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The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

techtrenches.dev

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Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#201

Post by LtWorf »

brabel wrote: post #157
pelorat wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of the military I'd say the real reason is political. After the fall of the Berlin wall, Europe collectively agreed (knowingly or not) that war is now a thing of the past and the goal should be the complete dismantling of militaries worldwide, starting with Europe. Lead by example, etc.

They agreed that war was a thing of the past, but still continued to push for NATO to allow new members anyway, ironically causing Russia (and China and everyone who is NOT in NATO) to suspect that war was NOT a thing of the past and therefore never quite abandoning their military completely. Unpopular opinion: the West should either NEVER have abandoned its military production (so as to maintain NATO actual prepared…

USA had no part in that push?

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#202

Post by throwaw12 »

jdw64 wrote: post #17

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…

> The problem is a management pattern .... Short-term cost cutting

Absolutely agree with this. Most MBAs are taught to optimize and reduce the slack.

It works fine with machinery and materials, but not with humans.

When machinery is optimized and run thin, when one of them breaks, you can get exact same in couple days (you usually prepare for it earlier), but with humans, they train their brain and next person is different from the first person.

Humans also break in different ways:

* They stop caring - you wouldn't notice it immediately, they will close tickets, but give bare minimum thought

* Communal brain will not be trained when there is not enough room for experiments and learning - which reduces the innovation eventually

This is exactly the reason it is difficult for US companies to compete with Chinese companies in manufacturing, because their communal brain have already trained and produced very good talent.

Next is the knowledge, more you outsource, more you lose it

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#203

Post by eszed »

alecco wrote: post #41

Speak for yourself. I now dare to code much harder problems and learning is bliss. No more having to sit down to dig needle-in-haystack through horrible documentation or random Stack Overflow posts. LLMs are a magnificent tool if you use them correctly. They enable deep work like nothing before. The problem is the education system focused on passivity (obeyance), memorization, and standardized testing. And worst of a…

> in Wikipedia you can spend hours reading banal pop-slop content or instead spend that time reading amazing articles about history, literature, arts, and science.

I'm not saying you're personally doing anything wrong, but there's a parallel here, when smart and curious people read articles about history and literature and art and science, rather than engaging directly with the real thing.

Or then the next level down, where creating amazing work in all of those domains depends on enough "slack" in the system for people to pursue deep work that will not be immediately profitable.

Do you see where I'm going with that? We (and I'm very much including myself: here I am on HN, instead of reading something more substantial) skim the (Wikipedia) surface, instead of diving truly deep. AIs (right now) are the ultimate surface-skimmers, and our fascination with and growing reliance on them reflects something in our current surface-skimming cultural mindset.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#204

Post by throwaway2037 »

Click/rage bait?

The opening paragraph is ridiculous. The FIM-92 Stinger is obsolete. It was replaced by FGM-148 Javelin. DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) didn't forget how to make things. They are still world class for manufacturing. (Northern Italy is also economically part of that manufacturing mega-hub.)

There are plenty of NLAWs (much cheaper than Javelin, and only slightly less capable) in EU/Nato stocks to satisfy Ukraine needs against Russian heavily armed main battle tanks. For everything else, you can use one or two suicide drones to kill anything with a motor.

And now to give credit where credit is due:

Looking at his (assumed) LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/denjkestetskov/

It looks like he was educated in Ukraine, so likely a Ukrainan national. If I were a Ukrainan, then I too would be publishing rage bait like this in an attempt to pressure allies to provide more funding, weapons, and gear.

As a final suggestion, the writer can visually spice up his blog post with one of my all time favourite military photos from Wiki: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AFIM-92_Stinger_USM...

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#205

Post by concinds »

rezonant wrote: post #71
allending wrote: post #32

There's a certain irony in that the article itself is quite clearly assisted by AI. Not a criticism per se as I don't have a problem with AI assistance, but food for thought given the material being commented on.

The tropes that AI introduces into articles are very noticeable, quite annoying, and very unnatural -- they unfortunately don't write well. It seems people use them to "polish" up their writing but in reality it would have read better if they hadn't. My current pet peave is using period instead of comma, as in: > My people lived the other side of this equation. Not the factory floor. The receiving end. Ostensibly thi…

The uncanny valley is an attractor basin.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#206

Post by fao_ »

xienze wrote: post #179
swiftcoder wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did anything come out from those billions? Per wikipedia: IBM employees have garnered six Nobel Prizes, seven Turing Awards, 20 inductees into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame, 19 National Medals of Technology, five National Medals of Science and three Kavli Prizes. As of 2018, the company had generated more patents than any other business in each of 25 consecutive years.

> the company had generated more patents than any other business in each of 25 consecutive years. A couple things about those patents, from a former IBMer who has quite a few in his time there. First, not all patents are created equal. Most of those IBM patents are software-related, and for pretty trivial stuff. Second, most of those patents are generated by the rank and file employees, not research scientists. The I…

Why do you need to generate transistor-level breakthroughs multiple times a year? Those breakthroughs are hard to generate, but they're important and industry-spanning. The problem is we've mostly stopped generating them.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#207

Post by ykonstant »

rezonant wrote: post #71
allending wrote: post #32

There's a certain irony in that the article itself is quite clearly assisted by AI. Not a criticism per se as I don't have a problem with AI assistance, but food for thought given the material being commented on.

The tropes that AI introduces into articles are very noticeable, quite annoying, and very unnatural -- they unfortunately don't write well. It seems people use them to "polish" up their writing but in reality it would have read better if they hadn't. My current pet peave is using period instead of comma, as in: > My people lived the other side of this equation. Not the factory floor. The receiving end. Ostensibly thi…

Unnecessary emphasis can get... quite comical... indeed.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#208

Post by InkCanon »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #204

Click/rage bait? The opening paragraph is ridiculous. The FIM-92 Stinger is obsolete. It was replaced by FGM-148 Javelin. DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) didn't forget how to make things. They are still world class for manufacturing. (Northern Italy is also economically part of that manufacturing mega-hub.) There are plenty of NLAWs (much cheaper than Javelin, and only slightly less capable) in EU/Nato stocks to…

The Stinger is an anti air weapon, the Javelin is an anti tank weapon.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#209

Post by sorenjan »

Frankly, I find the attitude towards AI coding here on HN to be both disappointing and a bit disgusting. Not long ago places like this where software developers gathered were full of various texts about how important it was to be able to reason about your code, how tech debt crept into your projects, and how skillful you had to be to write good software, various smart algorithmic tricks to squeeze more performance out of your hardware, etc.

Now? Seems like code quality is outdated and uninteresting all of a sudden. Everything is about agentic coding, harnesses, paying hundreds of dollars to Anthropic to let their LLM do the coding for you or perhaps using a 128 GB Mac to run a local model. Do you know your code base? Doesn't matter, if there are any bugs in the future Claude will fix them! Tokenmaxxing is the new paradigm, who cares about the end result as long as it's runs for now and passes all (AI written) tests!

But don't suggest these people shouldn't get $100k+ salaries, after all, they still "software engineers" in their minds, they're running the agent orchestration harness in the terminal after all, not everyone anywhere in the world could do that! They're special and deserve to be well compensated for their hard vibe coding work!

This industry is rotting from the inside.

Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code

#210

Post by TonyAlicea10 »

“Money was never the constraint. Knowledge was.”

The irony is how difficult it is to read this obviously AI-generated article due to its unnatural prose and choppy flow full of LLM-isms. The ability to write is also a skill that atrophies.

Even when AI is understandably used due to language fluency, I’d prefer to read an AI translation over a generated article.

If you don’t care enough to write it, why should I care enough to read it?

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