I could handle this style when it wasn't everywhere. But now I've developed a hypersensitivity and can't bear it. It's like suddenly most of the internet is in a language I can't read.

I hand wrote something recently that I re-read the next day and I'm worried I sound like an LLM now, I'm pretty sure I always sounded like one because I like it to make exhaustive lists in my sentences, but it makes me wonder if the bot is rubbing off on me.

It's part of our ecosystem now, we unconsciously mirror the patterns that we notice around us. This will include the language of LLMs because it has been invited in. We always affect the environment, and it always affects us. I hope that the consequence will be that we reduce the fluff, we stop writing to sound important or to justify a position, but instead use language to operate on the level of insight and shift our future into one that benefits us all.

I always wonder now if an article was written by GPT, or by someone who spent so much time chatting with GPT that they've started sounding like an LLM.

I have genuinely wondered if I've picked up an elevated tendency to say "it's not just X, it's Y". No smoking gun that it's affected me just yet, but it's at least a live enough issue that it raises the question.

I don't get how it makes this jump

> Then $40-65/month over 24-30 months

> replacing $3-5/week kerosene spending with a $0.21/day solar subscription (so with $1.5 per week half the price of kerosene)" in the next paragraph.

If it's $40-65/month that's $1.33 to $2.17 per day, not $0.21/day (assuming month with 30 days)

Similarly

> Crop yields increase 3-5×

> Farmers go from $600/acre to $14,000/acre revenue

Wouldn't that revenue jump require a 23x increase in crop yield?

Let's be very charitable and figure out a scenario where this could be true.

Suppose, a farmer has a farm which produces 1 unit of crop. Farmer uses 0.8 of the crop for subsistence and sells 0.2 of the crop. They get $600/acre.

Now, crop yields go up 5x, so now the farm produces 5 units of crop. Subsistence needs are the same, so the farmer is now able to sell 4.2 units of crop. This is 4.2/0.2 = 21 times more revenue or $12,600/acre.

Hmm yeah I didn't consider that they might use part of their yields in ways that don't generate revenue. However that would mean they use $2,400/acre/month of their crops for subsistence which doesn't seem very plausible, so I agree that's a very charitable interpretation lol

> $2,400/acre/month

You've added the per month part. The article itself doesn't provide a time period but the two reasonable ones are month and year. For a year, that could actually be a reasonable amount of crops kept by a family for their own consumption and storage for later consumption.

If it's monthly, that is pretty high.

They stop growing a full amount of low value subsistence crops needed to survive and start growing cash crops on some portion or on all of the land. Those cash crops have a higher value.

An example - say you have 4 acres of land and have a family of 4.

In the old world, say you needed one acre per person to grow enough food to the next crop harvest. This would be something like corn or potatoes that can keep. So all your land goes to growing food to survive and you cant make any money.

In the new world, with irrigation, you can do much more - say for the sake of argument, 4 times the crop, in the same space. Now, you only need 1/4 of an acre per person or an acre for everyone. So you grow vegetables that sell for 10 times as much on the 3/4s of land you have that you no longer need to use to survive.

Or even better, you grow high veg on the entire piece of land for income and use the cash to buy your corn and potatoes or whatever as you need them.

Just as all other commercial farmers do across the world.

In other words, solar allows them to become small business owners.

maybe over the lifetime of the installation ? But then they say the battery must be replaced after 5 years... So 5*12 - 30 months = 30 months without paying. So one pays about half 2.17 per day over the 5 years. But that's still about 5 times more than 0.21$/day... I'd love to believe the article, but you're right, the maths seem wrong.

That's in a "bear case" section and honestly is far too bearish, warranties are typically 10+ years for. Unless you buy something super cheap that goes bad and the manufacturer is no longer around.

ChatGPT math.

It's an AI generated article full of errors. Simple arithmetic errors. Probably copied from a video or another article.

It has a voice don't it...

"Modular. Distributed. Digital. Financed by the people using it, subsidized by the carbon it avoids."

Every second paragraph thinks it's Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone.

>It worked because it solved a real problem: Kenyans were already sending money through informal networks. M-PESA just made it cheaper and safer.

>Here’s why this matters: M-PESA created a payment rail with near-zero transaction costs. Which means you can economically collect tiny payments. $0.21 per day payments.

Even if it's not written by ChatGPT, it's the /exact style/ used by the linkedin AI evangelists

Yeah it’s all the punchy mini paragraphs.

Just one sentence here.

Then I realized.

That another sentence came after that.

Yeah pure shit for us to eat.

I always wonder what the point is.