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I have a constant battle with Kudzu every year. I wish we could find an easier way to kill the stuff, or transform it into something else.

That being said, goats will dig down and eat the hell out of the stuff.


It's edible if you want to go through the trouble. It's a variety of arrowroot which has a lot of uses in east asian food traditions. I like the tea.


My recent most favourite quote is "Anything is edible at least once".


Unless you get them very young, eating the leaves is reminiscent of chewing sandpaper. Now you have me wondering if it would be palatable juiced, maybe as part of a smoothie.


Yeah I've only ever eaten the young shoots. It was fine I never went out of my way to eat it again though.


And often used as a digestive aid/folk-medicine


Doesn't this just mean it will give you the shits?


No, it calms the digestive system, and used to stop diarrhea.


Goats sounds like a good idea. And once they eat all the kudzu, you can eat the goats.


But would they taste good of all they've eaten is kudzu? Maybe they should feast on sage and rosemary.


Yes, kudzu is incredibly good forage and produces some of the tenderest, sweetest meat you'd ever taste.


humans can eat kudzu, too. It doesn't taste bad


Salt, mulch, barriers, and/or poisons like glyphosate.


Doesn't Roundup control it effectively?


I have English ivy around my house, which isn't quite as invasive as kudzu, but still a major nuisance.

Roundup does basically nothing. The leaves are thick and waxy and so don't absorb herbicide effectively. Supposedly, applying a more concentrated formula on a weekly basis for a month can work, but I don't like the idea of spraying that much glyphosate.


If you have to use poison you can use way less by pruning and putting a dab of glyphosate on the stump. Even dishsoap straight to the vascular system will kill many plants.


I just mow it so I can see the vines and then pull them up and cut them. Over the course of the summer, I cleared a significant part of my land. Now that autumn weather has finally arrived, I should be able to get it all.


You can add penetrants to get it to work better with adding more glyphosate


You can use ammonium sulfate as a surfactant to cut through English ivy with glyphosate. It works great, and in theory you don't have to use as much Roundup that way either.


My husband swears by painting the leaves with the herbicide. Time consuming, though.


This is the only way I was ever able to kill English ivy in the back yard of my old house. I bought glyphosate concentrate, some disposable plastic cups, and a disposable foam paintbrush. I painted it on every damned leaf in the yard.

It works. It may take several applications to do so, but it works.


Top tip. Rubber gloves with some woollen gloves over the top. Soak the woollen gloves in glyphosate and then you can lovingly stroke the plants you want to kill. It’s a bit quicker


That is a brilliant idea.


has anyone tried a 55 gal drum of kerosine. might be safer, just take care the flames arent always visible


Burning the visible part would just make food for the roots.


Thanks ChatGPT, I’ll keep that in mind.


I found that chlorine triflouride is more effective


Doesn't that stuff kill bees and fireflies as well?


Yes. After generous application, all that will be left alive is your manicured Roundup Ready™ lawn. Bliss...


I understand your sentiment and share to some extent, but the reason this came into being wasn’t vanity. Having large shrubs or weed areas leads to pests and the spread of disease, while large trees become deadly during storms. In the AmericanSouth and MidWest, seasonal tornadoes make this latter threat far worse. Homeowners then become incentivized to clear their yards of both hazards. Kudzu and English Ivy kill the trees and make them more likely to come down. Once people clear a lawn, the only way to make it look good is by getting that rich green and uniform golf course like appearance brought to you by Bayer.


Communicate with your local beekeepers on when you do this and they’ll really appreciate it. Might even get some free honey.


It wraps all around trees and other desirable plants, and has shoots under ground that can extend many feet away. Digging it up is the only solution but even that is exceedingly difficult. I’ve learned to live with it.


As others have said, RoundUp / glyphosate doesn’t always handle these tougher plants. I’ve had good results with Crossbow: https://www.winfieldunited.com/products/herbicides/crossbow/...

Not sure if that is readily available in all regions, though.


no, not at all


Stripe


I don't think the folks that say this usually mean "never done before" in the way that you are saying.

"never done before" in my experience usually translates to "this combination of things doesn't have precedence internally [to the team or company], so I have to figure out how to glue all of these parts I don't understand together".


And then if someone does have a blocker, talking about it needs to be "taken offline", so you already have to do an external sync-up anyway.


I can't be the only one who read the title and thought this was about detecting a counterfeit Flash player.


It was actually silverlight in an adobe branded trenchcoat


Silverlight, now that's a name I haven't heard in a while. Next you're going to say Macromedia.


I misread the title and I thought it was some sort of hardware to identify vegan meat


let's create Myst in this


I'm curious, what did the uplink look like for those 18 wheelers?


Back in those days, a mixed bag depending on what was available at the venue and dependent on what the responsible LEC could provision (hence the need for some specialist engineers to be involved). Stadiums in particular are usually quite well equipped from a telco perspective. Could be anything from N x T-1s or DS-3s to fiber ATM to more esoteric stuff like SMDS and point-to-point microwave. Once IP became the de facto transport I'm guessing there was more stuff like MetroE and frame relay, and these days I imagine they just plug in some multiGbps fiber and ride IP back to the mothership.


I might be in the minority here, but IMO that snippet does not look nicer and looks pretty ugly. You've got like 3 things going on all jumbled together.

I would not want to encounter that line of code in the wild, or 3 months after writing it, and attempt to parse what it's doing.


I like the way this pattern trends, but one downside is that it mixes HTTP concerns into the service layer. E.g. the service layer needs to know exactly which HTTP error code this responds to when returning an error.

If the service layer is used for something other than a web server, e.g. a handler for a queue, we've now got a kinda funky abstraction.

I notice that the HTTP Request and ResponseWriter is also mixed into the service layer, which is another thing I would probably move one step closer to the actual HTTP server and away from the logic that interacts with the database.

In the past I've used `Temporary()` or `Permanent()` along with some other additional fields to help map to HTTP status codes at the HTTP server's handler layer.


This is def an anti-pattern.

As soon as you have your services suddenly hooked up to something else - chron (or hangfire or whatever) jobs or a message bus - it gets a bit weird because your service layer thinks you're still responding to an HTTP request and whoever works on the service now has to think about HTTP as well which is pretty fucking bizarre to begin with.

And your unit tests for a business logic service method are gonna look at HTTP errors? It feels dirty, but not in a fun tap-your-nose way.

It's really not hard to just return errors relating to what actually happened (can't find user by id, user is blocked from logging in, whatever) and have the app's ingress points (API controllers, message handlers, job runners) decide how to surface that in a way that makes sense for the specific interface.


I've done interfaces where centered around the kind of error that happened, which is typically standard across apps and translates well into status codes for http or grpc.

Eg "NotFound()" "InvalidParameter()" "Unknown()".

That said these could all just be sentinel errors with the normal unwrapping in the stdlib these days.


I agree with you in general, and I've never written code in this style.

But at the same time, converting between error and result domains is tedious and error-prone. As much as we believe separating concerns is a good thing, it's pretty likely that service layer code will never ever be used outside a HTTP service context, so... so what?

I probably still wouldn't design like this in my own stuff, but I'm not convinced it's actually so terrible.


I guess it really depends on what kind of stuff we work on. It's very common for service layers in systems that I work on to be shared between various ingress points (HTTP, GRPC, Kafka handler, etc).


Post author here.

For any non-trivial app, there would ideally be a set of domain error types/codes that the various application layers know about, rather than concerning themselves with HTTP statuses.

I didn't discuss that in the article, because I felt like it was a bit tangential. Perhaps it was a mistake to omit that detail.


sure. equal opportunity doesn't mean equal outcome.


The return on investment would likely be quite low. Who should pay for this positive right?


Well, YouTube’s got it 90% of the way there.

I didn’t say the corporations would or should be forced to pay for anyone who knocks on the door.


Oh, then we don't disagree. The internet is indeed wonderful in many ways and YouTube is a part of that -- from Indian videos about how to replace obscure components inside old printers to MIT Courseware and 3Blue1Brown. It's also possible to get a very good start on language learning using only YouTube videos.

I hate artificial barriers -- but I also feel a need to warn about the bad consequences of unrestricted positive rights.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights


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