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Rolling the ladder up behind us

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Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#61

Post by blibble »

deadbabe wrote: post #14

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 agent…

> 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.

so you're saying the venture capitalists will soon be out of a job?

what a shame

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#62

Post by ta1243 »

WalterBright wrote: post #54
whatshisface wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's kind of a silly example, your congressman could write a bill allocating 53% of cars to the two seater lobby and 47% to the four seat lobby.

And what if 62% wanted two seaters? Back in the 70s, the Department of Energy was tasked with allocating gas to the gas stations. A gas station had to apply for an allocation, and the DoE doled out the gas. The DoE doled out gas based on the previous year's usage patterns. Sounds smart, right? What happened is that gas consumption varies year to year due to a number of factors, like weather patterns, population chang…

> I remember than wonderful day very well - at last I could drive right up to the pump and get gas, rather than wait in line. The gas lines never returned.

Not in the UK, due to a fragile supply chain.

https://news.sky.com/story/supply-crisis-catastrophic-panic-...

We saw it when the Evergiven closed the Suez. We see it whenever irational consumer behaviour caused unpredicable behaviour.

The Randian world you are so enamoured with is one of fragility, because buffers and margins reduces profit.

Or are those "unintended side effects"?

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#63

Post by [deleted] »

WalterBright wrote: post #54
whatshisface wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's kind of a silly example, your congressman could write a bill allocating 53% of cars to the two seater lobby and 47% to the four seat lobby.

And what if 62% wanted two seaters? Back in the 70s, the Department of Energy was tasked with allocating gas to the gas stations. A gas station had to apply for an allocation, and the DoE doled out the gas. The DoE doled out gas based on the previous year's usage patterns. Sounds smart, right? What happened is that gas consumption varies year to year due to a number of factors, like weather patterns, population chang…

[deleted]

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#64

Post by whatshisface »

WalterBright wrote: post #54
whatshisface wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's kind of a silly example, your congressman could write a bill allocating 53% of cars to the two seater lobby and 47% to the four seat lobby.

And what if 62% wanted two seaters? Back in the 70s, the Department of Energy was tasked with allocating gas to the gas stations. A gas station had to apply for an allocation, and the DoE doled out the gas. The DoE doled out gas based on the previous year's usage patterns. Sounds smart, right? What happened is that gas consumption varies year to year due to a number of factors, like weather patterns, population chang…

Doesn't every nationwide firm engage in central economic planning?

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#65

Post by burlesona »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #20
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. Any…

> The issue with an industry awash with cheap dross, is that it becomes prohibitively expensive to produce high Quality stuff.

This seems to be one of the brutal truths of the modern world, and as far as I can tell it applies to everything. There's always a race to the bottom to make everything as cheaply as possible, and the further the industry goes down that "cheapness" scale, the more "quality" loses market share, the more expensive "quality" must be in order to operate at all, and finally things that used to be just "normal" and not too expensive are now luxury goods.

Consider textiles, carpentry, masonry, machine tooling, appliances, etc. etc.

This doesn't feel like a good outcome, but I'm not sure there's anything that can be done about it.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#66

Post by jaco6 »

stego-tech wrote: post #23
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…

Profit motives are a relatively recent phenomenon, though, and are often erroneously cited as analogous to efficiency gains (despite mountains of evidence to the contrary). > Even food is not able to escape this hole: it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore if you wanted to do that as a career. Does this not horrify you? That the foundational discipline of humanity - nutrition via hunting, gathering, o…

[dead]

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#67

Post by mm263 »

zimzam wrote: post #35
stego-tech wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profit motives are a relatively recent phenomenon, though, and are often erroneously cited as analogous to efficiency gains (despite mountains of evidence to the contrary). > Even food is not able to escape this hole: it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore if you wanted to do that as a career. Does this not horrify you? That the foundational discipline of humanity - nutrition via hunting, gathering, o…

What are you talking about? Inexpensive food is a boon to society. Cultivating food the 'old fashioned way' is incredibly labor intensive. We now have machines that allow us to cultivate far more food with far less labor. For example, in 1900 corn took 38 hours/acre to plant/cultivate/harvest. In 2000 it took about an hour. The yeild per acre has also improved 3x-5x in that span, so the time per bushel has decreased…

You are not making an argument you think you are making. We switched from one set of problems to another set of problems that didn't exist before industrial agriculture: soil erosion, pest explosion, entire harvests wiped out by disease because genetic uniformity, which means one pathogen can destroy everything - think Irish potato famine but now it's scientific and modern.

The mess of traditional farming - with its scattered plots, mixed crops, and local varieties adapted to every microclimate - was too complicated to tax and control, so they (that Xe talks about, *they*, the ones who stand to profit) bulldozed millennia of accumulated agricultural wisdom and replaced it with neat geometric fields of single crops that any bureaucrat could count from his desk. This wasn't just an ecological disaster waiting to happen (and it did happen - you not knowing about it doesn't mean that it didn't; maybe in the end you'll notice when our last species of corn dies out), it was also an epistemic catastrophe, a murder of local knowledge that understood why you plant these three things together here but those two things there, replacing it with the kind of simplified, one-size-fits-all stupidity that makes perfect sense in a government report and absolutely none in actual soil where actual plants have to actually grow.

Anyway, I recommend Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#68

Post by nancyminusone »

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?

Sure would be nice to make clothes from flour sacks again, but alas; today's sacks are made of polypropylene.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#69

Post by brooke2k »

WalterBright wrote: post #54
whatshisface wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's kind of a silly example, your congressman could write a bill allocating 53% of cars to the two seater lobby and 47% to the four seat lobby.

And what if 62% wanted two seaters? Back in the 70s, the Department of Energy was tasked with allocating gas to the gas stations. A gas station had to apply for an allocation, and the DoE doled out the gas. The DoE doled out gas based on the previous year's usage patterns. Sounds smart, right? What happened is that gas consumption varies year to year due to a number of factors, like weather patterns, population chang…

I feel this is a slightly disingenuous argument - mismanagement and poor planning can happen in both the public and private sectors. The US healthcare system is just one fantastic example of the private sector absolutely failing to deliver even a bare minimum standard of service. Gas lines are one thing - waiting fifteen hours in the emergency room to be seen, only to be charged thousands of dollars for some tylenol and a pat on the head is another.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#70

Post by AnIrishDuck »

WalterBright wrote: post #54
whatshisface wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's kind of a silly example, your congressman could write a bill allocating 53% of cars to the two seater lobby and 47% to the four seat lobby.

And what if 62% wanted two seaters? Back in the 70s, the Department of Energy was tasked with allocating gas to the gas stations. A gas station had to apply for an allocation, and the DoE doled out the gas. The DoE doled out gas based on the previous year's usage patterns. Sounds smart, right? What happened is that gas consumption varies year to year due to a number of factors, like weather patterns, population chang…

There were ... many other factors involved in the gas shortages of the 70s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_oil_crisis

I don't think the history here is as neat as you have laid out. To be clear: this is not a defense of central planning.

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