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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

#211

Post by dragontamer »

Lio wrote: post #184
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…

There’s even a management tutorial game which demonstrates the dangers of removing too much slack from systems. It’s called The Beer Game[1]. One of the funny things about it is even people that have played and discussed it before _still_ make the same fundamental mistakes next time. Short-termism is the death of companies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game

Wut?

The point of the beer game is that buffering in the supply chain makes the bullwhip effect worse.

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

#213

Post by 2ndorderthought »

Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #186
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…

I feel like it’s something more fundamental and broad than that. We slowly remove excuses to talk to other people. The thought crossed my mind the other day — if I’m asking the AI a question, that’s replacing a human interaction I would have had with a coworker. It’s not just in coding, it’s everything. With ChatGPT always available in your pocket, what social interactions is it replacing? The thing that gets me is,…

There is a lot of wisdom in this.

At the end of the day chatgpt won't be there to hold our hands in the hospital, have a laugh over failing to pick up a date, get invited to a bbq, groan over the state of the code in utils.c, or recommend us for our next job/promotion. They say software is social for a different reason than most of these examples.

It's good to be efficient, whatever that means, but there are no metrics on the gains that get made by talking to people. In a lot of ways those gains are what life is about.

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

#214

Post by ReptileMan »

liendolucas wrote: post #152

I still code daily without any coding assistance mostly because I believe this is the way to not forget how things are done, even trivial things. My main point against using AI is that I do not want to depend basically on anything when I'm in front of the screen (obviously not including, documentation, books, SO and alike). I closely see people that are 100% dependent on AI for literally everything, even the most tri…

>I closely see people that are 100% dependent on AI for literally everything, even the most trivial daily tasks and I find that truly scarly because it means that brain effort drops drammatically to a minimum level. To be stolen mental effort is not a minor thing.

I find myself thinking more and my thinking is of higher quality. Now I have 30 years of fucked up projects experience, so I know all the rakes I could step into.

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

#216

Post by gblargg »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #108

The article makes no sense, and stars with a very wrong perspective on things. 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,…

My thought as well. Imagine the cost if we kept active every production line of every obscure thing we haven't needed in decades. It's unreasonable to think that we should still be able to make these easily. It would hamper development of new things.

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

#217

Post by alecco »

eszed wrote: post #203
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…

I meant it as a simple to understand parallel. Absolutely deep reading and thought is much better than Wikipedia or an LLM chat.

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

#218

Post by joker99 »

mahrain wrote: post #180

I don't agree with "the west forgot how to make things", it moved supply chains for cheap consumer goods to asia, but in the B2B space a lot of things are manufactured in Europe: companies like Bosch, Volkswagen, ASML, Alstom and Airbus are cranking out extremely complicated machines that last many years in demanding environments. It's just a different level of value-add vs. low cost electronics (for instance).

I remember Covid and the supply chain crisis that unfolded in Europe and the west. Most of the companies you’ve mentioned weren’t cranking out anything during that time as all of them realised that "low cost electronics" are not always readily available and that we forgot how to make them or don’t have the capacity to produce them in significant numbers anymore ourselves. A lot of basic electronic components were not available during that time and we still haven’t fully grasped the complexities of our supply chains and where they begin.

I also remember, that EE for a while stopped using the term "jellybean parts". Turns out that most jellybeans are produced in Asia.

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

#219

Post by sounddetective »

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…

So you published this comment with an anti-Ukrainian spin, and just 2 minutes after posting, your comment is already at the top of comment rankings? I hope HN mods follow inauthentic upvote / comment behaviour on this site; this looks fishy.

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

#220

Post by jongjong »

This is why I advocate for making everything as simple as possible. The more complex the tech, the more likely it will be lost through the passing of time.

It's kind of insane how much knowledge a human being needs to have to build certain technologies and it's taken for granted.

AI might make the knowledge easier to acquire but it's still a lot of knowledge that people have to internalize.

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