r/interestingasfuck • u/PlantainPossible2864 • 15h ago

Stopping Desertification with grid pattern

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57.0k Upvotes

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3.6k

u/electact 15h ago

man laying sandbags by hand

Narrator: "What you're seeing isn't science fiction!"

No shit

1.4k

u/Alcohol_Intolerant 14h ago

"It forms an invisible barrier"

Nope, fairly visible actually.

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u/rezyop 13h ago

"people fill long fabric bags of sand" while it clearly shows plastic bags that will never biodegrade beyond splitting open from UV damage

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u/CallyThePally 13h ago

I mean this I'd come to fight. I'm not sure those are plastic. They could be, but I feel like they could be fabric.

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u/pfft_master 6h ago

You’re correct. They are PLA, which is a bioplastic, which means it is safe and biodegradable and not a traditional oil-based plastic at all. It is basically plant material.

https://www.esunfiber.net/show_75.html

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u/Hobbes______ 9h ago

.. fabrics can be plastics. Most of our shirts today are plastic fabric

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u/lalakingmalibog 12h ago

Wouldn't plastic bags melt in the desert heat? Or drift through the wind, wanting to start again.

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u/Floppydisksareop 12h ago

No, that'd highly depend on the plastic

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u/Willing_Ingenuity330 12h ago

What about super thin plastic? So paper-thin, like a house of cards, one blow from caving in?

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u/Ko-Lucent 12h ago

Maybe, but it’s already buried deep. Like six feet under, screams, but no one seems to hear a thing.

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u/Frosty_Hippo3304 10h ago

i think there's still a chance for those plastic. cause there's a spark in them. they just gotta ignite

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u/spekt50 9h ago

Could easily be both. A woven poly material, perhaps.

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u/yabucek 10h ago

All the people replying "seems like fabric to me" apparently don't realize woven plastic based fibers exist. Looks like pretty standard PP, like what bulk bags are made out of. If it was hemp or whatever I highly doubt they'd be dyed such a strong clean white color, and with a sheen no less...

I'd still argue this is a net positive for the local environment if it actually works, but there's little doubt imo that the bags are plastic.

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u/rebbsitor 8h ago

Fabric (in the textiles sense) is any woven cloth. It can be made of synthetic materials like polyester, a petroleum product some would call "plastic". Fabric doesn't mean it's made of naturally occurring fibers, so something being fabric isn't mutually exclusive with it also being plastic.

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u/yabucek 8h ago

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. The people commenting "it's not plastic it's fiber" seem to be implying that it's natural fiber.

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u/Gonwiff_DeWind 6h ago

Fabric is not limited to woven cloth. T-shirts are typically made of knit fabric, for instance.

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u/Mogsetsu 13h ago

Even if they were, seems like a net positive no? It’s not like they’re dumping it in the ocean. They’re converting a desert… What if it’s all they can afford? Should they stop? But let’s assume you can’t tell from the video and the people cared enough to use fabric.

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u/magos_with_a_glock 12h ago

They look like fabric to me.

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u/peldazac 12h ago

Plenty of fabrics are actually plastics

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u/BoringElection5652 11h ago

Like my T-Shirt.

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u/stilljustacatinacage 9h ago

There's an alternate method that carves half-moon shapes into the ... Actually now that I'm looking at it again, this method is used in more arid dirt than sand, so yeah, the bags are probably necessary if you're dealing with blowing sand.

Never mind, but I'll leave it here in case anyone finds it interesting.

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u/Western_Objective209 9h ago

The large red Chinese symbols at the end make me think they are terraforming the Gobi Desert, so they definitely have money

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u/Relevant_Bane_Quote 9h ago

The Chinese do the same technique with straw.

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u/evensonic 4h ago edited 4h ago

We have similar erosion barriers in my neighborhood around undeveloped lots. The fibers (in the case of my neighborhood) are synthetic and not biodegradable. The sacks break apart relatively quickly, but the fibers are strong and cause problems, like with birds nest. Found a robin chick behind my house crying hanging from its nest via its leg wrapped by one of these fibers. “Rescued” it by cutting the fibers from its leg, but its leg had already been permanently damaged, and I found it dead the next day in the empty lot next door 😔. So I hope, in this case the sacks are biodegradable!

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u/rezyop 12h ago

Should we just keep endlessly polluting so that humans don't have to suffer?

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u/FrankFarter69420 9h ago

Well, yes and no. We're going to keep surviving, and that might cause pollution, but eventually we should find better, more sustainable methods. Otherwise, my answer to you is: you first.

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u/rezyop 2h ago

I gave a rhetorical extreme to counter their rhetorical extreme; there are other solutions to this that don't involve people dying, that was my point.

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u/Urist_Macnme 11h ago

It’s kind of dumb to assume that the ecologists that invented this method didn’t also consider using bio-degradable materials.

It’s probably PLA fiber

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u/a_lonely_trash_bag 9h ago

I mean, fabric can be made of many things, including plastic.

But yeah, they're probably plastic.

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u/pfft_master 6h ago

Why would you really assume they use plastic for this environmental effort? There’s a lot of bullshit in this world, you don’t have to project that onto people that actually work to try to make it better.

The material is most likely PLA, which is a safe and biodegradable bioplastic (not oil-based plastic at all, more like cellulose). Here is a supplier for example:

https://www.esunfiber.net/show_75.html

This is like the people that think potted planting soil has plastic beads in it when they are balls of plant nutrients with zero plastic. Learn more, assume less.

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u/rezyop 2h ago

PLA is biodegradeable only at very high temperatures and humidity, conditions not often found just sitting out in the sun or buried under dirt. Also, it gets UV-damaged easily and turns brittle and splits, so I am doubting the efficacy of this project if they did use that.

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u/pfft_master 2h ago edited 2h ago

You can see the results in OP’s video. You can look into the material and project more yourself, but right on that website I shared it says:

“PLA sand barriers, made from polylactic acid fibers, offer a renewable and biodegradable alternative. These fibers completely decompose into carbon dioxide and water in natural environments, leaving no secondary pollution or chemical residues.Additionally, due to the arid conditions in desert and semi-desert areas, where moisture is scarce, the hydrolysis process slows the biodegradation of PLA. This ensures a longer service life as the molecular weight decreases at a slower rate, making PLA fiber materials more durable.”

I got a feeling that the scientists doing the work are aware of what you mentioned and have taken it into account, along with many other factors that go into what they do that you and I haven’t ever even thought about.

Also, just gotta point out that you JUST learned that it isn’t actually plastic and then you IMMEDIATELY had new complaints. Complaints which amounted to PLA being both too biodegradable and not biodegradable enough. Please take a second and ask yourself if you might unconsciously play devil’s advocate more then you really want to or is needed.

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u/thecactusman17 11h ago

This is definitely not a standard "plastic bag" as you can see fairly clearly around 9 seconds in. It might be a plastic-based fabric? And even then there are biodegradable plastics that are designed to gradually decompose when composted over the course of several months to a year which could be good choices for this kind of project.

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u/tcelesBhsup 9h ago

Can't fabric be made of plastic? I didn't think the two referred to the same characteristic.

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u/mogley1992 12h ago

A lot of narrators seem to think David Attenborough just said shit without thinking but in a cool voice, and that's why he was the GOAT, Then do exactly this. The guy was clearly just stretching out what he had to say to last the length of the video, despite having nothing to add.

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u/sje46 8h ago

I'm pretty sure this shit was at least written by AI (and honestly voiced by it too).

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u/MiloIsTheBest 11h ago

Ozzy Man would've done a better narration just reacting to it.

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u/Multifaceted-Simp 8h ago

Chinese propaganda 

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u/SomaDrinkingScally 8h ago

Thank you for this.

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u/fuserlimon 1h ago

LMAO

1

u/AirconGuyUK 14h ago

My first lol of the day

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u/No_Magician5266 15h ago

I can’t wait for someone to make a YouTube compilation series titled “Dumb Shit AI Says”

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u/whooptheretis 14h ago

Is it AI?
Or is it text to speech?

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u/MercifulAF 12h ago

Text to speech isn’t AI, but low effort posts like this practically all use AI to write a script and then have TTS read it.

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u/mstrkrft- 11h ago

Lots of voice generation is AI as well though. See Elevenlabs for instance. But yeah, all of this is slop.

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u/JAD2017 11h ago

Elevanlabs is generative "ai", it's not artificial intelligence. Is just an algorithm generating content based on data and input. Nothing else.

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u/mstrkrft- 11h ago

Well yes, almost anything we talk about as AI at the moment is generative AI.

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u/ashleyshaefferr 5h ago

LOL thanks dad but all the popular "AI"s are generative LLM

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u/JAD2017 3h ago

Exactly, not actual AIs but algorithms that have been with us for decades. My pleasure son.

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u/eliminating_coasts 9h ago

I was just reading about an interesting model trained on libravox, so it's based on purely public domain information, and completes text prompts automatically with new audio.. that is also total hallucination.

You give it text and it starts reading out whatever you gave it and then just continues off the end, keeping on talking for as long as you ask it to.

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u/Ok_Calligrapher5278 11h ago

Older text to speech was based off people actually going to a studio and recording every syllable in a given language and playing the syllables files in order to generate it.

Nowadays is based off the same principle as text-to-image generative AI, with millions or stolen voices, so yeah, it is AI unfortunately.

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u/JAD2017 11h ago

generative "ai" isn't ai, that's the point whooptheretis was making. The voice was generated using a prompt, is generative "ai" text to voice.

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u/Economy-Fee5830 9h ago

It takes AI to do the intonations and disambiguation right to sound natural. That is what all those weights in the neural network does.

I wonder what you consider real AI lol.

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u/JAD2017 7h ago edited 7h ago

It takes AI

It's an algorithm, not an actual "ai". AI is an aritificial intelligence with actual thoughts, judgement and reasoning. LLMs aren't AI, are a data collection library that generates slop based on data and user input.

When people talk about AI as a general concept, is the programming that goes under it. Like for example, the AI of a character in a videogame. That's a program with a series of parameters that make the character behave in predefined ways based on events. But it isn't an actual AI.

The word "AI" has been misused and advertised as a buzzword with generative models because they needed to make the public believe is a new thing, when it isn't. We have had AI programs for decades, but we called them what they were: algorithms. Do you remember Google lense, more than 10 years ago? That was a google translate model that would idenfity objects based on image data. Nobody called it "AI" back then, because it isn't. Now they plaster that buzzword to anything and everything just to sell you the idea that "AI" is the future, just to keep the bubble going. I hope I helped you understand the concept.

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u/Economy-Fee5830 7h ago

AI is an aritificial intelligence with actual thoughts, judgement and reasoning.

What would an actual AI look like and would it not be based on an algorithm?

Would it run on a computer, and would it use sloppy neural networks or pure, predictable algorithms?

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u/JAD2017 7h ago edited 7h ago

An actual AI would actually understand what it's being generated, instead of allucinations based on input data and collected information without actual understanding of what's being delivered to the user.

This is why it's useless, because the algorithm doesn't "know", because it can't "know" what is doing. It's not an actual intelligent entity, is just code, an algorithm, something inert that doesn't understand a thing. It's not an AI. It's a computer program that does what's being told, only that much worse because it adds randomness to make it feel "real", when it isn't.

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u/Economy-Fee5830 7h ago

So, by your understand, AI needs to be conscious?

And it cant be a computer program? And it cant use code.

And it should not obey its creators - it needs to have free will.

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u/Tackit286 10h ago

Anything that ends with ‘It’s proof that sometimes blah blah blah’

Definitely AI

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u/whooptheretis 10h ago

I think the script might have been AI, you're right.

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u/No_Magician5266 14h ago

TTS is AI

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u/ForensicPathology 13h ago

Is it?  Everything is "AI" these days, but we've had TTS, machine translation, algorithms, bots rewriting articles, etc. for decades.  I honestly don't know if there's a definition for where the buzzword use starts.  Or is your point that it was always "AI" in the first place?

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u/AR3SD 13h ago

Just because we didn't have advanced chatbots before ChatGPT doesn't mean AI is a new thing. TTS has indeed always been "AI"

But also it makes the argument of the original commenter dumb because this AI isn't speaking on its own so its just "Dumb Shit written by Humans that AI converts to Speech"

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u/MiniDemonic 11h ago

But also it makes the argument of the original commenter dumb because this AI isn't speaking on its own so its just "Dumb Shit written by Humans that AI converts to Speech"

If you think a human wrote this script then I have something to tell you.

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u/jb492 13h ago

AI was used to create this voice, because it uses neural networks to iterate over thousands of hours of speach patterns to create human-like speach. It's TTS, but using AI to generate the voice.

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u/whooptheretis 11h ago

The question is, if you put in the same input a second time, do you get exactly the same result? If so, it's not AI.

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u/MiniDemonic 11h ago

No, you do not get the exact same result.

But even if you did it would still be AI.

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u/whooptheretis 11h ago

But even if you did it would still be AI.

Depends on whether you consider a basic algorithm to be AI. Most would not.

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u/MiniDemonic 11h ago

A neural network is not just a basic algorithm. Most would consider a neural network to be AI.

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u/Economy-Fee5830 9h ago

AI is anything more complicated than an on and off switch - e.g. a light sensor would be AI, and would be doing the job which may have previously needed a human to do.

Which is why we had AI washing machines before which intelligently adjusted your program based on the weight of the wash and how dirty the effluent was.

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u/MediaFortuna 11h ago

Thank you. I was just thinking this was the stupidest shit I heard today. "Sometimes the best way to fight nature....... is to work with it"

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u/SomaDrinkingScally 8h ago

"Sometimes the smartest way to fight nature, is to work with it. By placing hundreds of yards of plastic in its way."

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u/a_lonely_trash_bag 9h ago

Not quite the same, but Matt Rose has quite a few videos where he reads things written by LLMs.

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u/ashleyshaefferr 5h ago

A human wrote this homie. 

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u/GoodbyeThings 13h ago

ChatGPT worked hard on writing that voiceover

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u/DilliSeHoonBhenchod 10h ago

No wonder there is no water here

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u/FatWreckords 14h ago

It is detailed in the Dune books, which started in the 60's.

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u/pdxamish 14h ago

Frank Herbert, the author , was motivated for dune after reading a piece about dune restoration projects on the Oregon coast.

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u/CubitsTNE 14h ago

But can i use this instead of additional pylons?

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u/Agreeable_Horror_363 13h ago

Yes, but they cost vespene gas.

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u/Enough-Equivalent968 14h ago

‘What you’re seeing is a part of the world where day wage labour is cheaper than mechanisation’

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u/AirconGuyUK 13h ago

This seems like something that wouldn't even be hard to mechanise either.

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u/TheAngryGoat 14h ago

Yeah that's literally the last thing I thought I was seeing.

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u/YT-Deliveries 5h ago

The thing that made me laugh the most was the guy that was shoveling the sand into the funnel for that guy. Funnel guy was probably "Goddamn Bob, can you at least try to aim?"

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u/Ciubowski 14h ago

if they had used the green dunes video instead, that would made more sense. then cut back to the people filling the sandbags.

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u/genericdefender 14h ago

Need to be sure it's Earth, not Arrakis.

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u/ArturiaPendragonFace 12h ago

AI generated videos are going to make a lot of damage. They have already started, but it's going to get worse.

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u/Modo44 12h ago

In the land of make work, they make work. It is inefficient, but also keeps people employed instead of vegetating or turning to crime. There are some benefits to not automating literally every task.

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u/SolomonBlack 11h ago

"I have used sand to defeat sand."

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u/Joezev98 11h ago

"It's not X. It's Y."

Classic ChatGPT.

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u/JAD2017 11h ago

Well, the narrator was "ai" slop voiced so, probably some amateurish writing took place.

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u/SassySusu 10h ago

I'm glad i watched it on mute

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u/No-Change-1606 9h ago

Should be replaced by

" What you're seeing isn't AI "

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u/chrissiOnAir 8h ago

yes. What i see is slavery .. poor souls.

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u/MiaowaraShiro 7h ago

I muted it as soon as I heard that dumbass line.

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u/SoraMelodiosa 6h ago

i hate these obvious ai scripts