Reluctant VScode user here. Sublime's speed make it the best editor to work with by far, but its package manager is in a sorry state. A good 70%+ of packages are outdated or don't work.
Assistants that work best in the hands of someone who already knows what they're doing, removing tedium and providing an additional layer of quality assurance.
Pilot's still needed to get the plane in the air.
But even if the output from these tools is perfect, coding isn't only (or even mainly) about writing code, it's about building complex systems and finding workable solutions through problems that sometimes look like cul de sacs.
Once your codebase reaches a few thousand lines, LLMs struggle seeing the big picture and begin introducing one new problem for every one that they solve.
It does have a tendacy to meander or spend too time reflecting on a topic instead of distilling the details. However the new ability to add a prompt improves this greatly.
Some instructions that worked for me:
- Specifics instead of high level
- Approach from non-critical perspective
- Dont be philosophical
- Use direct quotes often
- Focus on the details. Provide a lesson, not reflections
- Provide a 'sparknotes' style thorough understanding of the subject
> I have had this feeling twice. Both times my overwhelming thought was "Wow, I've been an idiot."
Same experience here. I'm a beginner swimmer and got caught in a rip tide in Bali.
The thing was, it was terrifying yet so calm at the same time. Everybody on the beach continued to bathe, unaware, and a few metres away I was frantically but silently fighting for my life.
The helplessness is especially haunting. You exert this primal will to life, and the force of nature just brushes it aside.
Anyway, I made it out, spent that evening binging Youtube videos about rip tides, and have developed a healthy aversion to ocean water.
Rip currents aren't just a hazard on the ocean, for that matter. Seiches on Lake Michigan can produce both rip currents and rogue waves, and people have been killed by them.
At a beach near my place, 3 young athletic men went swimming after soccer training at a fairly elite level. Got stuck in a tidal rip on a fairly calm day. 2 died. Hard to believe.
It's an uncomfortable title, but it's a truth that must be confronted. How have once downtrodden countries like Korea, China, and large swaths of Eastern Europe been able to turn rags into riches while most of Africa has so far failed to?
GDP is not everything of course. But even on measures of safety, why is Africa so much more violent than equally poor Laos or Cambodia?
South America shares some of Africa's woes, so perhaps it's not a uniquely African problem. But it seems less bad, and the region has produced success stories.
I've heard it said that Africa has yet to have its naissance. Maybe, hopefully, that's it and things will get better over time. But with the current corrupt institutions and leadership that looks to be a gargantuan task.
> How have once downtrodden countries like Korea, China, and large swaths of Eastern Europe been able to turn rags into riches while most of Africa has so far failed to?
At least for Eastern Europe, the answer is very clear: the European Union imposing a serious baseline regarding democracy, rule of law and corruption. While Poland and especially Hungary are testing how far the patience of the EU can stretch, in general it's still holding up. On top of that, Eastern European nations/their populations wanted to join the EU desperately, wishing to never experience authoritarian realsozialismus again.
China had an immense amount of young, trainable people and a lack of environmental and worker regulations, which the West was all too keen on exploiting, and established trade routes from UK empire times. That's how they got big.
Africa, in contrast, had and widely still has nothing. No coalition/federation that pushed applicants to improve, no/barely any external interest in the countries, no major trade routes, no one who gave a flying fuck about the entire region. The US largely don't care as long as there is no bad actor threatening their interests (such as ISIS, al-Quaeda and its offshoots), Europe doesn't care about anything but getting rid of migrants no matter what, the Arabs don't care, and there aren't natural resources worth the trouble of extracting them without violating supply chain concerns. The only ones at least caring a bit about Africa as a continent are the Chinese, but they don't care about politics as long as they get a supply of workers and a potential market for cheap crap now that Europe and the US are saturated - we're seeing first signs of that by Chinese fast fashion taking over clothing from Western "second hand" (mitumba) stuff.
IMO the main problem is the arbitrary way borders were drawn in Africa by colonialists. Too many ethnicities that didn't get along very well suddenly shared a common state, while others were split between many countries. When even much richer and educated areas have problems with multiculturalism of much smaller scale (the Balkans, Spain, Belgium for example), it's not surprising that countries like DR Congo with over 200 languages spoken are basically ungovernable through democratic means. The border situation isn't anywhere near as bad in South America and most of Asia - and even there countries which lack common national identity tend to be less stable than others.
Peaceful coexistence of many cultures within the same society is a nice idea, but in reality it's very hard to do right due to the tribal nature of our specie. Highly successful multicultural countries appear to be an exception, rather than a norm.
> Highly successful multicultural countries appear to be an exception, rather than a norm.
Them why is this "ideal" of multiculturalism so heavily pushed in media and government action?
I personally speak four languages conversationally and from my familiarity, I cannot imagine even these similar cultures agreeing on enough basic values to form a stable society. How could dozens of cultures with different values and worldviews ever form a body of law that respects each tribe's values, customs, and interests?
By the popular conception of "diversity," these arbitrary dividing lines should certainly be a strength and not a weakness. It's telling that "mixing different cultures together" becomes a reason in hindsight that an African country fails , but looking to the future is supposed to be a reason a Western country (or company, etc.) will succeed. It's difficult to see how these claims can both be true.
Plenty of European countries have more than one language, only recently got 1 unified language.
You have countries like India that manage to make a cohesive country out of disparate peoples.
That's not to say these aren't contributing factors.
My current 'theory' / observation is that sub Saharan Africa never really had large scale civilisations, I wonder if that colours their conception of what a nation state is.
Eg, if you think in terms of tribes. Perhaps that hinders scaling up to something bigger.
If these peoples have been living and fighting and reproducing successfully for millennia, why do Europeans and Americans think it necessary to get group them into states and force them to form large-scale heterogeneous bodies of law? Does that just make it easier to remove the mineral wealth from the continent?
Or do they need to develop their own concept of the state, or at the risk of sounding imperialistic, do they need to learn the concept of the nation state?
Broadly speaking I would say having structures larger than a tribe is a net benefit. Whatever form that may take.
>Or do they need to develop their own concept of the state, or at the risk of sounding imperialistic, do they need to learn the concept of the nation state?
Western governments need to stop assassinating leaders and toppling democratically elected governments every few years for that to happen. That hasnt stopped and it has a chilling effect, which is the purpose.
>It's an uncomfortable title, but it's a truth that must be confronted. How have once downtrodden countries like Korea, China, and large swaths of Eastern Europe been able to turn rags into riches while most of Africa has so far failed to?
It's all of Africa. I was flabbergasted to learn that, contrary to what I'd heard for years about how Africa was poor but rapidly growing, the truth is that Africa is poor and not growing at all. <https://np.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/6krxpv/world_map_of...>
> GDP is not everything of course. But even on measures of safety, why is Africa so much more violent than equally poor Laos or Cambodia?
Can you point to some statistics to back this up? I've lived in Africa for most of my life, and I struggle to see the truth of this. Apart from some countries at war, where is tis extreme violence going on? For what it's worth, I felt far more unsafe when I lived in the US.
Compare how many people were killed in wars in the 20th century, by continent. Africa has been by far more peaceful compared to Europe and Asia; it's not even close.
Why? I really do not care anymore. How much have been poured in? How many marshall plans in $? While Germany rose from a bombed out nation in 1945 to the EU's strongest economy?
South Korea too is even more impressive, from an illiterate peasant nation to now with Samsung and all that.
Japan got hit with the most destructive man made weapon, twice. Granted, they were an Asian powerhouse up to WW2.
I think the key is education and "making your own shit". Have any African nations made weapons, planes, tanks, communications equipment, trains, cars, and now computers and phones in the same ilk?
Being Swedish, we are 10milion only and have made planes, submarines, ericsson + vast mining and forest operations with assorted companies. :)
Nothing. Do you actually think vast sums have been poured into Africa, with the objective of helping its development? If so, I'd like to disabuse you of that notion.
Actually, development aid to Africa (a drop in the ocean compared to what the US sends to Israel, or spent on the Iraq/Afghan war each week, for instance) is intended to hinder its development, by propping up the donor countries industries at the expense of local industry, or by supporting rulers who tow the western line.
I cannot go into all the reasons why/how this is the case, but all the information is out there if you search for it.
Those three nations were heavily invested in by the US after WW2 and Korean war as bulwarks against communism, perhaps not the best examples of pulling themselves up by the bootstraps.
Are we not counting Haiti or Jamaica? If we’re counting “black” as “African”, then yeah. But then “There are no successful African countries” seems a lot less difficult to prove/refute.
Jamaica, and especially Haiti, are in no way "successes". The Dominican Republic is not exactly a rich country, but the contrast between it and Haiti are so stark as to beggar the imagination.
> it makes sense to evaluate states not just on their immediate utility, but on the utility of future states they make possible or exclude, and the states necessary to pass through to achieve them.
Great way to frame it. Somewhat similarly, I view it as path dependency: your current choices are constrained by previous choices, meaning the further you deviate from the person you wish to be the harder it is to turn things around if the future you so wishes to.
I saw the exact same commentary around the no-code hype of the past few years and it made me increasingly cynical. No-code tools made it super easy to create a boilerplate website that looked pretty but was not fit for purpose. Meanwhile it was advertised as "Build an AirBnB clone without code!".
OK fine, hyperbole as a marketing tactic. But many people handed over wads of cash for courses that promised results that were in reality no more than cardboard cutouts of actual websites.
The Internet appears to have an endless ability to create markets for don't-do-the-work-and-still-enjoy-the-reward snakeoil.
And now we have ChatGPT- an instant boilerplate-creating machine. Watch as a new (or in many cases the same) class of charlatans grease up this technological wave too.
> average ppl do not give a fuck/doesn't help them that much
I shared this opinion no more than a month ago. Then I decided to keep a ChatGPT-4 tab open for a week and lean on it for questions. I'm around 3x more productive. It's wild.
Anyone that uses a computer for work will benefit from this technology, or be upended by it.
I agree though, Google has the ability to catch up. But will they? They're a big boring company now. Slow and risk averse.
Yeah, I'm waiting for MS/Bing to open it for everyone. Until then I use perplexity. It's quite good, mostly because it gives back the relevant answers with source included, from sites that have almost zero chance to pop up in a google result.
Fix this and I'd be back in a flash.
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