Sigh. So can I apparently.

Come one editors. You can do better than that.

Or the administration could ask congress to pass a law to this effect. Like we used to do back during normal Republic times. Could have done that with the tariffs and then they'd have been legal.

I guess it's been a good run. The republic almost lasted 250 years.

It is quite fascinating that republicans like to claim the idea of being based in part on ideas from the Roman Republic, however they openly admire the later imperial age much more and it's leaders.

In fact farmers in North Dakota have been complaining about cloud seeding by insurance companies for years. These companies seed clouds that could harbor hail so that it rains out before it can drop hail. Mostly this is to protect urban areas. But the problem is it literally takes the rain away from farms the really need it.

Over the years there have been many lists published of lyrics people thought they heard but were completely nonsensical. To some apparently Abba sings, "feel the beat of the tangerine."

So I'm not surprised youtube can't understand song lyrics. Regular speaking, it's fairly good. And not too bad at translating the subtitles.

Just because big data, neural nets, and pattern recognition has been around for decades doesn't mean this stuff is not still in its infancy. In fact it very much is. The transformer architecture described by Google in 2017 was very much a breakthrough that turned decades-old stagnant ideas into something incredibly useful. We're not even 10 years on from that! Just a baby still. And only in the last few years has massively parallel computing power (GPUs etc) gotten to the point of allowing transformers to work on matrices of unbelievable sizes, which really exploded the field.

Meanwhile I use Claude Code and am quite amazed how good it actually is at the tasks I've asked it to help me do. I have no idea whether this is good or bad for us.

Oh wow. So are you lined up to be a long haul driver then? Surely you are manly enough. We have a huge shortage of drivers right now. Maybe you should talk to a trucker a little bit. The job they do is important and they are proud of what they do. But they are treated horribly.

Yes of course we're talking about BEV trucks. What does that have to do with reefer trailers?

What are you talking about? All the major manufacturers are currently selling electric trucks of that size and range in Europe. There's a guy documenting daily long haul driving in Europe with electric trucks. Google for electric trucker or elektrotrucker.

And to head off the inevitable comments, yes European trucks are as big or bigger than American ones. And yes the distances driven are just as long as American routes. Infrastructure for changing is much better than in the US of course, and improving.

I use GitHub as a simple public-facing repository, that part is pretty solid. I do all the work, including merging and actions, locally. I simply don't use GitHub's pull request mechanism. I did discover that if someone does submit a pull request, I can do the pull and merge locally and when I push back to my GitHub repo, GitHub automatically detects the pull request was pulled and closes it without using any of the web interface.

It depends on how you use git. My primary working repositories are all local, and not readable or writable by anyone else (nor should they ever be). I push my working branches to GitHub regularly, so others can pull from them. My collaborators on various projects do the same thing. I could push anywhere that's appropriate. A corporate or publicly-accessible Forgejo instance, GitLab, or even just a folder on my web server.

In my naivete I thought this sort of local repo, public repo split is how git was designed to work. Pull requests could take any form, really, provided commit messages meet your requirements (this commit closes issue #foo), and it's simply a matter of git pull. Sure I have to add remotes to my local git repo, and possibly create local branches to review the pull request commits, but that's not too hard. git gui's like gitg come in handy for navigating numerous branches and remotes. The author could have done that in the time it took him to write a complaint about GitHub. And like I said, github actions can be made to run locally in each collaborator's local repo.

git is decentralized. Development need not stop when GitHub has problems, and it should be trivial to move off of GitHub if that was necessary. Of course, maybe I just use git wrong. And sure I can understand that corporate development doesn't really mesh that well with git's distributed model, hence the use of GitHub as a crutch.

While I understand his frustration, this is git. Your repo is always local so you can always work with it without relying on a central service. In fact there are ways to run GitHub actions locally. And it can pull and merge from your local command line. I get the convenience of GitHub. But if you're choosing to be dependent on GitHub for everything, then I can't really blame Microsoft for your inability to do work.

Possibly, much like how many small farms hire out herbicide application. The biggest issue is that the electric weeder is slow and requires multiple passes. And all farmers require weed control about at the same time. But one benefit to the electric weeder is, depending on the crop, it could be applied much later in the season to control late flushes of weeds. Herbicides will injure crops that are past a certain stage of growth. The later in the season, the more risky it is to apply herbicides.

Not quite sure where your numbers come from. Glyphosate is typically between $5 and $6 CAD a litre, and a applications are anywhere from 0.3 to 0.7 l/ac (messed up units, yes i know but that's what we use). So chemical cost is extremely low, $2 to $4 per acre not counting labor and fuel. Application is extremely fast, more than 100 acres per hour.

The electric weeder is expensive, slow and costly to operate currently. But I'm hopeful this will improve. You're right it's a prohibitively expensive pill to swallow currently.

Definitely adjuvants and surfactants are a big health unknown. Glyphosate itself seems quite safe. Three generations of farmers have used it and have been exposed in far higher amounts than many of these sick people blaming their cancer on glyphosate. But although pesticide active ingredients are highly regulated and tested for safety, adjuvants and surfactants are not. Many of them contain organic solvents that could be carcinogenic. Manufacturers need not tell you anything about their formulation. It's a real wild west.