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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

#561

Post by 999900000999 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #441
999900000999 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

College should have never been presented as the only way to the middle class. In high school they shutdown my advanced trades class, maybe I could have been ready to hop into a decent job after graduation. I recently spoke to a young art school grad who talked about getting on disability over a life of the corporate grind. Who am I to disagree ? The Pentagon has never passed an audit, the government coffers are effec…

>College should have never been presented as the only way to the middle class. In high school they shutdown my advanced trades class, maybe I could have been ready to hop into a decent job after graduation. Not unless you were willing to compete on price against people in China learning the same advanced trades.

So I assume every time you need a leak plugged you ship your whole house to Guangzhou ?

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

#562

Post by qwertywert_ »

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…

It's interesting because i find when I'm less busy/stressed at work is when I spend more time motivated, doing better work, and fixing issues that otherwise would get left behind.

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

#563

Post by RataNova »

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…

The danger is not using a tool. We all use tools... The danger is skipping the part where your own brain builds a model of the problem

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

#564

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

bonsai_spool wrote: post #344
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what are you basing this on? The text has few of the obvious AI tells. The only thing that, to me, looks characteristic of LLM-generated text is the short and terse sentence structure, but this has been a "prestigious" way to write in English since Hemingway.

What are the obvious tells? List them, because I think our sense of the tells may not overlap. This article is clearly LLM-generated, even the title. A key indicator is that it almost makes sense: we forgot how to manufacture because that got sent to a different nation. The coding thing isn’t getting sent anywhere, so humanity is forgetting how to code. The distinction undermines a lot of the emotional baggage about…

There are quite a lot of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

But it's really just the usual ones that are truly obvious. "Not X but Y," em-dashes, "underscores the significance of X," and so forth.

A terse sentence structure can be a tell, but, IMO, it's a weak one.

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

#565

Post by clarkdale »

TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #210

“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…

LLMs are trained on real life grammar written by humans. Sometimes the characteristic traits you see by LLMs are written again by human hands.

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

#566

Post by RataNova »

dd8601fn wrote: post #466
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 have always had a problem, worse than most I think, where if I’m away from a language for a bit I lose my ability to write it quickly and competently, real quick. It doesn’t matter if I was quite competent in it… the mechanical bits fade fast. Doing llm assisted work is going to be like pouring bleach on my brain. I can feel it. The more I use it the worse it will be for me. I can still formulate what I need, and p…

There is a difference between understanding the shape of a solution and keeping the "finger memory" of a language alive

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

#568

Post by conqrr »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #528

AI isn't making us forget, and we aren't in the process of forgetting. We forgot, past tense, in 2015. The rise of coding bootcamps destroyed the historic knowledge and expertise of professional software developers. Waves and waves of people joined the tech workforce, without taking the years of experience required to learn how programming, and professional software development, should work. The result was a lot of r…

License makes a lot of sense. Many engineering fields have licenses. Needs to be made mandatory. Tech rapidly evolves which was an excuse. Well, a lot has stabilized now in terms of technologies.

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

#570

Post by pembrook »

vishnugupta wrote: post #60
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…

> 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…

> Without people who have actually worked with the system, you end up with a loss of tacit knowledge—and eventually, declining productivity.

> You are spot on w.r.t every assertion you've made.

Huh? What happened to the concept of "debate" on HN. It's just a bunch of people agreeing with each other. Yet the data doesn't support any of OP's thesis.

Here's a chart of the rise in productivity per hour worked in the United States since 1947. It's a steady linear increase every single year: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB

Yours is the type of story big company workers tell themselves to feel important while refusing to learn anything new and never taking any risks. But the truth is 99.999% of companies are not doing anything that unique or complex. Most companies are not ASML.

If I had a nickel for every time I've heard someone justify their do-nothing position within a giant bureaucracy while saying the phrase "institutional knowledge" I'd be rich. This is just a sign of a poorly run giant company full of engineers building esoteric and overly complex in-house solutions to already-solved problems as job security.

The truth is all of this "institutional knowledge" is worthless in the face of disruption, and it has a half life that's getting shorter every day.

Everybody talks shit about global just-in-time supply chains and specialization...but just because we had a fake toilet paper shortage for a few months during a 100-year global pandemic doesn't mean running things like it's 1947 for the last 70 years would have been better. You enjoy a much higher quality of life today due to these "evil" JIT supply chains which it turns out are far more durable than people want to claim.

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