4 ms·

So Seth, as presumably a non-farmer, is doing professional farmer's work all on his own without prior experience? Is that what you're saying?

tekno45 9mo ago
trying. until you can eat it, you're just fucking around.
- LoganDark 9mo ago
  He's writing it down, so it's also science.
  - tekno45 9mo ago
    exactly, its science/research, until you can feed people its not really farming.
    - pixl97 9mo ago
      >until you can feed people So if I grow biomass for fuel or feedstock for plastics that's not farming? I'm sure there are a number of people that would argue with you on that. I'm from the part of the country where there large chunks of land dedicated to experimental grain growing, which is research, and other than labels at the end of crop rows you'd have a difficult time telling it from any other farm. TL:DR, why are you gatekeeping this so hard?
- nonethewiser 9mo ago
  Thats not the point of the original commenter. The point of the original commenter is that he expects Claude can inform him well enough to be a farm manager and its not impressive since Seth is the primary agent. I think it is impressive if it works. Like I mentioned in a sibling comment I think it already definitely proves something LLMs have accomplished though, and that is giving people tremendous confidence to try things.
  - cubano 9mo ago
    > I think it is impressive if it works. It only works if you tell Claude..."grow me some fucking corn profitably and have it ready in 9 months" and it does it. If it's being used as manager to simply flesh out the daily commands that someone is telling it, well then that isn't "working" thats just a new level of what we already have with APIs and crap.
    - nonethewiser 9mo ago
      It's working if it enables him to do it when he otherwise couldn't without significantly more time, energy, etc.
nonethewiser 9mo ago
1) You are right and its impressive if he can use AI to bootstrap becoming a farmer 2) Regardless, I think it proves a vastly understated feature of AI: It makes people confident. The AI may be truly informative, or it may hallucinate, or it may simply give mundane, basic advice. Probably all 3 at times. But the fact that it's there ready to assert things without hesitation gives people so much more confidence to act. You even see it with basic emails. Myself included. I'm just writing a simple email at work. But I can feed it into AI and make some minor edits to make it feel like my own words and I can just dispense with worries about "am i giving too much info, not enough, using the right tone, being unnecessarily short or overly greating, etc." And its not that the LLMs are necessarily even an authority on these factors - it simply bypasses the process (writing) which triggers these thoughts.
- kokanee 9mo ago
  I started to write a logical rebuttal, but forget it. This is just so dumb. A guy is paying farmers to farm for him, and using a chatbot to Google everything he doesn't know about farming along the way. You're all brainwashed.
  - nonethewiser 9mo ago
    What specifically are you disagreeing with? I dont think its trivial for someone with no farming experience to successfully farm something within a year. >A guy is paying farmers to farm for him Read up on farming. The labor is not the complicated part. Managing resources, including telling the labor what to do, when, and how is the complicated part. There is a lot of decision making to manage uncertainty which will make or break you.
    - kokanee 9mo ago
      [dead]
    - AlotOfReading 9mo ago
      We should probably differentiate between trying to run a profitable farm, and producing any amount of yield. They're not really the same thing at all. I would submit that pretty much any joe blow is capable of growing some amount of crops, given enough money. Running a profitable farm is quite difficult though. There's an entire ecosystem connecting prospective farmers with money and limited skills/interest to people with the skills to properly operate it, either independently (tenant farmers) or as farm managers so the hobby owner can participate. Institutional investors prefer the former, and Jeremy Clarkson's farm show is a good example of the latter.
culi 9mo ago
Nobody is denying that this is AI-enabled but that's entirely different from "AI can grow corn". Also Seth a non-farmer was already capable of using Google, online forums, and Sci-Hub/Libgen to access farming-related literature before LLMs came on the scene. In this case the LLM is just acting as a super-charged search engine. A great and useful technology, sure. But we're not utilizing any entirely novel capabilities here And tbh until we take a good crack at World Models I doubt we can
- NewsaHackO 9mo ago
  I think is that a lot of professional work is not about entirely novel capabilities either, most professionals get the major revenue from bread and butter cases that apply already known solutions to custom problems. For instance, a surgeon taking out an appendix is not doing a novel approach to the problem every time.
- onion2k 9mo ago
  In this case the LLM is just acting as a super-charged search engine. It isn't, because that implies getting everything necessary in a single action, as if there are high quality webpages that give a good answer to each prompt. There aren't. At the very least Claude must be searching, evaluating the results, and collating the data in finds from multiple results into a single cohesive response. There could be some agentic actions that cause it to perform further searches if it doesn't evaluate the data to a sufficiently high quality response. "It's just a super-charged search engine" ignores a lot of nuance about the difference between LLMs and search engines.
  - hnaccount_rng 9mo ago
    I think we are pretty much past the "LLMs are useless" phase, right? But I think "super-charged search engine" is a reasonably well fitting description. Like a search engine, it provides its user with information. Yes, it is (in a crude simplified description) better at that. Both in terms of completeness (you get a more "thoughtful" follow up) as well as in finding what you are looking for when you are not yet speaking the language. But that's not what OP was contesting. The statement "$LLM is _doing_ $STUFF in the real world" is far less correct than the characterisation as "super-charged search engine". Because - at least as far as I'm aware - every real-world interaction had required consent from humans. This story including
tjr 9mo ago
I would say that Seth is farming just as much as non-developers are now building software applications.
PlatoIsADisease 9mo ago
Can't wait to see how much money they lose. I'll see if my 6 year old can grow corn this year.
- cubano 9mo ago
  > I'll see if my 6 year old can grow corn this year. Sure..put it in Kalshi while your at it and we can all bet on it. I'm pretty sure he could grow one plant with someone in the know prompting him.
NewJazz 9mo ago
Anyone can be a farmer. I've got veggies in my garden. Making a profit year after year is much much harder.

tekno45 9mo ago

trying. until you can eat it, you're just fucking around.

LoganDark 9mo ago
He's writing it down, so it's also science.
- tekno45 9mo ago
  exactly, its science/research, until you can feed people its not really farming.
  - pixl97 9mo ago
    >until you can feed people So if I grow biomass for fuel or feedstock for plastics that's not farming? I'm sure there are a number of people that would argue with you on that. I'm from the part of the country where there large chunks of land dedicated to experimental grain growing, which is research, and other than labels at the end of crop rows you'd have a difficult time telling it from any other farm. TL:DR, why are you gatekeeping this so hard?
nonethewiser 9mo ago
Thats not the point of the original commenter. The point of the original commenter is that he expects Claude can inform him well enough to be a farm manager and its not impressive since Seth is the primary agent. I think it is impressive if it works. Like I mentioned in a sibling comment I think it already definitely proves something LLMs have accomplished though, and that is giving people tremendous confidence to try things.
- cubano 9mo ago
  > I think it is impressive if it works. It only works if you tell Claude..."grow me some fucking corn profitably and have it ready in 9 months" and it does it. If it's being used as manager to simply flesh out the daily commands that someone is telling it, well then that isn't "working" thats just a new level of what we already have with APIs and crap.
  - nonethewiser 9mo ago
    It's working if it enables him to do it when he otherwise couldn't without significantly more time, energy, etc.

nonethewiser 9mo ago

1) You are right and its impressive if he can use AI to bootstrap becoming a farmer 2) Regardless, I think it proves a vastly understated feature of AI: It makes people confident. The AI may be truly informative, or it may hallucinate, or it may simply give mundane, basic advice. Probably all 3 at times. But the fact that it's there ready to assert things without hesitation gives people so much more confidence to act. You even see it with basic emails. Myself included. I'm just writing a simple email at work. But I can feed it into AI and make some minor edits to make it feel like my own words and I can just dispense with worries about "am i giving too much info, not enough, using the right tone, being unnecessarily short or overly greating, etc." And its not that the LLMs are necessarily even an authority on these factors - it simply bypasses the process (writing) which triggers these thoughts.

kokanee 9mo ago
I started to write a logical rebuttal, but forget it. This is just so dumb. A guy is paying farmers to farm for him, and using a chatbot to Google everything he doesn't know about farming along the way. You're all brainwashed.
- nonethewiser 9mo ago
  What specifically are you disagreeing with? I dont think its trivial for someone with no farming experience to successfully farm something within a year. >A guy is paying farmers to farm for him Read up on farming. The labor is not the complicated part. Managing resources, including telling the labor what to do, when, and how is the complicated part. There is a lot of decision making to manage uncertainty which will make or break you.
  - kokanee 9mo ago
    [dead]
  - AlotOfReading 9mo ago
    We should probably differentiate between trying to run a profitable farm, and producing any amount of yield. They're not really the same thing at all. I would submit that pretty much any joe blow is capable of growing some amount of crops, given enough money. Running a profitable farm is quite difficult though. There's an entire ecosystem connecting prospective farmers with money and limited skills/interest to people with the skills to properly operate it, either independently (tenant farmers) or as farm managers so the hobby owner can participate. Institutional investors prefer the former, and Jeremy Clarkson's farm show is a good example of the latter.

culi 9mo ago

Nobody is denying that this is AI-enabled but that's entirely different from "AI can grow corn". Also Seth a non-farmer was already capable of using Google, online forums, and Sci-Hub/Libgen to access farming-related literature before LLMs came on the scene. In this case the LLM is just acting as a super-charged search engine. A great and useful technology, sure. But we're not utilizing any entirely novel capabilities here And tbh until we take a good crack at World Models I doubt we can

NewsaHackO 9mo ago
I think is that a lot of professional work is not about entirely novel capabilities either, most professionals get the major revenue from bread and butter cases that apply already known solutions to custom problems. For instance, a surgeon taking out an appendix is not doing a novel approach to the problem every time.
onion2k 9mo ago
In this case the LLM is just acting as a super-charged search engine. It isn't, because that implies getting everything necessary in a single action, as if there are high quality webpages that give a good answer to each prompt. There aren't. At the very least Claude must be searching, evaluating the results, and collating the data in finds from multiple results into a single cohesive response. There could be some agentic actions that cause it to perform further searches if it doesn't evaluate the data to a sufficiently high quality response. "It's just a super-charged search engine" ignores a lot of nuance about the difference between LLMs and search engines.
- hnaccount_rng 9mo ago
  I think we are pretty much past the "LLMs are useless" phase, right? But I think "super-charged search engine" is a reasonably well fitting description. Like a search engine, it provides its user with information. Yes, it is (in a crude simplified description) better at that. Both in terms of completeness (you get a more "thoughtful" follow up) as well as in finding what you are looking for when you are not yet speaking the language. But that's not what OP was contesting. The statement "$LLM is _doing_ $STUFF in the real world" is far less correct than the characterisation as "super-charged search engine". Because - at least as far as I'm aware - every real-world interaction had required consent from humans. This story including

tjr 9mo ago

I would say that Seth is farming just as much as non-developers are now building software applications.

PlatoIsADisease 9mo ago

Can't wait to see how much money they lose. I'll see if my 6 year old can grow corn this year.

cubano 9mo ago
> I'll see if my 6 year old can grow corn this year. Sure..put it in Kalshi while your at it and we can all bet on it. I'm pretty sure he could grow one plant with someone in the know prompting him.

NewJazz 9mo ago

Anyone can be a farmer. I've got veggies in my garden. Making a profit year after year is much much harder.