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A parcel of land.

A few robot legs and arms, big battery, off-the-shelf GPU. Solar panels.

Prompt: "Take care of all this land within its limits and grow some veggies."


Jury is still out as to how well it works, but the traditional prompt is: "Be fruitful, and multiply"

Don't forget the extra instructions about not eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

What if it turns out that "take care of this land" means the traditional way California was taken care of with regular small slow burns. After over 10k years of this type of management there are many important native species that won't even germinate without the presence of ash.

Or it could turn out to look like satayoma (Japanese peasant forests) or it could be more similar to the crop rotation that was traditionally practiced in many parts of Central Africa where roots were important.

In Russia before the Soviets forced "modern scientific agriculture" on peasants to modernize, they practiced things like contour farming (where they interplanted rows of crops against the contours of the land to slow water down) and maslins (where they intermixed multiple varieties of wheat and barleys in the same patch). Now contour farming are an active area of research for their ability to prevent topsoil loss and build soil health while maslins provide superior yield stability and use little to no pesticides.

That's not even getting into the over 40-120,000 varieties of rice we've documented. Most of which are hyper adapted to a very specific location—often even a single village.

My point is there is no one way to take care of a plot of land. It's all relative to a number of factors beyond just the abiotic characteristics of the land itself. Your goals and intentions matter and you will always find localized unique adaptations.


Yeah I'm not sure how that's currently working out. https://proofofcorn.com/

Are you saying that has failed? It isn't obvious to me from that page that anything in particular is going wrong. I don't think anyone is daft enough to claim that AI solves the "Iowa remains unplantable due to winter conditions" problem.

Looking at the timeline they seem hopelessly behind. Its currently the planting window and they don't have land or a person to work it.

Ah, thank you. It's not the planting window yet where I am, north of Iowa, so I wasn't certain where they were.

logs suggest it's been 'critically failing' and 'blocked for 68 days' on farmhand introduction, although the logs don't go back far enough (and cut off too early) to really tell what's going on. https://proofofcorn.com/log

That's kind of the opposite problem -- the agent doesn't have robot arms or legs or a parcel of land. It has to rely on people to get access to land and plant and harvest the corn, and those people are ignoring it.

Done! The whole planet is now veggies.

It turned the planet into ‘taterchips!

If Starship puts some kind of fully-fueled, modular stage in LEO, and Orion docks with it, how fast could Orion then fly to and from Mars?

Space Weather still looks calm: https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/

Wow I had no idea about space weather. This entire Artemis run is so educational. Newly named moon features too!

NASA's rendering of the flyby:

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a005500/a005536/a2_fly...

Hope we get to see something like this in 4K !


Is that real-time or sped up? This video is about 1 minute. How much real time does it correspond to?

Artemis II is expected to be behind the moon for about 30-40 minutes. Around half-way in the video you can see Earth pass behind the moon in about 1-2 seconds. So yes, it's sped up considerably by a factor of around 2000x

Mild Space Weather: https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/

Moderate geomagnetic storm watch until April 2.


They can move around after they switch from launch to spaceflight config. Apparently they also have some exercise gear for the journey.


It is just the capsule though? There's no stage under them/another cylinder? Module

Trying to imagine how big the thing is like 10x10 feet room


Just the capsule - there is a module but it can’t be reached and is for more engines that they will leave behind.


ABC News says 330 habitable cubic feet or about the interior space of two minivans.


330 cubic feet =~ 9.3m²


A cube with an edge of 2.1 meters.

> ABC News says 330 habitable cubic feet or about the interior space of two minivans

I did lockdown in a ~450 sq. ft. Habitable under 400. Partner. Cat. Me. The astronauts will be fine.


~450 square feet, with how many feet in the third dimension? You probably had an order of magnitude more volume than 330 cubic feet there.


> You probably had an order of magnitude more volume than 330 cubic feet there

I’m 6’, so that’s the usable volume. (I’m not claustrophobic heighwise.)

I honestly don’t see an issue spending a couple days with folks I respect and admire in close quarters for ten days.


You don't get it. Your 400sqft apartment needs to be shrunk by a factor of 6 to have the same area as the Orion. Try living in an 8x8 foot square for a couple weeks.


That’s unfair as well - in space, more of the volume is usable. Perhaps equivalent to 2X 1G volume would be fairer.

> You don't get it

Have you ever been on a boat?


> Have you ever been on a boat?

What is a "boat"?


The boat you can step outside of, have a sky


> boat you can step outside of, have a sky

Not in a storm you can't! Granted I didn't do ten days. But I was with two other people for close to a week and it was...fine. We're old friends. There were moments it got annoying. But it was never boring or restrictive. We just played games, drank, looked out of the portholes, cursed hangovers and talked the one person who occasionally wanted to call it.


Yeah that sounds fun and closed spaces can be cozy too, at least especially when there isn't certain death outside

Here's a habitable zone in a different star system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST-1#Habitable_zone


How does this compare to the pi-mono coding agent?

https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages/codin...


Higher-end gaming laptops are still decently priced and work well for local AI inference.

And Linux runs better than ever on them; I'm running debian 13 with almost no driver issues.

For $2k you can get 32 GB DDR5 RAM and 16 GB fast VRAM. Bump the RAM to 64 GB and you're still below $3k.


What models or classes of models would I be able to run on that hardware?

I've asked myself that question while looking at some of the models on this: site https://laptopparts4less.frl/index.php?route=common/home


With 16 GB VRAM one can run a decent quant (Q4-Q8) of newer, smaller dense models. This leaves room for e.g. 32-256k context size.

This might not be enough to chew through a large code base but for smaller projects it can easily fit enough if not all of the code base to drive a good coding agent.

I don't recommend specific models or model providers due to how much hype and BS there is around benchmarks etc. Easiest is to check the latest generation of open models and look for a dense-type where a decent quant fits within the VRAM.

Some models run fast enough that some of the weights can spill over from VRAM to RAM while maintaining a usable prompt/token gen speed.


Thank you!


Ethereum has a new site for PQ research: https://pq.ethereum.org/


The one crypto that has no hashpower or security budget


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