estsauver

I think part of the battle is actually just getting people to identify which LLM made it to understand if someones contribution is good or not. A javascript project with contributions from Opus 4.6 will probably be pretty good, but if someone is using Mistral small via the chat app, it's probably just a waste of time.

But if I ask Claude or Gemini for a nice version of the recipe, it works perfectly. I think there's a lot of own goals out there.

Imagine the quality of life upgrade of getting compaction down to a few second blip, or the "Explore" going 20 times faster! As these models get better, it will be super exciting!

But to be clear, 1000 tokens/second is WAY better. Anthropic's Haiku serves at ~50 tokens per second.

(I can also see a world where it just doesn't make sense to share most of the layers/infra and you diverge, but curious how you all see the approach.)

Also, I put together a little research paper recently--I think there's probably an underexplored option of "Use frontier AR model for a little bit of planning then switch to diffusion for generating the rest." You can get really good improvements with diffusion models! https://estsauver.com/think-first-diffuse-fast.pdf

username at gmail if you want to chat

Claude Code v2.1.37

EU region, Claude Max 20x plan

Mac -- Tahoe 26.2

In the early years, it was extremely, extremely open and comprehensive. I've definitely looked through it when I wasn't sure how to handle something at work.

Put up a big "This property is not for sale" sign on the land.

https://estsauver.com/blog/scaling-visualizations

That being said, I don't think I would want to rent a car that didn't have a place to charge it or a very easy-to-use fast charger nearby.

> So you are saying that these special hybrid seeds that are the first generation of combining two strains are the only ones that can perform well?

For a lot of crop systems, yes! There are obviously crop systems where you can do clones and some exceptions are always present in biology, but basically yes. Yes for all the big staple crops except Canola.

> And that using any other seeds, even the second generation of that same strain, is so bad and so easy to confuse that it should be outright illegal?

I probably wouldn’t make it illegal, I think farmers should be allowed to do whatever they want to! (My completely out of the loop guess is the government is trying to help small holder farmers who are reporting that they’re being scammed by these groups and that they lack the resources to do genetic testing to prosecute them for the fraud.)

> That is very hard to believe. Such laws are in place to protect the IP of these special seed producers, to make their business model viable. That does have merit to a degree, you do want such companies to exist, but they should also have to contend with competition from other, perhaps less effective but cheaper, sources of seed.

It’s not really an IP protection thing, it’s an extremely difficult many year process to recover genetics on most hybrid crop systems. I don’t think most seed companies care about folks using saved seed, they know almost all farmers will buy good seed if they can.

> This doesn’t have much to do with protecting the farmers from being cheated into planting bad seed. And I am skeptical of the fact that even second generation seeds are that bad, or that these hybrids are really such a life-changing upgrade.

I think well answered by a parent comment, but the book The Wizard and The Prophet is pretty good reading on Borlaug and the green revolution. If you look at global food capacity vs population, it’s probably the single most important life upgrade for everyone of modernity.

(Small Edit: I should note that I’m not an agronomist, I’m just a guy who codes okay sometimes and that I’ve gotten to spend a lot of time talking to agronomists and smallholder farmers trying to make agriculture for small farmers work better.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_seed

To state once again, I don’t know much about this law or how the government believes it’s preventing counterfeit seed, but bad seed is a huge problem for farmers. I personally want farmers to be able to do whatever they want to with their farms!

Edit: (I personally know basically nothing about the law or how it’s been implemented.)

When you're making a seed that you want to make the best crop possible, the way to do that is to take two great lines of maize that share relatively little genetics, cross them at the last step, and enjoy the hybrid vigour that results. This is one of the most important practical advancements we have for getting good yields from crops: the yields are dramatically better for this seed then if you plant the seed kernels that are made by the hybrid. When you plant saved seed (which many poor people are forced to do through not being able to afford hybrid seeds) you get dramatically worse yields and often even doing things like using fertilizer doesn't make economic sense (https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/low-quality-low-ret... is frequently cited.)

However, to the naked eye, there's basically no distinction between a hybrid seed and stored seed. A lot of seed companies sell seeds that are coated to help protect the seeds from pests/blights, but seed counterfitters have learned how to copy this. To distinguish them, you either need to run genetic testing or plant them and wait a season. If you get scammed, the result can be devestating for a smallholder farmer's family.

I don't necessarily think community seed banks should be banned, but I think it's important context to know. There are people for whom they really need any seed, crops which are not served commercially well, and a whole bunch of other use cases I immediately understand for a community seed bank. But seed counterfitting is a real problem that is hurting some of the world's poorest people. (I'll also just say I'm not up to date on this law, the court case, or how it's been applied in the country.)

Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders of Apollo Agriculture and still serve on the board, which operates in Kenya and a few other countries trying to help smallholders get access to better agtech (which includes hybrid seeds and fertilizer and other high roi agricultural tools.)

Things get a lot more easier at lower quantisation, higher parameter space, and there's a lot of people's whose jobs for AI are "Extract sentiment from text" or "bin into one of these 5 categories" where that's probably fine.

There is an English version of Le Monde as well.