Not particular unique - this is a common practice in a lot of agricultural industries. e.g. there are wine co-ops in France where many vineyards commingle their grapes to produce a commercial volume of wine under a particular label.

What these systems rely on is a governing body that punishes producers that don’t meet the body’s standards and ruin the party for everyone else. Amazon is the governing body here and has previously shown no interest in protecting legitimate producers from counterfeiters.

This is the original source, linked on HN a couple months ago: https://christopherferan.com/2021/12/25/kenya-and-the-declin...

It seems like the collective washing and grading system was effective at producing high quality coffee (but not paying farmers a living wage) until the system got so extractive and climate change got so bad that farmers cut costs and started producing worse strains. In other markets buyers would go direct to the farmers for single-origin beans to encourage higher quality but in Kenya this was prohibited.

If there were ratings, presumably the incentive would be to have your beans rated as higher quality.

Thus doesn’t feel particularly evil to me - though it treats beans as fungible.

Something similar is done with milk sales from individual farms in England.

Am I wrong to assume those are LLM slop?

But ya, I love that genre. eg Haldeman's The Forever War, Scalzi's Old Man's War, Robert Charles Wilson's Spin

My kid got me hooked on Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl series. Super fun.

It's of a genre called LitRPG. Exactly as you'd expect. And yet somehow Dinniman makes it work.

I hate myself for loving it. h/t Joan Jett & The Heartbreakers

I vividly recall an episode of Dallas where Bobby was rationalizing to his brother JR about investing in renewables.

For a brief window of time our consensus for decarbonization extended all the way to (the most) popular media.

They're talking about our nascent circular economy.

Recycling now recovers >95% of raw minerals (and will continue to improve).

The learning curves for battery and solar tech will more than make up the for the shortfall.

Meaning at some point in the near future (2050 IIRC), humanity will have mined all the lithium it'll ever need.

Also, in the same time frame, it'll be economical to mine our garbage dumps. Further reducing the need to extract raw materials.

"Recycling now recovers >95% of raw minerals"

Not of plastic - recycling rates are decreasing. This is largely due to the excess ethane begin produced as a by-product of US fracking.

The ethane is converted to ethylene, then to polyethylene as a cost below that of collecting, cleaning, and processing used plastic.

True. The situation for both off-gassing and plastic recycling is rather bleak.

Sorry for being vague; I was only referring to economically valuable minerals used in electric batteries.

Aqua Metals has previously said they'll be able to reuse battery quality graphite (from batteries) as well (vs releasing it as CO2). But my recent scan of their progress wasn't very encouraging.

Learning more about Redwood Recycling stack is on my to do list.

Source? These are big claims and the collective shouldn’t rely on your recall as fact.

> essentially a bond return

You reminded me: David Roberts' often states that a hurdle for electrification and decarbonization projects is connecting them to "slow capital". Stuff like residential, community, solar, battery, heat pumps, appliances, ground source heat, yadda yadda.

I gather that there's plenty of "slow capital" perfectly happy with low risk long term modest returns. But these projects are too small to be worth the effort. Probably something about transaction costs.

My impression is there's an opportunity to bundle up these projects for the larger/largest investors. Biden's IRA created a "green bank" (RIP); maybe that was its intended function.

You're smart about money and finance, so you can probably explain what Roberts is talking about (to noobs like me).

https://volts.wtf

Stay tuned, I have an idea to soak up global capital for these projects.

I believe, but cannot prove, that our malleability was an evolutionary advantage. It enabled homo sapiens to gather in ever larger social groups.

Media, from obelisks to tiktok, enables exploitation of our evolutionary quirk.

I'm still upset over the canceling of Socrates. Never forget.

u/ipaddr is probably referring to

  1) the dearth of new (novel) training data. Hence the mad scramble to hoover up, buy, steal, any potentially plausible new sources.

  2) diminishing returns of embiggening compute clusters for training LLMs and size of their foundation models.

(As you know) You're referring to Wright's Law aka experience learning curve.

So there's a tension.

Some concerns that we're nearing the ceiling for training.

While the cost of applications using foundation models (implementing inference engines) is decreasing.

Someone smarter than me will have to provide the slopes of the (misc) learning curves.

I was not aware of (or had forgotten) the term "Wright's law" [1], but that indeed is what I was thinking of. It looks like some may use the term "learning curve" to refer to the same idea (efficiency gains that follow investment); the Wikipedia page on "Learning curve" [2] includes references to Wright.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effect

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_curve

GM, Ford, etc. recognize the existential threat posed by Chinese competition, proactively pivoted, then had those efforts sabotaged, with prejudice.