101–110 of 896 posts
As an anecdotal evidence I code way more now with agents because i have an entity who has vast amount of knowledge about pretty much everything and I have the creativity to use that well.
People are not perfect. I went to Ukraine just days before the invasion. Travel and Hotels in Kiev had become extremely cheap. You asked the Ukrainians about the possible invasion. "Not going to happen" everybody said."Russia talks always aggressively, but never does anything". They did not properly prepare and as a result lost 20% of its territory in days. Days after that I was back is Austria and could not stop thi…
I don’t know, but the evidence shows that software engineering is not that deep of an art. People come and go at rates that would not be sustainable in any manufacturing business.
No, every time people switch knowledge gets lost and code quality degrades.
In part I blame accounting rules justifying investments is easier than maintenance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You see zero similarities between Hitler invading Poland and Putin invading Ukraine?
There are some pretty substantial differences. Russia is on the strategic back foot here trying to figure out a way to stop NATO's advance. They've only turned to violence after long attempts at resolving the tension diplomatically and the US has been implacable. Putin's actually been pretty hesitant in his escalations so far; he's 70 and has a long history of trying to avoid war. Hitler was more about wanting more l…
Is that why Russians rejected negotiations when Ukraine offered to never join NATO and Russians insist on keeping invaded territories?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You see zero similarities between Hitler invading Poland and Putin invading Ukraine?
There are some pretty substantial differences. Russia is on the strategic back foot here trying to figure out a way to stop NATO's advance. They've only turned to violence after long attempts at resolving the tension diplomatically and the US has been implacable. Putin's actually been pretty hesitant in his escalations so far; he's 70 and has a long history of trying to avoid war. Hitler was more about wanting more l…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A claim that fits every possible observation equally well isn’t an explanation. What does it help you predict, when everything falls under that label? How does it help you predict behavior of different institutions?
Given a sufficiently long timeline all predictions breakdown (see prior comment on attenuation and entropy and Nostradamus) And on shorter timescales you aren't really predicting anything of consequence. You're just assuring all that effort trying to predict Apple's next move (for example) keeps Apple itself alive in the public debate whether they do the thing or not; they'll have missteps but our 24/7 fetishizing of…
This kind of forgetting is normal. It's how things work when time and resources are finite. The only problem here is the belief that you can keep capacity to do something without actively exercising it, and thus the expectation that you can "just" resume doing things after a long break, without paying up a cold-start cost.
But you can't, and there's no reason to be surprised. I bet the Pentagon and the EU weren't. They didn't need those Stingers and shells for decades, didn't expect to need them soon - but they knew they could get them if they really needed them, but it's gonna be costly.
I don't get why people think this is unusual or surprising, or somehow outrageous and proves something about society or "mindsets of elites" - other than positive aspects like adaptability and resilience.
This is true at all scales. Your body and brain optimizes aggressively, too. An individual saying "I need to warm up" or "I need to hit the gym a few times and then I'll be able", or "yes, I can, but I haven't done it for years so I need an hour with a book/documentation..." - all that is exactly the same as EU going "yes we can make artillery shells... though we haven't in a while so we need some time and some millions of EUR to get our supply chain sorted out first".
The real issue, in my view, is not AI itself. The problem is a management pattern: removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit, and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed. Short-term cost cutting leads to less junior hiring, and removes the slack that experienced engineers need in order to teach. As a result, tacit knowledge stops being transferred. W…
Also when companies grow big enough "business" becomes the main business of the company. By that I mean everything unrelated to the actual original domain, such as playing in the financial markets, doing stock buybacks, lobbying, cheating etc. When your CEO is an MBA and your real market is Wall Street any actual product RD and support is a real annoying cost that just cuts into the profits and thus into the exec compensation.
First of all this is clearly AI-assist writing (being charitable here). And the premise makes no sense anyway. The only risk of forgetting how to make shells is when other countries are making shells more efficiently. Non-western countries are not going to reject AI-coding, nor are they going to make software more efficiently by hand.
Programmers in non-western countries may not be able to afford $100 per month on vibe coding. They may keep taking the longer and harder route of a mixture of AI and hand coding.