In developing countries like India - a surprisingly high number of students do not have access to a computer. I have a lot of friends who had to learn enough on phone to bootstrap into buying their first laptop.
One of my best friend - in his village in the hills they did not have electricity but the government had sent a PC. No one was allowed to go close to it but that was the very thing that inspired him to learn computers. Today he's one of the sharpest linux/infosec folks in my small circle.
Graphite[1] has interesting plugin ecosystem like Grafana[2] & has been around since 2009. Architecture of Open Source Applications book[3] has done a nice overview of the architecture. I really like how it reuses linux filesystem as data store, making archiving very simple.
Imagine the earth as distributed, massively parallel operating systems. Physical, chemical and biological conditions as $environment and available system calls. Seeds could be apps that can survive on certain hardware.
I learnt from a billion agave[1] project that in Chile where it touches 55 degree centigrade, they are the most resilient apps that thrive. In peak draughts, they're reviving techniques of fermenting the leaves as a fodder replacement. Tequila, I hear is mostly agave.
In native Karnataka, India they use the fibres for ropes, the tips as needles, the dehydrated leaves as roof tiles. A large suit manufacturer until recently would buy off local agave for very strong and lasting fabric. I learnt that a hammock weaved from the fibre would easily last 10 years in sun and rain.
Perhaps a biased view but fter teaching students from colleges I feel that most who are "born in the high level" world float comfortably without needing to understand fundamentals (memory, OS interfaces, arch, drivers, crashes, ..).
As soon as something basic goes down or when you have unexpected dives into low level stuff, the fair weather pilots are suddenly out of their depth.
I started with C, eventually moved into business roles and honestly wasn't even that good a dev. But looking at the uncertainty ahead in the world from a climate point of view, I sometimes worry about the future of tech talent.
We are losing tech veterans at a high rate and gaining a lot of chatgpt devs. I once remember a stackoverflow outage from my dev days and a large part of team went on vacation in the second half as we were so used to asking and copying.
Any fragility to modern infra will make us fall so hard on our faces I fear and hope I am wrong.
An alternative view based on Energy returns on Energy invested-
1. Most agriculture pumps orders of magnitude more Energy into the farm to make fewer calories of food. Petroleum becoming food is indeed useful as it is fungible for human consumption.
2. As soil productivity is dropping around the globe given pesticides and fertilizer usage, the EROI is dropping.
3. The future of farming, few believe is in making more from less as the hidden subsidies disappear.
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apcnf.in is one of the world's largest natural farming transitions with a few bits of contrarian genius that could be highlighted here:
1. Rather than dumping a lot of nitrogen into field they innoculate it with a microbial power few months before the rain. This 'pre monsoon dry sowing' uses many times less fertilizer and uses time and daily breathing cycles of earth for a few months to spiral in microbes. Look up ghana jeevamruta on youtube for details.
2. They use foliar sprays which urges plant leaves to develop filament like needles on leaves turning them hygroscopic. There is much more water in the air than in rivers + freshwater bodies on every continent.
3. They try to trigger mineral - fungus - bacteria - root rhizosphere - plant synergies rather than pumping nutrition by brute force. These small spirals become larger and larger and are highly highly multithreaded natural algorithms.
4. Science has recently discovered that seeds contain millions of microbes. They coat the seeds with beneficial coating as seed balls and plant them few months before the rains. The day and night cycles of breathing in and out, with rythmic background of dryness and wetness urges them to grow. They also auto deploy at the right time, vs being artificially timed by irrigation.
5. They work on fundamentals of plant immunity which leads to wild grass like resistance and endurance in plants without artificial irrigation. These plants are also pest resistant and the produce has lower perishability in tune of weeks.
6. They discovered that good fungus extends and grows into the plant body like rails that carry microbes. The microbial 'water' is coated with thick cell walls and doesn't dry as easily as irrigation water.
7. They keep the field under 365 day green cover via 5 layers of plants. This might not be equally possible in all bioregions but helps protect the soil from blazing heat.
These are just some of the points I noticed in their attempts to lower the net input cost at farming. Most developed economies do not have to think of this today given financial, logostic and govt subsidies but as inflation grows and supply chains become fragile, I feel this way of thinking has a lot of merit for those trying to make things work under sustenance economics.
While I am all for social justice.. i don't think a Marc or a Zucker or Jobs should be turned into villains. A corner of my mind forgives them because of how "the system" rewards specialization and how little of the outside world they see.
Keeping away from these personality caricatures, here is why i think this topic and these conversation are important, yet difficult to have in constructive ways:
1. It builds over our preexisting imaginations of how the world is, what runs it fundamentally, who governs it today and how these frameworks are changing.
2. People are fundamentally biased weather we are heading towards prosperity or slowdown.
3. We can't help adding our ideas of how the world should be - what systems should come etc.
4. Timeline of events - a truth 10 years down the road is practically a lie today.
5. Contradictory movements - as rural real estate crashes, urban might spike up and we can mostly only hold head or tail of the elephant.
6. To make the discussion simpler, one could use simpler analogies but the risk again is that complex systems don't follow simple linear paths.
7. These are conversations about the problems of the goats and not understood so easily by lions given little incentive to understand pastureland. Yet they do eventually affect them.
There are fundamentals to growth of every system and what weakens them will eventually simplify the system.
I am not as much interested in being "right" because that is a very naive way of looking at this. I am more interested in highlighting these trends because i fear we often build downstream of international trends (hyped areas vs fundamental changes that go unnotiticed).
Safer proven strategies do reduce risk but they also take away the upside of rewards. There is no replacement for ahead of the curve courage and societies, markets, time - all punish as well as reward forward thinking.
I see great opportunities when systems undergo large changes. As global energy economics, labour availability, localisation trends undergo fast changes, we have a real chance of riding these waves vs doing service delivery for NY and Valley. Cloud seeding was innovative till Dubai flooded. The world markets will quickly shift the narrative hanging us dry if we are not intellectually prepared for different possibilities.
As short term trends, i am noticing that there is a huge collapse in the middle of the economic pyramid. Without fundamental innovations in how we recalibrate our systems, only rich dog shampoo products would work and a lot of us and our people will be out of jobs and economy.Perhaps this isn't as applicable to the audience of this group as the members are incredibly well connected and can float away to greener smaller pastures but i also see counter trends to the "infinite growth for everyone, eventually" narrative. There are only so many rich dogs to shampoo and this is to address the "rest of us" part of the problem. It is already clear in product circles that we aren't building for our people and i feel that we can.
No answers here, to be honest. But an urge to highlight that these shifts are both opportunities and challenges and some of the hardest problems in the world. Having spent a few years in rural areas working on climate, i confess i have tilted my brains a little. :)
I have come to love the tech community, in large parts because of the sensitivity, nuance and accomodation tech bros also have here on HN. Honestly i've tried many times to judge the tech world but i also see enough balancing acts going on here at HN.
Many of us may fall, but I see great kindness and hope in Technologists to be able to inch the world towards great positivity. Few others have that agency in this tilted world, so it is also that.
It is incredible and fascinating how physics, chemistry and Biology come together in plant roots.
I have been trained as a computers person and hated Biology in school so i have zero background in these waters but learning all this has been humbling.
I heard that fungi, bacteria and plant roots work for each other towards the "survival of the friendliest" paradigm. Some of the smartest people admit that we do not understand what viruses do.
Here is another video you might like. Key point being that if a plant is healthy, "pests"(garbage collectors) can't eat it and this applies to us as much as plants - https://youtu.be/D1wJefaFrVI?si=tSGAPq99lgroah7J
While the academic, lab and research road down this path is known, few orgs have been successful at applying this at scale.
One of the lesser known state supported entities out of India - https://apcnf.in/ is arguably one of the largest natural farming operations in the world. They have been studying not just how these interactions work, but also the critical points at which one can do high leverage, yet low cost inputs.
Below is an upcoming webinar if you'd like to learn how to get off industrial fertilizers, pesticides and even tractor spends in farming operations. As the natural systems are degrading.. i feel these pathways become fundamental technical innovations to keep the farming servers running the OS called planet Earth.
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Thrilled to see keen interest nature based computing at HN, therefore taking the liberty to share.
Full disclosure is that these methods aren't innovated by them as much as assimilated and fine tuned. Most of the knowledge is threads weaved from superhero permaculturists and scientists from USA, Europe and around the world.
Their edge of course has been observing the quiet ways of indigenous communities who quietly - apply knowledge (vs publishing). Working at almost a country scale has also given them experience on the social, economic and technical APIs of society which are necessary to take innovations from pilots to mainstream scale.
NCNF (National Coalition for Natural Farming) and RySS (Rythu Sadhikara Samstha) invite you to a webinar on Science of Natural Farming
Date/Time - 30th April (Tuesday), 3 pm
Speaker - Shri T Vijay Kumar
Panelists -
- Dr Chandrashekhar Biradar
- Ms Sabarmatee
- Shri Soumik Banerjee
I am realising that passing context for $this is the tricky part as-
1. It is very difficult for me to tell you about my context as a user within low dimension variables.
2. I do not understand my situation in the universe to be able to tell AI.
3. I dont have a vocabulary with AI. Internet i feel aced this with shared HTTP protocol to consistently share agreed upon state. For ex within Uber I am a very narrow request response universe with.. POST phone, car, gps(a,b,c,d), now, payment.
But as a student wanting to learn algorithms how do I pass that I'm $age $internet-type from $place and prefer graphical explanations of algorithms, have tried but gotten scared of that thick book and these $milestones-cs50, know $python upto $proficiency(which again is a fractal variable with research papers on how to define for learning).
Similarly how do I help you understand what stage my startup idea is beyond low traction, but want to know have $networks/(VC, devs, sales) APIs, have $these successful partnerships with such evidence $attendance, $sales. Who should I speak to? Could you pls write the needful in mails and engage in partnership with other bots under $budget.
Even in the real world this vocabulary is in smaller pockets as our contexts are too different.
4. Learning assumes knowledge exists as a global forever variable in a wider than we understand universe. $meteor being a non maskable interrupt to the power supply at unicorn temperatures in a decade. Similarly one time trends in disposable $companies that $ecosystem uses to learn. I'm in a desert village with with absent electricity might mean those machines never reach me and perhaps most people don't have a basic phone in the world to be able to share state. Their local power mafia politics and absent governance might mean the pdf AI recommends i read might or might not help.
I don't know how this will evolve but to think of the possibilities has been so interesting. It's like computers can talk to us easily and they're such smart babies on day 1 and "folks we aren't able to put right, enough, cheap data in" is perhaps the real bottleneck to how much usefulness we are being able to uncover.
We do. Come do an AMA for us next week. Tomorrow's is by a senior from the college who cracked GATE, went to IIT-D and is now working with Visa in Bangalore. EMail me.
1. India has 10K AICTE approved engineering colleges. While some of these are IITs and NITs that you might've heard of, beyond the top 50-100 colleges, there is _no support system_ for the students. The curriculum of most state universities still updates in 5 years with little autonomy given to colleges. As a result, most students still see Java, C and dotNet as the universe of CS.
2. India's gender inequality in the workplace picks pace from higher education. In the college we mentor in, there are ~400 boys and ~50 girls. Out of which, 30 boys and 5 girls actively code today. Since there is substantial gender based teasing/harassment, most colleges in India lock women up post 8pm. Collaboration doesn't kick off because of such low density of students. Especially for girls.
3. We run this with 200 students over whatsapp. We have groups for fostering reading, internships & jobs, AMAs, competitive programming and so on. If you would like to help us scale this community, get in touch and we can talk in detail.
― Rumi