Alex Howell

Thanks for all your input everyone! I think I'll still include it somewhere in the plot, but likely avoid using it as a windbreak as I don't want it blowing over in a storm...

Currently looking at seaberries and feijoa interplanted as an alternative.

Thanks for your help everyone!

To preface, my little farm is about 800 meters away from the ocean. They grow black pines all along the coast here, so a large amount of salty wind gets stopped at the coastline, but I've done soil tests under the microscope and have seen salt crystals in the soil in my plot.

I'm currently in the process of creating a living windbreak on the North side of my plot (the one exposed to ocean winds) and have considered adding in a couple of crab apple trees (Mainly to increase the chances of my regular apple trees pollinating, but also because I wouldn't mind a homemade source of apple cider vinegar).

There's a good deal on "Gorgeous", "Lemoinei" & "Dolgo" variant crab apples near me, and I was wondering which of these might be suited for purpose/if any at all. This is one of the least maritime tolerant plants I'm considering in my windbreak layer on paper, so I would love to hear about people's experiences here.

Hi Everyone,

I'm just making this forum as a place for people to post and log all the niche little Japanese machines/attachments for machines that I see in daily life for people's interests.

Feel free to chip in with things you've seen/have used in the past! There's a surprising amount of things out there.

First one I want to feature is this, the "Azenuri" (lit. ridge painter). This tractor attachment is used to both cut out a groove and smooth the border between rice paddies at the beginning of field preparation. It's essentially a large router drill bit and a steamroller all in one, and very satisfying to watch. Generally speaking the cultivators follow this step, and this border also serves as a visual marker to ensure farmers aren't cultivating outside of their plot.

Let me know if there are any other tools you want more info on!

Hugo Morvan wrote:I've asked a Swiss friend, but she doesn't know of any scythe producer which will send abroad (to Japan). Doesn't mean it doesn't exist though. Also she's very surprised Japanese do not have the best scythes.

I think that historically there were just too many hills and rocks and not enough grass to justify their creation... That's my theory anyway.

Russia is just across the pond with a long history of scythes, so that may be my best shot for importing one someday.

Just realized that my $50 submission is also applicable for a dual submission with this badge. Please let me know if you need any further information, and thank you for review!:

https://permies.com/wiki/90/118748/pep-commerce/Perform-sort-labor-internet-paid#3751628

I'd be more than happy to see a bamboo forum, thumbs up from me.

So the horsetails have started popping up here (Equisetum arvense), and I'm looking forward to a good harvest this year!

I've read conflicting information online about the best time to harvest, but that's likely as people are harvesting them for both culinary and medicinal reasons, so was wondering if anyone here had any insights.

I'm mainly looking to harvest them for medicinal reasons, so any advice here would be greatly appreciated.

So far I've heard:

If the strobil (initial fertile shoots) are sporing then they've already lost their medicinal potency.
Harvest the strobil, cut off the heads and peel them before eating.
Leave the vegetative until late spring to ensure maximum growth before harvest.
Harvest the young vegetative shoots before they branch out.

Christopher Weeks wrote:Has anyone ever asked one of these LLMs for information and had it just say "I don't know" or something to that effect? I haven't had that happen, which seems kind of weird.

If you catch them in a lie and call them out on it then they will admit fault and admit that they didn't know the answer.

There are LLMs which will document their thought process as they draft their responses. They will often say during the thinking stage: "can't find relevant information for this query", but then will still provide you with an answer which is posed as objective truth anyhow.

At least if you can see the "logic" behind the response it's easier to make an informed decision on whether to trust it or not.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:
there is more to AI than LLM's. Outside of the current hype, it seems there are small AI's in radiology, astronomy, chemistry, being trained specifically on hard and proven scientific data. The analyzing potential is astonishing; and I suspect these are the AI models that will matter to us all.

Totally agree with you here. As with all tools it depends on how they're used, and the expectations you have for them.

You wouldn't call an axe useless because it isn't good for digging holes.

If you ever want to lose faith in AI, just ask it questions about things you're a specialist in...

LLMs scrape answers for your questions from places like Quora, Reddit, Wikihow, etc. then make a bunch of assumptions to fill in the rest of the information that they can't find, but because it's "superhuman intelligence" people will take those suppositions for fact and act on them as such.

There are extremes of this issue where people develop "Chatbot psychosis" after being gaslit by their AI into believing they are destined to save the world, etc. Ultimately it will feed you answers that will keep you spending tokens.

If you are looking for a place for forums to co-exist with AI, you can always treat forum communities as a second opinion.