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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

#551

Post by WalterBright »

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…

On the other hand, we have government operations that spend staggering amounts of money, and accomplish nothing at all. This one even has lost $8 million and nobody knows what happened to the money:

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/does-noth...

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

#552

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

Kerrick wrote: post #453
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what are you basing this on? The text has few of the obvious AI tells. The only thing that, to me, looks characteristic of LLM-generated text is the short and terse sentence structure, but this has been a "prestigious" way to write in English since Hemingway.

https://awnist.com/slop-cop (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47806845 ) points out Staccato Burst, Dramatic Fragment, Colon Elaboration, and Short-Hook Paragraph. To me, those define the tone of this article.

Interesting tool.

I'm not trying to defend the blog post, but I gave Slop Cop 775 words of an essay by Schopenhauer (translated into English) and got "15 patterns detected."

I fear we're approaching the point where AI-written text grows indistinguishable from human-written text, unless the AI-user is exceptionally lazy and uses an obsolete model...

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

#553

Post by RataNova »

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…

AI is almost a distraction from the older pattern: management discovers a way to make the spreadsheet look better this quarter and the hidden cost only shows up years later

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

#554

Post by linsomniac »

This post uses the war machine to demonstrate AI=bad.

I'm far removed from the conflict in Ukraine, but from the reporting it seems like they are making extremely good use of well understood, inexpensive technologies like drones with mundane munitions.

I'm sure Stinger missiles have their place in the battlefield there, but a $120K stinger doesn't seem like a very good countermeasure against a few thousand dollar drone.

So, counterpoint: We also need to understand how to embrace the changing face of software.

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

#555

Post by WalterBright »

vishnugupta wrote: post #60
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…

> 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…

> optimised immediate profitability over everything else

Which is the usual complaint that businesses are focused on short term results, sacrificing long term results.

If that would be generally true, the stock market would be going down steeply, not up, as stock prices are based on expectations of future profits.

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

#556

Post by NateEag »

strange_quark wrote: post #520
MattJ100 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We see this in our open-source community. We've had a community channel for over two decades, where community members help newcomers and each other solve problems and answer questions. Increasingly we have people join who tell us they've been struggling with a problem "for days". Per routine, we ask for their configuration, and it turns out they've been asking ChatGPT, Claude or some other LLM for assistance and thei…

> In fact I see this pattern a lot. People use LLMs for stuff within their domain of expertise, or just ask them questions about washing cars, and they laugh at how incompetent and illogical they are. Then, hours later, they will happily query ChatGPT for mortgage advice, or whatever. If they don't have the knowledge to verify it themselves then they seem more willing to believe it is accurate, where in fact they sho…

So have you stopped using ChatGPT and Claude?

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

#557

Post by WalterBright »

aleqs wrote: post #538
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…

The problem is, in the minds of these people 'firing at 100% all the time' generally means doing busywork and/or thinking of ways to cheat/manipulate their customers and the market for maximum gain whole delivering minimum value. I would have loved to be 100% engaged working on solving real problems in honest ways at some of my past jobs, but alas MBA/marketing leadership, which has taken over much of tech has very l…

Profit maximization is a continuous process that has generated our high standard of living.

P.S. I welcome all attempts to prove me wrong!

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

#558

Post by joenot443 »

barankilic wrote: post #275
TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #210

“Money was never the constraint. Knowledge was.” The irony is how difficult it is to read this obviously AI-generated article due to its unnatural prose and choppy flow full of LLM-isms. The ability to write is also a skill that atrophies. Even when AI is understandably used due to language fluency, I’d prefer to read an AI translation over a generated article. If you don’t care enough to write it, why should I care…

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…

I would say that the simple reason is that writing is often artistic and coding very rarely is.

I don’t listen to AI music or watch AI videos, I don’t want to read AI articles

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

#559

Post by RataNova »

thegrim33 wrote: post #486
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 way the system is supposed to work is that companies that make bad decisions fail, and provide room for companies that do not make bad decisions to appear or grow bigger. Which works as long as you have an environment with fair competition where people are free to start and grow companies without running into entrenched interests or undue hardship.

That's true in theory, but I think the hard part is timing

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

#560

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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