do not yell at me, but... this is where genAI may be useful.
what if, bare with me, what if, after a certain amount of time, a certain amount of "requests", a code library can be given to a genAI to maintain; no improvements, no extra features, just bug fixes? This could continue until either someone picks it up, or the open source solution becomes irrelevant, not enough "requests".
To be fair, this article is partially true. Now, allow me to pour some gasoline/petrol/benzine around this thread.
Have you purchased a college course required book recently?
There is a market monopoly by Pearson, Wiley,Cengage, and McGraw.
Buy the eBook, or the actual book with a CD in the back, but cannot access the pictures because the code can be use only once! (often the codes do not work at all)
Updated every 2 to 3 years, minor changes sufficient enough the break the previous versions. e.g., randomized tests, samples and alike.
Captive audience. If Jacky teaches the course, bet your bippy it is Jacky's book you will be buying, no ifs or buts about it.
I can do the same for certification. Have you seen the PMP certification book? Grey paper with gray text republished annually, meaning of words and descriptions are changes and tests are adjusted specifically to confuse on wording. Or, have you tried to by an international standard like ISO? $300 spiral binder, assigned to you, cannot be transferred.
So, are books not too expensive? Depends on the type of book.
Yeah the textbook cartel is outrageous. I started a textbook publishing company to fight this!
I was working on web copy describing how crazy the mainstream textbook prices are, and used the price C$300 for the calculus book, trying to be flippant (to exaggerate the competitor price to make my prices look better). I decided to check the price in the bookstore, and to my surprise the price was even higher than that! (sold as bundle: book + exercise manual + solutions manual). When your real prices are higher than the pricing people use as hyperbole, you know there is a problem.
It makes no sense—for a subject that has been around for 300+ years, and virtually unchanged for the past 100.
It only works because the educators are complicit. Most bachelors degree textbooks in basic sciences do not need to change from one decade to the next. My Lorrain and Corson Electromagnetic Fields and Waves from when I was studying applied physics in 1975 is just as correct now as it was then.
I don't disagree about the complicity. However, biology and statistics, even at intro level, have had significant updates in material covered over the last 10-20 years.
More subtly, terminology changes. My copy of Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis is just as correct now as it was when it was published in 1976, but I remember one of my professors describing the terminology as somewhat dated, as of the late 2000s.
Well someone sat down and wrote a 1000 dense pages that probably took 2-5 years of their life. That deserves to be rewarded. Of course there are problems with professors prescribing their own books for the class etc. but when I went to school you could return that $300 book for $200 to the bookstore once the semester was done.
First, the authors make very little money on most textbooks. You would be shocked. The money is staying with the book publishers.
Second, they've started publishing new editions so quickly with only the problem sets changed (in general) so that students can't use previous editions. If you're learning on your own, you can get some good deals on older editions for just that reason.
And on top of that, they maintain their own platforms so that even if you buy them used, you have to subscribe to a service to take the tests! All of this lines up to finding as many ways to extract money from students and at interest after it's all said and done.
> when I went to school you could return that $300 book for $200 to the bookstore once the semester was done.
This is not my recollection at all. My recollection was that I could buy a book for $300 and sell it back for $75 if it was in great condition. And I could only do that about half the time because version N+1 would make my copy obsolete.
I had one professor in college who made most of their money by forcing students to buy his book (it was an ebook so it couldn’t be resold, and also super expensive, and the class homework was all linked to from the book itself). The class was also somewhat useless, which lead to a lot of students surmising that the professor’s deal was basically just <pay book price> = free A / course requirement lol
Where I studied in the UK the university provided all books. Which meant they had a lot more negotiating power, because they wouldn't pay £300 a book nor allow a professor to have a £300 book as a requirement for the course. So companies had to make sure their material was within the price range that universities were willing to pay for it.
In Germany I spent exactly 0 dollars/euros on books in university. We got access to a huge amounts of ebooks through the university network and profs never required a specific one and would just recommend a few. One of these was always available. This free access was of course covered by the 250 euros per semester tuition…
But yes, standards and certifications are horrible.
> Don’t blame books for being too expensive. Everything else is more expensive, and that’s why you can’t afford books.
College textbook pricing is a function of the aforementioned rate of increase of everything else becoming more expensive, not a function of the cost of books increasing generally. They are, the author argues, decreasing, unless you introduce external distorting factors.
The article is correct that recreational books are below for cumulative CPI. College textbooks on the other hand are at ~ 3 times the rate of general inflation.
Source:
BLS CPI-U (FRED: CPIAUCSL)
BLS "Educational Books and Supplies" (FRED: CUSR0000SEEA, ~767 in Mar 2026, base 1982-84=100)
BLS "Recreational Books" (FRED: CUUR0000SERG02, base Dec 1997=100, recently ~96-100
I also heard tell the illustrated manuscripts market is soaring.
> the author is wrong about textbooks.
The author didn't write an article about college textbooks, he wrote a response to an article about mass market books and affordability.
The forces which have made college textbooks (and college educations in general) unprecedentedly expensive, real though they are, have little to do with this article.
Edit: I re-read my original comment and I probably wasn't clear enough. The external distorting factor is the higher education system absolutely exploding costs of everything to do with higher education, from predatory professors and textbook companies to the rent-seeking and regulatory capture of higher education institutions. College textbooks got incredibly expensive for reasons having absolutely nothing to do with the actual costs associated with making books, which are arguably cheaper than they've ever been.
Only for commodity goods does the cost of production impact the price. As substitutionality lessens, the price more and more approaches the value delivered.
conjecture - retention of a generation? If i had deathfromtheside[at]gmail, then i grew up and was too lazy/non-tech/busy to set up a new account for janesmith[at]gmail?
That's a really good point… It reminded me of some of the crazy email addresses that my friends have had, and how they've mostly created new email addresses for their professional lives.
Just to be clear, plowing and tilling are not the same thing, and this article implies the researchers might be using it interchangeably. They bundle different soil-disturbance practices together, irrelevant of their uses, and potential compaction impact. Of course, tilling can also just be used as a generic term for all of the soil management in farms, but this is never explained.
It is also unclear if the paper is removing traffic compaction or it is part of their results. when an MF 8700 with 23,800 pounds rolls around it will compact things. A lot. I have a lunch box to prove it.
Would love to see no-till vs shallow till vs deep plowing. For this paper, they should have introduce and have primary conclusion around the technical data gathering as a novel idea, not draw conclusion from the collected data.
The physics and sensing seems rigorous. Understanding of agricultural taxonomy, farming, is coarse at best. 40 hours of total data during rain is a wee bit short. 2cm depth for the fiber is only going to sense near- or surface. Most crops go deeper than that. Single-site experiment on a single type of soil is very narrow.
To me, plowing (like a chisel plow or moldboard) is to break up soil, and 'folds' old crop like corn stalks back in. It is also the first step for never-used land prep for growing stuff. Usually, beginning of season, compacting, or new site. 8 to 20 inches deep. can flip the soil upside down.
Tilling gets the soil ready for seed, aeration, crumble large lumps and fill larger gaps on the surface, or mix fertilizer/compost into soil. 4 to 12 inches deep.
Discing aka harrowing (disc harrow) usually will cut the remaining roots a few inches deep, often done post plowing. good for putting last years leftovers just a few inches under. 4 to 6 inches.
Note that it seems that as the field size gets smaller, the tilling vs harrowing seems to flip? At least how people consider using them.
(edit: I am all over with this one, but I think the gist comes through.)
If you check the paper, it doesn't say "plowing" anywhere. Just tilling. And these are the parameters:
> Tillage had been applied at three depths commonly used in farming—no tillage, 10 cm, and 25 cm—while compaction had been imposed using two tire pressure levels—70 kPa for both front and rear tires, and 120 kPa for front and 150 kPa for rear tires.
What one has to keep in mind as well, that even though tractors are really heavy they spread that weight across a large area (using low tire pressures and having massive tires to begin with). So, iirc, the per area impact is even lower then a human. It impacts a lot larger area, though!
Plowing vs tilling is also very much about soil erosion and depends very much of the location you are in.
Compaction is sublinear with weight, make the tractor heavier so it combacts more makes a small difference where the tires are - but you can now pull something bigger (assuming horsepower) and that means less of the field is touched by tires and in turn less compaction. compaction is worse where the tires touch but they touch less.
the above is also why tires are better than tracks in many cases. The tire has more compaction, but when you turn it touches less land and so overall is better than a track.
of course every soil is different. For details of you particular land you need an expert who knows your soil.
I often do to, so this reply is not a criticism of your general point, however in this case your would have been better informed to read the actual thing and not the comment you replied to!
Yeah. But with a finite lifetime, and an effectively infinite supply of content on the internet - quick & dirty attention-rationing algorithms are unavoidable.
dnsmasq on an RPi Zero 2W is the backbone of my self-hosted setup. Combined with Tailscale, it gives me access from anywhere to arbitrary domains I define myself, with full HTTPS thanks to Caddy.
At home, I put all of my network infrastructure software in one basket because that seems like the right path towards maximizing availability[1]: It provides one point of potential hardware failure instead of many.
For me, that means doing routing, DNS, VPN, and associated stuff with one box running OpenWRT. It works. It's ridiculously stable. And rather than having a number of things that could break the network when they die, I only have 1 thing that can do so.
That box currently happens to be a Raspberry Pi 4 that uses VLANs as Ethernet port expanders, but it is also stable AF with a [shock! horror!] USB NIC. I picked that direction years ago mostly because I have a strong affinity towards avoiding critical moving parts (like cooling fans) in infrastructure.
But those details don't matter. Any single box running OpenWRT, OPNsense, pfSense, Debian, FreeBSD, or whatever, can behave more-or-less similarly.
[1]: Yeah, so about that. If the real-world MTBF for a system that relies upon 1 box is 10 years, then the MTBF for a system relying on 2 boxes to both keep working is only 5 years. Less is more.
It's both, and more, in a way. But it's primarily a DNS tweaking tool, and does not support things like zone transfers. Which you usually don't need with a small-scale personal setup anyway.
Yes, it is nothing like 2022 yet. But the concerning thing is that this may be just a beginning of a protracted event, plus the world, and especially Western Europe, is less resilient today to the disruptions in gas supply.
One of those is an absolute value (urea $) and one is a rate of change (food price inflation). Maybe I’m being dumb, but why are they tracking almost 1:1, both with linear Y axis?
I can compare Urea $ to Crude Oil $ and get an even closer 5 year correlation. Are we actually indexing against something else here?
Edit: that is, perhaps urea prices are driven mostly by energy costs, which in turn drives inflation rates.
Yes. Nat gas -> ammonia -> urea. Theres some efficiencies that vary by site but its a hundred year old process of a true commodity. The price per therm _is_ the input.
Was listening to a fertilizer analyst the other day. She thought corn:urea was the better comparison. Nitrogen is the cost of marginal yields. And corn:urea shows the farmer being squeezed between their commodity output price and the required input cost. At some point its just not cost effective to grow corn, so you go soy, and reduced supply should pish up future prices. Oh look! More commodity price inflation pressure!
And that was specifically due to the (ongoing) Russian Invasion of Ukraine. After the 2022 spike, most large countries began building alternative supply chains to reduce impacts from these kinds of hits.
For example, the US and Europe largely doesn't use urea unlike Brazil, India, and China.
This is also why Asian countries have been investing heavily in Hydrogen energy despite HN's hate boner to the technology.
Edit: can't reply
> Is it really hydrogen energy if your plan for the hydrogen gas is turning it into ammonia? Would give you another use for it, I suppose
The whole point of building a hydrogen energy market is becuase hydrogen electrolyzers are dual use, and the methodology to leverage and produce "green" ammonia is similar to "green" hydrogen.
A non-LNG method to mass produce ammonia has always been called out in most countries Hydrogen energy roadmaps such as Japan [0], China [1], and India [2].
A lot of the hate for hydrogen is for a vehicle fuel where it's strictly inferior to batteries, partly because it's such a pain to handle, and partly because it's a "submarine" for natural gas derived H2.
Evolving hydrogen from electrolysis and then immediately turning it into ammonia is a much better idea; ammonia is easier to handle than H2 gas and already has a market.
The Economist was recently citing hydrogen as "deep tech" [1] (meaning long R&D cycles, sometimes unproven techniology no short term profitability, heavy investment, industry-wide transformative power).
Most of your sources have plans focused on hydrogen production, but I'd be interested to see specific targets or plans regarding specific uses like fertilizers. There are some in the Hydrogen Roadmap Europe, but it seems focused on transportation [2].
> I'd be interested to see specific targets or plans regarding specific uses like fertilizers
It's primarily in Asia and North Africa. For example, India has begun building a 7GW green hydrogen project specifically for urea production [0] and as a technical demonstration. An Egypt-Germany-Norway JV is also expected to be completed by 2027 explicitly for this usecase [1]
There were plans to build a hydrogen plant near Whyalla in South Australia, a famous steel-making site; see e.g. [1]. The tl;dr uses were export (I expected ammonia but the whole thing was vague enough to include hydrogen) on boats, reduction of iron ore ("decarbonisation", apparently requires magnetite) and while all the financial engineering that didn't happen was going to happen, energy storage for the grid, soaking up S.A.'s over-abundant solar.
Someone observed that this was the entirety of the presently-outgoing (but sure to be re-elected) state regime's story about reducing electricity bills in the state.
2022 was abnormally high, caused largely by the disruption of gas supplies to Western Europe after sanctions on Russian gas and the destruction of the Nordstream gas pipeline.
Really interesting. It made me curious to dig in and learn that urea production starts with natural gas. And if you add natural gas to the chart as well urea and natural gas prices generally track together without a lag either way, except natural gas doesn't have the recent uptick seen in urea.
I guess the recent move in urea likely isn’t coming from energy costs, something fertilizer-specific, exports, shipping, or supply?
> I guess the recent move in urea likely isn’t coming from energy costs, something fertilizer-specific, exports, shipping, or supply
One of India's SOEs recently paused Urea production at some plants due to NatGas issues from the ongoing conflict [0].
Additonally, India began reducing purchasing of Russian LNG in late 2025.
India also launched a tender to purchase urea on the global market in February [1].
This led to a double whammy for urea in the short term given how Indian agriculture is heavily Urea dependent (around 70-80% of all fertilizers used in India are Urea).
But the same SOE recently announced it's restarted operations earlier today [2] and India has restarted spot purchases of what appears to be Russian LNG [3][4] that was originally destined for Europe (especially Hungary and Slovakia).
Edit: can't reply
I'm not a god damn LLM and I do not use AI to write my comments. If you can't engage with an argument, then fuck off.
Not sure which natural gas that’s referencing, but looks to be a US index (Henry Hub or so) - note the peak corresponds to a cold snap, not the Iran war. Natgas is tricky because it’s: difficult to store and difficult to transport (aside from well-established pipelines), so you have a massively disjointed market between various deliver markets (look at NY Henry Hub vs Dutch TTF), and also a massively disjointed market between delivery delivery dates (natgas calendar spread trades has been nicknamed “widowmakers”)
I guess it is users' accounts, so service accounts are exempt? I would hate to see a headless server rebooting and waiting for an age verification from a service account at a power or water sanitation plant...
Maybe all laws should have a "dev environment", starting with the politicians. All their systems will demand their age and proof of age for say 12 months? Toaster, washer, dryer, cell, dishwasher, car, calculators, etc. Then, if they still want to pass the law, 3 months of red teaming by the "general public" for all the systems that have their data. And, if they still want it, go for it.
what if, bare with me, what if, after a certain amount of time, a certain amount of "requests", a code library can be given to a genAI to maintain; no improvements, no extra features, just bug fixes? This could continue until either someone picks it up, or the open source solution becomes irrelevant, not enough "requests".
Yes, lots of details to work out.
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