On my iPhone I end up using a screenshot to select text via OCR and copy it from there. It’s frustrating when apps like Facebook won’t let you copy and paste stuff into Google Maps from a birthday invite.
I've also found you can just shoot the screenshot into ChatGPT and either ask it to translate or ask questions about it in your native language.
LLMs are arguably better translators since they're kinda built to concern themselves with context, or if it's missing you can just fill it in yourself with the prompt.
(Probably varies per language, I've had good success with going both directions with English and Spanish)
Are there any labs in the US that a regular joe could use to get their water tested? I’ve got quite a few properties with natural springs and I can send the water to get tested for bacteria and mineral content but I don’t know of anywhere that tests for PFAS.
Solar energy has become a significant topic in my rural Virginia county, where I serve on the Board of Supervisors. During our discussions, the issue of food production has come up a lot. While I understand people’s concerns about maintaining a resilient food supply, they often overlook the amount of farmland that is abandoned and rendered unusable for crop production.
I see it happen all too often, farmer dies, kids don’t want to do anything with the land so it sits growing up becoming unusable. The rate at which farmers are either retiring or passing away far exceeds the rate at which agricultural land is being converted to solar farms. For many farmers, this transition has become a valuable secondary source of income and allowed them to continue or expand their operations.
>>I see it happen all too often, farmer dies, kids don’t want to do anything with the land
Often they've moved away to The Big City and don't have any connection or the skills, and often too there just isn't a meaningful return in the crop to justify the lifestyle change or added responsibilities of management.
>>For many farmers, this transition has become a valuable secondary source of income and allowed them to continue or expand their operations.
I think every American should read the book The Crazies by Amy Gamerman that was just published, that talks about this issue. Illustrates a lot of what's really going on in our country.
Wild land does regenerate, but also trees grow, and they have a cost to remove them when they get bigger, especially the roots. Plowing is not possible with tree roots everywhere, though perhaps non-monoculture non-mass-produced crops are possible to grow there and eventually the roots may decay. It can take 20-30 years for roots to decay though, or longer.
Yes and no. Unfortunately it isn't a simple and easy topic which is what makes it so complicated to deal with.
Real thick top soil isn't really the natural state of land in most places, a large bulk of it was grown by the people farming it who spent multiple generations fertilizing it, maintaining it, and putting as much organic waste as they could back into it. It is its own ecosystem that was grown just as the crops above it are grown in higher than natural abundance. In most places it takes 80+ years to build up a significant top soil layer, and in the short term letting the land sit fallow for a bit of time will let some nutrients build up in the soil and will provide larger yields in following years. But if you let it go truly wild, the wild stuff starts growing and is also going to start consuming those nutrients until some sort of balance is achieved between top soil and plants above it. And the natural balance in most places only going to be a few inches of good top soil, not the 1-2 foot of topsoil that maximizes crop yields.
As to over utilizing it, you can both maintain that top soil and get higher yields from it, but if you are willing to push the land a little further and add a little more crop density or not fallow or fertilize the land quite as often, you can push the yields a little higher still. Like pulling a bit of the capital out of your investment account along with the interest payments. You can do that for 10 years, and have more to spend/yield for it, but each time you are spending capital/top soil and reducing yield for following years. Then 10 years in, your interest/yield expectations are lower than ever, so if you want to maintain even the old non-exploitive yield numbers you have to take out even more of it. 10 years again and now you are back to a shitty few inches of top soil. Oh sure, you can try growing it again, but just like capital the less you have to start with the longer it will take to grow, and it took others over an entire lifetime to grow what you spend in just 20 years.
Family farmers didn't usually do that because it would just be fucking over your own kids. But in this modern age, how many farms are actually being passed on to kids? How many people give a shit if the land is dead in 20 years if their plan was to sell out of it at that point? Or if they killed off other local farms by out competing with unsustainable practices that the others refused to emulate, why not buy their good land and run the scam over again? By time any of the shortsightedness of those actions culminates they will either be old and rich with investments into other industries, or dead, and the people who will ultimately suffer for it will just be poor strangers they never cared about and the cause of their plights easily deflected onto other sources.
I feel guilty because the house I grew up in and the house I currently live in were both formerly farmland (cherry orchards and grain fields respectively). I wonder why are we paving over prime farmland while simultaneously dedicating 5% of all US territory to growing field corn. Sorghum, field corn, and cotton are grown around here, depending on market conditions.
I noticed something similar with images as inputs to Claude, you can scale down the images and still get good outputs. There is an accuracy drop off at a certain point but the token savings are worth doing a little tuning there.
If anyone from Starlink or SpaceX is reading these comments here’s what you want to do: Sell your own branded trail cam with solar charging and LTE from orbit. You can charge $25-$40 a month for unlimited pictures sent from the cam. This would open up hunters, nature enthusiasts, and researchers to be able to place their hardware anywhere in the field without worrying about connectivity. Here in SWVA we have deep hollows that can’t get LTE without dense tower coverage that we don’t have the population to justify, but you can grab a satellite connection.
After writing this out I’m beginning to doubt the market would be big enough but I know at least 20 people with 2 or more LTE cams for deer season.
I work with researchers that deploy all sorts of solar powered sensor equipment in remote parts of New Zealand. Realistically Starlink would need to support NB-IoT and LTE-M which is what these kinds of devices are moving towards (if they need cellular connectivity). These are low power variants of 4G and 5G.
Even if you have solar and a fixed platform, you usually want to deploy as little solar as possible. Especially if you need to carry the gear on foot. So minimising power consumption is really important.
Agreed. As an avid hunter/angler I've been trying to make things more difficult the last few years instead of easier. At some point the trail cams start making people look more like butchers IMO. Similarly in the fishing world, tools like Livescope are becoming deeply embedded in the community.
For me, the draw of the woods and rivers is the chance to disconnect from technology and reconnect to nature.
This service uses a different radio link using LTE. That’s why you don’t need the dish. They had to launch new satellites with the extra radio gear. So your past experience is not necessarily representative.
$25-$40 is insane. Spypoint offers 250 pics for free a month and 1000 for $6 a month. As long as you can connect to a cell tower (1 bar is enough). That probably covers 80 % of hunt properties.
At least in the Western United States, most hunting is done on publicly owned land, and there's enormous swaths of public land with absolutely zero cell phone coverage.
In Finland, i get 5Mbps LTE uplink for EUR 4 per month, for a trailcam, with unlimited use (at least in principle). So $20 per month sounds expensive, but obviously there are places where one has no earthly LTE and then it could be justified.
In general, having low-bandwidth Starlink IoT connections globally accessible would be just great, I can see lots of usage.
Finland is fairly flat and has _excellent_ LTE coverage. Being in Norway myself, which isn't flat, but still has fantastic LTE coverage for political reasons, I do often find myself thinking like you, and need to be reminded of how abysmal coverage is in rural North America (and even in for example rural Germany).
This could also be a hardware startup. If only there were some entrepreneur types around...
Presumably there's a market for this in other niches, e.g. weather monitoring, defense/border monitoring, etc... The question is whether the juice is worth the squeeze. Where's the really valuable data?
I recall not too long ago a startup advertising exactly this idea for farms. It was some box with various sensors (and output lines) that you could configure to do a multitude of tasks
As long as it doesn't need near-real-time viewing (or if it does, said viewing can be billed for as a separate per-user fee), it wouldn't cost anything extra to SpaceX in the sense that those cameras could use free capacity, only transmitting when nothing else is.
Ten years ago I installed one cam for Surfline and at that time it's was an off-the-shelf but expensive outdoor camera (stock firmware) connected to a locally-based broadband.
Love this! I'd love to take the underlying data combine it with data like average income for a county and see which counties had the most affordable Taco Bell.
