I am still shocked Spain/Italy and USA are considered 'first world' countries. We are not in 70s or even 90s anymore. I've been to China in 2011 also thinking I am visiting some huge village but...that was the most futuristic trip I ever had. I was surprised by the penetration level of the mobile devices - everything had a QR code, you could buy/sell/send money, pay services all with a single tap on a phone.
> I am still shocked Spain/Italy and USA are considered 'first world' countries.
They're a mix. Rural southern Italy isn't the same as e.g. Milan or Venice. I've walked from 1st world to third world within a few blocks in San Francisco. It's a slightly longer walk in Cape Town.
> I was surprised by the penetration level of the mobile devices - everything had a QR code, you could buy/sell/send money,
I've has exact same experience in places in Africa (1). Yes there's poverty and crime, but also if the technology is affordable, effective and reduces the need to handle cash then it's adopted fast enough.
People's understanding of that part of the world is also decades out of date. Mobile devices actually "leapfrogged" the wired telecoms network rollout (2), but that was decades ago. Africa is huge and diverse, and it is not going to be China this decade, but also it's changing fast.
And it might be China-aligned as China positions to be a reliable trading partner with affordable goods. It's possible that affordable Chinese solar-battery electricity systems will cause another leapfrog. This includes Chinese EVs (3).
China has pursued a phased approach to growth. Instead of trying to pull everyone up at once, it’s trying to get top tier cities to a high level of development before moving to other cities. Shanghai already has a GDP per capita (PPP) that’s comparable to Madrid. But there are provincial capitals with almost 10 million people that are less than half or less than a quarter of that.
Visiting cities is also a misleading way to compare the U.S. in particular to anywhere else. I have family in town in Mississippi that has less than 10,000 people. But the town has a household income over 60% of the national household income. Cost of living adjusted, they’re about as well off as someone in a top tier city. Someone with a median household income can afford a newly renovated, 4 bedroom, 2,500 square foot house.
I've been in China in 2015 and like anywhere else in the world it was very mixed: some urban areas like central NY or central Madrid and Milan (or much shinier) and some rural areas like 200 year ago, but inevitably with electronics.
Basically in every country of the world you can travel one hour from big cities and get in a place deep in the fields or the woods with very different needs and dynamics from the city. They could be different countries and maybe both cities and countryside will be better off if we could have fractally composed states with different laws and regulations.
Americans optimize for hyper-individualistic convenience. The average one-way commute in Dallas, Texas is under 30 minutes. The average in Tokyo is 48-50 minutes. And the guy in Dallas goes to work in a perfectly climate controlled bubble where he doesn’t have to interact with anyone else, while the person in Tokyo is crammed into a rush hour subway car.
I love Tokyo too (never been to Shanghai), because I’m an asian collectivist at heart. But you can’t really compare across cultures when they’re optimizing for different things. Americans are very wealthy and spend a lot of their wealth optimizing to never have to be near other people.
Paris has a metro station everywhere at least in what a tourist can assume to be an enlarged city center. Tokyo is another city with a lot of metro stations. Manhattan too, at least up to Central Park (but 20+ since my last visit.) I don't remember Shanghai to stand out positively or negatively, but 11 years can be a long time.
I mean, you have those kind of luxuries even in the poorest of countries in Asia, it’s just that there’s still a huge discrepancy between rich and poor, city vs countryside.
It’s not difficult to find areas in all these countries that are significantly less developed than Spain/Portugal’s underdeveloped areas. It’s just not as black and white as you seem to suggest.
(I come from EU but have been living in various countries in Asia for over a decade)
From what I can tell, China has a capitalism problem, not an industrial wealth problem - they could house every one of their citizens in a decent apartment and give them gadgets and a car to drive, yet half the country is third-world poor still.
But that's because in a market economy, you can't just give away things, and those poor people don't produce much of value by capitalist standards, so the can't pay for those things.
I'm sure the CCP is working on the problem of how to give these people those things without crashing the economy.
> From what I can tell, China has a capitalism problem, not an industrial wealth problem - they could house every one of their citizens in a decent apartment and give them gadgets and a car to drive
I got an ASUS Rog Gladius III Wireless with my Asus ROG laptop. Thought it was a 'free' crap but damned. It is so good and lightweight. Has 3 modes: wifi, BT, cord. Now at my house we all have Asus Gladius mouses! There are also cheaper versions with just a cable connection. And they work without installing Asus Crap Software Center.
I had a razer mouse and headphones, which from time to time crashed their driver server or whatever and nothing could help until the cold restart of the PC and a laptop. Razer. Never again.
I use it for my interactive-fiction backend and to host save files for another game.
Nothing fancy, just a web server getting file and saving them. Like a KV-storage.
I have deployed it to dogital ocean on 2017. I have not TOUCHED it since then. Still running good. And I can access the Pharo GUI via the web VNC just from my browser with full access to the IDE and dev env.
The cons: I forgot how to run that docker image. If it fails I am in troubles reminding myself how to run it one more time. 6 years have passed...
Awesome, I’ve been learning Docker lately and asked ChatGPT how to do this. It told me to run inspect and that there was not a way to get the command used to launch the container. Thanks for sharing.
> And I can access the Pharo GUI via the web VNC just from my browser with full access to the IDE and dev env.
That's a thing I read about elsewhere, and it sounds like it has or had an integrated VNC Server - is that true (meaning run it heqdless from cli via ssh and connect to it through that), or do you need an X and leave Pharo "opened"? Any pointers appreciated ;-)
Some of us (me, for example :) have to spend multiple weeks a year to draw the design architecture of certain parts of the product. During engineering meetings everybody raised the same question: i commit to new area in product, how can I understand what are the components and how to do certain things? You can ask your colleagues but they might know it as well.
So I decided to document main flows and designs in PlantUML diagrams. having these diagrams greatly improved onboarding process, cause you can quickly glance what component does what and what are the dependencies (the code base was in JS, so it is usually quite limited on refactoring/figuring out wtf is going on).
But the problem with such approach is: diagram quickly gets out of date. Someone makes the change and the diagram makes no sense at all now. With what I saw in Gtoolkit, you can always query the real source code and build custom dev tools that always produce current and real overview of the system. I would love to have a starter kit for JS projects that you can drag and drop and start building your own tooling for your product.
How fast are your components really changing though? I write a lot of documentation for the systems I work on and rarely find old diagrams not making sense at all. Maybe smaller projects might have more changes going on but I find I have to add things more often than completely scrapping docs (the specific product I work on is almost 10 years old although the company I work for is a lot older)
You often see stuff as simple as a README get out of date. Lowering the barrier of entry to write documentation is hardly a bad thing, but the problem remains that said documentation takes time and work to stay relevant.
I am still in love of Settlers III and IV. I used to play with my sister via some direct LAN feature. Still remember how she gathered shitload of level 3 generals and I discovered that by using spies. I placed spies in the forest directly behind the tree. He was not visible until the soldier comes nearby. In this way I found her huge army. I gathered 40 elite vikings and did a special operation: 4 ferries dropped them just into the heart of her kingdom: mountains. I was able to completely destroy her economy before she could return her army. Then my looters took everything and she lost :D
Settlers V was naahhh and their latest browser based game was a disappointment as well.
