I was going to share a link to this. Thank you for making `cs`, I use it both with LLMs and directly in the terminal, despite not performing indexing it's pretty fast for my needs. Also definitely planning to try out semble.
This was an interesting thread to read as a Malawian living right here in Malawi and frustrated about our situation. As the article mentions, we have a lot of things going for us that should have us in a better situation - very few natural disasters, no wars/civil unrest, even though the rains are sketchy sometimes we generally have good rainfall and even though we have challenges with food sometimes, it's rare to hear someone actually died of hunger.
However, there are a multitude of problems that have resulted in us being where we are. Now mind you, I am just a software engineer not a development expert (but for some credibility, I was the first engineer at Malawian owned Credit Reference Bureau and built most of the software there and I have worked with Social Cash Transfer program before as a consultant).
* Infrastructure is a big problem, we have poor road infrastructure, almost no rail or airline industry though those are picking up as of recent years. Very few Malawians have access to electricity, I believe some reports indicated less than 10%. Most of our population lives in rural areas. Internet penetration is growing but even cell tower coverage is not yet there - our TELCOS have about 3-4 million subscribers max, we are a population of about 20 million people (maybe 40% under 19?) and yet our largest bank only has about 2 or 3 million customers.
* We have low literacy rates and high dropout rates especially in rural areas. This is worrying for a population with almost half being youth/children. Our school infrastructure is also not that great, it is not strange to find a class of students learning under a tree in some rural and peri-urban areas.
* Corruption and mismanagement of funds - this is a big problem here. A lot of the money in the government programs and NGO/Donor programs finds it's way into individuals' pockets. Some of the initiatives are well meaning but because of corruption and pilfering of funds the impact isn't always felt at the level that's expected.
* Mismanagement of Natural resources - we have deposits of gold, rutile, uranium and other materials - we have companies from Australia/China and the likes setting up and possibly benefitting without giving much back to the country besides some veiled Corporate Social Responsibility activities, with parts of the funds going into people's pockets - we need to do better to control our resources but the low literacy rates and lack of awareness of some of these things affects how we as citizens react.
* There's lots online about our agriculture, so I won't spend too much time there - only to say we need to do better to mechanize and not rely too much on the rain cycles. I'm saying this as someone who has gotten into farming recently and is frustrated by how... manual it all is :)
There's a lot more I could say but I hope this give somewhat of a picture.
I should just mention, Malawians are some of the brightest most hardworking people you will ever meet but also trustworthy and loyal. You will probably meet a Malawian doctor in any part of the world and our software engineers are getting there too, we just need the exposure and opportunity to prove ourselves. I help moderate a community of developers and I can tell you we have talent and we do come cheap (even as low as $25/hr ;)
If you are ever in the market to try working with some Malawians, contact is on the profile :)
pom.xml and package.json came up on couple of separate projects I ran the commands on. Which makes sense because the versions get bumped rather frequently. I guess context matters, as usual.
Nice, this seems interesting. I don't use Obsidian (I use Logseq) but this has given me a couple of ideas for a CRM I am building (it's currently in a Personal Relationship manager phase which I've found useful for about a year or two).
I also thought the same thing. Had to double take and scroll to see I'm not alone. It's an interesting phenomenon, I suspect the title was too on the nose that it invokes an immediate reaction.
Anyways, I wish more people commented on what's actually in the article - i've observed what OP is complaining about happening in whatsapp groups too esp when there is a difference of opinion; people defer to calling Meta's in-chat AI instead of giving a bit more effort and stating _their_ view.
I'm still working on basi[0], a Playwright alternative syntax/tool. I am curious about using LightPanda as an optional headless browser for it and wrote about it here[1]
Postgres can definitely handle a lot of use cases; background job scheduling always had me tempted to reach for something like rabbitmq but so far happy enough with riverqueue[0] for Go projects.
Where I come from (Malawi, Africa), WhatsApp is so widespread that most people prefer it over email - to the extent that people don't really check their e-mails unless it's required for work or they are applying for something. For most people, WhatsApp is the de-facto communication channel.
I help moderate a community of developers and we hit the whatsapp group limit of 1024 members and sometimes have to wait for someone to leave (intentionally or accidentally) before we can add new members. We've tried to move people onto "better" platforms like Discord or Slack but we always end up coming back to WhatsApp which is subsidized via MNOs (mobile network operators) social media data/internet bundles and for the fact that most people are just stuck on whatsapp.
Hi Eric, this is very nice work! I played with this and love the idea and execution. I have had similar thoughts about how chatting with AI seems to lack some of the elements you mention that we get from talking to other people.
I appreciate that you've made it open source and will be checking out the code and maybe that can get me to finally play with Tauri :)
This has inspired me to move my personal blog to Hugo aswell. I have been using Hashnode[0] for the past few years and while it's okay, they recently automatically deleted one of my blog posts which was written in my local language, Chichewa and was one of my popular amongst, even non-developers.
Ironically, my company's blog and websites are built with Hugo.
Thanks for all the great work. How good is the model at composing actions and is there a way to say, give the model ability to scope actions, for example if actions are related to permissions or some other context? Would one need to pass the role or permission as context or finetune separately?
Trying to keep it simple but I can already feel some "design pressure" to think about making the DSL more complete (language) by adding features like loops and variables. Still early days!
Looks interesting and good use case for introducing folks to extending web apps with WASM functionality.
Used a similar technique using tinygo wasm builds (without Vite ofcourse) on toy project where WASM based functionality acted as a fallback if the API wasn't available or user was offline - found it an interesting pattern.
Mass assignment problems sometimes also come from (improper?) use of frameworks. This goes beyond frameworks and more about how thorough the testing and review of how the user account modification and access control is done.