Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techtrenches.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 896 posts

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

#391

Post by TeMPOraL »

Terr_ wrote: post #138
0xpgm wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This kind of forgetting is normal Just as shift in power and the rise and fall of nations is normal.

For that matter, a lot of human civilization has been about identifying things that were normal and making them rare. "Normal" infant mortality of 40%, famines, floods, history being lost, etc. Anyway, when it comes to "this is normal" I think we should take care to distinguish between interpretations of: 1. "This specific case should not have taken certain people by surprise." 2. "This is a manifestation of a broade…

In the specific case discussed in the article and comments, I'm advocating for another interpretation:

4a. "If a process is unlikely to be needed any time soon, shutting it down and then paying cold-start costs if and when it's needed again, is better than keeping it going and wasting resources better used elsewhere", and

4b. "There's an infinitely long tail of low-probability problems, and you can't possibly afford to maintain advance readiness for any of them".

Also on the overall sentiment:

4c. "Paying a cold-start cost isn't a penalty or sign of bad planning. It's just a cost."

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

#393

Post by throwaw12 »

sph wrote: post #361
throwaw12 wrote: post #278

Earlier 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.

Western democracy is very interesting.

Corporations promote people to Principal or distinguished engineer only when they prove their worth by running long running large scale projects.

But when it comes to governing the whole country: lobby, marketing and boom, you are a president for next 4 years, which is anyway not enough to deliver anything big and see the impact. (Except the destruction, destruction is easy to cause)

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

#394

Post by 999900000999 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #331
mschuster91 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the 'teaching how to think' was replaced with 'how to get a well paying job'. Yeah. Companies didn't want to train new employees any more as that costs money (both for paying the trainees and the teachers) so they shifted to requiring academic degrees. That in turn shifted the cost to students (via student loans) and governments. People call it a red flag for scams if you are supposed to pay your employer for t…

The problem was the government providing the blank check loans with no underwriting. Without that subsidy from future taxpayers, incentives would be properly aligned. No lender would have been stupid enough to give 18 to 22 year olds $200k for bullshit degrees and sports facilities. The onus would have remained on employers and government to pay for education, rather than a certification, because they would have been…

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 effectively a slush fund for defense contractors.

At this point, I think a universal basic income is the only way.

Not enough jobs exist for everyone. Poverty doesn’t need to exist

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

#395

Post by bluGill »

don_esteban wrote: post #370
bluGill wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the hope but nothing stopped the EU from making their own stuff.

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.

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

#396

Post by matwood »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #271

The defense analogy makes absolutely no sense. All the examples are of production shutdowns or reductions. Knowledge was lost because people retired and not replaced at all. None of it was lost to automation. Automation is the exact opposite of tying knowledge to people. It's extracting knowledge from people and transferring it to a machine that can continue to produce the goods. Yes, AI can lead to problems and some…

Exactly. The US hasn't forgotten how to manufacture, in fact a ton of manufacturing happens in the US. What's happened is that it's been automated. And automation is one of the better ways to extract knowledge from a person who will one day switch jobs, retire or pass away.

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

#397

Post by confiq »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #378
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'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…

why I agree with both of you?

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

#400

Post by matwood »

bit1993 wrote: post #147
zelphirkalt wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not so much convinced by your last point, that point of new languages and frameworks. I think the cutoff date is closing in on our current now. If models cannot easily become bigger, they will likely advertise using "up-to-date-ness". Maybe they will be merely a few days behind. Or bigger models will make use of smaller but more up-to-date models. I think engineering skills will still remain relevant due to tast…

> I think the cutoff date is closing in on our current now. If models cannot easily become bigger, they will likely advertise using "up-to-date-ness". Maybe they will be merely a few days behind. Or bigger models will make use of smaller but more up-to-date models But they will still rely on assembly, C, Rust, Linux, HTML, TCP/IP... Doesn't matter how up to date they are, they rely on existing code they have been tra…

Except they already have invented new languages.

https://medium.com/@trezzescience/the-ai-that-invented-its-o...

Post reply on HN