Every day Peter Naur’s paper programming as theory building gets more relevant Link: https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1985-naur.pdf
This was the first article I thought of as well. Highly recommended read.
The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
401–410 of 896 posts
Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
This shows Western government system is broken. In ideal world (where we don't live): * Corporation - optimizes for mid-to-short term profits (remove slack, run everything thin) * Government - optimizes for long term profits (introduce regulations to keep the slack time, keep and attract the talent so state gets better) * Individual - optimizes for their life time (career, family and tries to leverage market conditio…
> In the west, government is optimizing for "loads and loads of moooney" More appropriately, government is optimizing for 4 year electoral terms. No one cares about longer timescales necessary to tackle hard problems. This is where autocracies like China, or monarchies for example, win over democracies.
It's also where autocracies fail spectacularly and lead to decades of misery for their citizens.
Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
#403I 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'm the opposite I don't think I've read a single line of code I've shipped in over 6 months. I'd say it's far more tiring working that way though, you're breaking the satisfaction loop so you never really get the dopamine you used to get coding by hand, when you had a problem figuring it out was like solving a puzzle and you feel satisfaction at the end of it. With AI it feels most of my day is spent being a QA than…
I find this interesting as someone who does primarily devops, my satisfaction has increased with ai. Since for me the code isn't the puzzle but an annoying inconvenience in the way of completing the entire system. For me QA is a big part of solving the puzzle.
Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) Russia will happily supply China with oil and other resources, and China will pay by industrial good and all other stuff they produce. China is working really hard on getting rid of dependence on foreign energy sources, any leverage Russia might get if it became the sole supplier of oil/gas to China is very temporary and Russia knows it. Furthermore, unlike USA, it has no delusion of ever dominating China - China…
You seem to be extremely fond of Russian propaganda.
That's the easy way out, isn't it? Why argue on merit of anything you don't like, just name it Russian propaganda.
Or, perchance, you want to provide a concrete argument why are my statements incorrect? (No, 'it fits Russian narrative' is not argument about correctness, it is an argument about the narrative.)
Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
> removing people and organizational slack You are spot on w.r.t every assertion you've made. When bean-counters took over the ecosystem they optimised immediate profitability over everything else. Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time. There's no room for experimentation, repair, or anything else. I've commented about lack of slack on several times here…
They also took out all the quality , though in pure business terms one can argue that's a kind of "slack" by itself. The beancounters have cut all the corners on physical products that they could find. Now even design and manufacturing is outsourced to the lowest bidder, a bunch of monkeys paid peanuts to do a job they're woefully unqualified for. And the end result is just a market for lemons. Nobody trusts products…
> And in the background of this something ominous: Companies can't just pivot back to higher quality after they've destroyed all their inhouse knowledge. (...) They can't move back upmarket after that's done.
The knowledge isn't the problem. It can be quickly regained, and progress of science and technology often offer new paths to even better quality, which limits the need for recovering details of old process.
The actual problem is, there is no market to go up to anymore. Once everyone is used to garbage being the only thing on offer, and adjust to cope with it, you cannot compete on quality anymore. Customers won't be able to tell whether you're honest, or just trying to charge suckers for the same garbage with a nicer finish, like every other brand that promises quality. It would take years of effort and low sales to convince the customers to start believing you're the real deal, which (as beancounters will happily tell you) you cannot afford. And even if you could, how are you going to convince people you're not going to start cutting corners again a few years down the line? In fact, how do you convince yourself? If it happened once, if it keeps happening everywhere around across all economy, it's bound to happen to your business too.
Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another perspective: AI reduces brain effort in some domains which actually frees up brain juice that can be applied elsewhere.
Show us effects. What amazing breakthroughs were achieved thanks to brain juice freed by AI usage? What great works of art were created?
I'll bite. I've been writing music for decades but I can't sing. With ai I can write lyrics and generate ai vocals, then separate the stems and extract the vocals throwing away the rest.
Add the vocals to my daw and create the rest the way I want.
Saying its a great work of art is subjective, but for me I can make music I couldn't before now.
Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing, only the gentle hand of US influence over their internal affairs, and the typical nationalistic bickering among themselves.
Those are impediments for sure, but they are not blockers, and if they had the will, they would have overcome that. Most, probably all NATO countries do have their own military industrial complex of some sort and the US is buying from them. Although, it certainly is the case that the US is the largest supplier of military equipment and so, yes, the US would benefit most from efforts to increase military spending.
I agree, the will was never there.
We will see whether the new realities of the war in Ukraine and Trump's approach to Europe will substantially change that.
The whole economic and societal tensions in the west make things tougher...
Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
#408The 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…
>. In many domains, productivity is already sufficient. What’s being sold is workforce reduction. This is a blindspot to many. People working on entrepreneurial projects need to build a lot. They start with nothing. They need (for example) features. There's a lot to do. Most firms are not that. Visa, Salesforce, LinkedIn or whatnot. They have a product. They have features. They have been at it for a while. They also…
> doesn't generate any for later.
"any" is quite an assumption.
Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
#409I 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'm the opposite I don't think I've read a single line of code I've shipped in over 6 months. I'd say it's far more tiring working that way though, you're breaking the satisfaction loop so you never really get the dopamine you used to get coding by hand, when you had a problem figuring it out was like solving a puzzle and you feel satisfaction at the end of it. With AI it feels most of my day is spent being a QA than…
Agree with you for my day job (which is coding corporate web app), for sure. I'm still letting A.I. drive more nowadays, but it does feel less fulfilling than it used to.
But for my personal projects, I work on games, and by offloading a lot of the coding work to A.I., my puzzle solving is no longer 'how to fix this stupid library spitting stupid errors at me' or 'how to get this shader working' or 'why is this upgrade breaking all the things' and more 'what does this game need in order to be fun and good?', which I find a lot more fulfilling.
It's also why I switched my focus to board game design for the longest time. I didn't have to fight my tools or learn some new api or library frequently. And if I wanted to try a new mechanic, I didn't need to spend 20 minutes or 2 hours or 2 days implementing it, I could write something on an index card in five seconds and shift mid-game most of the time.
A.I. just brought video games closer to that experience, which actually has made them more fun to work on again, because board games has the immense (financial/logistical if self-publishing or social/networking if attempting to get published through a publisher) challenge of getting physical games published to worry about.
Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not sure if it is necessarily copied. A lot of influencer-style people used some of these patterns (periods, not X but Y). So I'm not sure who is copying who?
These patterns are learned from magazine articles and other long-form publications. The tendency to have unnecessarily pithy/hooky section titles is one that particularly irks me, but it's not like AI invented that. I was reading some DIY books that are published by a company that does a lot of web/magazine work and they structure the text in the same way (this is all pre-LLM). Content creators are starting to includ…
> Content creators are starting to include these traits into their scripts now, too.
Why would you assume this when the more likely reasonable is that the 'content creators' are just pasting LLM output?