> Tilling requires less cognitive and logistical effort: you just apply calories to drag a blade through the soil and then dump seed in it. No-till requires things like “tracking the soil’s water retention levels”, “planting cover crops or even giving a field a year off”, and other such steps that in general can be summarized as “cost centers”.
No-Till is one of those ideas like permaculture or Modern Monetary Theory that attracts emphatic advocates while going against conventional practice. It isn’t clear why it would just be being adopted now if it actually worked. Do you have any actual experience farming?
What an odd response. We have centuries of evidence for minimal disturbance agriculture supporting civilizations.
What evidently does NOT work is the quite new practice of industrial tilling and fertilizer, which is causing rapid breakdown of our natural environment and future potential for food production.
The industrial practices that have enable us to feed a population of 8 billion, with surplus - a lot of food is thrown out as waste because we have so much of it we really don’t have to be super strict with it.
The industrial practices that have allowed the majority of the population to do something other than be directly involved in agriculture.
What part of that isn’t working?
The sky is falling, co2 will cook the planet, industrial agriculture is poisoning the land, over fishing will collapse fish stocks.
We’ve been told these things for, what, at least sixty years now.
>co2 will cook the planet, industrial agriculture is poisoning the land, over fishing will collapse fish stocks.
The insect population is down a ridiculous amount where I live and also in neighboring germany.
I could link the study and such but honestly it's not like these things aren't backed up by my own experiences and those of my parents and grandparents.
I do find a lot lot less insects than I did when i was young.
We no longer get much (if any) snow let alone the kneedeep stuff.
It's harder to catch certain kinds of fish. The fishing boats where I used to visit every year go quite a bit further nowadays because those fish stocks have collapsed.
Tilling with large amounts of mined fertilisers and poisons works for now, but is not especially durable. Many of us are going to discover this given that the fertilisers aren't produced anymore since the Hormuz Strait is blocked.
It doesn't have to cook the planet to cause massive suffering. Do you think there hasn't been global warming? What amount of global warming would change your mind?
Ideally, industrial farming will use this new data to min/max tilling intervals for higher production per acre, which is still wildly suboptimal but at least provably better than arbitrary downtime practices (or even none) that they would otherwise settle on. If nothing else, that’s language their shareholders will listen to: “use fewer resources to produce more goods” is the holy grail of corporations, and fertilizer must be the death of their opex today.
Do you have experience as a farmer? If you don’t, why should I believe that farmers who continue to till their fields know less about this issue than you do?
Because there are other factors at play. No-till is mostly about sustainability of farming. Humans often don't optimize for the most sustainable option but for the option that's most profitable (or perceived to be most profitable) _right now_.
Tilling and using crazy amounts of mineral fertilizer definitely improves yields. But it will, in the long term, also kill agriculture to a large extent if we're not careful. We're not talking about highly speculative outcomes here: The data is pretty clear and everyone with even a large pot and some soil can run the same experiment at home and come to the same conclusions.
Farmers need to survive, they need to earn money, they will obviously optimize for short-term yield. We shouldn't judge them for this, but we _should_ find ways to solve the issue, ideally together with farmers.
Tillage as a practice has existed for around 10,000 years. I’m supposed to believe that 10,000 years worth of people never figured out that the enormous amounts of energy they were investing into tillage was worse than just doing nothing?
Tillage before motorized agriculture was much more superficial. Besides, there are many examples of no-till traditional agriculture, or adjacent versions such as agroforestry.
The no-till experiments started when the destructive effects of deep deep plowing started to appear (e.g dust bowl). It's a clear sign that society realizes that the local optimum isn't sustainable.
No-till is actually quite technical if done right, often requires some level of herbicides or way to cover the soil.
The argument "why didn't we do it before" is moot, before the 19th century midwives didn't wash hands either, why are they even do it now? Right?
I'm not a farmer, but you are welcome to ask a no-till farmer for their experience, or do some reading. Heck, you could read the article that we're commenting on where scientists have dedicated their career to understanding this stuff.
Can you explain to me why a farmer with a financial stake in this argument continues to till his soil? Can you explain the benefits of tillage, or are you arguing that it has no benefits?
The modern industrial farming complex is designed to treat every field as identical, and to allow as few people as possible to work as big an area as possible. That allows for standardizing methods and optimizing the output per acre. Tilling the soil is mainly for aeration: the farm equipment rolling over the fields (which is needed to massively reduce labor costs) compact them, so you need to loosen the soil again. It's also for weeding; if you till before you plant you uproot any plants already growing there (weeding by hand is extremely labor intensive). It also allows you to mix compost and other beneficial components into your soil to further aerate it and give space for roots to grow. It's all to give your field a "blank canvas" that you apply your crops to, where you can just dump about 2-3x the recommended amount of fertilizer into it and not worry about the particular conditions of the soil itself beforehand.
We no-till farm thousands of acres in the middle of millions more acres of no-till grain farming. I don't think you have a clue what you're talking about.
Tilling comes in many different forms. The old plow is out nearly everywhere because it is so bad. Debending on local climate and soil some places farmers do some tilling others do none. There are lots of little companies scattered around the world that make a tillage tool for that local area that wouldn't be useful elsewhere if they tried to sell it.
There are circumstances and soil types that encourage tillage, usually dealing with water. Organic farming trades spray for diesel fuel. And farmers don't like change, but no-till is so ubiquitous that it's hard to find farms that till unless it's unavoidable, such as fixing problems from harvest time.
No, I don’t particularly care if the solution is cover crops, no tilling, a mix of both, or some other practice entirely (‘introduce groundhogs’ comes to mind as a particularly inflammatory option for mycelial networking). Advocacy for any single solution is not particularly interesting to me, so long as any practice is followed besides “dump imported nitrogen into the hopper each year until your waterways are toast”. (I am not your farmer, this is not farming advice.)
> If NIMBYs were primary motivated by making money the prudent thing to do would be to support unrestricted zoning and then develop or sell the lot.
That is highly dependent on what exactly is being built next to your home. Sure, if it's more luxury housing then it'll probably drive the value of your home up. If it's low-income housing then it probably won't. And what we need is more of the latter rather than the former.
> you can take out loans against the value of the equity but this isn’t particularly common.
It's because it's an investment, you're going to get the return once you finally sell your home. Only in a pinch if someone needs a large amount of money to start a business or pay for an emergency will they mortgage their house.
> And what we need is more of the latter rather than the former.
You just need to wait. The luxury housing that gets built today becomes low-income housing as it ages. There's no short-circuiting that process the way the incentives are set up, but you can drive down prices across the board by building more, even more luxury housing.
There was a recent case that everyone has been describing as "LLM output can't be copyrighted" but what it actually said was you can't register the AI as the author.
This is not true, and I'd love to see some actual citation here.
The courts have repeatedly said that copyright only applies to human creativity. The Supreme Court explicitly said this when they refused to hear the appeal:
> "We affirm our decision to refuse registration for the Work because it lacks the human authorship necessary to be eligible for copyright protection."
So they're saying that the LLM cannot be the author, because LLMs cannot claim copyright.
The related case about patents is more supportive of the narrative that AIs cannot be authors (see https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/21-2347.OPINIO...), specifically: "Here, there is no ambiguity: the Patent Act
requires that inventors must be natural persons; that is,
human beings."
The patent situation is that the Act says that inventor must be an individual, which the courts are interpreting to mean a human, so the LLM cannot be named as the inventor. So, in this case, yes, this is just saying that an LLM cannot be named as the inventor of a patent. That's not the same thing as the courts are saying with copyrights.
> So they're saying that the LLM cannot be the author, because LLMs cannot claim copyright.
They're saying that the LLM can't be the author.
Now suppose you supply the LLM with a prompt that contains human creativity, it performs a deterministic mathematical transformation on the prompt to produce a derivative text, and you want to copyright that, claiming yourself as the author. What happens then?
If you think the answer is that you can't, how do you distinguish that from what happens when someone writes source code and has a compiler turn it into a binary computer program? Or do you think that e.g. Windows binaries can't be copyrighted because they were compiled by a machine?
My understanding was that they did in fact do just that, but the court somehow misunderstood what they were doing, and assumed that the LLM was working completely autonomously without any human input at all, which isn't really possible IMO. Someone told it what to do.
They also argued that you couldn't copyright an output that you can't explain how it came to be, i.e. if they had been able to articulate how an LLM works, the outcome might have been quite different, which I found surprising.
If art in general (human-made or otherwise) is always derived from existing influences... should we really be forced to explain how or why we created a piece of art in order to defend it?
The usual bar for copyright infringement of a derivative work is, from what I have seen, "how much did you copy from the original, and how obvious is it", which is of course a subjective determination that would be made by each individual judge or jury of a case.
The part that the human created, the prompt, can be copyrighted.
The part that the LLM created, cannot be.
Copyright in code works exactly the same way: the source code is copyrighted. The binary code is only copyrighted to the extent that it is derived from the source code. This is well-established.
Maybe I am just misunderstanding something, but I feel like you might be contradicting yourself here... why can LLM output not be copyrighted, but compiler output can be?
No, that's the point - the compiler output is only copyrighted to the extent that it is derived from the source code. The compiler itself cannot create anything copyrightable, but because there is a deterministic link between the source code and the binary code, and the source code was the product of a human, the binary code is covered by the source code copyright.
It's like a photocopier. If you photocopy a page from a book, that page is still covered by the copyright of the book author, even if the page is 2x larger or otherwise transformed by the machine.
IMO the bigger question is how would you even tell if a work was generated by an LLM? There's a ton of code being written out there; the folks who generated it are going to claim they authored it for copyright purposes, and those who want to use it are going to claim it was LLM-generated. So what happens?
The alleged author, when bringing a copyright infringement suit, will submit testimony claiming they wrote it. Parties to the suit will have a chance to present arguments and evidence. Then, the claim will be adjudicated by a judge and/or jury.
That code isn't going to be open source. And if you use someone else's closed source code you are violating laws that have nothing to do with copyright.
I'm not sure I understand. I'm not talking about stolen/leaked code here. I'm saying: imagine you claim you're the author of some piece of code. You may or may not have written it with an LLM, but even if so, assume you have the full rights to all the inputs. You post it publicly on GitHub. You don't attach a license, or perhaps you attach a restrictive license that doesn't permit much beyond viewing. Someone comes across your code, finds it brilliant, and wants to use it. If that code was non-copyrightable (such as generated via an LLM), then they're fine doing it without your permission, no? But if that code was copyrightable, then they're not permitted to do so, correct?
So now consider two questions:
1. You actually didn't use an LLM, but they believe & claim you did. Who has the burden of proof to show that you actually own the copyright, and how do they do so?
2. They write new code that you feel is based on yours. They claim they washed it through an LLM, but you don't believe so. Who has the burden of proof here and how do they do so?
1. You copy their code. They bring a copyright claim (let's assume this isn't a DMCA thing and they're actually bringing a claim to court). Your defence is "the LLM wrote it so no copyright attaches". Since they're asserting their copyright claim, they would have to provide evidence for that claim (same as in any other copyright case), including providing evidence that a human wrote it (which is new, and required to defeat your defence).
2. They copy your code. You bring a copyright case. Their defence is "I used an LLM to wash the code without copying". Since they're not disputing your copyright claim to the original code, you don't have to defend or prove your copyright. But you do have to prove that their code infringes on your copyright, which would mean proving that the LLM copied your code when creating the new code. This has been done before by demonstrating similarity.
> What makes the leak illegal other than copyright? The occasional piece of software might be a trade secret, but a person downloading a preexisting leak isn't affected by those laws.
That's completely false as far as I'm aware. Where did you see this? A simple web search shows numerous sources to the contrary. Are you confusing them with patents by any chance? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret
The original Minecraft EULA did not have any of the usual boilerplate language to support unilaterally modifying the terms. I had a Minecraft account purchased under this original EULA which was modified a year or two after I bought the game. Around 5 or 6 years ago, Mojang emailed me about changes to their login system that would require me to migrate my account to Microsoft’s system (no doubt under new T+C), but the migration process never worked and they never responded to my support requests.
When I tried to resolve it a couple of years ago I received boilerplate emails informing me that the migration period had ended.
So if you deal with companies that simply don’t honor their contracts—companies like Microsoft and Mojang—you don’t even need use to imply consent, because they can just lock you out of your purchases and tell you to pound sand.
This is the thing that drives me crazy. Most of these phone calls should just be emails; I can usually stand to wait a week or two for the company to get back to me. General support funnels like support@example.com have been dead for most consumer-facing technologies for close to a decade at this point. I’m not installing an app for every company I’m forced to interact with when there are already existing, universal technologies available that they could implement if they just priced their products appropriately.
It would be nice if more businesses embraced email instead of requiring phone calls for basic tasks. Imagine how much more productive we could be if we could just send off a quick email with the information and questions.
Instead, what we're likely going to get are "voice agents" calling each other when we could have just used email instead...
Businesses likely don't know a better way because the person selling them software doesn't want them to use an open and federated technology. They want the business to use Slack, with a SalesForce CRM, and then add a JIRA workflow to top it off.
Most of the time it's simply not being aware of what's out there or just showing them a different work flow.
Whenever I interact with them I get asked to describe my issue then regardless of what I write I get asked a battery of questions you would expect are getting fed into a form and then on the off-chance I get connected to a human operator (which was my goal to begin with) they end up asking me for all the same information again.
> Would the citizens of a sovereign nation being forced to violate their Constitution by Putin and Trump be a “violation of human dignity” too?
If Ukraine was worth defending they would have no trouble finding men willing to die to defend it. It’s one of the most corrupt countries in the Western world, its women are being allowed to flee so that they can prostitute themselves to Arabs and Europeans, and it hasn’t had an election in 7 years. Zelensky attempted to take control of the country’s anticorruption bureau in July of 2025: “Many suggest the attempted purges are payback for NABU pursuing charges of illicit enrichment and abuse of office against former deputy prime minister Oleksiy Chernyshov, a key ally for the Office of the President.”[1] In November of 2025, Timur Mindich, a former business partner and close friend of Zelensky, fled to Israel after being accused of orchestrating a kickback operation in cooperation with ministers of Zelensky’s own government. [2][3].
You have the opportunity to go die for these people right now. An increasing number of men in Ukraine have decided they would prefer not to.
> So defeating the Nazis wasn't worth doing, because we had to draft to accomplish it?
What you are implying is that condemning conscription as a violation of human dignity would necessarily lead me to condemn the actions that led to the downfall of a regime that itself engaged in conscription. Your mistake is in thinking that one necessarily follows from the other. I could condemn the specific act of conscription while considering the acts of the Allies in general as morally desirable, I could take a utilitarian approach and say that conscription is infinitely undesirable but the Nazis were infinitely undesirable + 1, or (as is my actual position), I can simply say that both regimes engaged in acts of evil that I am unwilling to dignify by calling “necessary.”
Issues of moral judgement are pass-fail. An act is good or it isn’t. This manner of thinking does not require you to create a gradation between the stranger who tries to rape you and the stranger that tries to kill you; they are both simply behaving immorally. The Rape of Nanjing was wrong; it did not justify the civilian deaths that occurred during the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
> Wouldn't the alternative be "A violation of human dignity"? Forced confinement in a war zone?
The discussion we are having is operating from the reality that Ukrainian men are being conscripted. If a man can be compelled to serve his country (I reject this premise), it follows that a woman ought to be compelled to serve as well. The conventional justification for exempting women from conscription has been that they are necessary for the nation to reproduce itself. But the majority of these women are not likely to return to Ukraine, so what is the point of treating them any differently from the men if they are already a guaranteed loss?
This is all tangential to the point I was making; you completely ignored the corruption scandals I mentioned.
> You really should make up your mind here.
You’ve been posting here too long to think that this sort of behavior conforms to the site guidelines. I have showed great restraint in writing this reply despite your inconsiderate behavior. My next reminder will not be polite.
> Would the citizens of a sovereign nation being forced to violate their Constitution by Putin and Trump be a “violation of human dignity” too?
You've yet to answer it.
> This is all tangential to the point I was making; you completely ignored the corruption scandals I mentioned.
Yes, I ignored the blatant dodge attempt to drag things off-topic.
> You’ve been posting here too long to think that this sort of behavior conforms to the site guidelines. I have showed great restraint in writing this reply despite your inconsiderate behavior. My next reminder will not be polite.
Pick "tutting schoolmarm" or "internet tough guy". Both in one paragraph just looks silly.
What does the Iranian say? If we're all about respecting documents, we should make sure we assess them all equally. The U.S. constitution has a lot to say about many of the things that are happening right now, but those are being happily ignored. We can't even respect our own constitution, the idea that we'd respect others is laughable.
How do you even securely hold an election during a full scale war? Thousands are outside the country or on the front lines. You'd also be creating huge targets at polling stations. Luckily their constitution recognises it's a bad idea to try.
No-Till is one of those ideas like permaculture or Modern Monetary Theory that attracts emphatic advocates while going against conventional practice. It isn’t clear why it would just be being adopted now if it actually worked. Do you have any actual experience farming?
reply