I got a storage organizer with 24 drawers. One for each type of cable I use. So instead of one big box that I have to hunt through, I have instant, labeled access to all my usb cables, and a few other cables and items.
I've visited Lady Musgrave Island in the Great Barrier Reef. It is covered with trees called "the grand devil's-claws", the seeds of which are barbed and sticky. The seeds stick to the wings of birds eating seeds, and so they can spread across islands.
However, a visitor to the island will soon notice lots of dead birds on the ground. There are no predators or scavengers, so the birds lay there decomposing.
Thus, the trees use the birds not only for reproduction, but also for food. It's a carnivorous forest out there on the reef.
[0] lists 28 documented cases - if we ignore the 5 before 1943 (probably not reliable records), that gives 23 in just over 80 years or roughly one every 3.5 years (although you'd expect that to have increased over time as more people live or tourist near the trees)
Of those 23, 5 were infants (<3y), 1 was killed by 4 coconuts, 1 was killed by a bunch of 57 coconuts(!), and 2 were accidentally killed by their harvesting monkeys.
Killing an animal on their way to the beach is a free bonus for coconuts: they necessarily drop from the top of the tree and they need a high quality shell in any case for their primary job of floating on water and dispersing.
I was in south India for about a month and I heard of 1 person dying from a coconut during that time period and heard it wasn’t unheard of. Not a lot of people die but plenty of folks get injured.
As the article points out: If conditions exist for "high-quality plant growth" (correct light, soil, moisture, etc) then plants don't make weird adaptations like eating things/water-conservation methods.
However, if those conditions DON'T exist, then it's hard for plants to get very big.
There's also this: the larger a moving creature you're trying to capture, the more resources you need to invest in the trap. Bladderwort exists everywhere because it's easy to trap small/microscopic things. Giant bear-eating plants exist nowhere because consistently trapping a bear with just leaves, sap, and stems is really fucking hard.
At a certain point, the plants reach an equilibrium where the effort is worth the end result, but diminishing returns if they got larger.
One can imagine some pretty twisted stuff, but anyway large mammals tend to have enough brains to learn to recognize dangers without, or failing that, with evolution (think innate fear of snakes).
Consider plausible interactions, like cow vs. sundew. The sundew's only hope for survival is looking inedible and repelling the cow, capturing the cow is completely out of the question.
If you want to speculate about that, then how about the bamboo die-off cycle? Imagine if you lived in the PNW or Appalachia, and every 120 years the entire side of a mountain launched an army of hungry rats at you. Starves all those cute smug “panda” gluttons too.
The pi has a sub $100 accelerator card that takes it to 30 TFLOPs. So you can add three more orders of magnitude of performance for a rough doubling of the price.
For me, it's a bit like pair programming. I have someone to discuss ideas with. Someone to review my code and suggest alternative approaches. Some one that uses different feature than I do, so I learn from them.
This is how I use it too. It's great at quickly answering questions. I find it particularly useful if I have to work with a language of framework that I'm not fully experienced in.
> I find it particularly useful if I have to work with a language of framework that I'm not fully experienced in
Yep - my number 1 use case for LLMs is as a template and example generator. It actually seems like a fairly reasonable use for probabilistic text generation!
I got a storage organizer with 24 drawers. One for each type of cable I use. So instead of one big box that I have to hunt through, I have instant, labeled access to all my usb cables, and a few other cables and items.