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Proof of Corn

proofofcorn.com

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Re: Proof of Corn

#301

Post by 9rx »

greedo wrote: post #295
9rx wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hell, the yield on such a small lot (it'll mostly be end rows) will be terrible. One of my fields has a creek in the corner that divides just two acres from the rest of the field. I've never noticed any meaningful yield drag in that part.

Perhaps your soil is more fertile in that area? It's not uncommon to see a 25% drop in acreage on the border of fields due to trees, end rows etc.

25% would be quite extreme. There is some evidence of that much loss on individual rows being possible, but not the entire headland. 10% is considered to be more typical, which works out to be around a 4% loss across the entire piece. Which is well within the normal range of field variability, so it is ultimately not noticeable.

Of course, if it were a 5 acre field, with some assumptions about its shape, we'd only be talking more like a 2% loss across the entire field. Not nothing, but terrible...?

Year-to-year variability will see much larger swings than that. If that's the margin you're trying to operate on, I dare say you're cooked, even if your fields are large.

Re: Proof of Corn

#302

Post by catlifeonmars »

nerdsniper wrote: post #291
ThunderSizzle wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

? If you have a cushy job where you don't really work, and you make a lot of money (doesn't mean you have capital), how does that translate to being suited to becoming an entrepreneur with the money they are no longer earning with the effort capacity they apparently don't have?

> (doesn't mean you have capital) Then they’re not going to be doing any significant lobbying so they’re not covered by GP’s comment, which was selecting for “people who have political capital”. Yes, there are other forms of political capital besides money, but it’s still mostly just money, especially when they’re part of the tiny voter block of “people who make a lot of money and dont do much work and dont have weal…

Don’t dismiss the other forms of political capital so quickly. Sure, the people who are independently wealthy can independently influence political decisions, but there are so many situations in history where the once conditions worsen for the upper middle class, there is impetus to make political change, overthrow governments, etc. It’s usually when the scholar/merchant class gets annoyed that laws change.

Re: Proof of Corn

#303

Post by dagss »

doug713705 wrote: post #280
retsibsi wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you spell out your definition of 'intelligence'? (I'm not looking to be ultra pedantic and pick holes in it -- just to understand where you're coming from in a bit more detail.) The way I think of it, there's not really a hard line between true intelligence and a sufficiently good simulation of intelligence.

I would say that "true" intelligence will allow someone/something to build a tool that never existed before while intelligence simulation will only allow someone/something to reproduce tools that already known. I would make a difference between someone able to use all his knowledge to find a solution to a problem using tools he knows of and someone able to discover a new tool while solving the same problem. I'm not s…

I honestly don't think humans fit your definition of intelligent. Or at least not that much better than LLMs.

Look at human technology history...it is all people doing minor tweaks on what other people did. Innovation isn't the result of individual humans so much as it is the result of the collective of humanity over history.

If humans were truly innovative, should we not have invented for instance at least a way of society and economics that was stable, by now? If anything surprise me about humans it is how "stuck" we are in the mold of what others humans do.

Circulate all the knowledge we have over and over, throw in some chance, some reasoning skills of the kind LLMs demonstrate every day in coding, have millions of instances most of whom never innovate anything but some do, and a feedback mechanism -- that seems like human innovation history to me, and does not seem like demonstrating anything LLMs clearly do not possess. Except of course not being plugged into history and the world the way humans are.

Re: Proof of Corn

#304

Post by ryukoposting »

Yeroc wrote: post #88
bluGill wrote: post #25

Polk County Iowa is where Des Moines is - the largest city in Iowa. (I live the next county over, but I bike to Polk county all the time) This is not a good location to run this because the farm land is owned by farmer/investors or farmer/developers - either way everybody knows the farm will become a suburb in the next 20 years and has priced accordingly (and if the timeline is is less than 5 years they have switched…

If you spend time on the website you can see the plan is to rent (only!) 5 acres of land for this project. Since it's a lease only and such a small plot it seems unlikely to get him into trouble. Given the small size though I'm dubious he'll find it easy to get any custom operators interested in doing a job that small!

Came here to mention this. Nobody farming 5 acres of land has a "farm manager" LOL. Hell, nobody farming 50 acres of land needs a farm manager. The gaping chasm between what this guy is purporting to do, and what is actually being demonstrated, is laughable.

Re: Proof of Corn

#305

Post by huslage »

This is highly ridiculous. It's missing entire categories of costs, not to mention selling 1000bu of corn is not easy and you won't get that price for it.

The real question isn't "Can AI do x thing?" but "SHOULD AI do x thing". We know how to grow and sell corn. There is zero that AI can do to make it more "efficient" than it already is.

Come on.

Re: Proof of Corn

#306

Post by TheRealPomax »

kennywinker wrote: post #26
TheRealPomax wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was no challenge. There was a statement, "AI can write code, but it can't affect the physical world."

Tell that to all the car accidents caused by people distracted by siri, the people who’ve done horrible things because of AI induced psychosis, or the lives ruined by ai stock trading algorithms.

I didn't write the statement, nor did I waste time and money on this "experiment" when the US needs time and money spent on very different actions right now.

Re: Proof of Corn

#307

Post by Etherlord87 »

- AI can grow corn

- Yes it can

- Prove it

- AI, tell me instructions to grow corn

- Go buy seeds, plant them, water the field and once you gather the corn report back

- I'm back with the corn, proving AI can grow corn!

This is the experiment here, with nuance added to it. The thing is, though, if you "orchestrate" other people, you might as well do it with a single sentence as I described. Or you can manage more thoroughly. Some decisions you make may actually be detrimental to the end result.

So the only meaningful experiment would be to test a bot against a human being: who earns more money orchestrating the corn farm, a bot or a human? Consider also the expenses which is electricity/water for a bot and also food, medicine etc. for a human being.

Re: Proof of Corn

#308

Post by Razengan »

pixl97 wrote: post #130
embedding-shape wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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.…

> 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.

How soon before we see a company with an AI CEO?

Re: Proof of Corn

#309

Post by cityofdelusion »

I don’t see how this ever gets past the land phase. How does the AI know if the proposed land rental is fertile, farmable, accessible to vehicles, accessible to specific machinery, etc? Assuming a human intervenes here, I don’t see how you find an operator to get up to run a combine on 5 acres for the harvest. I’d have as much luck finding someone to do it on my backyard garden.

Re: Proof of Corn

#310

Post by bethekidyouwant »

progval wrote: post #163
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…

Anthropic tried that with a vending machine. The Claude instance managing it ended up ordering tungsten cubes and selling them at a loss. https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1

People convinced the vending machine to stock tungsten cubes because it’s funny. Also tungsten cubes are cool.
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