Your productivity has not increased by a few times unless you're measuring purely by lines of code written, which has been firmly established over the decades as a largely meaningless metric.
I needed to track the growth of "tx_ucast_packets" in each queue on a network interface earlier.
I asked my friendly LLM to run every second and dump the delta for each queue into a csv, 10 seconds to write what I wanted, 5 seconds later to run it, then another 10 seconds to reformat it after looking at the output.
It had hardcoded the interface, which is what I told it to do, but I'm happy with it and want to change the interface, so again 5 seconds of typing and it's using argparse to take in a bunch of variables.
That task would have taken me far longer than 30 seconds to do 5 years ago.
Now if only AI can reproduce the intermittent problem with packet ordering I've been chasing down today.
I'm measuring by the amount of time it takes me to write a piece of code that does something I want, like make a plot or calculate some quantity of interest.
Or even the fact that I was able to start coding in an entirely new ML framework right away without reading any documentation beforehand.
I'm puzzled by the denialism about AI-driven productivity gains in coding. They're blindingly obvious to anyone using AI to code nowadays.
A few weeks ago I was interested in median price paid in the UK for property. I pulled down a 900,000 line csv from gov.uk and asked chapgpt to give me a python to parse it based on price (col 2) and county (col14), then output the 10,25,50,75,90 percentiles.
It dropped out a short file which used
from statistics import quantiles
Now maybe that python module isn't reliable, but as it's an idle curiosity I'm happy enough to trust it.
Now maybe I could import a million line spreadsheet and get that data out, but I'd normally tackle this with writing some python, which is what I asked it to do. It was far faster than me, even if I knew the statistics/quantiles module inside out.
I'm not adding a+b. It will be more like, "Calculate the following nontrivial physical quantity from this catalog of measurements, reproject the measurements to this coordinate system, calculate the average and standard deviation using this pixelization scheme, estimate the power spectrum, and then make the following 3 plots."
This would have taken me an hour previously. It now takes a few minutes at most.
I feel like many AI skeptics are disconnected from reality at this point.
It feels like our (US) political system; people in their camps refuse to believe any data proposing a benefit of the "other" camp.
For me, the rise of the TUI agents, emerging ways of working (mostly SDD, and how to manage context well), and the most recent releases of models have pushed me past a threshold, where I now see value in it.
The reason why Chinese people have difficulty pronouncing Indo-European languages is that Chinese has a very limited set of syllables, and they always follow the pattern (consonant) + vowel + (nasal/rhotic consonant), with possibly one of the consonants being dropped.
Chinese does not have clusters of consonants like "rst" in "first." The closest thing in Chinese phonology to "first" would be something like "fi-re-se-te." If you grow up never pronouncing consonant clusters, they are incredibly difficult to learn.
This is all related to the existence of tones, but tones are not the direct reason why Chinese people have difficulty pronouncing words like "first." Tone provides one additional way of differentiating syllables, so Chinese can get away with having far fewer syllables than non-tonal languages. You essentially get 4-5 different versions of every syllable.
> This is all related to the existence of tones, but tones are not the direct reason why Chinese people have difficulty pronouncing words like "first."
Actually they kind of are. The tonal system of modern Chinese dialects developed from voiced initial constants of syllables. Old Chinese (Han dynasty and older) might not have been a tonal language altogether. Many linguists think that they developed from final consonants that have since disappeared, and before that happened, yes, Chinese would have had (some) consonant clusters. But still nothing like essentially free-form syllables like other language families.
They're indirectly related to the difficulty Chinese native speakers have with learning to pronounce Indo-European languages, in that the tones developed as Chinese syllables became more simple and restricted.
The tones are really not as difficult as people make them out to be.
90% of the effort in learning any language is just learning massive amounts of vocabulary.
Things like tone and grammar are the very basics that you learn right at the beginning.‡ Beginners complain about them, but after a few months of studying Chinese, you should be fairly comfortable with the tones. Then, you spend years learning vocabulary.
The two things that make Chinese difficult are:
1. The lack of shared vocabulary with Indo-European languages (this obviously doesn't apply if your native language is something with more shared vocabulary with Chinese).
2. The writing system, which because it's not phonetic requires essentially the same level of effort as learning an entirely new language (beyond spoken Chinese).
‡. The same goes for grammar issues (like declension and conjugation) that people always complain about when learning Indo-European languages. These are the very basics that you learn early on. Most of the real effort is in learning vocab.
>Things like tone and grammar are the very basics that you learn right at the beginning.‡ Beginners complain about them, but after a few months of studying Chinese, you should be fairly comfortable with the tones.
Disagree slightly with this- pronouncing the tones individually and getting to the point where you can be understood isn't too hard (well still hard), but combining them when speaking more quickly is more challenging, especially if you want it to flow nicely, and adding emphasis while maintaining the tones. Not that it's mandatory if you just want to understand/be understood, it depends on one's goals.
It's a common misconception that it's enough just to learn the tones and move on and it's very hard to find teachers who are able to help with more advanced pronunciation
I fully agree that a lot of the difficulty with the tones is in pronouncing them at pace, and in internalizing how they interact with one another.
However, this is still something that happens very early on when learning Chinese, and it takes nowhere near the same amount of invested time as learning thousands of vocabulary terms.
Yours is the first comment I strongly agree with; as a multilingual/bicultural Asian American, children don't have this supposed difficulty hearing tones.
Most of it is passively paying attention. It should not be a struggle, it's one of those the more you struggle and overintellectualize the less time you are focusing on paying attention and letting your hearing ability do its work it was evolved to do.
The other thing is this whole emphasis on accents is misdirected. Teachers do not place this excessive emphasis on accents, it is people who want to sound "authentic" which is not a very wise goal of language learning in the first place.
I do think that learning music can help a little, especially a sonically complex instrument like violin and the like.
(caveat: I'm way oversimplifying on my Saturday afternoon, but that's my tentative views on this that I would try to argue for.)
I've seen people struggle to pronounce a word when I explicitly tell them what tones it contains, but then pronounce it perfectly when I ask them to just imitate me.
But I disagree about accents. One of the major flaws in most foreign language education, in my opinion, is that pronunciation is not emphasized heavily enough at the beginning. Being able to pronounce the basic sounds correctly has a huge impact on how native speakers perceive your language skills, even if you're not very advanced in the language.
> Being able to pronounce the basic sounds correctly has a huge impact on how native speakers perceive your language skills, even if you're not very advanced in the language.
That's true, but it counsels against trying to develop better pronunciation early.
If you sound like a native despite having just started to learn the language, people will naturally conclude that you are mentally retarded.
It does actually get much more difficult to fix your accent as you improve in a language. You have to significantly regress, slowing down your speech and taking pains to say everything correctly. You can lock in a good accent early on with much less effort.
There's really no risk in having too good of an accent early on. People will assume you're more advanced than you are, but once you tell them you're learning, they'll simply be impressed by your lack of an accent. There are worse things that could happen.
> 2. The writing system, which because it's not phonetic requires essentially the same level of effort as learning an entirely new language (beyond spoken Chinese).
This is an interesting observation. Another one that I sometimes mention to my friends who didn't have an occasion to learn Chinese before is that in this language speaking, reading and writing are actually 3 separate components. You can read characters without knowing how to write them properly or even remembering them entirely. Lots of my Taiwanese acquaintances forget how to write certain characters, because nowadays most of the text they write is in bopomofo on their phones. Bopomofo represents sounds, so basically knowing how an expression sounds and being able to read the character (pick it from a set of given characters for the chosen sound) is enough to "write" it.
Learning 10,000 words is objectively more difficult than getting used to tones.
You can get used to the tones in a relatively short amount of time. If you are in an immersive environment for a month or two, you will end up wondering how it is that anyone can't hear the tones.
In contrast, there is simply no way to memorize thousands of words in that timeframe.
Which is why the way to deal with this is by sanctioning US companies in retaliation. Europe can't shield its own companies from the US, but it can inflict equal pain on US companies.
The US was barely treading water militarily, at enormous cost in both lives and cash. It was not progressing towards its military and political goals. That's why the US public pulled the plug.
The US could have continued to tread water for another 5 years, or another 10 years, or another 15 years, and would have lost even more men and spent even more money, and it would still have faced the same problem: there was no way to win the war. Every day that the war continued just meant more deaths and more money wasted.
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