I love the idea of hydro/aquaponics and built a system as a student more than a decade ago. It’s a fun project.
But as a form of agriculture it’s a spectacularly bad idea at home.
This setup is about 1 square meter of NYC space, that’s about $18k. Meanwhile agricultural land goes for about $2/m2, or 9000x less. Then you spend $700 in parts to set up the 1 square meter, even if you put the system on cheap rural Kentucky land. Then you pay $170 a year to power the system for again, 1 square meter.
Meanwhile the 1 square meter produces like less than $100 in annual produce.
Green house farms like in the Netherlands have perfected this growing method and it’s quite effective. Home food production is a joke by comparison just like home anything production of a commodity product.
So fun DIY projects but as a serious way to grow food it’s terrible, not economical or sustainable. I tore down my project the same year I built it, taught me a lot but made no sense to continue.
Could you also add your thoughts on whether you think a B1 level is a sensible requirement for permanent residence in any country?
Because that's what the post seems to boil down to, but you haven't opined on it (other than refusing to learn B1, which implies the answer somewhat).
B1 by the way is considered doable for a consistent parttime learner in 9 months, and 1-2 years for someone doing weekend studying. That's an average.
For a studious family with higher educational background making 200k a year (this is significantly above average in Germany), you've got both the IQ and the capital for tutoring to do better than average.
Seems like a sensible, useful, necessary and practical bar to set for permanent residence, to me.
There's some people that say having no airconditioning, no dishwasher, no elevator, no computer, no smartphone isn't as bad as it sounds.
And they're completely right, for them. And completely wrong, for others.
I'll never claim that it's not enough for you. And I agree also that 80% of anyone's trips can be done on just about any EV, even an old Zoe. The statistics are very clear on that, 80% of trips are short.
But you won't sell to the majority with that limitation. Just like 80% of the time my house has just 2 people in it (me and my gf), but if there was a local law that on homes in my street I could not have more than 2 people in the house (like visiting friends and family), I wouldn't have bought it. Because I don't buy it for '80% of the time', I buy it for 100% of the time.
The same goes for cars. People buy 5 seater cars even though the average car has 1.5 persons in it, for this very reason. Only 1% to 2% of cars have 2 seats, even though this is more than necessary for the average occupation in a car.
Exactly this, he should've just fixed this, or not written an article about it.
After the 'sensorium effect' (he should've used ancient greek for a +10 bonus to archaic intellectual points), he describes the 'knowledge-doing gap'. i.e. the AI reasons it needs to build X, logs this for 110 turns in a row, but doesn't do it. It doesn't actually specify why not, and whether it is again a limitation of his MCP implementation. If the AI articulates it must do it like the author says, but decides not to, either it doesn't think it must do it, or it does think it must but somehow can't technically execute its own decisions, it can't be anything else.
In fact in the context of 'advising the UK government', this 'knowledge-doing gap' I assume is a technical limitation, is entirely moot. For the cost of 0.00001% of the UK's government you could just hire a human being to execute that which the AI articulates. I'm curious what the results would be if he just did a manual execution of the AI's articulated actions would be.
The fact he doesn't go in to this but just keeps repeating examples of this makes it a pointless article.
Quite annoying to have to read a paragraph of text next to a moving image. I right-clicked every GIF and turned off 'loop'.
Beyond that reading an AI piece just feels like a waste of time. The text goes on and on without making a point, or getting to an actual learning. It just delineates the AI's limitations, doesn't go into whether these can be fixed, are innate, or what conclusions you can draw from it, over and over with example after example but no point.
Mostly it seems to keep repeating that the AI has the correct analysis but just doesn't execute. The AI knows to build X and logs this in each of its turns, yet doesn't build it. It's like there's some API connection missing between analysis and execution, and turns this into a 10 page article.
The article ends with some weird question to the AI asking if it enjoys the games, and you get some quasi-scifi mumbo jumbo answer back that looks very profound to say my mom, but is just silly to post if you know what the LLM is doing: predicting the next word. Honestly this is a poor article and I wish it wasn't posted.
I thought it was quite the opposite, too easy. Your ship recharges health. Also you can claim and island and heal there. It's so easy to the point it's actually boring, I got 10 kills before I quit, never got close to dying. Hell you can even claim an island, sit there in healing-mode, while shooting down enemy ships that don't heal...
For one it's a peace-time situation where strong-arming interventions are met with consequences, in this case China can stop supply of critical products to punish the Dutch. In a wartime situation such supply would've been stopped anyway, so there is nothing further to lose and everything to gain from an intervention, but such an intervention is only possible if the factory is on your soil.
Second, Nexperia is a legitimate Dutch company with Dutch expertise. The Chinese bought it. The Dutch don't need Chinese expertise to operate the local factory they built and sold to the Chinese.
Third, China is a global hegemon, South Korea isn't by comparison, and South Korea is a neighbour of China, the Netherlands isn't. China could pressure a battery factory in South Korea during a military conflict by military force, but in Western Europe that's a different story.
'breaking records' implies a lot more than it is. The amount of breaths anyone takes in their life also continues to break their own personal record, but it's not as impressive as it sounds.
Output today is 2x what it was 10 or 20 years ago. Nice but 'record breaking', meh. Especially in global context, it's quite tiny.
It's obviously both in different circumstances. I've had plenty of raises while the rest of my team didn't, and when I stopped doing what I was doing, I joined them.
PHEVs are typically discouraged in many countries nowadays, because drivers fall into one of two categories:
A) plug-in to charge on a (virtually) daily basis at home
B) plug-in to charge as necessary, some of whom have no home-charging (apartment-dweller)
PHEVs make no sense for category (A) people because there is no range-anxiety if you home-charge every day. Typical drivers do 40km a day on average. Even an entry-level Tesla model 3 has >530km of range, and goes up to 750km for the model 3.
PHEVs also make no sense for category (B) people, because the PHEV has just 50km of range. So if you don't plug in all the time, you're basically driving a gasoline car with an extra engine and a battery, increasing weight (= fuel) and maintenance cost.
Various studies of real-world usage have shown PHEVs are less efficient because the behavior of its drivers. They'd be better off just driving a regular hybrid, like a Corolla.
The only area where PHEVs make sense are people who drive short-distances on a daily basis, plug in the car always at home, yet make frequent (say weekend) long trips of 6+ hours of driving without any breaks, or long trips to remote areas with no charging infrastructure. This is a pretty rare combination. Most PHEVs are traditionally owned by urbanites lured by a green dream and green subsidies, who're better off getting a pure EV or just an efficient boring hybrid.
I think at the upper range, and for Teslas, this is true. But for the rest, not quite yet.
Suppose you buy an entry-level Renault 5, the WLTP range is 310km. In mild conditions you typically get 85-90% of that, enough for the majority of people. But in winter you get 65% of that, so 195km, on a new battery. And after 5 years that may be 165km in winter, and that's just not great. With home-charging that still is enough for most requirements, but you are more restricted for longer trips and have to charge diligently.
I live in an apartment so I wouldn't be home-charging daily, there'd be plenty of times I'd want to park my car at the first available spot in my area at 55% charge and use it the next day, which is even more restrictive.
For the entry-level Tesla the WLTP range is 530km or 70% more. There the problem is much less. And for home-chargers, it's also a no-brainer usually, especially with home solar. But for an apartment-dweller who just needs an entry-level car, it's still a toss-up between a new EV like a renault 5 for 30k, or just a Toyota Corolla Hybrid that gets great mileage, low maintenance and can be had new for 30k or a few years old for 20k.
Unfortunately, I refuse to buy a Tesla due to Musk's politics.
It's more like the recent events trigger people's awareness and learning about multi-year trends that are happening regardless of recent events.
EVs are a good deal in much of the world. They're more quiet, lower maintenance costs, lower fuel costs, therefore lower cost of ownership and operation. And they have less volatile costs as electricity prices swing less than gas prices.
Long-term trends show electricity and gas prices decouple.
It's just that every time gas prices spike, people look into solutions and find out these truths.
I didn't say work hard. But if you keep contributing what you already contributed previously and nothing changes, your salary likely also doesn't change. Changing that doesn't necessarily require working hard, I haven't made any such claim. In fact my salary inversely correlated with my effort. But I do recognize that when I stopped changing things (i.e. my role in the company became stagnant), my salary also remained stagnant.
I was at my previous company for almost 10 years, I had annual promotions and I roughly 4x'd my annual income in this period, which averages to about 15% of year-on-year pay increases. Part inflation, part growth in skills.
Virtually all of that happened in the first 8 years. In the last 2 years I also stalled and saw minor inflation corrections of 2% a year, so I quit.
In my experience it had everything to do with me. In the first 8 I was very hungry, and always willing to take on something more or different. In the last 2 I was very much set on just coasting and doing what I was already doing, and it translated in them paying what they had always paid me, plus a little for inflation correction.
I think the truth is usually that if others don't stall and you do, that the solution probably sits with you as well. That having been said, I think now with AI the value-add of an employee sees so much pressure, that I think stalling will be a major trend.
For me it's as much culture as it is work. In fact I live in the capital city of my country, even though my work has not always been here. I live here because it has world class restaurants, bars, museums, architecture, parks, gyms, a dozen public swimming pools and a million amenities you wouldn't even think of but are fun to do once or twice, like there's dedicated restaurants where you can play jeux de boules.
And most importantly there's a million people here, statistically there's a good chance you run into people who're in the top 5% of whatever their field is in. Whether it's musicians, engineers, athletes, philosophers, there's a good chance you'll run into a lot of interesting ones.
My friend lives in a village and he has 1 pizzeria and 1 italian and 1 chinese restaurant. There's no gym. There's a very basic park with grass and some trees. There's no museums, architecture is all the same. There's no nightlife whatsoever. There's no real amenities, not even a library. There's a few shops with the basics, with very limited opening hours. There's as much nature nearby as there is for me. Tere's also no real way to make friends, and there's a few hundred people to meet at most, statistically most of them aren't very interesting to you (not 'not interesting in general', but 'to you'. It's easier to find 'your tribe' if you can select from a million vs a hundred).
So it's really the 'commute' or I should say proximity to culture, i.e. people, their thoughts and their creations, that sells the city for me, not the proximity to the company I happen to work for, which is sometimes in another city.