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FWIW a friend of mine who's part of DN42 told me they had seen it live (but didn't pay much attention) and that it was a bit funny when I shared that link with him.

OTOH this stuff has already been refuted and pesticide makers lobbying like this, spreading FUD on organic food, is a well known pattern already.

We can't afford properly refuting each occurrence, the effort is highly asymmetrical.


Refuted where? Be specific.

This doesn't say that conventional cultures are better on that front.

Do you have a source for this?

Hey, at least you won't find any worm in there!

It should be fine if you remove the first layer. And the other layers as well after that one. If you throw away the whole thing it should be completely safe for you anyway. If you handle your trash carefully, with gloves and a mask, that is.


Nonsense. The intensive agriculture that conventional pesticides enable destroys biodiversity and kills land fertility. Organic monoculture is still monoculture but conventional monoculture is still worse.

I've noticed a naming issue that keeps cropping (heh) up. No-till. Organic. Free range. The confusion is caused by information asymmetry (or word fuzziness). I think organic means one thing, farmer thinks it means another (or, as is frequently the case in capitalism, maybe they know what I think it means, but that I won't be checking closely, so they can get away with it being "technically organic").

The thing I'm noticing too is that people on HN are way worse at systems thinking than their confidence makes them seem. People on HN are always looking at food systems in isolation. It's weird because they're observing the systemic effects of these systems.

As an example, you don't have to use farmland to make up for that "productivity loss" (very narrow to look at these systems as just their food output in the first place). In the US, we have 40 million acres of grass lawns. The most useless thing to grow ever because the vast majority is non-native grass (some NPC will say "erm it gives us oxygen", which like... yeah so does literally anything else and nature isn't here just for breathing). For cropland, we have 328 million acres.[0]

40/328 ≈ 12%

And like sure, we can't use 100% of the lawns to grow food, but the idea that the reduced yield + needing 20% more makes organic "bad for the environment" because obviously that means taking the existing natural land and turning that into farmland is so unimaginative and lazy. We have a lot of ways we can make up for that 20% "loss". [1] Of course, there are always master mental gymnasts who will say weird things like "growing food on the streets? it'll get polluted!" (I regret to inform them that many farms are right up next to highways, so they should be upset at ICE cars) and "eww it's going to make a mess and there will be bugs" (ok, go live in a hospital and eat IV nutrition if you want to live a sterile life, we need bugs to survive, sorry). Although a question for me remains how much land is actually necessary to provide food for the US without imports.

But there is still so much to be done to make organic farming better (beyond just doing the bare minimum for the certification). Incorporating intercropping, trapcropping, agroforestry, covercropping, crop rotation, no-till and so on. I'll even let a few "weeds" like goosefoot pop up. I guess really, one must qualify organic farming by prefixing "regenerative". The first thing I thought of when I started thinking about how I would farm in an ideal world is how the majority of land would be dedicated to nature - prairie and forest must be 2/3 of it. (Oh no it's unproductive! Not! Tons of stuff to eat out of a well-managed prairie and forest.)

Yes this stuff becomes more labor intensive, but isn't the promise of AI that it will write all the "it's this, not that"s while I do the work that matters - feeding people?

[0] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/111436 [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1720760115


I've read the same kind of argumentative Mille-feuille garbage in French already.

You have to think about who is motivated to write this kind of stuff. Invariably, it's people selling conventional pesticides or people paid by such people. The lobbying is strong, contrary to the arguments. This is actually a very good sign, these despicable people feel threatened.

I don't know the rules of the organic label in the US, here in Europe it's not perfect, and yeah, thhere are still pesticides including some bad stuff like copper sulfates that are allowed, and the level of care absolutely vary from ome producer to another but it's still better than conventional products for pretty much everything except for the price if you don't factor in the cost of the damage done to the environment and yourself.

This kind of misinformation needs to be firmly fought back. They want to sell glyphosate, which they try to trick us into thinking it's not bad, that's the full extent of it. It's bad, we are better off without it, that's it, end of the story.


The HP Elitebook laptops get this right.

You can configure whether you prefer the standard behavior or to use the actions assigned to the F keys by default, I think in the BIOS, and then you can use fn lock to switch at runtime. That's nice in itself but that's not all.

In the latter mode, holding a modifier key like Alt makes the F key act standard, so Alt+F4 works in any mode as expected.


> VS Code is open source

Open core at best. It's proprietary software built on top of an open source base. The remote coding feature is proprietary and you need to run proprietary software on the remote server / container to use it. People maintaining forks (like Codium and the Theia IDE) are not allowed to use VS Code's marketplace. Many of their flagship VS Code extensions are proprietary. Why would they do this if they believed in open source?

The distinction is quite important. VS Code aims to get control of the development process of those who are not using Visual Studio. That's the only reason why VS Code exists. VS Code is not a gift no strings attached.

By the way the title of https://code.visualstudio.com/ is a lie that says "The open source AI code editor". Three lines under, there's "By using VS Code, you agree to its license and privacy statement.". The license is https://code.visualstudio.com/license, which is very much like your usual horrible Microsoft EULA, including tracking and forbidden reverse engineering, decompiling or disassembling. Really, the only thing missing there is the license key field at first run.

GitHub is still proprietary SaaS also aiming to control the whole open source ecosystem. With GitHub, a big chunk of the open source (and free software! Which is even sadder) world relies on proprietary infra. That's as close as Extinguish as you can get (it's just that git is not the thing that's Extinguished). GitHub is actually a pretty good example of lock-in, see what other commenters wrote on this.

30 years later, Microsoft, still the same lying company trying to control its users and the world with proprietary software. With the twist that they try a bit harder to look cool and open source (since the moment they realized open source wasn't going to disappear, not before). They really are not, especially for end-user facing software, including when the end-users are developers.

The only thing that dramatically changed is that they don't publicly claim Linux is cancer anymore, and that's probably because they are coerced into dealing with Linux. Exactly like the Web against their failed attempt to privatize it with MSN (MicroSoft Network) (the current MSN news frontpage and the memory of their messenger are only shadows of the original ambitions behind MSN).

At least the stability and consistency is comforting… or not.

Don't fall for their open washing. They just play along and attempt to get control on what they didn't manage to extinguish. Only forced changes happened, the spirit seems intact.


"Grift"

(The f is for "feft")


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