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by helle253 90 days ago
that's funny, i know where this story is set (i grew up there) - or at least, the place Claude was basing things off of

some inconsistencies that stuck out/i found interesting:

- HWY 29 doesnt run through marshfield, its about 15 miles north.

- not a lot of people grow cabbage in central wisconsin ;)

- no corrugated sheet metal buildings like in the first image around there

- i dont think theres a county road K near Marshfield - not in Marathon county at least

fwiw i think this story is neat, but wrong about farmers and their outlooks - agriculture is probably one of the most data-driven industries out there, there are not many family farmers left (the kinds of farmers depicted in this story), it is largely industrial scale at this point.

All that said, as a fictional experiment its pretty cool!
1 comments
CamperBob2 90 days ago
I think it serves even better as a metaphor for software engineering's future than as a forecast for the future of farming. As you suggest, farmers already had to make the "transition" over the course of the 20th century. A farmer from 1926 wouldn't recognize his counterpart today. They would have nothing to talk about. Software people, though, are still twentieth-century programmers at heart, who are just starting to feel their way through the Kubler-Ross process.

Really a great story, and to the extent it was AI-written, well... even greater.

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arcanemachiner 90 days ago
Kubler-Ross process -> "A model outlining emotional responses to terminal diagnosis or loss: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance"
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CamperBob2 90 days ago
Exactly. The stages don't always occur in order, or at all, but you can see the general progression play out any day, all day on here.

I'm happily surprised (frankly amazed TBH) that the submitter didn't get bawled out by people flagging the post and accusing him of posting slop.

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selimthegrim 90 days ago
> As you suggest, farmers already had to make the "transition" over the course of the 20th century. A farmer from 1926 wouldn't recognize his counterpart today. They would have nothing to talk about.

Can you elaborate on this?

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CamperBob2 90 days ago
Automation and technology in general have made it possible to do more farming with fewer people: https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-reso... . In the US job market, agriculture accounted for 51% of workers in 1880 and less than 3% in 1980. It now appears to be closer to 1% depending on which source you reference.

Hard to imagine many occupations that have undergone more radical change in the recent past than farming. The profession is now utterly technology-dependent, and a few companies like John Deere have hastened to take unfair advantage of that. Hence the growing advocacy of right-to-repair laws.

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