exactly, as they say everyone has to learn to code.
The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
61–70 of 896 posts
Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
#62Is this written by a real person though?
Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can really reduce almost any problem to a “it’s a problem because of people”, so that adds very little to a discussion.
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A claim that fits every possible observation equally well isn’t an explanation. What does it help you predict, when everything falls under that label? How does it help you predict behavior of different institutions?
Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
#64> The defense industry thought peace would last forever, too.
Not really since they are always pushing for more wars.
Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
#65You could say COBOL has had this "problem" for 40 years also. That's why we need to constantly be inventing new ways of making things. The old ways are always forgotten over time. If you REALLY need something long-forgotten, then you have lazy-load it back into being at significant cost. That's the price of constant progress.
The point of the article is that sometimes the "old ways" really means "not particularly profitable or necessary in the short term" but the bill comes due in a crisis. The reason US/EU manufacturing was "the old ways" is that people could make easier money with financial engineering, an insight that extended all the way to Raytheon. COBOL is a bad example, but higher-level languages vs. assembly is not. If you write…
But these are hard IT things a human programmer really struggles with as well. What % of software written is that? Very very low. Most software is dull and requires business vagueness to be translated into deterministic logic and interfaces; LLMs are pretty great at that as it is. If humans use their old ways to fix complex problems and llms do the rest, we still only need a handful of those humans. For now.
Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
#66Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
#67I disagree with the premise - interesting but I interpret the same fact pattern differently. The history of technology is the replacement of manual processes with automated ones. Consider a very basic process: checkout of a restaurant. Writing the price of each item on a sheet of paper, manually adding them and writing the total was replaced with typing in the prices and eventually with just pushing the button for th…
Though I do believe you are making them in good faith, I find those comparisons do not hold.
CAD still requires you know what to do, and without CAD you can still draw blueprints by hand because you know what the result should be. Checkout is basic arithmetic you can do on a paper or even your personal phone. In both cases it is clear what the process is and what the output should be, and it doesn’t replace knowledge and training and certification.
With coding, none of that is true. By and large, there is a trend of people who don’t know what they’re doing shitting out software, or people who should know better not verifying the very flawed output they get. That is already having negative consequences in people’s lives.
Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
#68I saw academic rigor fall of a cliff in exchange for 'better job alignment' between end 80s when I had my first class after finishing highschool called 'Formal verification in software' on to beginning of the 2000s when I left giving the first class to new students 'Programming in Java'. All the 'teaching how to think' was replaced with 'how to get a well paying job'.
Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
#69Do you think this is a tooling problem or more about incentives and how engineers are trained now?
I think the article is making the point that it is a cultural problem about cost cutting and short term thinking.
Yeah, agreed - short-term incentives seem to drive a lot of this. Do you think tools can help, or is it mostly cultural?
Re: The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
#70The 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…
Seems to me that - optimistically - this would shift the job of a software engineer into a more formal engineering role, and that the actual implementation is done by AI. In the same way in other areas, engineering and implementation differ and implementation can be (and is) automated. No idea how this should take form, though, and if it’s even realistic. But it seems like due to AI, formal specs and all kinds of “ol…
That sounds right, but it can be superbly wrong because that presupposes that you can debug what the AI gets very confidently wrong.
There are three legs to the stool: specification, implementation, and verification. Implementation and verification both take low-level knowledge and sophisticated knowledge of how things break.