> Modern sheep grow their wool continuously, but that took a while to breed in.
No they don't.
In the summer their wool starts to grow out much thinner, like maybe a quarter as thick - it's really noticeable. This gives what's called a "rise", a gap between the sheep's skin and the thicker coarser wool. Once that's high enough to get shears (or these days, machine clippers which are like a big beard trimmer) into you can shear the fleece off.
If there's no rise you haven't a hope in hell of cutting it.
If there's a good rise it practically falls off.
If you leave them long enough or if the rise starts growing in too soon, they'll start "casting" where their wool just falls off in big chunks. This is actually quite dangerous for them because it's itchy and they roll on their backs to scratch, and get stuck upside down with their legs in the air and suffocate.
And you thought sheep farming was easy and fun ;-)
I thought animal farming in general is an arcane science.
My friends have goats but they aren't farmers and they haven't got a clue how to care for them. The females sometimes are left with milk in their breasts after their young are weaned and one of my friends will get anxious about that and ask us to help her milk them. It's impossible. You can't milk a goat that doesn't want to be milked. If you push them too hard they lie down so you can't reach their teats and that's that unless you want to have three people lifting the goat up and another one trying to milk her while she squirms and kicks. I don't trust the milk either. Once in a while they succeed in milking a goat and when I tried the milk (after boiling it) it was sort of gritty, like it was mixed with sand. It was not impurities from the environment because I filtered it through a muslin so I think the animal may have had some infection like a mastitis or something that affected the milk's texture.
I bet farmers know exactly what to do about all that or probably they know how to get the animals used to milking when they're still young so that the won't resist it that much. I've watched videos of goats being milked and it looks almost effortless when a pump is used. The goats just line up in their feeding trays and then someone walks up to them from behind, pumps out their tits and moves to the next one, bish bash bosh. My friends don't even have a dedicated structure to feed the goats, we just throw hay for them on the ground so they end up fighting.
My friends really have no idea how to care for the goats, it's rather sad. The owner of the farm has even said he wants to get "wild" goats that don't need to be cared for. By that he means a herd of goats that have gone feral and roam the hills in a village nearby. He thinks because nobody actively cares for them and the herd persists that must mean the goats are somehow self-sufficient. I think that's a big misunderstanding. Domesticated animals need a lot of care one way or another.
I think I'd prefer to have sheep though, if I had animals. Sheep look much nicer than goats.
I absolutely love goat's milk and I would love to keep goats, but they are every possible kind of a pain in the tits to deal with.
A neighbour of mine had a goat that we thought had some terrible thing happen because she was choking and gagging and frothing at the mouth like some cartoon rabid animal. Nope, far simpler. She'd eaten a grey lycra-and-elastic sports bra off the washing line, got a bra strap hooked over her tongue, and the rest of the bra down her throat. Hooked the strap with my finger, pulled it out in one quick deft rather unpleasantly squelchy motion, and ten seconds later you'd never have thought there had been anything wrong with her.
The bra went in the bin.
Bloody goats.
Your friends either need to learn how to care for goats - if only there was some world-wide repository of knowledge with books and videos and stuff! - or give them a good home somewhere else. They're probably hard to milk because as you say they're not used to being handled, and it may be too late to do that by now. If that's the case, you may never be able to milk them no matter how you handle them, and maybe you can breed from them, or maybe you can give them a nice new home, cosy and fragrant, along with some onion, garlic, ginger, cumin, coriander, and chilli, with a kilo or so of spinach too.
As an aside, you probably want to get yourself a copy of "Self-Sufficiency" by John Seymour, and have a read of that.
XD My friend got her skirt munched. While wearing it.
I totally think it's like you say: the goats have never learned to be milked and now they'll never learned. The new generation might, but who's going to teach them? Not me because I'm only there half the year (when it's hot and I don't want to move).
>> As an aside, you probably want to get yourself a copy of "Self-Sufficiency" by John Seymour, and have a read of that.
Pretty much all domesticated sheep will cast their fleeces.
There are some breeds that don't, and obviously due to random genetics you'll get individuals that don't.
Sheep that don't cast their fleeces are damn near impossible to shear and are mostly kept for meat. Likewise, sheep that don't have much of a "rise" (see my other comment) and are difficult to shear quite often, uh, don't have a particularly long career, as it were.
I think it depends on the - ahem - context. In my experience they usually can, sometimes they can't.
But generally their sense of software architecture remains abysmal, so even if their writing is ok, you need to have architectural authority the very least to guide them.
The fact that they sometimes can't means you can't have someone who is not a software engineer. Otherwise there is no way to verify whether the LLM wrote correct code or not.
I feel like this depends on the kind of project/work to some degree. Lots of software engineering time is spent on very simple websites, apps and other projects that LLMs have been well trained on. I suspect if you want a static site with a contact form or a CMS theme/plugin, you could probably get a usable result by having some non-technical person plug some prompts into an AI.
They wouldn't be able to verify if the code is correct, but based on my testing, if the work is simple enough, it probably wouldn't matter much.
There are a lot of companies whose modus operandi is basically "build the same basic site 300 times, except with a different colour scheme and logo".
Exactly. Expertise is frequently required to steer, correct, rework, know what is good and what isn't. This happens 500 times a day on both the micro level and the architecture level.
"People will write new UI frameworks and languages if the problem seems interesting to them."
I would think even with AI assistance industrial quality solutions (which is what we are talking here I think ) still require corporate size sponsor to thrive.
Yes, anyone will create whatever suits their fancy. But there is huge gap between hobby project and industrial adoption.
”GUIs always look bad outside of the "main" platform.”
I think this is slightly wrong in two ways.
i) If you want platform native then reimplement the gui on every target platform. It’s as ”simple” as that.
If you need to ship to multiple platforms then preferably you need lots of plarform specific engineering in any case.
”I just want my hobby tool” scenario likely does not require cross platform support unless there is market for it. I mean rather than offering the tool on multiple platforms it should be offered on multiple languages first, perhaps. As soon as you are not writing the tool for yourself we are talking markets and distribution. Likely most people can chill out and just implement the gui for themselves (and not even publish it in githubb).
ii) cross platform quick-and-dirty way. Without screenreader support, multiple language and glyph support etc.
Game ui:s look the same on all platforms. Websites look the same on all platforms.
There is place and time for deep ui engineering that respects the _critical_ cross platform issues like accessibility (screen readers etc) and different languages and scripts.
And then there is the situation where you want just few images to click. The latter is vastly simpler, fast and fun. But harder to convert to a professional quality gui experience. For small tools and MVPs this sounds like a fair tradeoff.
If you enjoy doing a thing in specific way, nobody is going to take that away.
Chess is a great example. More players than ever, perfectly obsolete if you compare yourself to a computer, but that does not hurt.
If the AI takes your livelihood - that hurts. But I did not read this to be a complaint on that.
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