Independent of what you believe, I don't think this is the right way to approach thinking about it. It's basically emotion-oriented dismissal used as way to shortcut any substantial or nuanced discussion. It's like the opposite of intellectual curiosity.

I'm gonna need to see some proof on that 5-year-old-draws-pelicans-better claim.

The NGO delivery channels are privileged because they are charitable. That's why they get to bypass the country's restrictions. You can't open that channel up, the country would object at humanitarian exemptions being used as a backdoor for commercial imports.

What I mean is that they should use the standard commercial channels and use their economical and political channels to make sure they work well so that everyone would profit from having working import systems.

The result of this might be NGO money being used to fund inefficiency or even corruption. By maintaining their own channels, the NGOs can be more certain their funds are being used responsibly. It's possible otherwise local government would take it upon themselves to try to bleed these western NGOs.

If you read the article you would know that the problem wasn't finding the money to pay import duties (or the delivermen), the problem was not being allowed to give them the money in the first place and the sheer informality of the logistics infrastructure.

I think those studies have framing or methodological issue.

I agree the maintenance burden is probably being undervalued by developers in general, but there's just no way the work I do isn't faster. I just categorically couldn't have achieved the outputs I do now in the time windows I have. The software just wouldn't have existed in the world of 3 years ago and I did enough coding back then to say that with certainty.

They support Windows, which is many millions of lines of code not written by the current maintainers.

It's a bit harder to avoid windows than it is to avoid Bun.

More importantly, it's not the same thing at all. All the code in windows (at least until recently) was written by humans, understood by humans and reviewed by humans. And that code has stood the test of time, proven its value and stability in the wild, on billions of systems. The fact that the current maintainers haven't needed to understand or replace the code is some indication of the code's quality.

Almost none of Bun's rust code has been even seen by a human, and it's only about two weeks old.

I'm somewhat willing to accept vibe-coded code if it's either absolutely non-critical, well reviewed, or maybe in the long term if it's proven itself. But not two week old code.

That's a valid way to approach this - bun isn't valuable enough to bother with or at least wait for a while, Windows is.

But I think the comparison is closer than you are making it sound. I sincerely doubt the Windows codebase was all written by humans, let alone reviewed. And my understanding is that the code is being regularly rewritten and replaced because of how flawed it is, it's just a massive undertaking.

Also if you look at their investment in AI-driven code rewriting into Rust, my bet would be that some modern Windows code itself is being vibe-coded.

I mean should we even compare Bun to Windows in the first place? Like Mircosoft with its resources would find a way to support Bun and Windows is one of their most popular and most used products. The situation with Bun is very different in terms of business/product.

> They support Windows, which is many millions of lines of code not written by the current maintainers.

All of which was battle-tested on millions, if not billions, of devices over 40 years. The new Bun is effectively a different project than it was a month ago, with next to no prod use.

I have no problem having a dependency on a 40 year/billions of use software, I do have misgivings about a dependency on a project that has never been used in prod, and was only written last week.

Windows have a incredible degree of architectural coherence and design intentionality.

It is far easier to understand some part of the various NT source code leaks than it is to understand Claude code leak

This comment is true on both points: Dave Cutler certainly knew what he was doing.

If you're asking about logistics, try reaching out to your country's embassy in Jordan and see if you can get in touch with an aid/development worker. They know how to make things happen.

This is a very western approach to a very Ugandan problem. A trivial amount of money (for a Westerner) could have saved a lot of time and pain.

Can you please expand what you mean? It's not clear how money would have solved this problem better.

Specifically I was talking about this part

> "At some point, one man quietly pulled me aside and suggested that if I "gave something," they could help solve the problem more easily.".

You can pay that fee/bribe and things will go smoothly.

But more generally my thought was that the western idea is that bureaucracy rules are something to be followed and, even if painful, are the path to getting the state to provide the services. In Uganda, it's better to model bureaucracy as a system that exists to enable bribes and following the rules to the letter and expecting state services is fighting the system.

If you want to get goods to someone in Uganda, don't talk to the Australian Post about the rules, talk to a Ugandan importer who knows how to actually work the system that exists in practice.

Caveats about broad brushes of course, but that's the realistic approach IMO.

>If you want to get goods to someone in Uganda, don't talk to the Australian Post about the rules, talk to a Ugandan importer who knows how to actually work the system that exists in practice.

Well, as it turns out, you also need to have sufficient local knowledge on the sending end to ensure that your parcel actually manages to exit the country in the first place.

I don't think that is a real concern.

I literally have a full time employee whose job consists almost entirely of keeping track of these rules.

I get daily emails saying things like "Shipping synthetic human hair wigs via lines X, Y is now forbidden", "Shipping line Z accepts steel coils again". Much of the time there's no obvious logic behind it either, like ... why does a single shipping line decide to ban plastic wigs?

It was the local, not the Westerner, who refused to pay, right?

It was Django. But he had a very different financial situation. And a potentially fraught one as a refugee and foreigner. I would pay the bribe, but I would try very hard not to put the recipient in a position to have to do so (no criticism to the author).

Django rightly figured out he wasn’t in a hurry and he could just wait it out. The bribe is price discrimination for people who aren’t willing to sit around for a day.

Frankly Django got lucky. It is far more common for import controllers to delay until the costs of delay force you to pay.

It would have been easier and cheaper to send money to Django than to send the laptop.

Although, I'd say there is a certain charm in physical gifts.

And a MacBook at that. Not exactly the friendliest machines to experiment on, and yeah you’re right, the $400 could get a windows/linux machine one would think.

Also not sure what a computer scientist is doing plugging 12v into a usb port but maybe that was deeper into the science part than I’ve ever got.

I find that documentation creep is wildly better in AI coded environments than human ones. You can deterministic force a documentation sync process on every PR, documentation rot has gotten way better.