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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • IIRC, that used to be a much more significant problem;

    Yep systems that could automatically dose the fertiliser were not yet in widespread use. Farmers don’t want to over-fertilise for the simple reason that fertiliser costs money but before those systems were available it was all too easy to say “fuck it I’ll drown the field so that there’s enough everywhere”.

    Not rotating crops seems to be a US thing, farmers over here never stopped doing that. There’s also EU-wide laws about having to either let land fall fallow, or plant cover crops or nitrogen fixers. You can, in principle, plant your nitrogen fixers year after year on one field and your cash crops on another, but only if you’re a complete idiot.


  • Under solutions, there, is written “compost” and “animal manure”. That’s fertiliser. Import-dependent agriculture is a whole another topic and I didn’t want to get into it, but long story short, no matter how good and natural your soil management is you can’t expect to export nutrients all the time and not develop a shortage. You can pull nitrogen out of the air, that’s nice, but you can’t do that with phosphate and minerals in general. Good news is that good water treatment plants will pull phosphate out of the waste water.


  • Modern tractors already self-drive on the field, fertiliser is applied in tightly controlled doses based on aerial analysis, that future is already there. You don’t plant or fertilise at the same time as you plough so it makes sense for those things being attachments, not integrated machines. The reason combine harvesters are dedicated machines is because they do so much in one go it doesn’t fit into a (sensibly sized) attachment.

    You could also have drones distribute that fertiliser but you can’t work the soil with them, and you already have a tractor to work the soil with so you can just as well use it to apply the fertiliser. There’s also tons of odd lifting and transporting jobs on farms, that’s why there’s forklift attachments. You’ll need something with torque, low ground pressure, PTO and attachment points and well that’s a tractor.


  • I don’t think that tractors will ever go the way of the dodo and when you have proper logistics, say a reasonably dense S-Bahn type rail network that can also handle shipping individual containers, a tractor and a trailer is all you need as you only have to haul to the next logistics hub and there’s no truck load even 100 year old tractors can’t tow: When you can pull a plough through soil torque isn’t something you need to worry about, 20 horses at 5km/h go vroom. 20 horses! Do you know how much those eat.


  • They absolutely can do such things but then the money comes out of their pockets, possibly with the option to sue Rockstar for breach of contract and money back. I wouldn’t even be surprised if Rockstar contacted Valve and said “don’t worry we’ll take the hit”, having calculated what it costs to continue supporting the deck vs. taking that hit. Certainly not a company which has to worry about cashflow a lot.

    Sony also refunded CP77, IIRC without getting CDPR involved, and Sony generally has a shoddy return policy. At that point, to the store, customer goodwill is more important and they’ll figure out things on the backend.

    OP didn’t describe that kind of case, though, but “I bought a game without checking whether it’s compatible with my hardware and didn’t bother to launch it for six months”. Steam isn’t going to refund that out of their own pocket that’s what the 14 days are for, so that they don’t have to do it out of their own pocket.


  • Possibly, technical inspections. I’m not sure whether it’s a requirement for cars to be street legal or just a requirement for cars to be sold on the market. The regulation only mentions that it’s about type approval but it’s not like modifying a car automatically nullifies its type approval.

    Certainly would be hard to argue for authorities that snipping the eCall would endanger others, similar situation as with seat belts I don’t think legislation is unified there.





  • Sounds like the consumer version of the DHL StreetScooter Work (L), with those even the passenger seat is an optional extra. Trouble was that while it’s the perfect vehicle for last-mile distribution routes most companies doing that kind of thing (like bakeries) don’t have the finances to back up an actual car producer, and DHL didn’t want to become a car producer. Taking over the company to get their hands on the trucks, yes, but bringing it to scale so they wouldn’t have to subsidise it? Not their business. And German car manufactures don’t want to build it because small bare-bones vehicles don’t have margin, anything smaller and less fancy than an actual van doesn’t make sense to them given the fixed cost of their production lines. Don’t worry, though, the inventor got the rights back, production is moving to Thailand, new vehicle is in the pipeline, with the core components (chassis etc.) designed for a 50 year lifetime. I’m sure DHL will figure out how to deliver delivery vans.







  • It’s not an agent with its own goals so in the gamedev definition, no. By calculator standards, also not. But just as a washing machine with sufficient smarts is called intelligent, so it’s, in principle, possible to call a calculator intelligent if it’s smart enough. WolframAlpha certainly qualifies. And not just the newfangled LLM-enabled stuff I used Mathematica back in the early 00s and it blew me the fuck away. That thing is certainly better at finding closed forms than me.