It was paid for through code assist enterprise and had all the flags enabled for the "preview" models. Still the only way to get gemini 3+ was to open and close the application 5 to 10 times and sometimes you would get 3 for a bit and then get dumped back to 2.5 and no matter what you do it would not use 3.
I tossed it after spending like 3 hours total messing around the google cloud console and trying a bunch of shit from the github issues. The other offerings don't waste my time (or waste less of it anyway). If they want me to beta test their shit they shouldn't charge for it.
I would like one for the vram but I am sure they will be unobtainable after the initial stock sells out as I assume they were produced before the RAM prices went up.
It definitely speeds the effects of dementia and similar because your brain insists on filling in what you didn’t hear and it tends to be wildly negative, at least in my two experiences of having gone through it.
I mentioned this could be a possible falsification of the idea. It's also possible there are multiple causes and the modality I mentioned is a cause for some. I'm not sure. There are definitely cases where isolation contributes to cognitive decline.
Exactly. My mom lost her job because of early onset. She was very social, read tons of books, etc…. Now, I’m happy she at least still knows who am, but she can’t put a sentence together.
I feel like big / old companies thrive on process and are bogged down in bureaucracy.
Sure there is a process to get a library approved, and that abstraction makes you feel better but for the guy who's job it is to approve they are not going to spend an entire day reviewing a lib. The abstraction hides what is essentially a "LGTM" its just that takes a week for someone to check it off their outlook todos.
They are caching internal LLM state, which is in the 10s of GB for each session. It's called a KV cache (because the internal state that is cached are the K and V matrices) and it is fundamental to how LLM inference works; it's not some Anthropic-specific design decision. See my other comment for more detail and a reference.
But there's more to agtech than driving a tractor around, a lot of what these big integrated systems do (at the high end) is very data driven -- determining where and how to plant, irrigate, fertilize, etc. There's a lot of integration work beyond just making the tractor drive.
35 years in the tech industry has taught me one thing: incumbents that have been around for a long time are almost always more clueless and more full of shit than you think, what they do isn't as hard as they claim and you can probably do better given a fraction of the time they spent just because you don't have legacy systems to worry about and because technology and tooling has moved on.
Incumbents thrive on the myths about what they do being hard and impossible to replicate.
Yes, it is a lot of work to replace what you can get off the shelf today. But it isn't like the basic tech itself is all that hard to replicate step by step if you accept that it takes time and the first N development stages will give you something that isn't as feature rich and polished. And if one makes it open source, interoperability will be easier to do something about.
Perhaps some of the analysis tools/services you can buy today will be hard to replicate, but I doubt they are that hard to replicate. And it is worth having slightly suboptimal results for a couple of seasons than being on the receiving end of a hostage-situation.
But yes, it is certainly a huge effort to get what you actually need.
The Pareto principle applies. For highly complex systems it’s easy to build most of what the incumbents have. It’s the last 20% where it is hard to catch up just because the incumbents have decades of a head start and have the momentum. And even more so here because it’s not just software. It’s very science and hardware heavy.
For farming, it’s even more tough because the market has a really uneven distribution. Usually the best place to tackle huge incumbents is in the midmarket. They’re big enough to need your automation, but they’re small enough to take a risk to save some money, and the features you haven’t built yet aren’t blockers for them.
But there’s basically no midmarket farming, all farms are pretty much either really big or really small.
> But there's more to agtech than driving a tractor around, a lot of what these big integrated systems do (at the high end) is very data driven -- determining where and how to plant, irrigate, fertilize, etc.
How difficult is this to implement outside of big ag-tech? I feel that a community of experienced farmers and programmers (or programmer-farmers) could tackle this.
The machine, from tractor to combine and everything in between often feeds data together to produce a holistic understanding.
Things like
- How much fuel was used
- Where your tractors and sprayers drove
- Soil samples and content
- How and where every bit of chemical and fertilizer was applied
- What weather hit your field
- How much and and the moisture content of every bit of the field you harvested
But if you're observing a fleet of 100+ machines you kinda need some integration and a central location. Which in turn connects to multiple other services like weather, crop markets, fuel prices etc.
I think that is a different market than the market for dumb tractors. There might be some overlap, but I doubt the people who want to fix their own tractors are different than the corporations that are tracking 100 tractors across hundreds/thousands of fields.
The software is certainly easier to build, but there's a lot of hardware involved here beyond the tractor. Claude is not necessarily going to make it easier to do soil sampling or measuring field conditions or yield outputs.
Farmers would be foolish to rely on an LLM because farming margins are too low to makeup for even a small quick mistake. Many farms will profit 1% on investment over 1-2 decades, although year to year yield can vary 30%.
What kind of sensors do those cheap kits come with?
A tractor is a big thing to have rolling around unsupervised. I would want a lot of safeguards. Blindly going from one GPS point to another sounds like a nightmare.
The cheapie aliexpress specials simply drive the line they're programmed to drive. They have GPS and a gyro to account for the slope of the land. You're supposed to stay in the tractor while they're operating as a safety... but this doesn't always happen in some parts of the world.
30 years ago you had a hand-gas and clamped the wheel to drive the tractor in a line. Using GPS is a litle bit more safe than that. And I talk about Germany!
Right, but that has nothing to do with a vendor making a dumb tractor. Why do we need to dismissively move the conversation from TFA. The data driven approach is made up of several parts, and we're looking at a specific part
Making a dumb tractor for the use-case of dumb tractor is obviously a winning idea.
I just don't think you're going to effectively compete with big agtech by putting a bunch of parts in a box, shaking it, and hoping you end up with a beautifully integrated solution. Integration hell is the reason big commercial firms dominate when it comes to large integrated systems.
Why not? They sell telematics systems separately from cars. It’s possible to do this and it might not be too difficult depending on how the system is composed.
Precision ag is orders of magnitude more complicated of a system than vehicle telematics. Again, driving the tractor is the easy part, and you can already get cheap systems to do this.
admittedly, i'm not a farmer nor an expert in data driving farming. but getting a farmer the ability to precisely drive a tractor in a field so that planting seeds, applying fertilizer, and any of the other steps would be a huge win. The settings used when doing that can easily come from bigFarmData gained from other sources. Can it be used even more precisely when everything is gathered/integrated by one company? That's a question that I'm not by default saying yes to, but it seems like you do think that is true. Even if it is true, does that mean the difference from a farmer going broke because his DIY tractor behaved slightly differently than your solution? I'd posit that a farmer only being allowed to play the bigFarmData game by only being allowed to buy from one vendor that is expensive while also forcing any repairs to be expensive will cause farmers to financially unnecessarily struggle.
The economics of farming (at least in the US) are brutal. Scaling up is really the only way to make a living long term. Some of this is due to equipment cost (look up how much a combine costs), and some is due to competition. It's not unusual for a farmer to be land rich and cash poor.
If you want to see a couple of guys learning how to farm from scratch, visit https://www.youtube.com/@spencerhilbert. Spencer and his brother made a bit of money off games and Youtube and have been starting out on corn, hay, as well as raising beef. It gives a pretty good insight into how pervasive tech is in farming, and how despite that, how much of farming still relies on hard, physical work.
I'll check out Spencer's channel. For a comedy perspective, there's Clarkson's Farm or Growing Belushi. Even though they are for entertainment, there's a still a lot of info in those shows to not be written off.
However, I'm not as interested in being a farmer at that level. I'm much more interested in the homesteading aspect of farming. I'm not trying to feed the world as much as me and mine and maybe some extra. So not just farming, but also some ranching with sheep/goats/chickens/pigs. I have friends doing this that I'm keeping an eye on. They had a head start as their kids grew up in FFA and are already familiar with raising live stock, and then having them processed to make that part much less daunting.
That would be a correct interpretation. Depending on how "cowboy" you want to go, there's plenty of slang. Raising hamburgers and steaks. Bacon seeds. Lamb chops. Just idiomatic sayings referring to the ultimate end products. I've heard all sorts of things to be cute.
Scale is a huge factor. It makes the most sense to invest in precision ag tech when you have enough acres that the investment pays off. At 5000+ acres, farms are using integrated systems that combine satellite data, on-tractor sensors, soil sensors, drone sensors, in-field weather sensors, with a lot of science to squeeze the most out of the land. At that scale, there's a lot of money invested in a season and you aren't looking for a DIY project, you need production quality product with proven scientific rigor. You probably don't have the manpower to do a DIY project anyway, you are relying heavily on automation and outsourcing. And at the low end, it it more effort to implement any of this than you'll get out of it.
So a DIY solution is aiming for somewhere in the center of the market -- enough scale that it makes sense to bother, but not enough enough money to avoid the headache of DIY. It might make sense for some mid-sized farms in developing economies, but it seems to be a narrow window to me.
Is suspect most farmers would prefer the diy add-on version of these than the single manufacturer integrated one. A modern smartphone and stay of I/o sensors send like it could do pretty much the entire job
I had to scroll back up to see what this reply was to, to get the full chuckle and yup, I was told frequently by my male parental unit that the top two reasons for having kids was chores and tax deductions. But there's a reason farm families leaned on the large side. The more hands you had helping the less hard things could be while never being easy
While the model was "ok" everything else was trash.
Constant 429s or 502s for "reasons".
10 different ways to try and pay for the stupid thing and none of them clear.
My favourite was as a paying customer I could not get it to use the latest model. Sometimes it would but most times it would dump me to 2.5.
All of my experience is exactly the opposite of the gp comment is saying.
The gemini-cli repo is gong show too https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli
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