This would make a good explanation for the bizarre biblical angels, especially having parts of their “body” that aren’t connected to each other. They only appear disconnected in the 3D projection we see, and are actually parts of a 4D organism.

I draw the line at “overpopulated” when our resource consumption is unsustainable to the point where we are becoming the sole consumer of the planet.

It’s commonly stated that we would need 2 planets the same size to sustain our current population in a way that doesn’t result in eventual collapse.

We’ve cleared vast land areas and scoured the sea of fish in our quest for calories. Eating bugs will not be the solution that makes us sustainable.

It’s been proven our population increases every time we increase our carrying capacity, such as through the invention of nitrogen fertilizer, mechanized agriculture etc. And there has never been a time that there were not people starving somewhere.

If we carry on this path we will be eating bugs and people will still be starving while ecosystems continue to collapse. It sounds like there is no net gain, IMO.

Some of the concepts in this book really stuck with me, but I had no idea what the title was! Thanks!

“Some days you’re the original, some days you’re the copy” or something like that

Valid point. When I grew up fishing for shrimp as a kid I was quite terrified of them until I was taught how to eat them.

I can assume they taste bad, because otherwise we would all be eating them already. Humans eat just about everything on the planet if it’s tasty, even if it’s really weird. Example: shrimp, lol.

Personally I don’t see the need for it when we have plenty of plant sources of protein like pulses, and we can raise ruminants on otherwise useless land (like my hilly, rocky farm).

It seems to me just an excuse to continue overpopulating the planet. Sure, we could develop new protein sources to feed 10 billion - but if we had kept our population to the 4 billion it was in the 1970s we could all be eating thick beef steaks and salmon without worrying about straining the carrying capacity of the planet.

Maybe we should focus on getting our population down to a sustainable level before we worry about new and exotic foods.

I still think that, environmentally consciously, we should all switch to a mostly plant based diet and explore meat alternatives without fear.

I don’t have an issue with this statement, in fact I have friends who grow beans and lentils and I cook and eat dry beans every day in addition to my lamb. Plant proteins are healthy and delicious, and they easily stand alongside other standard dishes on our plates. Everyone I know eats a lot of beans.

My issue with the bugs is the same as I have with soy protein. Soy protein has been snuck into all manner of processed foods to boost protein numbers while replacing the higher quality proteins that you would expect in those foods (i.e. many cheap chicken breasts are injected with a solution of salt water and soy protein to plump them up and make you think you got more “chicken”)

I feel like using insects this way just is another step in adulterating our food supply, separating those like you and me who know what we are eating from the “commoners” who will not.

I have no problem with explicitly eating bugs outright if you choose to, I just don’t want to have them snuck into my hamburger at a restaurant.

Interestingly my ex-wife was from Taiwan and had never eaten insects except as a novelty - so it must be a different part of Asia where it’s common. Taiwan tends to like fish, pork and chicken as well as tofu and black beans.

That’s the problem, it isn’t delicious. That’s why they keep coming up with schemes to use them as a protein additive, like “cricket flour”.

I raise lamb free range on pasture, no inputs other than grass, and that’s what I’ll be eating for the foreseeable future. Let me tell you, that’s delicious.

I would encourage anyone else concerned about factory farming to find a small producer, most of us will gladly even give you a tour and let you see our herds, we love to show off healthy animals on green grass. And we’re often cheaper than the supermarket these days, no greedy middlemen to mark it up.

The difference is that shrimp are delicious? Last time you got a bug in your mouth what was your instinctive response?

The great reset is bogus but there’s definitely a “conspiracy” to get us to eat bugs… A boring, capitalist conspiracy. Just the next step in the race to the bottom, another cheap and low quality food that the unwashed masses can afford to keep them alive and trudging off to work.

I will eat bugs when I see the billionaires have them on their plates.

I think you’re misreading the point I’m trying to make. I’m not arguing that LLM is AGI or that it can understand anything.

I’m just questioning what the true use case of AGI would be that can’t be achieved by existing expert systems, real humans, or a combination of both.

Sure Deepseek or Copilot won’t answer your legal questions. But neither will a real programmer. Nor will a lawyer be any good at writing code.

However when the appropriate LLMs with the appropriate augmentations can be used to write code or legal contracts under human supervision, isn’t that good enough? Do we really need to develop a true human level intelligence when we already have 8 billion of those looking for something to do?

AGI is a fun theoretical concept, but I really don’t see the practical need for a “next step” past the point of expanding and refining our current deep learning models, or how it would improve our world.

And it still can’t understand; its still just sleight of hand.

Yes, thus “passable imitation of understanding”.

The average consumer doesn’t understand tensors, weights and backprop. They haven’t even heard of such things. They ask it a question, like it was a sentient AGI. It gives them an answer.

Passable imitation.

You don’t need a data center except for training, either. There’s no exponential term as the models are executed sequentially. You can even flush the huge LLM off your GPU when you don’t actively need it.

I’ve already run basically this entire stack locally and integrated it with my home automation system, on a system with a 12GB Radeon and 32GB RAM. Just to see how well it would work and to impress my friends.

You yell out “$wakeword, it’s cold in here. Turn up the furnace” and it can bicker with you in near-realtime about energy costs before turning it up the requested amount.

We may not even “need” AGI. The future of machine learning and robotics may well involve multiple wildly varying models working together.

LLMs are already very good at what they do (generating and parsing text and making a passable imitation of understanding it).

We already use them with other models, for example Whisper is a model that recognizes speech. You feed the output to an LLM to interpret it, use the LLM’s JSON output with a traditional parser to feed a motion control system, then back to an LLM to output text to feed to one of the many TTS models so it can “tell you what it’s going to do”.

Put it in a humanoid shell or a Spot dog and you have a helpful robot that looks a lot like AGI to the user. Nobody needs to know that it’s just 4 different machine learning algorithms in a trenchcoat.

Most claim they can code, but if they were coders they would be coding

I dislike techbros as much as you, but this isn’t really a valid statement.

I can code, but I can’t sell a crypto scam to millions of rubes.

If I could, why would I waste my time writing code?

Many techbros are likely “good enough” coders who have better marketing skills and used their tech knowledge to leverage into business instead.

Actually a modern “sand battery” does have to be sand or at least a granular material. The difference between a sand battery and thermal mass is that you use a conveyor to superheat small fractions of the sand, allowing the isolation of high grade heat.

If you have a single kWh to store and 1 ton of sand to work with, you could heat 1kg of sand to hundreds of degrees (sand battery), or 1 ton of sand by one degree (thermal mass).

1 ton of slightly warm sand is useless, while you can extract the high grade heat from the 1kg and get your 1 kWh back.

Entire system is home built and programmed except the inverter which was a surplus rack-mount.

The dump load in the water tank tracks the battery bank voltage, drawing more power as the voltage rises into the float range. This is used to sense available surplus power, which is used to turn on other dump loads, i.e. air conditioning in summer.

I have a couple window units that are cranked to max cooling and come on in sequence as the surplus power rises, on an early summer day with clear skies it can get to the point of needing a sweater in the house :D I’m migrating to a homebuilt multi-stage heat pump this year after the prototype worked quite well last year.

Also seriously considering the ice storage concept for hot nights, though I might need to make an actual ton of ice!

Just made a deal on 8 massive surplus AGM batteries too to refresh my bank

I’ve been really curious about the possibility of a small DIY sand battery type system. I currently store my “negative value” midday solar power by dumping it into a water tank and using it to feed my hydronic heating system.

However as we know that results in a tank containing useless low-grade heat on a cloudy day, where a sand battery would result in a small amount of usable high-grade heat.

The cooling equivalent could actually be implemented fairly easily at home with common consumer ice machines (which are effectively heat pumps). Make ice when there’s surplus, dump it in an insulated hopper with a heat exchanger for night-time cooling, recycle the near-freezing melt water to make ice the next day. Water is a lot easier to handle because it can be pumped instead of conveyed, and you get the advantage of phase change storage.

Am farmer, can confirm. I also have my chequebook with me… Non-farmers, when was the last time you wrote a cheque, aside from rent? I feel like we’re the only ones still using them.

“I’m drunk”

I tried this too and was similarly unimpressed! Good, but not amazing.

IMO the best flavour to work ratio for potatoes is to cube them and toss them into an Actifry with either beef fat or coconut oil and salt. Get a ton of crispy surface with about 5 minutes of active work, including cleanup.

Mashed is also super easy despite the above comment and is probably my go-to way to eat potatoes. Cube, pressure cook 7 min, mash with milk and butter. And I grow a ton of potatoes so I eat them almost every day 😁

Even with external volumes, I don’t think there should be any mechanism where a container can escape a bind mount to affect the rest of the host fs? I use bind mounts all the time, far more than docker volumes.

As a barn cat owner, everything on that list goes down the cats. They are my cleanup crew. Especially chicken bones as I don’t trust the dogs with them.

No cat has ever choked on bones or become sick from eating scraps. If there are things like onions, they just don’t eat them. In fact none of my cats have ever died of anything other than being eaten by coyotes or run over by trucks 😥

The real problem is with corporate landlords who are attempting to buy up as much of Canada’s housing stock as possible and control the market (rent-seeking as you say) otherwise the “mom and pop” landlord really is providing a service more than making much of a profit.

Years ago I moved out of my mobile and into a real house. The mobile was paid for by then and I thought hey, I’ll rent it out instead of selling. Make some money, give someone a home.

What a nightmare. In the end I was forced to sell it just to be rid of the last in a long line of delinquent tenants, despite me doing my best to vet them.

Activist renters don’t seem to realize that there’s someone on the other end of the deal who is holding the bag. I agree, rent should be free, housing should be a right. But without a co-op or government to build the house and maintain it, the person who has to do that is your fellow working man, and do you expect them to do that for free or at a loss? The whole time while being treated with disrespect like they were some greedy billionaire?

Of course you are paying their mortgage. You’re using their credit and wearing out their consumable asset (the house) the least you can do is cover the costs! If you don’t like it, take out a loan, buy a house yourself and you’ll soon find out how much it costs to own one! Hint: more than rent unless you bought with cash (And by doing that you have lost the opportunity cost. Which is fine if you live there, but not if it’s supposed to be an investment)

Investing in rental stock only works in a rising housing market, or if you’re a slumlord. Otherwise, just buy index funds, a lot less hassle and better returns.