Comment by nonethewiser
1 day ago
1) You are right and its impressive if he can use AI to bootstrap becoming a farmer
2) Regardless, I think it proves a vastly understated feature of AI: It makes people confident.
The AI may be truly informative, or it may hallucinate, or it may simply give mundane, basic advice. Probably all 3 at times. But the fact that it's there ready to assert things without hesitation gives people so much more confidence to act.
You even see it with basic emails. Myself included. I'm just writing a simple email at work. But I can feed it into AI and make some minor edits to make it feel like my own words and I can just dispense with worries about "am i giving too much info, not enough, using the right tone, being unnecessarily short or overly greating, etc." And its not that the LLMs are necessarily even an authority on these factors - it simply bypasses the process (writing) which triggers these thoughts.
More confidence isn't always better. In particular, confidence pairs well with the ability follow through and be correct. LLMs are famous for confidently stating falsehoods.
Of course. It must be used judiciously. But it completely circumvents some thought patterns that lead to slow decision making.
Perhaps I need to say it again: that doesn't mean blindly following it is good. But perhaps using claude code instead of googling will lead to 80% of the conclusions Seth would have reached otherwise with 5% of the effort.
> "...a vastly understated feature of AI: It makes people confident."
Management is so confident in this, they are axing developers/not hiring new ones.
I started to write a logical rebuttal, but forget it. This is just so dumb. A guy is paying farmers to farm for him, and using a chatbot to Google everything he doesn't know about farming along the way. You're all brainwashed.
What specifically are you disagreeing with? I dont think its trivial for someone with no farming experience to successfully farm something within a year.
>A guy is paying farmers to farm for him
Read up on farming. The labor is not the complicated part. Managing resources, including telling the labor what to do, when, and how is the complicated part. There is a lot of decision making to manage uncertainty which will make or break you.
We should probably differentiate between trying to run a profitable farm, and producing any amount of yield. They're not really the same thing at all.
I would submit that pretty much any joe blow is capable of growing some amount of crops, given enough money. Running a profitable farm is quite difficult though. There's an entire ecosystem connecting prospective farmers with money and limited skills/interest to people with the skills to properly operate it, either independently (tenant farmers) or as farm managers so the hobby owner can participate. Institutional investors prefer the former, and Jeremy Clarkson's farm show is a good example of the latter.
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>A guy is paying farmers to farm for him
Family of farmers here.
My family raises hundreds of thousands of chickens a year. They feed, water, and manage the healthcare and building maintenance for the birds. That is it. Baby birds show up in boxes at the start of a season, and trucks show up and take the grown birds once they reach weight.
There is a large faceless company that sends out contracts for a particular value and farmers can decide to take or leave it. There is zero need for human contact on the management side of the process.
At the end of the day there is little difference between a company assigning the work and having a bank account versus an AI following all the correct steps.
> A guy is paying farmers to farm for him
Pedantically, that's what a farmer does. The workers are known as farmhands.
That is HIGHLY dependent on the type and size of farm. A lot of small row crop farmers have and need no extra farm hands.
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Grifters gonna grift.