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

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

#441

Post by lotsofpulp »

999900000999 wrote: post #394
lotsofpulp wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

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

#442

Post by chromacity »

I just can't get over the incredible irony of so many of these "AI is bad for you, mmkay" articles being LLM-generated.

If the author sincerely believes the thesis that AI makes you vulnerable / dumb, they are either incredibly hypocritical. But more likely, they're just cynical and trying to get traffic to their website. And you're not getting back the time you spent reading this and arguing with it.

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

#443

Post by djeastm »

bontaq wrote: post #435
barankilic wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am really amazed at how we are really okay with LLMs writing code end to end (without human in the loop) / dark factory concept but when it comes articles, HN is suddenly against LLMs writing words. I do not see the difference between writing code and writing prose. Both have keywords, grammars, syntax, meaningful combinations (function or chaining in code / collocations in words). If we think that AI-generated wor…

This is a funny point. People don't want to read LLM code either, so who knows where that puts us.

It puts us in a secondary, less-rare, less-valuable role out of the driving economic loop we've grown up in.

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

#444

Post by torginus »

hrimfaxi wrote: post #414
sph wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I wonder what longer cycles with easier recall methods might yield.

I dunno if cycle length is the key here, the Soviets and the Chinese went with five-year plans, and done properly, it seems like thats a long enough amount of time to accomplish very important things.

WW2 took slightly less than 6 years, when we count it from the invasion of Poland to the fall of Nazi Germany.

The moon landings took little less than 7 years, so I don't think we are terribly off by the timeframe.

Considering the world's been getting faster (just think about how different the US was before Trump took power a bit more than a year ago), I think 4 years is fine.

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

#445

Post by giantg2 »

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…

The real issue isn't the management pattern. The real issue is outsourcing. Offshore The manufacturing and coding and you wont have the facilities and personnel to do that type of labor anymore. Management has a and in that, but the people and the officials they elect have an even bigger impact (regulation vs invisible hand and all that).

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

#446

Post by throwaw12 »

gnz11 wrote: post #420
throwaw12 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is a management pattern .... Short-term cost cutting Absolutely agree with this. Most MBAs are taught to optimize and reduce the slack. It works fine with machinery and materials, but not with humans. When machinery is optimized and run thin, when one of them breaks, you can get exact same in couple days (you usually prepare for it earlier), but with humans, they train their brain and next person is dif…

Perhaps US companies should invest more in their employees then? Advancement, promotions beyond %1-3% COLAs, career paths, etc would go along way to keep employees interested in seeing their employers succeed instead of jumping ship every couple of years. The would require some effort from the C-suite however and since they jump ship every few years as well, I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Invest in employees is very broad statement.

Before investing to employees I think it should revisit management practices and strategies, which starts in MBA and university.

Instead of teaching how to increase shareholder value in the short term, it should also teach how to increase value to the society in the long term as well (and focus on it highly) - not just say: if you win society wins kind of generic fluff.

Without changing management strategies everything becomes short term after a while

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

#447

Post by markus_zhang »

throwaw12 wrote: post #278
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…

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…

I always think that’s the failure of citizens, not just the officials. Eventually history is going to blame us for not taking action, not pushing back, and pretty much sleep tightly when things fall apart around us.

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

#448

Post by lotsofpulp »

_heimdall wrote: post #429
lotsofpulp wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was clear when they captured Crimea.

Sure that plays a role for sure, though I don't think anyone in 2014 was predicting a broader invasion 8 years later.

Crimea was Feb 2014, and then in Jul 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight 17 was shot down by "pro russian separatists" in eastern Ukraine. Seems like they were laying the groundwork for a while. I have no idea what portion of this wikipedia article is true:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novorossiya_(confederation)

But it seems Ukraine had questionable control of the eastern parts of the country long before the 2022 "official" invasion.

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

#449

Post by dkrich »

Arun2009 wrote: post #433

The west also "forgot" to calculate by hand. Because they invented calculators and computers. The west is not merely forgetting to code. It is creating systems that can code. They aren't standing still. They are progressing to a higher level of production.

This raises a good point. The analogy in the article implies that eventually there will again be a need to know how to write code at a large scale and nobody will know how to do it. I don’t think the analogy holds if you think of AI as a sort of orchestration and abstraction layer which at the end of the day, all software development tools are.

But I do think there’s another thing going on quietly in corporate America currently that will have major ramifications for companies that have prioritized using AI and that is a loss of technical excellence in general.

I can’t put my finger on it but sometime around 2023 or so there was a noticeable falloff in technical competence at companies I work with because the higher ups went all in on a generative AI future. No longer were they investing in training new hires and having rigorous certification standards. Instead people were encouraged to use AI tools to answer questions and would regularly pass off the output to more knowledgeable workers for refinement. These people clearly had no idea whether what they were sending out was accurate or not but it looked and felt like real work.

I think there will be a consolidation across the tech industry and AI will not be a differentiator and only those who are actually competent will succeed but right now AI is allowing a lot of incompetence to go undetected throughout a lot of organizations.

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

#450

Post by markus_zhang »

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.

I think that has something to do with the prerequisites of democracy.

I believe one important factor for a democracy to work properly, is to have a large number of citizens who 1) can stand up and push back when they feel something is wrong, and 2) is sufficiently knowledgeable. We don’t have that anymore. Of course I’m also to be blamed for that.

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