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Is Gemini cli not an agentic model? Or are you just saying it's built poorly? Gemini 2.5 didn't really work for me but Gemini 3 seems fairly solid

Gemini fairs poorly at tool use, even in its own CLI and even in Antigravity. It gets into a mess just editing source files, it's tragic because it's actually not a bad model otherwise.

It frequently fails to apply its diffs at first but it always succeeds eventually for me. I'm happy with it. I understand it is slower than other models but it also costs barely anything per month.

AIUI plants are actually only responsive to a few wavelengths of light for most of their growth. I've wondered, if solar panels can collect energy over a broader spectrum, if it could actually be more efficient to drive LEDs tuned to just what plants need, driven by broad spectrum solar power. In this way you could, theoretically, power a 3d growing operation based solely on the solar panels on the roof.

Every vertical farming company says this in their advertising. That didn't stop them from going bankrupt.

Conventional agriculture works much better. You can build acres of greenhouses and make a profit.

Vertical farming is such an abject failure that every single vertical farm is biomass constrained, meaning that they have to stretch their biomass with water. This is why vertical farms generally only sell "leafy greens", a marketing term that tries to sweep the inherent technical failure of vertical farming under the rug.


Back of the envelope math:

  Solar panel captures energy from an 800nm wide range (300-1100nm)
  Plant captures energy from a 300nm wide range (400-700nm) 
  The solar panel could reproject and amplify the 300nm range at (800/300=) 2.7X more power than the sun

The reason plants capture energy from this range is because that's where most of sunlight's energy is concentrated, which is going to drop this quite a bit further. Glancing at a solar radiation spectrum curve makes it look a lot closer to ~1.5x. Combine that with inefficiencies of both the panel and the LEDs and it really doesn't look that good.

But solar panels are only about 30% efficient, so that kinda kills any gains.

Thanks, this is exactly the comment I was looking for. In addition to the 70% loss due to the solar panel efficiency, I think we should also lose some efficiency in the conversion to light via leds (although I expect that’s much more efficient, perhaps at like 80%).

I’m curious what is physically possible, if we assume we can achieve the max possible efficiency. I’m guessing there’s behavior like a Carnot engine, and the energy transfer can only be up to ~86% efficient (but please correct me if I’m wrong!!). In that case, conversion from light to energy via solar panels -> conversation back to light via leds should be 0.86*0.86 = 73% efficient in best case. And the full effect should be (800/300)*0.73 = 1.94, about twice as good as growing plants with the sun’s direct light. I’m surprised that seems possible!

p.s. My efficiency guesses are probably wrong. Please correct me.


By using multiple junctions and stacking them, top one converting the most energetic photons, then the second-most etc, one can approach the theoretical limit of about 95% or whatever it is. However in practice it's very expensive and difficult as I understand. AFAIK the current state of the art is about 6 stacked junctions at around 60% efficiency, at great cost.

And as you say the LEDs aren't 100% efficient either, though both deep red and bright blue are among the most efficient, about 85% there.

So that leaves you with about 50% overall just from those two.


I thought that efficiency was governed by the wavelengths they absorb? Ie absorb all wavelengths == 100% efficiency.

So that would imply they are inherently more efficient just looking at the figures provided.


I love this idea and it's one of those ideas I categorize into the bucket of "when all the other lower hanging fruit has been picked", just because it's more complicated.

When we've got actually braindead policy like ethanol fuel mandates, the ROI of switching a corn farm to solar is so incredibly high that solutions like this just aren't competitive.

I wish some of our billionaire class would turn their attention to these things rather than building yet another rocket company. Maybe that's why Gates is buying up farmland, who knows.


Maybe present it as proving out technology that could be helpful in building a self-sustaining Mars colony?

Does his opposition of homosexuality some how make his point about writing critiques less interesting?

I can't believe you wrote your comment on a computer with wouldn't exist without eugenicist shockley's nobel prize winning invention. Shameful!


> Does his opposition of homosexuality some how make his point about writing critiques less interesting?

i'll bite: yes. it belies a lack of compassion, imagination, openness and curiosity required to create compelling fiction or writing advice that resonates with people who aren't bigots.


Orson Scott Card is one of the best selling sci Fi authors of all time, and has won the hugo and nebula award multiple times, and has been translated into 35+ languages. I think you would be pretty hard pressed to show that his writing isn't compelling to many people.

a lot of that happened before his views were more widely known. much like jk rowling. a lot of people have written both best-selling authors off as bigots; this is just a matter of fact. they may be financially comfortable but their standings have been irreparably harmed by their own statements.

Yes, and that's a completely different point from the one you were making.

Your claim that they became massively popular before they revealed themselves to be bigots, contradicts your claim about their

> lack of compassion, imagination, openness and curiosity required to create compelling fiction or writing advice that resonates with people who aren't bigots.

You are doing the cause a disservice. Think better.


we can learn new things about people that change the way we feel about them and the work they produce. nothing is truly static.

Ok cryptofash.

What's that, you didn't know you were?

Well, as you say - nothing is truly static...


"Attention Is All You Need" was a paper by a bunch of Google researchers

Still, attributing that progress to "years of research at Google" alone is simplifying the facts to the point of being just plain wrong. That kind of research was always very much in the open and cooperative, with deep levels of standing-on-shoulders.

Attention e.g. was developed by Dzmitry Bahdanau et al. (those being Kyunghyun Cho and Yoshua Bengio) in 2014 while interning at the University of Montreal.

The insight of the paper you point to was that with attention you could dispense of the RNN that attention was initially developed to support.



For the same period:

AMZN: +2100% META: +1700% MSFT: +1300% GOOG: +1400%


This is a specious comparison at best. Apple is, at heart, a hardware company. They have different growth profiles. A consumer hardware company getting that sort of growth is mind boggling.

Was meta a public company back then? Amazon, I think, was quite small, too.

You're right, Facebook didn't go public until May 2012, after the start of the period mentioned. Amazon went public in '97.

What exactly is supposed to happen though? "Don't be horribly racist" is a nice idea, but it's not like we see people who put these acknowledgements up actually attempting to return the "stolen land"

I think it makes sense to put it on the website if you're going to do it though, since it's a website about, basically, a building in melbourne.


Well, similarly to how the neo-right slowly shifted the social frame with frog memes and screaming slurs at children on online FPS game lobbies, things like land acknowledgments slowly shift the reference frame of society towords a place where some good outcomes might actually be possible.

> it's not like we see people who put these acknowledgements up actually attempting to return the "stolen land"

It's a humiliation ritual that legitimizes claims of theft and invites stochastic violence against the people outing themselves as colonizers.

It's like apologizing for dubious rape allegations; once you apologize for it you've admitted guilt, and invite retribution from everybody positioned to impose it.

Forgiveness is never offered so there's no point to going along with any of these charades. They condemn you either way.


He ended up producing a documentary you can watch, called 7 Mile.

So authoritative!

You had me for a second :)


If you cosleep with your 8 month pregnant wife she might not be sleeping well and by proximity you may not be sleeping well.

Do humans not fit the standards for being broken into multiple subspecies? I assumed that they would but "the science community" is too scared of the implications when idiots learn about it.

I look at a sumatran tiger and a Siberian tiger and I see a lot less variance than I see when I look at a pygmy, a Norwegian, an sentinel islander, and a han Chinese person


>Do humans not fit the standards for being broken into multiple subspecies?

No. Multiple human subspecies did once exist (examples being Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo Erectus, and Homo Floresiensis) but only our species, Homo Sapiens, remains (with traces of Neanderthal DNA so there was some interbreeding.) However race is a cultural and social construct. Different human races are not different human subspecies. A Pygmy, a Norwegian, a Sentinel Islander, and a Han Chinese person are all the same species. The superficial variations in average height, skin color, etc. do not vary enough to constitute species differentiation - humans share 99.9% of their DNA, and the vast majority of genetic variation exists within populations (in other words, within "races") and not between them.


> the vast majority of genetic variation exists within populations

This particular argument (I am not talking about anything else) always looked to me as "inkblot defense" (Cephalopods muddy water to defend themselves).

Genome is discrete. A single nucleotide polymorphism can have far-reaching consequences. So it's a bit like arguing that this collection of pentagons is not statistically different from this collection of hexagons because radius variation within collections is greater than between collections.

One day I've got into trouble by pointing to another genetic adaptation (EPAS1 SNPs) rather than the poster child of genetic differences: an SNP in the 6th codon of the β-globin gene. But that's another story.


Species is a fuzzy concept, much like class of radius variation.

Well humans and chimpanzees share almost 99% of their DNA despite being quite distant relative so that number is somewhat deceptive. Not disagreeing with the overall point of course

> However race is a cultural and social construct. [...] The superficial variations in average height, skin color, etc. do not vary enough to constitute species differentiation

Species is also a social construct. Calling race a social construct isn't the persuasive argument people seem to assume.

> the vast majority of genetic variation exists within populations (in other words, within "races") and not between them.

This is is a fallacious argument, because there is no such thing as the "average Norwegian" and the "average Pygmy", and so you cannot even construct a meaningful sentence like "the average Norwegian and the average Pygmy are more alike than any individual Norwegian is to any other Norwegian". People need to stop using this silly argument.


It's the established scientific consensus. Obviously it isn't convincing to racists, but no argument would be given that racists don't approach the subject in good faith to begin with.

I think you're being too pedantic, though, because the statement "the average Norwegian and the average Pygmy are more alike than any individual Norwegian is to any other Norwegian" is perfectly sensible within the context of this thread and relative to the supposition that genetic variability between human populations is a valid basis to justify a biological definition of race and further classifying human races as subspecies. That species is also a social construct is true, and you seem to think that it disproves the premise, but it really doesn't because species is a social construct in the sense that all scientific classification is a social construct. But when people say that race is a social construct, they mean it was created to justify white supremacy, slavery and colonialism, and that (unlike species) it serves no useful scientific purpose. You're intentionally omitting necessary context to create a false equivalence between race and species.

Here are some actual scientifically credentialed papers and statements supporting the thesis that race has no biological basis. I doubt anyone will bother reading them but here they are just for the record. Further reading is easy to find.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8604262/

https://bioanth.org/about/aaba-statement-on-race-racism/

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/evolutionary-human-s...

https://www.sapiens.org/biology/is-race-real/


> It's the established scientific consensus.

So was the fact that ulcers weren't caused by bacteria. "Established scientific consensus" is another argument people need to stop using.

> You're intentionally omitting necessary context to create a false equivalence between race and species

No, I'm not equating race and species, I'm refuting the argument that race being a social construct makes it meaningless or scientifically useless by pointing out that species is also a social construct while being meaningful and scientifically useful. Therefore the argument that it's a social construct is a red herring.

> But when people say that race is a social construct, they mean it was created to justify white supremacy, slavery and colonialism, and that (unlike species) it serves no useful scientific purpose.

So you agree that calling it a social construct is completely besides the point, and people are not saying what they mean and merely polluting discussions with pointless red herrings.

Now whether race serves a useful purpose is highly debatable. There are plenty of statistical associations with race that are used to this day, eg. race as a risk factor in sickle cell anemia. If your argument is that we usually have better classifications than race in many circumstances, then sure, but note that this still doesn't prove the intended point that race classifications are useless, which is a claim that they never have any use.

Edit: > the statement "the average Norwegian and the average Pygmy are more alike than any individual Norwegian is to any other Norwegian" is perfectly sensible

Just want to be clear that this is still a fundamental category error. These are completely unlike measures and equating them properly yields different conclusions, eg. using pairwise genetic distance measures. See the paper, "Human Genetic Diversity: Lewontin's Fallacy" for where this misunderstanding originated.


> But when people say that race is a social construct, they mean it was created to justify white supremacy, slavery and colonialism

Yes, the modern context of what we call race today is inherently linked to notions like limpieza de sangre and casta in post-conquest Latin America - the true prototypical example of structural racism, where for several centuries and over several generations a "white" appearance was conflated with a socially elite status and a "racialized" appearance with poverty and marginalization. The Moors in Medieval, Renaissance and early modern Europe were of African origin, and sometimes even had what we would now call a Sub-Saharan appearance, but they were not considered "Black" in racial terms because that was not a notion that existed in that specific milieu.


But the DNA of the sumatran tiger and a Siberian tiger is also over 99% identical?

The DNA of humans and chimps is 98.8% identical.

The percent difference between genomes of species is one of those tricky measures that doesn't really give good intuition. I find it much more useful to think in terms of the time since two species shared a common ancestor.

e.g. For humans and chimps, that's several million years. For Sumatran and Siberian tigers, it's around a hundred thousand years.


> it's around a hundred thousand years.

So not that far away since modern humans began splitting up into separate subgroups outside of Africa? Of course there have been quite a bit of intermixing since then (more so in Eurasia than the more isolated parts of the world before the modern times, though)


What's the most recent common ancestor between an North Sentinel islander and a Norwegian? Mitochondrial Eve is 150kya

There are estimates that the most recent common ancestor of all humanity lived a few thousand years ago. Isolated peoples are almost never fully isolated, and all kinds of rare events can happen in 100+ generations. Andamanese peoples in particular were in contact with each other, with occasional contacts to the mainland.

Tasmania may have been isolated for ~8000 years between sea level rise and European contact. But the last person of fully Aboriginal Tasmanian descent likely died in 1905.


Probably less than 40k? Since it took a while for modern humans to leave Africa.

I don’t think the out-of-africa hypothesis is defensible in light of recent archeological findings, and, incidentally, DNA complexity analysis.

Out of africa remains defensible but more and more people will come to the conclusion that the chinese hyporhesis of the multiregional origin is somewhat true so we will get a hybrid i guess

The problem is that "Out of Africa" is an uninformative name. The outflow from Africa was well underway 100k years ago or even 200k years ago, and there was no inherent break between that ongoing outflow and what happened 40k years ago when (inasmuch as we can reconstruct today) behaviorally modern rather than 'archaic' humans began to migrate out, which we now call "Out of Africa". So it's hard to even tell apart the "recent Out of Africa" and the "multiregional" hypotheses in a way that might help settle a debate.

What percentage of DNA do all mammals share? And what all mammals except platypus?

In the age of AI we probably could do better in dvivding humans by pattern of variation rather than amount of variation.

But who cares about such divisions if we all can interbreed?


You are free to create your own human classification scheme with k sub-species and try to popularize it, there's nobody stopping you and there isn't some authority out there called "the scientific community" that's going to send you cease and desist letters.

There's just not much to gain from the exercise and there are better things to spend your time on.


The evidence of infringement would be apparent when b and c were colocated and there was a utility next to them for XORing files and piping it into VLC

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