In the context of reviews my experience has only been code review quality brought up as a negative thing for folks and the bar to not be a negative is low enough that folks slowly take less and less time to review code well because it isn't valued come review time.
That rather implies a society of subsistence farmers is the "most valuable", which is the one thing everyone in every society runs away from as fast as possible when technology prevents economic alternatives.
IME the people who care about societal value more than monetary value either already have plenty of the latter or aren't going to be the ones doing the work.
Do we need more farmers, or for food to be more 'valued' in a monetary sense? The developed world is awash in affordable food. Even machine tools are incredibly cheap and accessible, the issues around those are related to where they're built and creating skilled labor to run them.
I work laughably far from anything that provides basic needs to anybody, but that's not because I don't value food, it's because our system is _incredibly_ successful at creating it so I can go do other stuff.
I do agree we have some huge policy issues to deal with around food affordability and skilled labor and supply chains, but I don't think it's because we've de-valued food production.
ehhhh, lets be real. I’m a dyed in the wool meat eating junk eater.
But, a lot of how we produce food today is not humane or sustainable, and a lot of the food itself is so poor in nutrition that it leaves us unhealthy and unbalanced.
This isn’t a lecture, just an observation, I am guilty of eating (almost exclusively) poor quality, over processed, mass produced foods.
But realistically speaking, if we solve the worlds hunger, what should be left is the pursuit of art and science.
Not whatever we seem to be doing with Excel; how can that be more valuable than feeding and healing humanity?
Not sustainable due to the fossil-fuel laden garbage we feed to bovine stock.
Not sustainable because it causes major health issues which stress the healthcare system and limits quality of life - especially the affordable stuff that people tend to think is “normal value”
As I said, all the fossil fuel inputs could be replaced with renewables. In particular: farm machinery can be run on non-fossil energy, nitrogen fertilizer can be made with green hydrogen, and pesticides can be synthesized with feedstocks derived from non-fossil sources like biomass.
The second sentence doesn't make any sense. None of that makes something unsustainable, just regrettable.
It's possible, but we're not doing it because we believe it makes more economic sense to ignore those issues.
When economic sense no longer makes sense sense then we're going to be having issues. And going back to my primary point, everything should really be serving the primary sector, not the other way around really.
The base issue is that fossil fuels are not being charged the cost of their externalities. All the problems stem from this. Do that, and all these subsidiary problems melt away.
Huh? Nitrogen fertilizer is mostly derived from fossil fuels and has been since the 1900s food boom. Aren't phosphates mainly shipped from islands that build up huge stocks of bird poop? The inputs are all fossil fuel intensive.
Nitrogen fertilizer is synthesized from hydrogen and nitrogen. The hydrogen is currently derived from fossil fuels, but there is no requirement that it be so.
Saying "ammonia is produced from fossil fuels, and so must always be" is like saying "cars run on fossil fuels, and so always must". A non sequitur.
Phosphates are derived from large phosphate deposits in various places, such as Florida. Phosphorus will ultimately have to be mined from lower concentration deposits, perhaps ultimately from average crustal rocks, where it appears at about 0.1% concentration. However, build up of mostly insoluble phosphates in soils will I think likely reduce the need for this fertilizer if erosion is kept in check.
This can't be replaced at a volume that can feed the world nor in a way the world can afford. Lots of things can be done in alternative ways if you remove half the requirements (in this case volume and affordability).
It can be replaced at volume that can feed the world. After all, the total energy involved is small compared to what would have to be produced to power the entirety of industrial civilization. Agriculture uses < 2% of total US energy consumption.
> The highest value thing you can do in this life is produce food.
This highly depends on the actual productivity. Producing food by subsistence farming barely feeds you and your children. Making something that improves food production, from ploughs to better seeds to fertilizers, has a significantly larger impact, even if you're not directly producing something edible.
> The highest value thing you can do in this life is produce food.
Talk to a non-corporate farmer today, and ask them how valued their production of food is. Society, however, does not agree with your sentiment. Obviously I'm nitpicking, but if society agreed with your proposed value, the billionaires of the world would be farmers and not tech people. That's how weird and out of balance we seem to be today.
I'm not sure going into farming is even good for society at the moment. My dad was a farmer for a while and there was mostly a food surplus with the EU paying him to set aside land to control that. You do good for society by providing things it's short off.
You should take a look at the price of food after Russia launched their full scale invasion in Ukraine. A significant increase, 15% at its peak and lowering thereafter to about 5%. Still, it is above pandemic levels.
You rise food prices and there's a domino effect on the economy, everything else also increases in price.
It is important the EU is able to produce its own food at acceptable prices.
if food security is important then the EU should pay for cost-effectiveness, economic sustainability, ecological resilience, storage capacity, and so on.
AFAIK right now it pays the same for a huge unproductive monoculture of non-edible corn (ie. for bioethanol) as it pays for wheat. (though there's finally talk about some changes to CAP, mostly to stop paying already rich big farms.)
food prices are pretty volatile anyway, and as you see even a war only moved them 15% whereas in Hungary inflation was more than 20%.
Hungary is facing a stagnant economy, with poorly targetted subsidies and overall high corruption. Inflation was already high since 2019 compared to other OECD countries with similar GDP per capita (checked Estonia, Poland, Portugal and Slovakia). They have also continued to engage with Russia economically despite sanctions (even outside the energy sector) leading to sometimes having exemptions or attempting to use that as leverage against EU policies. All of this has further destabilized their economy, given neighbours will hesitate in trade.
Hungary is the worst example you could pick from the EU.
>Talk to a non-corporate farmer today, and ask them how valued their production of food is.
America spends $20-$30 billion a year paying corn growers per bushel of corn they grow
America spends $100 billion+ per year paying people to buy the output of those farmers using food stamps.
America requires that 10-15% of all gas in the entire nation is actually ethanol derived from corn.
Twice now, President Trump has personally destroyed the market for American soybean production and dropped $20 billion on the industry to not piss them off.
I am family friends with the family that grows a significant amount of Potatoes in Maine. They love to complain about anything and everything as they drive around in $80k pavement princess trucks that aren't their $80k work trucks about how much liberals suck as those at least third generation farmers inherit the entire thing and they switch to cute "artisanal" breeds of potatoes that they sell to those same liberals for a nice markup and harvest them with the literal undocumented workers they swear they hate and pay a few dollars an hour, and insist the men aren't men anymore as they drive their airconditioned harvesters and aren't missing any fingers like their ancestors, and spend all their free time getting piss drunk and smoking weed which was grown by their cop buddies as they vote for people who want to make such a thing a crime again, and reminisce about when they were important; In high school. They are actually pretty friendly if you have the right skin color and genitals though.
I think farmers can maybe quit the bellyaching. Most of the modern world solved famine by just giving farmers money for doing a basic job, one that's been so improved and enhanced by technology that they are allowed to care about such things as "How will a trade war affect my profits this year" instead of "Oh my god oh my god an unexpected frost we are all going to die". It is some of the best $150 billion the US spends.
Most of the food production in the United States has been moved over from small individual farmers to large corporations. Any time there is government policy that negatively hurts farmers there is a big push from the media to show small time farmers hurting but the biggest losers are actually the much larger corporations.
Farmers are the ultimate DEI hire and are small farmers are just used as political tools, eventually if companies like John Deere keep getting away with blatant consumer rights abuses these small farmers will be completely wiped out and just left with massive corporations that heavily lobby the government for more subsidy's and free hand-outs
This is probably incredibly naive so apologies if so - are things like differing obesity or other health problem causing conditions accounted for when looking at overall outcomes of the system?
The higher cost makes perfect sense to me but calculating an apples
to apples comparison of health outcomes between potentially very different populations seems potentially very difficult? Again sorry it's probably a solved problem but figured I'd ask :)
The lower life expectancy in the US is almost entirely down to young people dying at a much higher rate than Europe due to car accidents, murder, and drug overdoses. It skews the averages pretty badly. If those individual risks don't apply to you then life expectancy is actually pretty decent.
There is a wide variance in the general healthiness of the population depending on where you live in the US, which does affect life expectancy. Where I live in the US my life expectancy is in the mid-80s despite the number of young people that die.
Letting people figure out cigarettes were bad for them took a very long time, and if social media is another form of addiction why not treat it how we treat other addictive products?
We could assume that this time is different and people, well children and minors specifically, will learn to avoid the addiction rather than banning them like alcohol, cigarettes and gambling.
This time might be different. But it's probably not.
There was a - very similar - moral panic in the 1700s about young people 'reading excessively', which was blamed for escapism, unhappiness[1] and even increases in suicide rates (see: Werther Effect). The language used was 'reading addiction' - much like todays 'smartphone addiction' or, more modern, AI-related 'illnesses'.
Today, the panic is that kids read too little, or the wrong stuff.
What is and isn't societally desirable changes. The tactic to ban the currently undesirable behaviour persists. Moral panics tell us more about generational dynamics and power structures than the medium itself..
Increased suicide rates were being discussed, and there were doctors claiming they had empirical evidence (worse eyesight, loss of sense of reality, 'melancholy' (aka: depression) ...).
Of course, that was 200 years ago, so our standards of 'rigorous empiricism' can hardly be compared to what they had. But the patterns still are eerily similar.
Also, note how modern diagnostics not only concern the well-being of the media-consuming/delusional individual, but also their environment. Polemically speaking: You can be perfectly happy being weird, if your environment feels negatively affected by you, you technically still are a psychiatrical case and need 'fixing' according to the DSM.
Hell is other people, only the young can defend themselves and their interests less and are easier being picked on.
In my experience if the ai voice was immediately noticeable the writing provided nothing new and most of the time is actively wrong or trying to make itself seem important and sell me on something the owner has a stake in.
Not sure if this is true for other people but it's basically always a sign of something I end up wishing I hadn't wasted my time reading.
It isn't inherently bad by any means but it turns out it's a useful quality metric in my personal experience.
That was essentially my takeaway. The problem isn't when AI was used. It's when readers can accurately deduce that AI was used. When someone uses AI skillfully, you'll never know unless they tell you.
i feel like i've seen this comparison made before, but LLMs, when used, are best applied like autotune. 99% of vocal recordings released on major (and even indie) labels have some degree of autotune applied. when done correctly, you can't tell (unless you're a grizzled engineer who can hear 1dB of compression or slight EQ changes). it's only when it's cranked up or used lazily that it can detract from the overall product.
I'm bad with spread sheets so maybe this is trivial but having an llm tell me how to connect my sheet to whatever data I'm using at the moment and it coming up with a link or sql query or both has allowed me to quickly pull in data where I'd normally eyeball it and move on or worst case do it partially manually if really important.
It's like one off scripts in a sense? I'm not doing complex formulas I just need to know how I can pull data into a sheet and then I'll bucketize or graph it myself.
Again probably because I'm not the most adept user but it has definitely been a positive use case for me.
Neither am I frankly. Finance stuff can get conceptually complicated even with simple addition & multiplication though. e.g. I deal with a lot of offshore stuff, so the average spreadsheet is a mix of currencies, jurisdictions and companies that are interlinked. I could probably talk you through it high level in an hour with a pen & paper, but the LLMs just can't see the forest for all the trees in the raw sheet.
I'd assume the app / technology Microsoft is pushing over all else is more worth a bug bounty than say Visio so maybe more accurate to ask are there any major companies with their new key product that don't have bug bounties?
Happy to be wrong and put my foot in my mouth though I've misunderstood folks before :)
This is about the M365 Copilot, which is the enterprise version. The normal consumer version of Copilot shares nothing in common except for the name, at least that’s what I’ve been told. Different architecture, team, back end, etc. And side by side, the enterprise version is much crapper of the two.
If a system requires a sign off for a PR to be submitted then it's a collaborative effort for the PR to succeed.
Someone just leaving comments and not signing off on reviews isn't helping unblock anyone and should put in more effort to be willing to sign off and move the work forward. If the most people in the org thought this way nothing would be committed and everyone would have 'non-blocking' comments to deal with.
Another way to look at this is in absence of another code reviewer, not signing off after commenting is equivalent to passively blocking the PR and can be a bit toxic depending on the circumstance.
I'm probably missing a scenario (maybe there's a bunch of people you know will review the code for instance) that this makes sense so happy to learn where/when specifically it makes sense :)
> not signing off after commenting is equivalent to passively blocking the PR and can be a bit toxic depending on the circumstance
Blocking a PR can also be toxic "depending on the circumstance".
I see zero toxicity in leaving comments without blocking. It's never prevented the people I've worked with from getting work done.
I've worked at three large tech companies and none of them had this "block PRs" mentality but they all got stuff done. The reviewers understand their roles: they leave feedback, if there are questions, they answer them. If the feedback's handled, they re-review.
It works exactly the way you say it should, minus the "blocked/changes requested" status on a PR. Maybe precisely because we understand that a PR is blocked until it's approved anyway, and the green check is the goal.
All the opportunities for dysfunction are the same: people can still bikeshed, they can not review, they can not come back and re-review, etc. None of that is affected by the "changes requested" vs "comment" dichotomy.
Frankly, the "we can't collaborate without blocking PRs" take seems strangely dysfunctional to me.
I think I don't understand the last sentence. This seems the opposite of what I wrote ?
As for leaving comments without blocking I do not mean it is always or even commonly toxic but that I've seen instances where it could be argued to be so or potentially unhelpful.
I think the misunderstanding might be when you or your team leave comments without blocking are you going to sign off after they are addressed or are you leaving them on a review you ultimately don't feel comfortable signing off on even if they're addressed?
How often does someone leave comments on a review they would never feel comfortable signing off on either way because they don't know the area? I think I'm in agreement with you - leaving comments without blocking and signing off after they're addressed or if someone else signs off and mine aren't addressed that's fine. I'd block the review if it was something I was that concerned with.
> I think I don't understand the last sentence. This seems the opposite of what I wrote ?
I guess I misunderstood, and I think I attributed some context from others' previous comments to you. My bad, sorry. :) Looks like we generally agree.
When we leave comments, even without blocking, we're going to sign off when they're addressed (assuming someone else doesn't sign off first). That's our job as reviewers.
If we don't feel comfortable signing off (eg: because the diffs also touch an area outside our knowledge) then we just comment to that effect. ie "this part LGTM, but someone else from <team X> needs to sign off."
The main thing is: if we have comments on a PR that we think should be addressed, but aren't "do not merge this under any circumstances", then we just don't select the "request changes" option, and it doesn't seem to cause problems for us.
That said, if I worked somewhere where there was established guidance to either accept or request changes, then I'd do that without a second thought.
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