The author is talking about the case where you have coherent commits, probably from multiple PRs/merges, that get merged into a main branch as a single commit.
Yeah, I can imagine it being annoying that sqashing in that case wipes the author attribution, when not everybody is doing PRs against the main branch.
However, calling all squash-merge workflows "stupid" without any nuance.. well that's "stupid" :)
I think the point is that if you have to squash, the PR-maker was already gitting wrong. They should have "squashed" on their end to one or more smaller, logically coherent commits, and then submitted that result.
I don't think there's much nuance in the "I don't know --first-parent exists" workflow. Yes, you may sometimes squash-merge a contribution coming from someone who can't use git well when you realize that it will just be simpler for everyone to do that than to demand them to clean their stuff up, but that's pretty much the only time you actually have a good reason to do that.
Does orange peel not produce any CO2 / methane when left like this? I'm assuming there is some negative carbon footprint before this becomes a positive?
The ecological win definitely looks nice on paper, but whenever people talk about compost the carbon footprint / gas emissions is always at the front of people's minds, and I don't really see that discussed in the article.
The article does say
> Especially since, in addition to the double-win of dealing with waste and revitalising barren landscapes, richer woodlands also sequester greater amounts of carbon from the atmosphere – meaning little plots of regenerated land like this could ultimately help save the planet.
How long will it take for it to cross the CO2-neutral mark? Maybe a silly question, definitely not my area of expertese.
CO2 is going to be neutral for the peels. You're just transporting it from where the oranges grew to where they were dumped. The CO2 benefit is purely from the trees and other biomass that grow where they wouldn't be growing before.
As for methane, that's a good question. Orange peels are better than most things because the limonene inhibits methane producing bacteria. But you'd still get quite a bit in the deeper piles (that produce the anaerobic conditions needed for methane production).
Spreading them out more would help, but might interfere with the beneficial effects.
China could definitely do this, to offset the minuscule of the destruction they do with the dark fishing fleets around (and possibly in) protected marine areas.
The orange peel is going to decompose and produce CO2 either way. Methane is produced when there is not enough oxygen available while decomposing, which certainly seems a possibility if it's dumped in big piles.
Remember the orange trees took the CO2 out of the atmosphere to make the peels. Some of it, probably most of it, is going back into the atmosphere but some of it is going to become soil carbon which could be retained for decades
You're getting downvoted but it's a reasonable question if posed in good faith. The tl;dr is that there are really a few options for what could happen to those orange peels:
(1) Landfill burial
(1a) Without methane capture and use: Produces methane, relatively high short term warming potential.
(1b) With methane capture and use: Ends up as CO2 after burning the methane.
(2) Composting (this approach)
(2a) Mostly aerobic: Produces CO2
(2b) Mostly anaerobic: Produces methane
A deep pile that is never turned will decompose anaerobically, resulting in fairly undesirable methane. A shallower pile or one that is mixed well will result in mostly aerobic decomposition. The aerobic decomposition will produce CO2 but not huge amounts of it. Each hectare of land could absorb something like ~8 tons of CO2 per year; with 7 hectares, the CO2 emitted by composting 12t of oranges is going to be dwarfed by the new vegetation. After a few years when you're growing big trees, the rate of CO2 absorption might rise as high as 20-30t/year/hectare in costa rica's environment. And this is probably an underestimate, as the soil amendment of the orange peels seems to have stimulated faster regrowth than would have happened otherwise.
And perhaps more to the point: There isn't really a purely "no co2" way of disposing of organic matter other than perhaps burying it at the bottom of a deep mineshaft (but the co2 or methane will be produced anyway). Landfilling it is strictly worse - you still get the decomposition products, _or worse_ because you'll mostly get methane, but without producing useful soil byproducts.
Overall this project is a huge win on a carbon perspective and a waste reduction perspective.
It's not a reasonable question. What's the alternative for the orange peels? They were going to rot and release that CO2 whether they did it in a big pile here or somewhere else.
But seriously GP could have had a mental model that landfilled orange peels might sit there for a long time -- which depending on conditions and food could be true on human scales (like 10-40 years) but not on the scale of 100 years. Especially if the conditions were dry -- a dry orange peel is pretty robust. That's not likely to be the case in Costa Rica, but I'll forgive some naivety here absent demonstrated malice.
The way I understood it, the original article is saying the _only_ remaining differentiator is taste and the comment you replied to is saying "wrong, there are also other things, such as effort".
I don't necessarily interpret the comment you replied to as saying that "taste is not important", which seems like what you are replying to, just that it's not the only remaining thing.
I agree that taste gets you far. And I agree with all the examples of good taste that you brought up.
But even with impeccable taste, you still need to learn, try things, have ideas, change your mind etc.. putting all of that in the bucket of "taste" is stretching it..
However, having good taste when putting in the effort, gets your further than with effort alone. In fact, effort alone gets you nowhere, and taste alone gets you nowhere. Once you marry the two you get somewhere.
Aren’t you just making their point stronger? Effort is what is being replaced here, with some taste and a pile of AI (formerly effort) you can go to the moon.
In other words, it requires a tremendous amount of effort to fully communicate your tastes to the AI. Not everybody wants to expend the time or mental effort doing this! (Once we have more direct brain/computer interfaces, this effort will go down, but I expect it will not be eliminated fully)
This is the second time in two days I've seen a subthread here with folks seemingly debating whether or not defining and communicating requirements counts as work if the target of those requirements is an LLM system.
I'm confused as to why this is even a question. We used to call this "systems analysis" and it was like... a whole-ass career. LLMs seem to be remarkably capable of using the output, but they're not even close to the first software systems sold as being able to take requirements and turn them into working code (for various definitions of "requirements" and "working").
I'm also skeptical that direct brain interfaces would make this any less work; I don't think "typing" or "english" are the major barriers here, anymore than "drafting" is the major barrier to folks designing their own cars and houses... Any fool thinks they know what they need!
At some point, just an idea will be enough for your Neurolink to spawn an agent to create 1000 different versions of your idea along with things that mimic your tendencies. There will be no effort, only choice.
Deciding between 1000 different versions is a lot of effort IMO. With manual coding, you’re mostly deciding one decision point at a time, which is easier when you think about it. It just require foresight which comes from experience
As both a software engineer and a creative, I absolutely do not want 1,000 versions of what I am trying to make generated for me. I don't care if it's free or even cheap. I want to make things.
I know this is a concept deeply alien to a lot of HN's userbase but I did not get into programming or making art to have finished products; that's a necessary function that is lovely when it's reached, but ultimately, I derive my enjoyment from The Process. The process of finding a problem a user has, and solving it.
And yes I'm sure Claude could do it faster than me (and only at the cost of a few acres of rainforest!) but again, you're missing the point. I enjoy the work. That is not a downside to me.
Effort is still (and probably will always be) the hardest thing to replace.
Any time someone says AI can do this, and do that, and blah blah. I say ok, take the AI and go do that.. the barrier to entry is so low you should be able to do whatever you want. And they say, oh, no, I don't want to do that (or can't, or whatever). But it should be able to be done.. And I just nod, and sip my drink, and ...
.. and I'd like to point out these are seasoned professionals that I've seen put in effort into other things in their careers that have the capacity to literally do whatever is they want to do, especially now.. and they choose not to do so, at least not without someone guaranteeing them a paycheck or telling them they have to do it to survive.
Not really. The effort required to produce the same result has declined, but it has been on the decline for many decades already. That is nothing new. Of course, in the real world, nobody wants the same result over and over, so expectations will always expand to consume all of your available effort.
If there is some future where your effort has been replaced, it won't be AI that we're talking about.
> It made me angry because makes the point that natural selection has become ineffective on humans and thus intelligence declines unironically. There is no joke in that - all jokes build upon the assumption of this being true.
you seem pretty convinced that intelligence plays an important role in natural selection. I'd argue that decisiveness, confidence, looks, social skills all play a more important role. (I'm not saying that's a good thing)
I'm interested in understanding your point of view, can you elaborate on what you mean by "There is no joke in that"?
The only cases where I've had gemini step on my toes like that is when a) I realized my instructions were unclear or missing something b) my assumptions/instructions were flawed about how/why something needed to be done.
Instruction following has improved a lot since a few years ago but let's not pretend these things are perfect mate.
There's a certain capacity of instructions, albiet its quite high, at which point you will find them skipping points and drifting. It doesn't have to be ambiguity in instructions.
Interesting, props for coming up with a good name.
But it's weird to me to call this a "ratchet", and not just a custom lint rule. Since it sounds exactly like a lint rule.
The hard-coded count also sounds a bit like something that I would find annoying to maintain in the long run and it might be hard to get a feeling for whether or not the needle is moving in the right direction. - esp. when the count goes down and up in a few different places so the number stays the same.. you end up in a situtation where you're not entirely sure if the count goes up or down.
A different approach to that is to have your ratchet/lint-script that detects these "bad functions" write the file location and/or count to a "ratchets" file and keep that file in version control.
In CI if the rachet has changes, you can't merge because the tree is dirty, and you'd have to run it yourself and commit it locally, and the codeowner of the rachet file would have to approve.
at least that would be a slightly nicer approach that maintaining some hard-coded opaque count.
yeah that’s the way we do it at Notion. it’s important to store the allowed violation count in a file type that makes merges easy; we use TSV rather than JSON because dealing with commas and delimiters during merge conflict is super annoying and confusing.
right now we have one huge ratchet.json.tsv file with all violations but it’s getting pretty ungainly now that it’s >1mb length.
Yeah, I can imagine it being annoying that sqashing in that case wipes the author attribution, when not everybody is doing PRs against the main branch.
However, calling all squash-merge workflows "stupid" without any nuance.. well that's "stupid" :)
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