You did all of this in one week?! Pretty cool. Even with LLM-assisted making, it shows that you have a lot of taste and architecture know-how. What would you attribute to being able to think through useful abstracts like the design tokens?
last time i tried, i didnt get the standalone mode to run.. there seems to have been an update in february, so i will give this another try when there's time..
There is no water scarcity in California, only misallocation. The vast majority of our water is heavily subsidized and used for agriculture, and a substantial amount of those crops are grown for export, yet agricultural exports makes up an insignificant part of California's economy.
We could end all California water scarcity talk today, with no impact to food availability for Americans, by curtailing the international export of just two California crops: almonds and alfalfa.
Anecdotally, my friend's grandma was an almond farmer. As they drove past a river in the Central Valley, she exclaimed "Why is there water in that river?! Those could be watering my almond trees!"
That alfalfa gets extensively exported as livestock feed... and alfalfa is literally mostly water by weight. So the arrangement is literally shipping out local groundwater in bulk to other countries.
I hear about the almonds a lot. Are they more water-intensive than other tree nuts? Are they not commonly grown elsewhere in the world? All I really know about them is that they seem kinda nice, but not really worth the cost.
So why hasn’t that been done? Have some representatives and senators set limits on almond exports. Surely they wouldn’t be voted out in the next election given how farmers are outnumbered.
Almonds are climate-appropriate product and valuable. Alfalfa can cheaply be grown off rainwater in the Midwest and it alone frees up sufficient water.
The problem is alfalfa is expensive to transport (heavy due to desired moisture content). So while it can be cheaply grown in the Midwest, it can't be cheaply transported from the Midwest to where buyers of alfalfa are (typically overseas).
Alfalfa is also a staple for crop rotation, so any farming operation will still grow some alfalfa to maintain rotation for good soil health (or during bad condition seasons since it's hardier to poor conditions and not a permanent crop).
If alfalfa cannot be exported (through policy or economic conditions), the low price attracts more livestock production in-state (which would be even worse for water use).
Those things makes it a hard crop to target for sustainability and export.
> it can't be cheaply transported from the Midwest to where buyers of alfalfa are
Trains.
Alfalfa isn't the only alternative, and they should switch to higher-value crops anyway. They would if they had to pay for water. We simply need to charge everybody for water usage.
I will say I came upon this same design pattern to make all my chats into semantic Markdown that is backward compatible with markdown. I did:
````assistant
<Short Summary title>
gemini/3.1-pro - 20260319T050611Z
Response from the assistant
````
with a similar block for tool calling
This can be parsed semantically as part of the conversation
but also is rendered as regular Markdown code block when needed
Helps me keep AI chats on the filesystem, as a valid document, but also add some more semantic meaning atop of Markdown
So many formats, with different tradeoffs around readable/parsable/comments/etc. I wish there was a "universal" converter. With LLM's sometimes used to edit chat traces, I'd like ingestion from md/yaml, not merely a "render from message json".
So .json `[{"role": "user", "content": "Hi"}` <-> .md ` ```json\n[{"role": "user", "content": "Hi"}` <-> above ` ```user\nHi` <-> `# User\nHi` <-> ` ```chatML\n<|user|>\nHi` <-> .html rendered .md, but with elements like <think> and <file> escaped... etc.
Hmm. HTML has always had goals and tradeoffs which are in tension with many uses. XML too. Witness the very many versions of "write this instead, and it becomes HTML" - long and widely used and valued. Perhaps we collectively might have done better, but we didn't. Turns out LLMs also find different formats significantly easier to use for different things.
As a tradeoff example, yesterday I again tripped on the KISS "CDATA doesn't support HEREDOC-like prefix whitespace removal". So does one indent, compromising payloads where leading ws is significant, or not, confusing humans and llms.
Re reinvention and first principles, aside from engineering tradeoffs, it can be hard to understand design spaces and to be aware of related work. I suspect there's a missing literature to support these, but professional organizations have been AWOL, and research funding dysfunctional. And commercial conflicts of interest. And it's hard. But now coding LLMs are messing with "don't reinvent wheels" payoff tables. Perhaps we'll someday be able to be explicit about design space structure and design choice consequences too. And perhaps we're already getting transformatively more flexible around format extension and interoperation. TFA isn't just a new format - it's a github repo which will help teach LLMs how to do progressive execution of fenced code blocks, making the next format which does this potentially easier to create. "Merge in what X does, but <change request>". Yay?
IIUC, non-meme carcinization is something vaguely like "similar tradeoffs pressure towards similar forms in diverse contexts". LLMs might help us more easily understand tradeoffs, implement forms, and manage diversity?
Nah read my own comment history. I tend to phrase things this way a lot too because it positions it as opinion/curiosity rather than arrogant / confident statement?
I can’t get past all the LLM-isms. Do people really not care about AI-slopifying their writing? It’s like learning about bad kerning, you see it everywhere.
I had a similar reaction to OP for a different post a few weeks back - I think some analysis on the health economy. Initially as I was reading I thought - "Wow, I've never read a financial article written so clearly". Everything in layman's terms. But as I continued to read, I began to notice the LLM-isms. Oversimplified concepts, "the honest truth" "like X for Y", etc.
Maybe the common factor here is not having deep/sufficient knowledge on the topic being discussed? For the article I mentioned, I feel like I was less focused on the strength of the writing and more on just understanding the content.
LLMs are very capable at simplifying concepts and meeting the reader at their level. Personally, I subscribe to the philosophy of - "if you couldn't be bothered to write it, I shouldn't bother to read it".
This happens to non-native English speakers a lot (like me). My style of writing is heavily influenced by everything I read. And since I also do research using LLMs, I'll probably sound more and more as an AI as well, just by reading its responses constantly.
I just don't know what's supposed to be natural writing anymore. It's not in the books, disappears from the internet, what's left? Some old blogs for now maybe.
The wave of LLM-style writing taking over the internet is definitely a bit scary. Feels like a similar problem to GenAI code/style eventually dominating the data that LLMs are trained on.
But luckily there's a large body of well written books/blogs/talks/speeches out there. Also anecdotally, I feel like a lot of the "bad writing" I see online these days is usually in the tech sphere.
> The real story is actually in the article. … And the real issue for Cursor … They have real "brand awareness", and they are genuinely better than the cheaper open weights models - for now at least. It's a real conundrum for them.
> … - these are genuinely massive expenses that dwarf inference costs.
Popular content is popular because it is above the threshold for average detection.
In a better world, platforms would empower defenders, by granting skilled human noticers flagging priority, and by adopting basic classifiers like Pangram.
Unfortunately, mainstream platforms have thus far not demonstrated strong interest in banning AI slop. This site in particular has actually taken moderation actions to unflag AI slop, in certain occasions...
It is certainly very obvious a lot of the time. I wonder if we revisited the automated slop detection problem we’d be more successful now… it feels like there are a lot more tells and models have become more idiosyncratic.
You could also have had the courtesy to put that in your original post. But let’s not get meta.
I did a quick test and it detected an AI summary of a random topic, even after two prompts to disguise it. So as expected it may have become a lot easier to detect.
This is an Internet forum and one of the ways such places are valuable is that it enables you to ask questions to other humans and allows those other humans, if they'd like, to answer.
You will get better results asking questions like GP's than Googling because you're asking the specific person who made a claim to quote an example, so you can judge from the specific example they provide, rather than the Google results. The best answers are often technically interesting niche tools which don't have great SEO.
Case in point: the platform you recommended does not show up anywhere on my first page of Duck.com results.
Building a PCB milling software tool that combines converting Gerbers to toolpaths in G-Code and then actually commanding and operating a restored PCB mill from 1998.
Bringing back the hobbyist self-made PCB workflow since it can be a headache to get designs back from PCBWay / JLC between customers, tariffs, shipping..get more quick to close the prototyping loop.
Obsidian has become almost an operating system for working with markdown. Its Live View / Edit mode is excellent (WYSIWYG) and its ability to accept pasted content and handle it appropriately is good and getting better. Its plugin/extension ecosystem is robust (and has a low barrier to entry), and now that it has a CLI I expect to see an acceleration of clever workflows and integrations.
No affiliation, just a very happy ~early adopter and daily user.
Wow, that's a strong opinion and harsh words that come across as really entitled, and probably unfair. From my PoV, they're a tiny, scrappy, transparent and likeable company who built and maintain a fantastic software application that radically improved ~everything about my daily workflow and PKM. I get more value out of Obsidian in a day than most other apps in their entire lifespan. The core app is free! They have to eat. I'd probably throw $ at them even if they didn't charge a few bucks / month for Sync. (Which works flawlessly.) Sure it'd be cool if you could self-host their Sync module -- but many Obsidian users use other DIY approaches for sync; in the end it's markdown files on a local disk, do with it what you will.
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