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Rolling the ladder up behind us

xeiaso.net

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Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#11

Post by th0ma5 »

kevmo314 wrote: post #6

> Actually, what are we going to do when everyone that cares about the craft of software ages out, burns out, or escapes the industry because of the ownership class setting unrealistic expectations on people? Nothing, I guess? There's an implicit assumption that software written by humans is a necessity. If the future finds that software written by computers is more profitable then that's just what it is. The univers…

This also assumes that non human written code will be of any use to humans and no one has shown that to be possible, it is all humans patching it up so far.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#13

Post by dontlaugh »

WalterBright wrote: post #7
dontlaugh wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was the Luddites’ position. Organised labour should one again take up this principled position. Join a trade union!

Do you really want a return to the days when "women's work" was spending every free moment spinning and weaving cloth by hand? When cloth was so valuable there was a profession called "rag pickers"? Where new clothes were rare, hand me downs were the usual, and people wore clothes until they disintegrated? And poor people made clothes out of flour sacks?

That’s not what the Luddites wanted. They praised the technology itself and recognised it would save a lot of time. But they also recognised that they the workers wouldn’t reap any of those benefits, they’d just lose their jobs.

Do you really think capitalists would choose to shorten the working day with no loss of pay as productivity increases? If so, you are incredibly naive.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#14

Post by deadbabe »

Vibe coding is not going to go away.

Just as alchemists always dreamed of turning lead into gold, there is a dream that people have had for decades of writing less and less code: Open source. Scaffolds. Code generators. No-code tools. Coding Agent LLMs.

If vibe coding goes away, it will be because it has been replaced with something even more hands off. Perhaps vibe prompting. Or even code farming: just have AI agents constantly build totally random shit and go through and see if any of it is useful for something. Maybe even take a genetic approach where you score the fitness of various software for a certain solution and AI will cross mutate the genes. This will be a change of that rivals our shift from hunter/gatherers to the agricultural revolution.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#15

Post by derektank »

schmidtleonard wrote: post #10
WalterBright wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The owning class will use it to reduce payroll costs Of course. That's been going on since the invention of the plow. That's why today we can do more interesting things than turn over the earth with a pointy stick all day every day. > economic democracy, where average people regain control over their lives History shows us that this inevitably means people lose all control over their lives, because the state will m…

I have a whole list of things I'd like from my car that the market does not provide because it is more profitable not to. Why do I get the feeling that instead of seeing this as a horror story you would scold me for unreasonable expectations, even though it is the identical mirror form of the horror story you just told?

My take would be to scold you to start your own company that provides the features you want from your car if it's not already being provided by the marketplace

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#16

Post by stego-tech »

schmidtleonard wrote: post #10
WalterBright wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The owning class will use it to reduce payroll costs Of course. That's been going on since the invention of the plow. That's why today we can do more interesting things than turn over the earth with a pointy stick all day every day. > economic democracy, where average people regain control over their lives History shows us that this inevitably means people lose all control over their lives, because the state will m…

I have a whole list of things I'd like from my car that the market does not provide because it is more profitable not to. Why do I get the feeling that instead of seeing this as a horror story you would scold me for unreasonable expectations, even though it is the identical mirror form of the horror story you just told?

Because Mr. Bright has a long, storied comment history of neolibertarian fantasies being wielded as a cudgel against anyone who dares envision a future that does not align with his own.

Speaking from experience with them in another thread. Your best bet is to ignore the bait and move on to more fruitful discussions.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#17

Post by mrtksn »

I knew what was this all about the moment I glimpsed at the title on the front page, my neural nets must have been trained to output that from the few tokens I guess, which makes me think maybe all this AI stuff isn't that different from what's happening in real brains. I bet others too had similar experience.

So the AI thing is happening, maybe its not with this particular tech we have today but they are on to something and we probably better embrace it.

Humans rolled the ladder up behind on so many things. Very few people will survive the planet Earth without the tools and abstractions we built over the many Millenia's and that's how we all live like kings. Any misery out there in the world is a result of our inability to manage it, not because the resources are scarce.

The Luddites, as explained in the article were indeed about the way tech is being adopted. All that tech eventually reached every corner of the world and not every place had Luddites.

Programming computers by hand is shitty anyway, good riddance. Finally we are about to have machines that can be programmed without thinking about the intricacies of programming that have nothing to do with the thing we want to achieve.

All the tech left behind still does have aficionados, maybe in 10 years we can watch someone program a computer using Java on the Primitive Technology channel.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#18

Post by brendoelfrendo »

WalterBright wrote: post #4
Refreeze5224 wrote: post #2

This is the true problem with AI. It's with who owns it, and what they will inevitably use it for. Whether it can do cool stuff with code or equal a junior developer is irrelevant. What it can do is less important than what it will be used for. The owning class will use it to reduce payroll costs, which from their perspective is a cost center and always will be. If you're not an owner, then you have no control over t…

> The owning class will use it to reduce payroll costs Of course. That's been going on since the invention of the plow. That's why today we can do more interesting things than turn over the earth with a pointy stick all day every day. > economic democracy, where average people regain control over their lives History shows us that this inevitably means people lose all control over their lives, because the state will m…

This happens anyway, lol. Go to a car lot and you will see the majority of cars available are black, white, silver, and maybe red. Your car will have a stereo. Your car will probably have 4 seats, not 2. Dealers stock the most common configurations and, maybe this is not your experience, but my experience is that they will twist themselves into knots to avoid helping customers make custom orders for exactly what they want, even though the manufacturer has a fancy configurator page where you can do exactly that.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#19

Post by asmxyz »

WalterBright wrote: post #4
Refreeze5224 wrote: post #2

This is the true problem with AI. It's with who owns it, and what they will inevitably use it for. Whether it can do cool stuff with code or equal a junior developer is irrelevant. What it can do is less important than what it will be used for. The owning class will use it to reduce payroll costs, which from their perspective is a cost center and always will be. If you're not an owner, then you have no control over t…

> The owning class will use it to reduce payroll costs Of course. That's been going on since the invention of the plow. That's why today we can do more interesting things than turn over the earth with a pointy stick all day every day. > economic democracy, where average people regain control over their lives History shows us that this inevitably means people lose all control over their lives, because the state will m…

There are _other options_!

You're argument is that the only two alternatives are that the ruling class and owning class be separate groups of people, or the same group of people. And either way the labor class if F'ed. You're right that having the ruling class and the owning class being the _same people_ is terrible. That's what we're living in right now!

But what about the labor class being the owning class? What if Amazon was owned by the people who work at Amazon? Instead of Bezos?

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#20

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

kevmo314 wrote: post #6

> Actually, what are we going to do when everyone that cares about the craft of software ages out, burns out, or escapes the industry because of the ownership class setting unrealistic expectations on people? Nothing, I guess? There's an implicit assumption that software written by humans is a necessity. If the future finds that software written by computers is more profitable then that's just what it is. The univers…

Well, as someone who considers themselves to be a "software craftsman," I have come to the conclusion that the work I do will never be valued, and will always be considered "too expensive." Since I work for free, that's not an issue for me, but that's economically unfeasible for most folks.

The issue with an industry awash with cheap dross, is that it becomes prohibitively expensive to produce high Quality stuff. Anyone that tries, will get driven out of business. Some clever folks will figure out how to do "slightly better" stuff, and charge more for it, but a good way to go out of business, is to focus on Quality as a principal axis.

That's basic market dynamics. It is what it is, and is neither evil, nor good.

It does mean that only "niche" craftsmen, like myself, will produce anything of decent Quality, but will be unable to do so at scale, because we can't get a team together, large enough to do big things.

I guess the saddest thing, is that I have really wanted to help teach my techniques to others, but have found that no one wants to learn, so I gave up on that, many years ago.

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