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

techtrenches.dev

291–300 of 896 posts

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

#291
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, in other words, is quarterly earnings in specific and shareholder capitalism in general.

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

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything AI generated is troll. There's no logic. It's just pattern repetitions. I don't get how supposedly smart engineers fall for it

Because a lot of engineering is pattern repetition, which is not very fun for engineers either, and LLMs can do it much faster?

Not really. Any patterns got optimized and automated. If you’re still seeing patterns, then you need to look harder, because they will be similar onlu superficially.

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

#293
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: 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. I think that's still a symptom. The real problem is ideology: the monomaniacal focus on profit-making business, which infects our political leaders, down to capitalists and business leaders, down to the indoctrinated rank-and…

What do you think the war in the gulf is about, the US cannot compete with China so they are destroying the global system that enabled them. There is no plan to have a peace with Iran, only perpetual war and the destruction of the middle east, starvation in East Asia and poverty and nationalist wars in Europe, potentially with Russia taking over vast swathes of Eastern Europe again. Suddenly Russia is the one in charge of the China-Russia relationship. It's such a stupid plan for the US that you might think it was designed by Putin himself.

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

#294
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,…

i see what you did there :)

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

#296

“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…

I am really amazed at how we are really okay with LLMs writing code end to end (without human in the loop) / dark factory concept but when it comes articles, HN is suddenly against LLMs writing words. I do not see the difference between writing code and writing prose. Both have keywords, grammars, syntax, meaningful combinations (function or chaining in code / collocations in words). If we think that AI-generated wor…

Slop is slop.

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

#297
Talking of military stuff: it's not a problem really. No one can keep the non-needed capacity in existence, it's not even possible if no one consumes the product. Make sufficient buffer stocks to have time to re-learn the process when needed, and that's it. There is no realistic way it could work any different, otherwise it's like: maintain entire Cold War era production capacity and keep it idle or working at 5% workload, just to be able to ramp up when needed? But it means keeping almost all of the Cold War budgets still flowing. Wasn't going to happen - and of course, in Russia it also didn't happen, and couldn't.

In the end of the day, Russia burnt through their entire Soviet stocks in roughly 2-2.5 years, while US spent a very small proportion of theirs and Europe, maybe about half. And now consumption on both sides is similar with expenses on the Western side to feed that machine being almost invisibly small. Nothing bad happened.

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

#299

>I read the Fogbank story and recognized it immediately. Not the nuclear material. The pattern. Build capability over decades. Find a cheaper substitute. Let the human pipeline atrophy. Enjoy the savings. Then watch it all collapse when a crisis demands what you optimized away. >In defense, the substitute was the peace dividend. In software, it’s AI. Before it was AI, the cheaper alternative was remote contract dev t…

It had to be H1B Indians and outsourcing to India. As a European, I have seen some "Eastern European devs" around, sure. But they were not present at every company I worked with. Indians were. Quality-wise, it was always the same story, but I'm not going to elaborate. Everyone who is ready to accept it, knows what I would be saying anyway.

No, you probably need to elaborate on that. Because in my experience, the quality from people in India varies just as much as the quality from any other country, including the USA.

What does make a difference is the company they work for. Large hourly "body shops" gives you coders whose quality tends to be lower, regardless if we are talking about an Indian firm or an American firm. Direct hires of independent individuals tend to be higher. But there is always individual variation.

You see people from India more, sure. There are more of them. Over a billion of them, to be precise. Anyone who dismisses a billion people as "always the same" is not being clever, they are being racist. And you know that, otherwise you wouldn't have pre-empted this response with "everyone who is ready to accept it."

Say that there are communication gaps to overcome. Say there are cultural differences. Say that those cultural differences change the assumed business expectations and the mechanisms by which people express their thoughts and opinions. Those things are all true. My recommendation to anyone who has an urge to dismiss an entire population is to instead get to know them: Step up and learn how your teammates think and work. It will make for a better team, better communication, and better results.

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

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 metri…

> At the end of the day chatgpt won't be there

Are you sure it won't?

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