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The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

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Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#41

Post by ethbr1 »

troupe wrote: post #29
ethbr1 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were able to fix it up with some automation in a couple days. Critically, still running visually on her machine, and with internal resources for lifecycle support if the process changes.

Do you have any guess how long it will take to break even? Presumably you charged some amount to spend a few days automating it and hopefully it frees her up to do something more valuable for the company. Sometimes the reason things aren't automated is because there isn't anything more valuable for that person to do so automation doesn't have a positive return on investment.

It was an internal citizen developer initiative that I was supporting externally. Don't know her salary, so couldn't say.

> because there isn't anything more valuable for that person to do

I've seen an interesting shift post-COVID where (remaining) ops workers are often more coordinators of / responsible for their area of responsibility.

Which is a distinction because in that sort of job, not having Task X leads directing into finding something else you can be doing to improve your area.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#42

Post by [deleted] »

tuatoru wrote: post #38
radlad wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's basically a JOIN The comment you're replying just explained why this is not "basically a JOIN." There are two unrelated systems (not SQL databases) which don't expose any APIs to the analyst.

It's still basically a join. If it's on a computer, it can be converted to text files, and then it can be JOINed, one way or another.

[deleted]

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#43

Post by ethbr1 »

tuatoru wrote: post #38
radlad wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's basically a JOIN The comment you're replying just explained why this is not "basically a JOIN." There are two unrelated systems (not SQL databases) which don't expose any APIs to the analyst.

It's still basically a join. If it's on a computer, it can be converted to text files, and then it can be JOINed, one way or another.

My sibling from another mother. That's exactly what we did.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#44

Post by opportune »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #28
userbinator wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the fuck are we doing as a society, that this lady, with a machine that could compute the above in a fraction of a second, has to spend a decent chunk of her work time doing this? To put it bluntly: do you want her to be unemployed instead?

I was going to say that - I'm increasingly subscribing to "bullshit jobs" theory : * productivity for goods is high and availability is high (we can discuss inequality and distribution) * we just don't need everybody to work 40hrs a week to obtain collectively good standard of living * but as a society we are uncomfortable with universal basic income * so instead we basically do UBI through inefficient, unnecessary j…

Who's saying that lady's job is bullshit just because it can be automated? There is real value in paying some up front cost in detection/monitoring/validation of data to prevent mistakes. Just because software engineers would consider her job "beneath" them because they could do it faster or better does not make it not worth doing.

There are mega-efficient factory farms in Nebraska that are immensely productive per-human involved, but that doesn't mean what hobby farmers in Connecticut or subsistence farmers in Africa are doing is bullshit.

I think "bullshit jobs" are less of a thing than people believe. It's just that people devalue assembly-line or cog-in-machine work, even when they're the ones doing it - especially in the US where we grow up wanting to be a unique success story like an entertainment celebrity or rich entrepreneur and so that kind of work is antithetical to our idea of a successful person. Fact of the matter is, machines needs cogs, and we don't have an infinite capacity to replace human cogs with automated ones.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#45

Post by 8note »

opportune wrote: post #14

It's way too premature to say we are turning into fragmentation cycle regarding bespoke hardware. GPUs are still universal computers, they just use a different model with different performance characteristics (and applications, which stem from these performance characteristics and also inertia/maturity of tooling) than CPUs. ASICs and specialized processors have been a thing for a long time and their application towa…

The last two decades at least have moved towards a purpose built consumer device, with a general purpose server.

Gpus, CPUs, and Asics, are run by vendors rather than end customers. The end customer runs a full computer, but has no rights to it because it's called a smart phone rather than a computer

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#47

Post by dr_kiszonka »

glandium wrote: post #15
karmakaze wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a perfect use-case for automation using recorded macros. The failure (or perhaps solutions exist) is lack of facilities in our desktop OSes.

AFAIK, macOS is the only OS to come with this sort of things out of the box (and that is supposed to work consistently across all applications; good luck with that on Linux). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automator_(macOS) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleScript

There is a free Power Automate Desktop for Windows.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#48

Post by csomar »

tuatoru wrote: post #38
radlad wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's basically a JOIN The comment you're replying just explained why this is not "basically a JOIN." There are two unrelated systems (not SQL databases) which don't expose any APIs to the analyst.

It's still basically a join. If it's on a computer, it can be converted to text files, and then it can be JOINed, one way or another.

In these cases, the work is usually about connecting the systems together than the data modification itself.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#49

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #28
userbinator wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the fuck are we doing as a society, that this lady, with a machine that could compute the above in a fraction of a second, has to spend a decent chunk of her work time doing this? To put it bluntly: do you want her to be unemployed instead?

I was going to say that - I'm increasingly subscribing to "bullshit jobs" theory : * productivity for goods is high and availability is high (we can discuss inequality and distribution) * we just don't need everybody to work 40hrs a week to obtain collectively good standard of living * but as a society we are uncomfortable with universal basic income * so instead we basically do UBI through inefficient, unnecessary j…

> so instead we basically do UBI through inefficient, unnecessary jobs.

Your first 3 bullet points make sense, but this last one is where I think the normal theory behind "bullshit jobs" really falls apart. Every individual business has a large, strong economic incentive to not hire these bullshit jobs if they don't need to, so why should we think they would be so generous to engage in this "bullshit jobs charity"?

I think what is really happening is that as society advances, lots of rules, regulations and processes just build up and up over time, and this complexity eventually becomes self-sustaining, even if it greatly diverges from the original intent of the original rules.

Case in point (which is a common case I know) is the complete, total insanity of the US healthcare system, specifically how healthcare is paid for. Literally every single person I know that has ever gotten into some aspect of healthcare payments (potentially with an idea to improve the madness) eventually comes to the conclusion "The whole system is completely fucked, it should all just be torn down and greatly simplified." The problem, though, is now there are a ton of entrenched interests who depend on that complexity for their livelihood (I heard it referred to as "an abusive relationship" - Company A exists to "simplify some aspects of healthcare payments", which means they depend on the underlying complexity in the first place to exist), so there are no real incentives from the people that control the levers to simplify. So a lot of those bullshit jobs come about to manage that complexity, but it's not like some company thought "let's hire people to do busywork so they'll have employment."

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#50

Post by Qwertious »

waterheater wrote: post #2

This fragmentation was predicted well over a decade ago, but we're finally seeing mass market realization of these predictions. The most relevant idea here is Koomey's Law [1], which postulates that the "number of computations per joule of energy dissipated doubled about every 1.57 years." This law is essentially a combination of Moore's Law and Dennard scaling. As transistors get smaller, Moore's Law predicts increa…

The dark silicon isn't necessarily application-specific, it's also used by duplicating a particular circuit and then rotating which duplicate does the computing, so that the other areas have time to cool down a bit before they're used again.
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