You learn a lot more by reading code than writing it.
So reading the output i believe is an immensely big gift by an LLM, because if you actually take note - and of course know your skills - then ot becomes such a great pal to work with.
I like reading what the LMM gives me, not always, but a lot of times.
It's quite a surprising result: it turns out that there are cases where seeing someone else work through a worked example is more effective than struggling through the problem yourself.
(Obviously it doesn't apply universally, but your "see how ridiculous that sounds?" suggests to me you may not have heard of this before.)
As that link says, this approach is used in Maths textbooks, and yet, as the parent of two kids, I have never come across a single student who is able to pass trig without working the problems.
If reality differs from the results of academic studies, it's not the reality that is wrong.
The worked-example effect doesn't say that worked examples replace exercises. It says that worked examples prior to exercises beats exercises alone.
There's a section on that page about faded worked examples:
> "In order to facilitate the transition from learning from worked examples in earlier stages of skill acquisition to problem solving in later stages, it is effective to successively fade out worked solution steps"
As long as the literature contains insights a reader isn't aware about, reading the literature is low-hanging fruit compared to having to derive all the things yourself.
As soon as the literature no longer contains insights, it becomes more productive to explore mathematics oneself by trial and error.
Organized education will model this on a topic by topic basis: during class you're handed the more valuable insights on a silver platter, during an exam you are prevented from looking at your textbook.
Every time you read a chapter and do the exercises it's a small simulacrum of catching low hanging fruit followed by making sure you can derive similar statements with trial and error for fixing any gaps. The trial and error while you do problems does improve your intuition, but only trial and error is like having every student redevelop the frontier starting from antiquity.
For most of us, writing code is the way to carve out intuition into an artifact. But, I have noticed some people are able to read deeply - and by that I mean, reverse the code to understand the intuition that brought it to life. This is a rare skill and I dont have it, but some do. Not just for code, but also for any book - fiction or non-fiction - some are able to deconstruct the scenarios much better than others, and in that sense understand what they read.
I feel one need to also have developed the intuition by writing lots of code for reading to be really effective.
An an analogy I’m reading a lot of German those days as I’m aiming to become fluent, and it’s very effective to improve only because I spend so much time developing a the intuition by going through the whole grammar, forcing myself to write, forcing myself to speak, etc. Doing only the reading improves your pattern recognition, but doesn’t make you go as deep as one who also writes and speak. If you combine the different aspects they reinforce each other and you progress way faster
> I feel one need to also have developed the intuition by writing lots of code for reading to be really effective.
This is one of the problems young engineers are going to face who rely excessively on AI to generate code. Their intuitions on what constitutes good code will not sharpen, since they are not exercising the tool that sharpens it which is writing code. Intuitions start fuzzy, and incorrect, and gradually sharpen with precise communication of said intuition in the form of writing code or proofs. Reading alone may delude one into a sense of false mastery where intuitions are actually fuzzy, but one thinks otherwise.
a lot of people get stuck, or code up a naive brute force algorithm and call it a day, nothing intrinsically forces a coder that refuses to look at the work of others to write better code.
The amount of shit that gets shipped from China to Europe (world) is fucking ludicrous, and people should be taxed heavily for the stupid shit they often don't need.
Unfortunately, if you want to fix electronics more often than not China is the only place you can buy spare parts. I don't think buying spare parts to devices counts as "stupid shit".
If you were to interpret the comment you’re responding to charitably, you’d understand that electronics components are a minuscule minority of all of Chinese exports.
Sure! I understand that everyone buying stuff on Temu and Shein is horrific. At the same time, me paying $$$ for ordering electrical components from China is rough for me. And also, I find it mind-blowing and ridiculous that Ali offered free shipping for small orders for so long whereas if I'd buy local I need to pay up for shipping, and if I'd start a small business in the Netherlands, shipping to the rest of the EU for small parcels is prohibitively expensive, not even taking into account PPWR
I'm tired of being told I don't matter because I'm in a minority. You'd never dare imply a tax making gypsy folk singing unviable is fine because it's a "miniscule minority" of all music played, so why do it for electronics repair?
But a ban on making loud noises after midnight would also impact a gypsy who likes to folk sing after midnight and it would be pretty ludicrous to cite that as a reason not to do it.
The right thing to do is not to sweep him under a rug because "there's only a few such gypsies", but to look at what he's doing and say "yes, this is what we want to ban". Being a in minority is not a shield from consequences, but it shouldn't be a reason for dismissal either.
In the case of the 3-EUR-tariff, nobody has come out and said "we want to make small electronics production/repair untenable", so I'm optimistically assuming its effects are not intentional.
Yup and those parts often cost literal cents making the €3,60 per item a ridiculously high fee. All while we're protecting the environment by repairing things.
I did two orders from Aliexpress recently. On the first one they did count the fee per item, on the second they already had the categories figured out & counted the fee only per category.
Since then I am now getting "duty saving" adverts for them where they help you to get items on sale & in the same category. So it took them like two months not to only adapt, but to use the fee as apart of their marketing. ;-)
Oh ok I kinda stopped ordering from them since it was introduced. I've been ordering lots of stuff before it came in so I could have some stock of things I use a lot, like WS2812B LEDs, micro screws etc.
I was really infuriated when I heard that it was mainly the big chains like Lidl, Aldi, Ahold that have been lobbying for this crap. They are always trying to kill the little guy.
Right, so tell me where in Europe can I buy replacement parts for random electronics when I need them? Often very specific ICs, last time it was a cassette deck pinch roller, etc.
Preferably somewhere where it’s cheaper than the value of the thing being repaired.
Yes, and that's a whole different problem, which in itself does not equal stupid shit.
The reason the price for parcels from China is going up in Europe is not shipping chips or component, it's from shipping stupid fucking shit people do not need, from e.g Temu and copied goods such as clothing, shoes and what not.
The toll offices in the airports are being drowned in cheap crap. Shut it down by making people pay more for the shit they buy. That will of course hurt everyone else, but that is how it works.
Might it just be that people are buying from Temu because stuff at the mall is 10x as expensive and doesn’t even last all that longer nowadays? People can’t afford to pay 40€ for a T shirt.
As if everyone wear fast fashion from their local retail store for 20 years. Truth is many people are buying new clothes because they want new clothes and not because they break (just like many in HN buys new electronics even if their computer from 20 years still boots)
The fact that these clothes tend to be in the category of "doesn't last or made of plastic" (plus low human labour costs) is what makes them cheap enough to be possible for people to order/buy them in as large quantities.
Maybe switch to less frequent random inspections instead of looking at every parcel? That would reduce the costs immediately at the "price" of letting in some illegal drugs and weapons. Sign me up.
I’ve found that those sites tend to charge insane amounts for shipping (20€+ to Portugal at least) which considering the price of the parts in question generally makes it not worth it unfortunately. Maybe it’s better now, I haven’t tried in a few years.
You're replying to a comment that proposes a market-based solution. Shipping has externalities. Those externalities should be included in the cost of shipping. Then the market will make the right decision.
Every time I see somebody make an argument about "externalities" it's never actually backed up with any fact-based analysis about the magnitude of them. It's always exclusively vibes-based, "this thing you like is too cheap, it should be prohibitively expensive to make up for the thing I just thought of"
How do you expect people to discuss them across the scale of a whole economy without giant spreadsheets? Externalities are a well understood economic concept whose study goes back a century.
I'm not saying externalities don't exist, I'm saying that basically every time somebody makes an argument relying on the concept, there's no attempt to quantify the externalized cost, it's just a vibe. Just go upthread, the argument is just "the stuff you're buying is crap that I don't think you really need, therefore it should be more expensive, however much more it takes for you to stop buying it".
The economic concept implies that we're going to have an evidence-based discussion about how we're tracking specific dollar cost amounts of pollution or something, and then in practice that essentially never happens and it's just "I've decided you don't really need that thing you want"
That’s because it would not be possible to discuss reasonably these things without writing a thesis. It’s better to hand wave the cost of the externalities and those that are familiar with the domain will understand - rather than writing a thesis on “the externalities of manufacturing and distributing <product> in this <industry> <subsector> in <country> and relative cost to export versus produce locally.”
Well, if some bureaucratic governing body provides decisions based on some opaque system, and forces these upon market participants - usually that is regarded just the opposite of market-based solutions in economics. Those decisions do have zero chance of internalizing external costs, but most likely will just add an other layer of externality and move the process even more into the field of non-market based coordination mechanisms.
They did not make the argument of externalities. My impression was that they tax the shit out of things they don't like personally, to minimize their consumption.
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