation per capita is decreasing almost everywhere due to improved yields [1].
That's actually incredible - and it has just barely grown since the 60s, when we had just 3 billion people. That means we can now feed nearly 3x the humans on virtually the same amount of land. That's fantastic, I had no idea the efficiencies had been that significant.
Back in the 1800’s people linearly extrapolated farmland usage, and concluded we’d run out in the early 1900’s.
It was about as ridiculous as the degrowth movement is today. Improving efficiency and decreasing environmental impact is almost always a better bet than embracing artificial scarcity.
Improving efficiency sometimes comes with other externalities. See, for instance, massive CAFOs where cows basically live on mountains of their own shit. Or gestation crates, where pigs cannot even turn around.
These things are more efficient, but many people consider them inhumane.
Efficiency is always a tradeoff, it's not always better. It needs to be considered, and done with intention, not with mindless drive towards efficiency for efficiency's sake.
I like to remind people that the Lord of the Rings is about a villain named Sauron, who was a wizard/angel/god whose domain was crafting. He was originally a beautiful person, who just wanted to build more and more. But he wasn't satisfied with the efficiency of the humans, elves, and dwarves. Convincing them was much slower than just telling them to do what he wanted. So he made some rings to control them. And he started breeding orcs who would do what he wanted without question.
Sauron became highly efficient, but he lost his beauty. I'm not anti-efficiency, but I am "think about the tradeoff you are making first. Understand what you are giving up."
Good luck with trying to persuade farmers to apply that additive.
Unkess there’s something in it for them that they can’t get by just claiming they’re applying the additive, farmers won’t do it.
There is no industry in the world more allergic to regulation than farming, despite the fact that most of themp farmers in the developed world (and much of the developing world) are heavily subsidised by the city dwellers they complain about.
If the additive actually reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and there is a working emissions trading system anywhere in the world, and the additive costs less to use than the reduction times the current carbon price, they could get paid for applying the additive.
Next step, make it legally required to apply the additive. Like filters in chimneys, catalytic converters in cars, etc. and have fines attached to not using it.
If that doesn’t work, increase fines and/or add criminal charges and prison.
Indeed, it's quickly obvious where an LLM is lacking context because the type of a variable is not well-specified (or specified at all), the schema of a JSON blob is not specified, or there is some other secret constraint that maybe someone had in their head X years ago.