The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021) • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by JohnFen » Sun, Oct 22, 2023, 4:55 PM UTC

asdff wrote: post #67

radlad wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but I'm not sure everyone has the inclination to become a programmer. And the whole thread was about how computers should work for everyone, including this lady whose job could be automated. Which begs the question: do most people actually want general purpose computing? Or does the average human prefer "apps"?

If the average human were allowed to achieve its most base preferences, we'd all be a half ton in weight, floating around in chairs, stupefied at some screen, just as depicted in Wall-e .

I actually don't think this is true at all. While there will always be a percentage of people who would prefer that, my observations are that most people don't. They tend to have interests that drive them to put time and effort into doing things, instead.

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

#152

Post by JohnFen » Sun, Oct 22, 2023, 5:03 PM UTC

asdff wrote: post #72

conception wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You see this in manufacturing as well. You’d think robots would be everywhere but often, like way more than you’d imagine, it’s cheaper to hire a human to do it.

I think part of that is how these sorts of businesses choose to organize their money. A manufacturer might budget themselves to be quite lean, so lean that for any sort of improvement like automation with robots, they have to hire an expensive consultant to tell them they have to hire an expensive robot company to build them expensive robots with expensive service contracts. So of course in that model the human is ch…

There's another aspect to it as well.

It's really common to see jobs that people are doing that appear to be easy to replace with robots. But if you actually try to develop automation to do it, you very commonly hit a bunch of gotchas that make the automation infeasible. Sometimes this is a systemic thing (you can't effectively automate this without having to change too much of the rest of the process at the same time, which makes it economically a nonstarter), but more often than you'd think it's because there's an aspect of the job which doesn't seem particularly hard or important because humans do it without even thinking about it -- but to computers and robots, it's incredibly difficult.

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

#153

Post by JohnFen » Sun, Oct 22, 2023, 5:08 PM UTC

dmvdoug wrote: post #122

npsimons wrote: post #116

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. 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. :)

I've been a dev for a very long time, and I still regularly hear weird software stories from colleagues that are not just "the same old thing" again. They're a pretty small percentage -- maybe 2-5%? -- but despite the low flow rate, the well never seems to actually empty.

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

#154

Post by smokel » Sun, Oct 22, 2023, 5:14 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #93

eru wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at all the other classes people are already sitting through for high school and not learning anything either. What makes you think this one would be any different? Already around the world high schools all have something highfalutin like 'teaching critical thinking' in their curriculum.

> What makes you think this one would be any different? Because unlike almost all other classes, that one would be immediately beneficial in daily life , in a direct and apparent way.

No it won't, unless we build infrastructure for them to work with.

Even worse, given modern security standards, I wouldn't be surprised if programming and scripting were to be prohibited in the next ten years or so.

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

#155

Post by JohnFen » Sun, Oct 22, 2023, 5:17 PM UTC

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…

> In theory, they can both do any computation, so they differ only in their performance characteristics

But surely, the exact same thing can be said when comparing any two different machines that engage in computations and can do conditional branching.

GPUs can be used for any computational task that a general CPU can be used for, but a GPU is optimized so it will do certain sorts of tasks much better (and as a consequence will be worse at other kinds of tasks). CPUs are meant to be adequate (if not spectacular) at any sort of task.

It seems to me characterizing GPUs as "specialized" and CPUs as "not specialized" is entirely correct.

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

#156

Post by genewitch » Sun, Oct 22, 2023, 5:18 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #137

danielbln wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a good usecase for an LLM.

Perhaps, but LLMs while may be slightly better (or slightly worse) than average humans, if you have 20 instances of the same LLM will have correlated errors whereas 20 humans will be… well, not entirely [0] uncorrelated, but less correlated, in their errors. [0] We'll still sometimes get an entire office of telephone help-desk people who are all convinced that $1/megabyte is the same as $0.01/megabyte, or whatever th…

it was 0.01¢ and the rep / software was billing it as $0.01 - saying 0.01 of a penny is $0.01.

I may be off by a factor of 10.

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

#157

Post by imtringued » Sun, Oct 22, 2023, 5:19 PM UTC

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #118

omscs99 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What the fuck are we doing as a society that we have such a system of perverse incentives in place?

It's called capitalism. Some confuse that with the more neutral concept of a market economy.

In capitalism, individual wealth accumulation is the primary goal, not employing and paying people living wages.

Since capitalism is a disequilibrium state, full employment is not expected. Busy work is part of the system.

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

#158

Post by userinanother » Sun, Oct 22, 2023, 5:20 PM UTC

Hgelo wrote: post #121

omscs99 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Many companies don’t even give top performers raises large enough to cover inflation. Who are you kidding here

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

#159

Post by JohnFen » Sun, Oct 22, 2023, 5:20 PM UTC

seydor wrote: post #51

ditch your phone , go back to your desktop, problem solve. Mobile has been a regression in pretty much everything except corporate profits. The focus of the article is wrong. PCs for example are not getting more specialized, they are getting new capabilities with the additional specialized gpus. As others have said the problem does not lie in processors, but on the software and UI, which has been steadily dumbing dow…

I agree -- this is exactly why when my current smartphone dies, I'm going to be switching to the dumbest phone I can find and start carrying a real pocket computer along with it.

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

#160

Post by smokel » Sun, Oct 22, 2023, 5:21 PM UTC

conception wrote: post #34

opportune wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But surely she had the tools to do that in excel itself, no? This is something I see a lot in software, where people devalue and trivialize the skills and abilities needed to make software simply because they know something is possible to do in software and because, as a software worker, they most likely had a natural predilection towards the kind of thought processes that led them toward pursuing software work. I th…

You see this in manufacturing as well. You’d think robots would be everywhere but often, like way more than you’d imagine, it’s cheaper to hire a human to do it.

This has to do with the fact that robots are still pretty bad at basic tasks such as picking items from a container, or handling fabric. Just have a look at the state of the art in garment manufacturing robots. For most tasks, human muscle and sense of touch are way ahead of any robot.