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Proof of Corn

proofofcorn.com

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Re: Proof of Corn

#261

Post by nonethewiser »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #197
nonethewiser wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

When I say successful I mean more like profitable. Just yielding anything isn't succesful by any stretch of the imagination.

>I would submit that pretty much any joe blow is capable of growing some amount of crops, given enough money

Yeah in theory. In practice they wont - too much time and energy. This is where the confidence boost with LLMs comes in. You just do it and see what happens. You don't need to care if it doesn't quite work out it its so fast and cheap. Maybe you get anywhere from 50-150% of the result of your manual research for 5% of the effort.

Re: Proof of Corn

#262

Post by lighthouse1212 »

ppchain wrote: post #22

The point they seem to be making is that AI can "orchestrate" the real world even if it can't interact physically. I can definitely believe that in 2026 someone at their computer with access to money can send the right emails and make the right bank transfers to get real people to grow corn for you. However even by that metric I don't see how Claude is doing that. Seth is the one researching the suppliers "with the h…

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Re: Proof of Corn

#263

Post by lighthouse1212 »

ep103 wrote: post #227
pixl97 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>ather than trying to find the areas where we could replace humans with as little quality degradation as possible The particular problem here is it is very likely that the easiest people to replace with AI are the ones making the most money and doing the least work. Needless to say those people are going to fight a lot harder to remain employed than the average lower level person has political capital to accomplish.…

Ai hype is predicated on the popular idea that it can easily automate someone else's job, because that job they know nothing about is easy, but my job is safe from ai because it is so nuanced.

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Re: Proof of Corn

#264

Post by onion2k »

culi wrote: post #62
jdthedisciple wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 capabilitie…

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.

Re: Proof of Corn

#266

Post by neya »

embedding-shape wrote: post #39
ppchain wrote: post #22

The point they seem to be making is that AI can "orchestrate" the real world even if it can't interact physically. I can definitely believe that in 2026 someone at their computer with access to money can send the right emails and make the right bank transfers to get real people to grow corn for you. However even by that metric I don't see how Claude is doing that. Seth is the one researching the suppliers "with the h…

These experiments always seems to end up requiring the hand-holding of a human at top, seemingly breaking down the idea behind the experiment in the first place. Seems better to spend the time and energy on finding better ways for AI to work hand-in-hand with the user, empowering them, rather than trying to find the areas where we could replace humans with as little quality degradation as possible. That whole part fe…

>That whole part feels like a race to the bottom, instead of making it easier for the ones involved to do what they do.

This is what people said while transitioning from horse carriages to combustion engines, steam engines to modern day locomotives. Like it or not, the race to the bottom has already begun. We will always find a way to work around it, like we have done time and again.

Re: Proof of Corn

#267

Post by doug713705 »

retsibsi wrote: post #251
doug713705 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there intelligence without sentience ?

Nobody can know, but I think it is fairly clearly possible without signs of sentience that we would consider obvious and indisputable. The definition of 'intelligence' is bearing a lot of weight here, though, and some people seem to favour a definition that makes 'non-sentient intelligence' a contradiction.

As far as I know, and I'm no expert in the field, there is no known example of intelligence without sentience. Actual AI is basically algorithm and statistics simulating intelligence.

Re: Proof of Corn

#269

Post by hnaccount_rng »

onion2k wrote: post #264
culi wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 capabilitie…

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 age…

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

Re: Proof of Corn

#270

Post by kortilla »

hahahahhaah wrote: post #208
bluGill wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bill gates is one of the largest farmland owners in the world (or at least was - I last checked about 10 years ago...) He hires people to work on his farm, and managers to manage it. Food is the most important thing for modern society and the reports I have suggest he is trying to raise food in the most sustainable fashion possible (organic is often not sustainable)

Why is organic not suatsinable? Not affordable I get. But does organic damage the environment making it hard to farm again? or use inputs that are not sustainable? Genuine question. I am alway curious when a statement goes against conventional wisdom.

Organic is literally throwing out a ton of modern technology that makes farming scalable and able to sustain the population at its current numbers.

Organic was never about sustainability, so I’m not sure why you think that’s against conventional wisdom. Organic has always been “chemicals bad so we do things the old fashioned way”

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