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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

#631

Post by ezoe »

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…

What you describe had been happened already when programming task became using search engines, passing data between libraries, and delegating coding to off-shore workers.

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

#632

Post by Forgeties79 »

coffeefirst wrote: post #615
Forgeties79 wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does "fair" have to do with anything? Not wasting other people’s time when they expect your work to at least pass a cursory check. It’s selfish and disrespectful. It reflects poorly on you. I don’t know about all that other stuff you wrote but it’s not really what I’m talking about so I’ll clarify. I don’t know what your high school/college was like, but we used to trade papers for editing. It was universally…

And this is the AI ethos: anti-contentiousness. Is it correct? Is it any good? Should I subject another person to this? Is it profoundly rude to not even read their email and just have a robot respond automatically? The slopmonger does not engage with the question at all, because they never cared.

They also lack any imagination because clearly they didn’t think about how they would feel if they were on the receiving end.

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

#633

Post by idle_zealot »

ahussain wrote: post #596
vishnugupta wrote: post #60

Earlier 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…

Engineers seem to think business people don’t know what they are doing, but if your post were true, then companies would add slack to outperform their competitors. The broken system likely doesn’t have enough business impact to justify the investment to maintain it.

> companies would add slack to outperform their competitors.

I think if they did this they'd get buried by the market. Your slack is someone else's opportunity to undercut you. It's a systemic problem, it's in every individual's self interest to work towards instability.

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

#634

Post by WalterBright »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #628
WalterBright wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working long hours was necessary in those days because productivity was much lower. Productivity has gone up so much people can work a lot less, and vast part of the population doesn't work at all.

Depends what you mean by work. Most people do a lot of work themselves that the Richie Rich would pay somebody else to do, like cooking, cleaning, childcare, gardening, etc. If it counts as work when you hire somebody to do it, it should equally count as work if you do it yourself.

People still did cooking, cleaning, childcare, and gardening in those times of 12 hour work days.

BTW, cooking in those days was an all day affair. The wood stove required continuous feeding and watching. Today one can just put the food in a microwave.

I cook a steak now and then, it's the only cooking I do. It takes about 10 minutes. The dishwasher does the cleaning.

Rich people hire others to do the cooking because the rich peoples' jobs pay off far more per hour of work. For example, if my profession pays me $100/hr, it makes perfect sense to pay someone $30/hr to do the cooking for me, as I am still $70/hr ahead.

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

#636

Post by christofosho »

sgt wrote: post #173
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…

You sound convincing, but it also reads very AI generated. A lot of people will stop reading half way.

... Yeah, that was my issue as well. I'm pretty sure it _is_ AI generated, and flagged it. Hopefully moderation can follow up.

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

#637

Post by cowmix »

WalterBright wrote: post #600
spiorf wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the process has impeded even higher standard of living, because it misallocates resources from value generation to value appropriation. It's the extreme short term profit maximization that makes the economy a zero sum game. Otherwise it is not.

Do you really think the economy is zero sum? For example, who was Elon Musk's wealth transferred from? What do you think about all that money being invested into AI? Is that "extreme short term profit maximization"?

I don’t know who his wealth was transferred from, exactly. But I do know what he’s using it for now: as a gravitational force to unilaterally screw with public institutions and systems the rest of us depend on.

Even if you agree with some of DOGE projects’s goals, the way it operated was wildly thoughtless about consequences beyond Musk’s personal wishes, and almost completely unaccountable.

I’m honestly sick that my personal Model Y purchase helped add to that power.

And I say that as someone who was a huge Musk fan for years, despite the warning signs — the Thai “pedo” comments, and his very public turn during COVID.

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

#639

Post by slibhb »

Yes, and textile factories involved people "forgetting" how to weave. Whitehead:

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them"

It remains to be seen whether this implies some kind of constraint on human progress. I doubt it.

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

#640

Post by rawgabbit »

auggierose wrote: post #548
TeMPOraL wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

So, is that a market failure, or is that the market functioning as intended?

Market failure. Customers cannot differentiate between quality and crap due to no fault of their own.
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