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The rise of industrial software
101–110 of 201 posts
Re: The rise of industrial software
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I considered it may be a dictionary correction issue but i am sort've railing against the suggestion of current level LLMs being used for tax-software and POS design. Edit: And if I was using C or C++ above my lack of capitalization would either evoke an error too OR passably continue foward referencing the wrong variable and result in a similar error to your transposition.
I said that was something which would happen in the future, as in not the current level LLMs. But this is what people will pay the programmer for, the programmer will (hopefully) know when and where the LLM can be used to offload the grunt work and where they should just skip the LLM and hand code it, those things the average person will not know, the full system and this applies to current level LLMs
In the future, this will be all voice controlled making most of our user-interfaces and expenditures on adapting to this intermediate stage moot.
Re: The rise of industrial software
#103This essay, like so many others, mistakes the task of "building" software with the task of "writing" software. Anyone in the world can already get cheap, mass-produced software to do almost anything they want their computer to do. Compilers spit out new build of any program on demand within seconds, and you can usually get both source code and pre-compiled copies over the internet. The "industrial process" (as TFA pu…
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Re: The rise of industrial software
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're getting caught up on the technical meaning of terms rather than what the author actually wrote. Theyre explicitly saying that most software will no longer be artisianal - a great literary novel - and instead become industrialized - mass produced paperback garbage books. But also saying that good software, like literature, will continue to exist.
Yes, I read the article. I still think it's incorrect. Most software (especially by usage) is already not artisanal. You get the exact same browser, database server and (whatsapp/signal/telegram/whatever) messenger client as basically everyone else. Those are churned out by the millions from a common blueprint and designed by teams and teams of highly skilled specialists using specialized tooling, not so different fr…
I think the author of the post envisions more code authoring automation, more generated code/test/deployment, exponentially more. To the degree what we have now would be "quaint", as he says.
Your point that most software uses the same browsers, databases, tooling and internal libraries is a weakness, a sameness that can be exploited by current AI, to push that automation capability much further. Hell, why even bother with any of the generated code and infrastructure being "human readable" anymore? (Of course, all kinds of reasons that is bad, but just watch that "innovation" get a marketing push and take off. Which would only mean we'd need viewing software to make whatever was generated readable - as if anyone would read to understand hundreds/millions of generated complex anything.)
Re: The rise of industrial software
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Economic growth is not directly proportional to energy consumption. A major feature of any useful tool is that it (often dramatically) reduces energy consumption.
Economic growth tracks almost 100% with energy consumption. The earth at night map is quite telling on the matter.
Newsflash! Less happens while people are asleep!
Correlation doesnt say anything about the sensitivity/scaling. (i recognize that my original comment didnt quite make this point, though the correlation is definitely not 100%, so that point does still stand)
can you note the difference between the earth being lit by torches, candles, kerosene lamps and incandescent bulbs, versus LED lights? LED isnt glowing harder, it just wastes less energy.
A rocket stove, or any efficient furnace, can extract vastly more energy from the same fuel source than an open fire. I assume combustion engines have had significant efficiency improvements since first introduced. And electric engines are almost completely efficient - especially when fed by efficient, clean/renewable source.
How about the computing power of a smartphone versus a supercomputer from 1980?
What is more energy efficient, a carpenter working with crude stones or with sharp chisels?
and we can, of course, put aside whether any measurement of economic value is actually accurate/useful... A natural disaster is technically good for many economic measures, since the destruction doesn't get measured and the wealth invested in rebuilding just counts as economic activity
And, Of course, then there's creeptocurrencies which use an immense amount of energy to do something that was previously trivial. And worse, when it is used in place of cash. But even there, some are more efficient than others - not that anyone who uses them actually cares.
Re: The rise of industrial software
#106This thought-provoking essay does not consider one crucial aspect of software: the cost of a user developing a facility with a given software product. Historically monopolistic software producers can force these costs to be borne because the user has no alternative to upgrading to the latest version of, for example, Windows, or gmail, or the latest version of the github GUI. A signficant portion of the open source /…
I've never found a term I liked for this particular concept at the intersection of education & business so I made one up a while back: A Knowledge Pool is the reservoir of shared knowledge that a group of people have about a particular subject, tool, method, etc. In product strategy, knowledge pools represent another kind of moat, and a form of leverage that can be used to grow or maintain market share. Usage: Resour…
The formal term that business people use is "institutional knowledge".
Re: The rise of industrial software
#107I've just done my first almost fully vibe coded hobby project from start to near completion, a village history website with a taxonomy, and it's taken so much poking and prodding and cajoling to get the software to do exactly what I want it to do. Having built plenty of production stuff, I know what I want it to look like and the data model was really clear, yet even trying every trick in the book to constrain them,…
> you still needed the captain driving the ship.
The question is more what becomes of all the rowers when you’re switching from captain + 100 rowers to captain + steam engine
They’re not all going to get their own boat and captain hat
Re: The rise of industrial software
#108These damn articles. Software moved into an industrial revolution when you could write in a high level language, and not in assembly. This has already happened .
You either see what codex and opus are capable of and extrapolate the trendline or you don’t; the author clearly saw and extrapolated. Not that I disagree: I’m on record agreeing with the article months ago. Folks in labs probably seen it coming for years. Yes we’ve seen major improvements in software development velocity - libraries, OSes, containers, portable bytecodes - but I’m afraid we’ve seen nothing yet. Claud…
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Re: The rise of industrial software
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
You either see what codex and opus are capable of and extrapolate the trendline or you don’t; the author clearly saw and extrapolated. Not that I disagree: I’m on record agreeing with the article months ago. Folks in labs probably seen it coming for years. Yes we’ve seen major improvements in software development velocity - libraries, OSes, containers, portable bytecodes - but I’m afraid we’ve seen nothing yet. Claud…
And if we extrapolate 5% economic growth per year we will consume all the energy in our light cone in 1000 years.
If we extrapolated the rise in the standards of living of a Detroit Black blue-collar factory worker in Detroit from the early 60s to our current days, most of them should own 64ft yachts by now.
Re: The rise of industrial software
#110“industrialisation of agriculture led to ultraprocessed junk food“ The mass production of unprocessed food is not what led to the production of hyper processed food. That would be a strange market dynamic. Shareholder pressure, aggressive marketing and engineering for super-palatable foods are what led to hyper processed foods.
Shelf life is one of the major factors allowing treatment more similar to nonperishable commodities.
I think some people do instinctively feel like all different kinds of software have different shelf lives or useful lifetimes for different reasons.
But there's always so much noise it's not very easy to get the expiration date correct.
Mass production is pretty much a given when it comes to commodities, and things like long shelf life are icing on the cake.
The inversion comes when mass production makes the highly processed feed more affordable than the unprocessed. After both have scaled maximally, market forces mean more than the amount of labor that was put in.
Strange indeed.