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

cacm.acm.org

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

#121

Post by Hgelo »

omscs99 wrote: post #56
ethbr1 wrote: post #3

I understand this is ACM, but I would say the decline has strictly been a failure of software . Specifically, corporate IT's failure to deliver general purpose development tools usable by anyone in a company to make computers do work for them (aka programming). There's still a ton of general value that could be delivered by general purpose processors/computers. But instead, most non-programmers live in a Kafkaesque r…

Hypothetically, if she figured out how to automate it on her own, would she get any kind of reward for it? If not, why should she automate it? Another example, if there’s some repetitive task that you automate at a software dev job, would you get rewarded for figuring out how to automate it? The answer is obviously dependent on culture, at my current gig you just get brushed off Seems to me like you’re assuming that…

I hate this take on optimization.

She would of course get a raise or would succeed otherwise in our economy.

The only reason why I'm as successful as I am is that people understand that I'm so good in optimizing shit that they give me raises.

And alone the time I have to myself to skill up instead of waisting it on repetitive things is ridiculous if you think about return of investment and reinvestment.

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

#122

Post by dmvdoug »

npsimons wrote: post #116
dmvdoug wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be a Tell HN that is just an 800-comment-long thread full of these stories because I love them.

> There should be a Tell HN that is just an 800-comment-long thread full of these stories because I love them. As gratifying as they are, they get repetitive. Once you've heard one, you've heard them all. I'd much rather hear about the place that fixed a policy problem that was blocking such progress in the first place. Software is easy, getting people (and orgs) to change is hard, tedious, boring, but absolutely nec…

I believe that about repetitiveness. It’s just that I’m not in software or computers, so I haven’t been subject to them all.

Although I was a lawyer, and I can tell you that human beings come up with an infinite variety of ways to do weird things, which gives me hope that there may be a weird software story out there for you, that you’ve never heard. :)

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

#123

Post by crabbone »

ethbr1 wrote: post #3

I understand this is ACM, but I would say the decline has strictly been a failure of software . Specifically, corporate IT's failure to deliver general purpose development tools usable by anyone in a company to make computers do work for them (aka programming). There's still a ton of general value that could be delivered by general purpose processors/computers. But instead, most non-programmers live in a Kafkaesque r…

> set of dates in an Excel file

PTSD intensifies

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

#124

Post by yodelshady »

atoav wrote: post #104
dingi wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why not? she needs to be rewarded for that automation somehow.

Realistically that reward is going to be: 1. more work 2. nice words and then more work 3. nice words, more work and then she is asked to do the same for another person's task who is then fired Sorry to be cynical here, but it is very rare for managment to reward the few people that do a better than good job with more free time or less work.

I believe dingi is perfectly aware of the realistic outcomes, and is instead describing the normative ones, i.e. what you need if you want an enterprise that actually self-improves, where the best employees aren't actively looking for the door whilst concealing things from management.

It is, however, wholly a management problem to find those actually-rewarding rewards.

Crazy idea: what if employees retained IP of any spontaneous, self-directed R&D? You could then license their tech and make the role redundant, something any ruthless capitalist would consider a win. The employee can go job-hunting with a small passive income and glittering CV, which means they're much more likely to actually tell you so you can get that outsourcing win.

In reality, it seems far too many businesses have moats as a result of excellent decisions made by founders in the past, and as a result can't be outcompeted by companies that do manage talent better.

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

#125

Post by ethbr1 »

delusional wrote: post #88
ethbr1 wrote: post #3

I understand this is ACM, but I would say the decline has strictly been a failure of software . Specifically, corporate IT's failure to deliver general purpose development tools usable by anyone in a company to make computers do work for them (aka programming). There's still a ton of general value that could be delivered by general purpose processors/computers. But instead, most non-programmers live in a Kafkaesque r…

>I helped a lady on Friday at a midsized bank whose job it was to take a set of dates in an Excel file, search each one individually into an internal search tool, then Ctrl+f the result report and verify that every code listed in the original document exists in the report. I happen to work in a midsized bank, and we have TONS of these sorts of manual processes. My favorite unintuitive fact is that 90% of them turn ou…

When I stumble across things like this, I always remember this scene from Babylon 5 (and Peter Jurasik's delivery!)

(Context: they've found an attache and friend they thought was dead, alive but forgotten in a prison cell) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kCj-Rnd5SsA

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

#126

Post by spease »

ludston wrote: post #52
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Whilst business owners have a financial incentive not to employ people, there are competing incentives. For example, non-owners are incentivised to have more people reporting to them because it increases their status and status is usually correlated with salary. In fact, when you are rich enough that money doesn't mean anything any more, you may as well have a bunch of people employed to do nothing but make you feel…

> In fact, when you are rich enough that money doesn't mean anything any more, you may as well have a bunch of people employed to do nothing but make you feel important and powerful.

I’d just like to proactively coin the term “Ego Engineer” for the post-AGI world.

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

#127

Post by ethbr1 »

bloak wrote: post #84
makeitdouble wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's many situations where manually dealing with 100+ records is a decent tradeoff. I feel people in our field overestimate the actual complexity of many dumb looking tasks. From your bank employee example, it looks like your solution would be to open the bank's internal tool to her excel instance, have it somewhat find the right records and inject the right value, while checking the listed codes. That looks like…

I think you're right. I've sometimes been in the situation of having to maintain a script that depends on APIs or data formats that change from time to time without warning. A fair amount of skill and effort is required. (There is skill involved in writing the script so that it is maintainable and not too fragile but still detects when something has gone wrong.) If the script is doing a task that has to be completed…

Over the years, I've internalized a few rules to soften what you point out.

* Understand both the cost of making a mistake and of the process not running. Be aggressive on things that are 'nice to have' or have downstream manual re-validation. Be conservative on things that are 'must have' and immediately effect an outcome.

* First, do not harm -- program defensively and break execution on any violated expectations

* Understandable error messages at the user level are gold. The user has no idea what "schema mismatch" means. They can understanding "Column 3 had unexpected value. Was expecting 'X'. Saw: 'Y'"

--

On ugly HTML, that's a bad one, because of how ugly it can get.

I've only done toy work with it, but I hear good things about Beautiful Soup (Python). https://beautiful-soup-4.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

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

#128

Post by Jensson »

blueblimp wrote: post #57

I question the article's framing of CPUs as "universal" and GPUs as "specialized". In theory, they can both do any computation, so they differ only in their performance characteristics, and the deep learning revolution has shown that there is wide range of practical workloads that is non-viable on CPUs. The reason OpenAI runs GPT-4 on GPUs isn't that it's faster than running it on CPUs--they do it because they _can't…

You can't run a GPU without a CPU, but you can run a CPU without a GPU.

Could we change GPU's so they become more general purpose? Yeah, an we already have by gluing the GPU to a CPU ie integrated graphics, lots of CPUs has that. But when you do that we call it a CPU and not a GPU, so as soon as you make a GPU general purpose we start calling it a CPU.

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

#129

Post by ethbr1 »

criddell wrote: post #106
concordDance wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't speak for them, but I've done office automation work with a breakeven measured in days.

I’ve automated things where the breakeven will occur decades from now. It was fun though, the chance of errors is decreased, and I learned a bunch of new stuff. Sometimes it’s about the journey and not the destination.

Calculating breakeven ROI is part of the push from a lot of companies to start citizen developer initiatives.

The point being that the "I" is also flexible -- an existing employee fooling around to learn automation whenever they have downtime is much cheaper than hiring a consultant.

Sure, the automation is worse and delivered more slowly. But you can get automations from a lot of people in parallel, plus you're upskilling your workforce.

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

#130

Post by spease »

userbinator wrote: post #24
ethbr1 wrote: post #3

I understand this is ACM, but I would say the decline has strictly been a failure of software . Specifically, corporate IT's failure to deliver general purpose development tools usable by anyone in a company to make computers do work for them (aka programming). There's still a ton of general value that could be delivered by general purpose processors/computers. But instead, most non-programmers live in a Kafkaesque r…

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?

> To put it bluntly: do you want her to be unemployed instead?

Fine. Then write her a script and continue to pay her a salary. Hell, let her keep coming into work if she wants to. Functionally, what’s the difference to the business?

Presumably she’s still going to want to maintain social relationships in her life, which means she’s got an intrinsic incentive to do things to benefit someone else even absent financial incentive.

But now we’ve effectively got an atomic form of UBI, which scares people. Yet 1 person’s worth of work is being done for the cost of 1 salary.

In fact, if she starts doing something else productive to society with her time, you’ve got 2 people’s worth of work being done for the cost of 1 salary.

And if someone automates that and she switches to something else, it increases to a 3:1 ratio.

Where is her employment status a problem, except to the sensibilities of people who believe that everyone needs to be “employed”?

If no one ever automated what she was doing for fear of her losing her livelihood, then the maximum productivity we’d ever expect to see is 1:1.

Seems like not having UBI or a stronger safety net is creating a perverse incentive for economic inefficiency.

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