samuelbalogh

Awesome work, thank you!

Fantastic! Any plans to support other languages?

Wrote an mcp server for Cursor Background Agents. This makes Cursor agents accessible like any other tool: your AI-assisted IDE (Kilo, Cline, Roo, etc) can spin them up programmatically, fan out subtasks in parallel, or wire them into ci/cd pipelines. It’s useful for distributing long coding jobs, spreading out llm costs, and treating Cursor as just another composable backend service.

yes, super helpful - sequential thinking, DB access, browser automation, etc

Church - it's rare to read a sane comment like this on HN.

The world we constructed is pure hell for around 80 billion animals.

Veganism is about reducing suffering as much as practical and possible. Some people (you included) have a problem with that and reject it altogether because of cognitive biases.

Yes there are crop death and suffering due to veganism. A plant based diet however reduces this by about 75%.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

why should we wait for lab grown meat if we can go vegan right now?

> going against every bit of our human evolution

you're saying this typing on a _computer_ - how does that fit into human evolution?

IMO humans evolve in an ethical standpoint as well and tend to want to cause the least amount of suffering possible as we evolve. That is why we have medicine, don't usually own slaves, don't hit children, and don't abuse animals.

I got very positive feedback from students preparing for high school keystone exams (given that it can generate questions from a given online resource / PDF) so I'm pretty happy about that!

Yes, it's meaningless if the topic is mostly unknown to the learner. But that's not the goal of flashcards - the goal is to first read the text, and then reinforce what you learned with bite-sized questions/answers.

Everyone learns differently, I always found flashcards to be incredibly useful and entertaining.

A bit random plug - I made a flashcard site and generated flashcards based on this resource (because I want to learn computer architecture, among other tech topics)

https://brightmind.space/app/en/topic/677e9b273de1c962084316...

It's partly due to the insane subsidies that livestock farming receives in the EU.

If meat was not heavily subsidised, it would be much, much more expensive.

> Sometimes I talk to my vegetarian friends and ask "If you want to be vegetarian, why don't you just eat natively vegetarian dishes? Why the fake meat?". So far no satisfying answer.

Because there are people who like the taste and consistency of meat, but object to killing animals.

> With no corresponding change to the amount of fuel used to climb up to cruising altitude

Yes, but

1) a plane flying a larger distance has to lift a heavier load of fuel

2) emissions tend to do more damage at high altitude than they do at ground level

so I would not discount the benefits of reducing flight distance as much as possible.

Source: How Bad Are Bananas? by Mike Berners Lee

Same here - I do fly 1-3 times a year and I always feel bad about it.

I can't help but think that flying will hopefully become a taboo topic, something that people do occasionally but definitely don't brag about.

I would disagree with "We were built for work". Evolutionary, we were built to survive until reproduction age and a bit longer after that, to care for offsprings.

I think people who misunderstand the FIRE movement think that early retirees don't want to do meaningful work, like volunteering, painting, making music, etc. I think that is the point of FIRE - to be able to do the most meaningful things you can think of.

Such a great story, well written too.

That would possibly be a solution, but alas I don't think it's going to happen anywhere soon.

I think that in the systemic terminology, a mature forest is a carbon "stock". Deforestation means getting rid of that stock and putting all of its CO2 into the atmostphere by burning it. Unless you use all that wood for something else (buildings or whatever) which is possible but I think it's unlikely. I might be wrong though!

> You may be surprised to learn that cattle herd size has remained relatively stable over time

This doesn't seem to be true, at all.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cattle-livestock-count-he...

This data goes back to 1962 and shows a trend. I suspect that if we had data from before the advent of industrial agriculture, that curve would tend to approximate lower and lower numbers as we go back in time.

Thanks for the thoughtful comment!

It's true, not all cattle production can be held accountable for deforestation. For example, here in the UK, it's supposed to be a less carbon-intensive industry than in South America, because the grasslands on which cattle graze are good for little else - they are not really suited for crops. I agree on that point.

However (and from this point, it's speculation from my part), I am very skeptical about that grassland being grassland before agriculture arrived. Eg. was it part of the ancient forest that largely covered Britain? If so, it was indeed deforestation, only it was around 500-1000 years ago.

And this gives a whole other dimension to the discussion - we are OK with our deforestation here in Europe, because it happened a long time ago, but we are not OK with deforestation in Indonesia to produce palm oil (which WE consume) because it's happening now. Strangely, we are not that keen on re-forestation and we just want to push the burden to developing nations (a form of de-humanizing the poor, in my opinion).

I don't have any argument here, I just thought I would share my thoughts.

I don't think it's fair to treat deforestation as a local issue. Cattle production drives deforestation - whether it's in Brazil or the USA or China, doesn't matter, because we share the atmosphere.

Three-quarters [of global deforestation] is driven by agriculture. Beef production is responsible for 41% of deforestation [...]

https://ourworldindata.org/what-are-drivers-deforestation

Eating local doesn't even make a dent in reducing your carbon footprint.

https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

Use the soy we are feeding cattle to feed humans directly. Cut out the middleman - lots of resources freed up all of a sudden.

Keep subsidies to beef low and increase subsidies for plant protein (peas, beans, soy).

Encourage healthy plant-based diets all over the world.

Profit from the vast areas saved to start reforestation projects.

I 100% agree.

Even after the swine flu, bird flu, SARS, MERS, covid, HIV and other viruses, we are still keeping animals in confined spaces, butchering them and selling their meat on markets so we can consume parts of their dead bodies, hurting our planet and ourselves in the process.

It's a grim side of humanity.

edit: prions too, not just viruses.