The American Age Is Over

Benchmarking LLM social skills with an elimination game

Political problems can be solved with technical solutions. Take the problem of food insecurity in third-world countries as an example. It's a hard problem to solve because transporting food overland via unpaved roads through politically unstable areas is expensive and dangerous. Long-term, using highly-productive first-world agribusiness to feed the third-world will fail, because no matter how cheaply agribusiness can produce food the transportation costs will make the whole enterprise cost prohibitive. This is a political problem: we can easily produce enough food to feed the entire world, but we can't get that food to the places where it is most needed due to political instability. But it's a political problem with an engineering solution. If the tools and techniques needed to efficiently grow food are cheap and widely available, farmers in politically unstable areas can simply grow their own food without a dependence on far away agribusiness. GMO crops crafted for nutritional value and hardiness, easily accessible guides on farming best practices, weather forecasting, irrigation, fertilizer, pesticides, financial markets to hedge against risk, cheap tools and machinery; these are all unsolved or partially solved problems. Whenever someone comes up with a "good new thing" that improves the SOTA in terms of value per dollar in one of these areas, we get closer to solving the political problem of global food security.

If political realities prevent us from solving problems, then we can either change the political realities or create new solutions. Individuals generally can't change political realities, but they can create good new things that work around them. So it is good advice.

The untold story of America's hidden role in Ukrainian military operations

> Preparatory Refactoring says that you should first refactor to make a change easy, and then make the change. The refactor change can be quite involved, but because it is semantics preserving, it is easier to evaluate than the change itself.

> In human software engineering, a common antipattern when trying to figure out what to do is to jump straight to proposing solutions, without forcing everyone to clearly articulate what all the requirements are. Often, your problem space is constrained enough that once you write down all of the requirements, the solution is uniquely determined; without the requirements, it’s easy to devolve into a haze of arguing over particular solutions.

> When you’re learning to use a new framework or library, simple uses of the software can be done just by copy pasting code from tutorials and tweaking them as necessary. But at some point, it’s a good idea to just slog through reading the docs from top-to-bottom, to get a full understanding of what is and is not possible in the software.

> The Walking Skeleton is the minimum, crappy implementation of an end-to-end system that has all of the pieces you need. The point is to get the end-to-end system working first, and only then start improving the various pieces.

> When there is a bug, there are broadly two ways you can try to fix it. One way is to randomly try things based on vibes and hope you get lucky. The other is to systematically examine your assumptions about how the system works and figure out where reality mismatches your expectations.

> The Rule of Three in software says that you should be willing to duplicate a piece of code once, but on the third copy you should refactor. This is a refinement on DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) accounting for the fact that it might not necessarily be obvious how to eliminate a duplication, and waiting until the third occurrence might clarify.

These are lessons that I've learned the hard way (for some definition of "learned", these things are simple but not easy), but I've never seen them phrased to succinctly and accurately before. Well done OP!