The great thing about living in modern times is you can do both, and mix & match as much as you want.
There's still countries/areas with large swats of land where it's you against nature. Nothing more, nothing less.
But (contrary to your ancestors millenia ago) you can bring a phone, camping gear, preserved foods, use a lighter to get that fire started, or play Tetris in-between grizzly bear attacks. ;-)
Likewise, people have options whether to 'live in the fast lane' & make lots of money, disappear into the Amazon forest, or somewhere in between. Or do the latter for 3 weeks a year only.
Explore the world, move around, try things & find out what suits you best. Oh and of course: everything changes (and will keep doing so).
Personally I do feel people (from developed countries) should get out into nature more. A good % of people have lost touch with the natural world that we all depend on. And it shows.
As the article explains: landlocked doesn't help, but it's not a big factor overall.
It's the combination of factors that make up the environment to work in: geography, politics, education, healthcare, culture, etc.
Seems like Malawi is stuck in a kind of "local minimum" where the direction to get unstuck is a political no-go area. A charismatic (and competent!) leader with a long-term vision might help. Maybe that is what's lacking?
On the low end, the actual number doesn't say much. Having $2/day to buy food from, is very different from having $2/day and a small plot of land that grows the family's food subsistence-style.
Also countries where a large % of the population works in agriculture / fishing, and/or have high rates of corruption, tend to have significant informal economies.
From developed-country point of view that may appear as an almost non-existent economy, while in reality people are still growing / building / manufacturing stuff (be it low-tech / low-value mostly). And could be happy living so.
Not saying that's the case for Malawi. Just be aware that "$2/day" paints only part of the picture of how 'rich' people are.
The trick is to hit a 'Ballmer peak', such that the overall experience is optimal. Long term effects included.
But for most psycho-active substances, such optimal dose / frequency is quite low (if not 0). A beer during a BBQ with friends? Fine. Some recreational drug to enhance the experience of say, a music festival? That I can understand.
But needing a smoke 10, 15..20x all day, every day? Look in the mirror, and admit: you're just an addict, damaging your health.
"Moving atoms" can refer to anything that a) touches the physical world, b) has 'eyes' (camera/microphone/Lidar/IR/UV/whatever) and c) requires some brains.
Dark factories exist. This will expand into other areas like logistics, farming, food delivery, maintenance/cleaning jobs, household equipment, etc etc. Over time, blue collar jobs face the same fate.
A lot of this will be powered by AI systems running locally on commodity hardware.
And this is where China is leading: They've got the factories. They build the robots. They make the ICs with integrated video capture & AI features. They fabricate the circuit boards those ICs go on. And they lead in the small/local AI models to run those.
To compete, US would need to re-shore manufacturing which takes decades. Same for EU countries (which have great potential imho if they weren't so slooooww to act & would focus on doing vs. regulate).
Never mind that the billions poured into AI by US companies, are targetting white collar/creative jobs, with the AI part as a cloud service. Or military applications. Not (so much) the manufacturing / logistics etc side of things.
Ah, see, I agree with you more than you think. Industrial automation _is_ super useful and it happens right now. But it's not really the latest AI wave that is the most important in that. And my point is that before the general humanoids work, there are lower hanging fruits to pick.
Insightful, funny, colorful, visionary in places & not a speck of naivety in sight. Well worth the read.
"(..) tending to favor the creation of small, fast-moving, short-lived adhocracies...digitized hunter-gatherer groups roaming the steppes of Cyberspace."
They're called startups. Or hacker groups, if you will. Not much difference between those 2 imho.
> It particularly used to really piss me off that when I was partway through working on something and had several applications open, with data loaded, that if I tried to leave it like that overnight so I'd be able to continue immediately the next morning, chances are Windows would decide to update and reboot, closing everything.
Whenever I use a recent(ish) Windows (rarely :-), it's annoyances like this that make for a poor UX. Again & again.
When you put a computer to sleep/hibernate, you expect it to come out of sleep in a similar state as before. When you select "shut down", you expect that. Not "installing update 1..20, then shut down".
It keeps amazing me that within Microsoft, after having done so many OSes used by millions, some eggheads think that breaking user expectations is a good design decision. It is not.
> ..and inspiring every studio to stop what they are doing and make something in that genre.
This. After Doom, there were maaany releases where a studio had X out there, and then released [3D version of X]. Or also throw themselves onto the fps genre. Almost to the point of killing innovation.
Don't get me wrong: that, and the 'infinite' storage of CD-ROMs got us many nice games.
But neither did much to sharpen game developer's creativity skills. Many "me too! (meh..)" releases in that era.
Distinction between compiled vs. interactive is important. But it becomes less relevant the shorter compile/edit/debug cycles are. The "instant feedback" aspect is what matters.
For a # of years I used a setup with all my favourite tools running from a RAMdisk. That's on MSX2/2+. Edit/assemble/debug cycles in <1 minute if so desired. There was also KUN BASIC on that platform: a JIT compiler for (a subset of) MSX-BASIC. Speedups of ~10..20x or more for many programs or -sections with near-zero effort.
And of course, all this could be freely mixed. Short snippets of machine code for speed/'heavy lifting', BASIC to glue everything together & make quick edits.
Sadly this seems to be lost on modern platforms. Despite >10,000 faster cpu's, ungodly amounts of RAM, storage etc.
There's still countries/areas with large swats of land where it's you against nature. Nothing more, nothing less.
But (contrary to your ancestors millenia ago) you can bring a phone, camping gear, preserved foods, use a lighter to get that fire started, or play Tetris in-between grizzly bear attacks. ;-)
Likewise, people have options whether to 'live in the fast lane' & make lots of money, disappear into the Amazon forest, or somewhere in between. Or do the latter for 3 weeks a year only.
Explore the world, move around, try things & find out what suits you best. Oh and of course: everything changes (and will keep doing so).
Personally I do feel people (from developed countries) should get out into nature more. A good % of people have lost touch with the natural world that we all depend on. And it shows.
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