"In 2022, my project HowToCook became enormously popular on GitHub, causing me to spend significant time maintaining it.
Unfortunately, my relationship with Lily changed. Her arrogance and disrespect led to us breaking up. I learned that people change."
...
"After moving my account and files to Suzhou, I explored GPU computing, built a Boeing 737 simulator in Suzhou Center, and reignited my relationship with Lily, looking forward to our future together."
> AnduinOS has more than just cosmetic changes, though. It removes Canonical's controversial Snap packaging format and its supporting tools. It replaces it with Flatpak and the GNOME Software app store configured to show only Flatpak apps. AnduinOS uses native .deb packages throughout, including for Mozilla Firefox; it comes with no Flatpaks installed at all.
Sounds like a big win for those of us frustrated by Snap. Are there any other good Debian-derivatives with Flatpak? I suppose you can always add Flatpak on vanilla Debian.
Driverless tractors may allow for bigger, heavier machines which would be better yet. The bigger the better because soil compaction goes up at a sub-linear rate to weight. While the soil compaction is worse for a heavier tractor where it touches the soil, the heavier tractor can handle a wider pass which means it overall doing much less damage vs a smaller tractor that would need to do several passes touching more soil to get the same work done. This is also why tracks are often worse than tires - even though tires compact the ground more where they touch the soil, the track touches more soil in a turn and thus does more damage in a turn than you save in the row!
Of course different soils are different. You need to discuss the particulars of an individual field before you can make a judgement on what is best. But overall bigger is better.
Tractors are made heavy for traction (hence the name), not for safety. In addition to the weight of the tractor itself, fluid is often added to the tires for extra weight, and weights added to the front for more traction and to keep the front down when pulling a heavy load.
You can gain some traction by going from tires to tracks, as some modern tractors do, but you still need a certain amount of weight or you're just going to spin when you're trying to pull a 30-foot-wide chisel plow through soil and last year's stalks.
Going fully autonomous might make tractors a little cheaper, if they don't need A/C and mirrors and things like that, but not lighter. And they'd still need the human stuff for occasions when it can't drive itself anyway, like moving it around the barn lot or going down the road to the next field.
No, reducing speed wouldn't significantly reduce weight. Nor is there an actual need to reduce weight in the first place.
Machine costs do matter by hour. Tractors and harvesters are extremely expensive and there is only a limited time window to get the work done. Going slower means that farmers would have to buy more machines.
Presumably the weight is there because it helps the tractors pull. I don't think the human is a small percentage. How could you reengineer the system to get the right traction without the weight?
Surely the weight of a tractor pales in comparison to the person sitting inside? The heavy weight is for that big engine with a lot of torque. Can a lighter weight tractor pull its load?
I’d assume all the functionality inside the cab, the space needed, seat, controls, windscreen, AC inside the cabin, etc, add up to quite a bit of weight. If you went truly driverless without a cabin you could save a ton of weight.
Maybe a ton at the most - but the tractor weights far more than a ton. Actually more weight is a good thing in tractors because that allows for more traction.
Tractors are not cars - weight balance doesn't make nearly as difference. Between lower speeds, lack of suspension, and all wheel drive it doesn't matter.
Weight balance absolutely makes a difference. If you don’t have enough weight on the front of the tractor, for instance, certain implements are nonfunctional. You need to balance weight from front to back. Standard issue parts of tractors is adding weight boxes to either the front or back of the tractor to balance the weight of the implement on the other side.
Fair enough - but the humans and the need for a cab is not significant. Those weights are still added based on the implement, and removed for other operations. They are also heavier than the cab + human in many cases. They are also added in front of the front axle, or behind the rear, while the human weight affects both axles (not evenly, but close enough)
Removing a cab and a human removes at minimum 300-500 lbs (when you account for human weight, all the framing, window glass, HVAC components, seats, screens, etc etc) which is balanced somewhat evenly across both axles.
That means you can take that weight, and use only a portion of it to balance the tractor. Less weight overall.
First of all more weight is good! Weight means more traction, and traction is important. Depending on the system traction or horsepower may be the real limit, but the other is still close.
Second while balance can matter typically doesn't. Even when balance matters, you still need weight on the other axles. Most of the time your are towing something with most of the weight not on the tractor so you just want more weight and you want it more or less evenly balanced - about what a cab gives you.
Tractors tend to spread their load with more, gianter, wider tires.
The trade-off for making the tractor larger is that you can pull wider and multiple or multi-function implements to do the entire thing faster in one pass.
The larger contact patch for having an absurd number of wheels reduces soil compaction and reduces the chance you get stuck; working in fewer passes further reduces soil compaction and prevents you from getting stuck (since in the ideal case, you're doing one pass on solid ground, and never driving over tilled soil).
Tractors get stuck when they drive in mud (and other mud like soils) all the time. However when driving on not-mud it is true. That is the trade off, the heavier you are the more care you need to take about mud.
I suspect tanks get stuck often in part because that is fun and in part because they need to train troops how to get them unstuck and so they intentionally send tanks into mud - which is to say in a real war the generals might (should) avoid getting stuck, but in training it is important to get stuck often. I'm not a military expert though, but that is my opinion on tanks.
What you could achieve with a driverless tractor is using two smaller ones instead of one big one. Since the driver's effective wage leaves the cost equation, the number of tractors can potentially be much larger.
Come to think of it, this might also benefit small landholders eventually by reducing the minimum amount of land required to fund a single tractor.
I can't figure out how to link, but if you search me you will see elsewhere that I explained that bigger is better for the soil.
Most small landholders should sell and move to the city. You need a fair amount of size to make a decent living selling something cheap. Though my biggest worry is the medium sized farmers - wasting $10/acre in extra chemicals when you have 600 acres is only $6000 - you probably won't even notice it and in any case not wasting it costs investment too. When you have 6000 acres though that $10 is a larger number and you can afford to put a lot of money in better whatever to not waste it.
In order to link, you right-click (or equivalent) on the time stamp of the post, which on your comment currently says "4 hours ago". That creates a link like this:
> Most small landholders should sell and move to the city.
Economically, this has been true for decades irrespective of developments in autonomous vehicles. But city life is miserable, and there will always be people trying to escape it on the farm.
The American voter is too ideologically attached to the idea of the small family farm and opposed to the big scary boogeyman corporation to support any policy that encourages consolidation of farming and farmers to move to th city
> The Parliament acts as a co-legislator with equal legislative power in this process
The EU Parliament doesn't have equal legislative power. EU Commission proposes legislation, and the parliament can only accept or reject. Of course informally they can discuss with the Commission and let the Commission know what they would or would not pass.
> effectively representing the citizens while the Council represents the member states governments
This is true. But you maybe forgot another body, the EU Commission.
EU Council, Council of the EU: Represent member states
EU Commission: Represents the EU
EU Parliament: Represents the citizens
I guess US doesn't have a body like the EU Commission, that is not elected and that represents the interests of the "deep state".
> The EU Parliament doesn't have equal legislative power. EU Commission proposes legislation, and the parliament can only accept or reject.
Note that this means that, crucially, the Parliament also cannot repeal laws. Which means that they can just try and try and try again, and if it passes once, it cannot be withdrawn except by initiative of the commission.
It's like the IRA said to Thatcher, you have to be lucky every time, they only have to be lucky once.
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, only the Council can propose legislation, while the Parliament can only accept or reject the Council's proposals [1].
EU Council (Meeting of EU countries' head of states): Proposes what should be done
Council of the EU (Council of ministers of EU countries): Proposes what should be done
For posterity: If counting by full months, this 12-month span was a close one: There was a traffic death in early July in 2024. And now on August 1, 2025, there was another traffic death (a collision of two bicyclists, one 80-year old on an electric bike, and one 70-year old on a normal bike. The younger one died.)
Plants have chloroplasts that produce oxygen and sugar. But plants also have mitochondria that consume oxygen and sugar and run many of the same metabolic functions as in animals.
Scientific writing style is not always very good at highlighting the unknowns. "We don't know this" doesn't make very convincingly looking text, so people tend to avoid admitting it up front.
But you are, of course, correct to ask.
Like another comments said, this is an open question.
One theory is, that while the algae floating in water were absorbing broad spectrum, the algae growing attached at the bottom of the water evolved to chlorophyll to capture whatever was left at the edges of the spectrum. And then later land-based plants would have evolved from the water plants that were already attaching themselves to the bottom. But then why are also the current ocean-floating algae green now?
Another theory is that a perfectly-absorbing leaf would somehow absorb too much energy and get overheated, and that it was better to absorb only part of the available light.
None of these theories are fully convincing, so the question remains open.
According to the article, at least todays retinal-based photosynthesis is anoxygenic and does not invole carbon fixation. At night, these cells metabolism stops. Chlorophyllic photosynthesis with attached carbon fixation allows the cell to build up starch during the day, which it breathes under the use of oxygen at night, so the cell remains active during the night. Looks like a big evolutionary advantage to me.
Also, light is not the limiting factor for plant growth, it‘s usually water or nutrient availability.
carbon fixation is a completely separate process. in principle you could hook up a sufficiently engineered cell to electrodes and do the carbon fixation part in the dark by supplying it with juice from the mains.
accordingly there is no particular reason for purple photon assimilation to not be attached to carbon fixation... though i suppose as the electron energy levels dont quite match up it might be a schlep to get purples to make sugar.
> "We don't know this" doesn't make very convincingly looking text, so people tend to avoid admitting it up front.
Saying definitively that we don't know something (1) requires an investment of time to verify that lack of knowledge, and (2) can become incorrect at any time.
If you want to do something with the answer but find that it doesn't exist, sure make a note of that to request that someone could maybe try to find out. But if it's just a curiosity rather than directly relevant, why bother?
> Saying definitively that we don't know something (1) requires an investment of time to verify that lack of knowledge, and (2) can become incorrect at any time.
And (3) doesn’t necessarily make you lose credibility but too many believe it does and partially it can.
Those who believe science is truth are innocently choosing an answer without full knowledge. That is the definition of religion and faith.
True science is a search for truth like philosophy and theology. I think you can get too caught up in any one of these three.
If you have hard core faith, that’s awesome, but put your faith into that which won’t fail you.
In science, there is clear delineation between things we know to be true (laws), things that appear to be true based on our current knowledge (theories) and things that may or may not be true but seem to be true based on limited data/limited research (hypotheses).
I don't think the three (I only see two, though, but don't want to nitpick) approaches are really comparable.
Newton's First Law (Law of Inertia) – assumes objects remain at rest or in uniform motion unless acted upon by an external force; inaccurate in non-inertial (accelerating) frames without fictitious forces.
Newton's Second Law – assumes constant mass and low velocities; inaccurate at relativistic speeds where mass increases with velocity.
Newton's Third Law – inaccurate in electromagnetic, quantum, or relativistic contexts.
Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation – assumes instantaneous action at a distance and weak fields; replaced by General Relativity in strong fields or at high velocities.
Boyle's Law – inaccurate at high pressures, low temperatures, or with real gases, which deviate from ideal behavior.
Charles's Law – assumes ideal gas behavior; deviations occur at high pressures or low temperatures.
Ohm's Law – assumes constant resistance; inaccurate for non-ohmic materials like diodes or at high voltages where resistance varies.
2nd Law of Thermodynamics – inaccurate with fluctuations at microscopic scales, temporarily decreasing entropy.
Kepler's Laws – inaccurate when considering relativistic effects.
Laws of Motion of Fluids (e.g., Bernoulli's Law) – assumes incompressible, non-viscous flow; inaccurate for real fluids with viscosity or compressibility effects.
Dalton's Law of Partial Pressures – assumes gases do not interact; inaccurate at high pressures or with strong intermolecular forces.
Fick's Laws of Diffusion - inaccurate in complex systems with reactions or non-constant diffusion coefficients.
Laws of Electromagnetic Induction (Faraday's Law) – assumes ideal conditions; real systems have hysteresis and other non-ideal effects.
Laws of Radioactive Decay – exponential decay is inaccurate as does not fully regard environment or decay chain complexities.
Fair enough. At which point do these non applicabilities make you think that the fact of putting your faith in science is bad? I mean, I tried to point out that science is a process, and yes, laws come with caveats. Some of them are known in advance, some not.
The search for truth, if we are still arguing that, where is it? I don't understand how anybody can argue that the search is the same across theology and science. In a sense it is the search for the same thing, but in so many ways it is not. The commenter I was replying to is confounding the difference, and this comment, seems to ask me to point out what mistakes theology made, and I know of plenty.
Principle seems to be the modern equivalent term to the concept that used to be represented by the word "law," in this context. I've also seen them used interchangeably on various things: "principle of least action" vs "law of least action" is a pretty common example.
How about this: it takes energy to build a photo-synthesis machine. A machine like this won't consume all photons but only some range of electromagnetic spectrum. This is because you need to have such structure to allow light to pass through the outer part of the body of the organism, but be absorbed at a very specific place inside. This is why multi-junction solar cells exist, to use more of the solar spectrum. It would cost a plant more energy to build such a multi-layered chloroplast, so perhaps having just a single layer using a single range of the spectrum is the most optimal (at least as a local maximum).
> Another theory is that a perfectly-absorbing leaf would somehow absorb too much energy and get overheated
If having both pigments means the plant would be close to black, overheating is an absolutely valid hypothesis imo, plants just like animals have optimal temperature metabolism and often getting too hot is deadly, while under optimal temperature is tolerable.
sure but there are probably ecological niches that are light starved. for instance deeper in the water column or in dark areas like caves or polar regions
Evolution is only possible along certain paths, for example, we are not going to evolve to have more than four limbs, eyes at the back of our heads or extra hands.
Similarly, at the cell level, we have just the one photosynthesis process in plants and that isn't going to take an entirely different path to work on different wavelengths. The evolutionary investment is in chlorophyll with a magnesium element at the heart of it. Imaginably you would need an entirety different molecule with some other magic atom in the middles of the usual organic chemistry and that isn't going to happen given the sunk cost in the chlorophyll way of doing things. There is a greater chance that we will get six hands than that happening.
Of course, for example several sea weeds come to mind in dark green to brown tones; which makes sense, they can disperse heat very fast since they are immersed in cold water / liquid cooling
Indeed, and frequently you will see that leaves are a much darker hue of green than the ones exposed directly to sunlight. So, using the same mechanism, still more is absorbed if light is scarce.
Not-so-many years ago, this kind of work developing optimization algorithms would have been called optimization algorithms, not AI.
> We develop Urania, a highly parallelized hybrid local-global optimization algorithm, sketched in Fig. 2(a). It starts from a pool of thousands of initial conditions of the UIFO, which are either entirely random initializations or augmented with solutions from different frequency ranges. Urania starts 1000 parallel local optimizations that minimize the objective function using an adapted version of the Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno (BFGS) algorithm. BFGS is a highly efficient gradient-descent optimizer that approximates the inverse Hessian matrix. For each local optimization, Urania chooses a target from the pool according to a Boltzmann distribution, which weights better-performing setups in the pool higher and adds a small noise to escape local minima.
It does look like the gradient descent is paired with a type of genetic algorithm:
> For each local optimization, Urania chooses a target from the pool according to a Boltzmann distribution, which weights better-performing setups in the pool higher and adds a small noise to escape local minima. These choices add a global character to the exploration. When one of the local optimizations of Urania finds a better parameter setting for a setup in the pool, it replaces the old solution with the superior one. Upon convergence, Urania repeats and chooses a new target from the pool. In parallel, Urania simplifies solutions from the pool by probabilistically removing elements whose removal does not impact the overall sensitivity.
This irks me to no end, why not just call it applied mathematics algorithms to not use specific terms, rather than AI. Is grep AI? Is your web browser AI?
> it modifies Canonical's current version of GNOME to look strikingly like Windows 11, using a collection of existing extensions and themes
https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/23/anduinos/
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