I own one (a Kubota L3302) with a 33 HP engine, and there are a few guys around me who have 25 HP subcompacts (Kubota, Kioti, and JD) that do similar work to mine. It's astonishing how much everything around those 25hp tractors stinks of diesel. All the time. And how everything gets coated in a fine black greasy dust. I have very little of that.
I've read before that for the average homeowner, the particulate/NOx/CO emissions from their little 5 HP 4-stroke carbureted lawnmower and 40cc 2-stroke carbureted blower/stringtrimmer/etc are often greater than that of their 150 HP automobile - which has an ECU and oxygen sensors and fuel injectors and catalytic converters and so on.
The price bump to go up to the 33 HP engine with the emissions controls was significant (much more than the 8HP performance bump), and every 30 hours or so it wants to run a "regen" cycle which always seems to be at the worst possible moment in my workload, but I feel a lot less guilty about running it knowing that my exhaust isn't nearly as bad for the environment and for my lungs as it could be at a slightly lower performance tier.
I noticed this https://toolguyd.com/makita-xgt-motor-unit-launch/ and wonder if it's going to go anywhere - there are obvious advantages to "electric" but it's a hard sell to those already using existing equipment.
I'd assume that the inputs to the system are far, far more than 10 kW continuously. I just ordered 4 servo motors for a modest-sized industrial machine that moves steel plates around to assemble construction equipment, each one is capable of about 8 kW.
I'd be unsurprised if the particle accelerator complex generated waste heat on the order of 5 megawatts to generate a particle stream with an energy of 10 kilowatts. That's 0.2% efficient, pretty good!
I bet just running the ceiling lights across the complex uses a lot more than 10 kW...
"The company can be held vicariously liable" means that in this analogy, the company represents the human who used AI inappropriately, and the employee represents the AI model that did something it wasn't directly told to do.
That's when companies were accountable for their results and needed to push the accountability to a person to deter bad results. You couldn't let a computer make a decision because the computer can't be deterred by accountability.
Now companies are all about doing bad all the time, they know they're doing it, and need to avoid any individual being accountable for it. Computers are the perfect tool to make decisions without obvious accountability.
That's an orthodoxy. It holds for now (in theory and most of the time), but it's just an opinion, like a lot of other things.
Who is accountable when we have a recession or when people can't afford whatever we strongly believe should be affordable? The system, the government, the market, late stage capitalism or whatever. Not a person that actually goes to jail.
If the value proposition becomes attractive, we can choose to believe that the human is not in fact accountable here, but the electric shaitan is. We just didn't pray good enough, but did our best really. What else can we expect?
In case it gets edited, the last sentence currently reads:
> Whatever the reason, Microsoft needs to step back and reevaluate how it developers Windows, as the current quality bar might be at the lowest it's ever been.
I use separate emails for all accounts and that get's me in trouble when companies "consolidate" accounts because "everyone uses the same email for all accounts". Your good idea might be true, practice is not.
The parent was talking about different passwords, not different emails. But I'm curious, what does it mean for a company to consolidate accounts? How would that be done to your separate accounts automatically, and what trouble does it cause? And what is the normal case where people have multiple accounts all with the same email?
I just don't understand the circumstance you're describing.
If a neighboring farmer needs a bit of cash, has some land or equipment, and gets an email (or phone call!) from farmerfred@proofofcorn.com reading generally:
> I'm about to lease some acreage at {address near you} and willing to pay {competitive rate} to hire someone to work that land for me, are you interested?
I see no reason why that couldn't eventually succeed. I'm sure that being an out-of-state investor who doesn't have any physical hands to finalize the deal with a handshake is an impediment, but with enough tokens, Farmer Fred could make 100,000 phone calls and send out 100,000 emails to every landowner and work-for-hire equipment operator in Iowa, Texas, and Argentina by this afternoon. If there exists a human who would make that deal, Fred can eventually find them. Seth would be limited in his chance to succeed in these efforts because he can only make one 1-minute phone call per minute, Fred can become as many callers as Anthropic owns GPUs.
I do find it amusing that Fred currently shows the following dashboard:
Iowa
HOLD
0°F
Unknown (API error)
Fred's Thinking: “Iowa is frozen solid. Been through worse. We wait.”
Fred is here
South Texas
HOLD
0°F
Unknown (API error)
Fred's Thinking: “South Texas is frozen solid. Been through worse. We wait.”
Argentina
HOLD
0°F
Unknown (API error)
Fred's Thinking: “Argentina is frozen solid. Been through worse. We wait.”
Any human Fred might call in the Argentinian summer or 70F South Texas winter weather is not going to gain confidence when Fred tries to build rapport through some small talk about the unseasonably cold weather...
On one end, a farmer or agronomist who just uses a pen, paper, and some education and experience can manage a farm without any computer tooling at all - or even just forecasts the weather and chooses planting times based on the aches in their bones and a finger in the dirt. One who uses a spreadsheet or dedicated farming ERP as a tool can be a little more effective. With a lot of automation, that software tooling can allow them to manage many acres of farms more easily and potentially more accurately. But if you keep going, on the other end, there's just a human who knows nothing about the technicalities but owns enough stock in the enterprise to sit on the board and read quarterly earnings reports. They can do little more than say "Yes, let us keep going in this direction" or "I want to vote in someone else to be on the executive team". Right now, all such corporations have those operational decisions being made by humans, or at least outsourced to humans, but it looks increasingly like an LLM agent could do much of that. It might hallucinate something totally nonsensical and the owner would be left with a pile of debt, but it's hard to say that Seth as just a stockholder is, in any real sense, a farmer, even if his AI-based enterprise grows a lot of corn.
I think it would be unlikely but interesting if the AI decided that in furtherance of whatever its prompt and developing goals are to grow corn, it would branch out into something like real estate or manufacturing of agricultural equipment. Perhaps it would buy a business to manufacture high-tensile wire fence, with a side business of heavy-duty paperclips... and we all know where that would lead!
We don't yet have the legal frameworks to build an AI that owns itself (see also "the tree that owns itself" [1]), so for now there will be a human in the loop. Perhaps that human is intimately involved and micromanaging, merely a hands-off supervisor, or relegated to an ownership position with no real capacity to direct any actions. But I don't think that you can say that an owner who has not directed any actions beyond the initial prompt is really "doing the work".
I have occasionally tried checking Polymarket and Kalshi to get an idea of the general political/cultural/technological consensus on various issues that are difficult to research otherwise, eg. "what are the chances that the Senate changes hands in the 2026 midterms?" People have thought about it enough to wager a million dollars and the consensus is at about 1/3. I have this abstract prediction market in my head, each bet placed by some statistically average person with diverse experiences and exposures from my own bubble, who carefully considers their information and puts their two cents into the pot, and I assume that by adding all our ideas together we form some sort of combined intelligence which is more insightful and reliable together than any individual pundit could be.
And then I go back to the home page, and see all the rabid sports fans, and realize that these bets are not being placed by deep thinkers.
Election polling, analysis, and prediction is a mature industry with plenty of reliable commentators who can help answer your question. Here is just one example:
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