The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code • Hacker News Board

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

#611

Post by WalterBright » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 5:43 PM UTC

wredcoll wrote: post #608

WalterBright wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> as stock prices are based on expectations of future profits. I thought stock prices were based one what I thought I could sell it for next week.

If you could sell it for more next week, that means the next week buyers are expecting higher profits.

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

#612

Post by wredcoll » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 5:44 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #611

wredcoll wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as stock prices are based on expectations of future profits. I thought stock prices were based one what I thought I could sell it for next week.

If you could sell it for more next week, that means the next week buyers are expecting higher profits.

No, it just means they're expecting someone else to buy it from them at a higher price. See also: bitcoin.

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

#613

Post by WorldMaker » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 5:45 PM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #475

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> R&D can be outsourced or bought and subsidized by the government in universities, so why do everything yourself? Because some problems that many companies in very specialized industries work on are so special that outside of this industry, nearly all people won't even have heard about them. Additionally, many problems companies have where research would make sense are not the kind of problems that are a good fit fo…

Those fields still develop in-house expertise and world-leadning products. General Electric was cited above, but their turbine engine division is producing the most fuel-efficient, reliable, and lowest TCO aircraft engines there have ever been. The materials science and engineering expertise needed to do this isn't something you can find in a freshly-graduated university student. Products like jet engines, though, ar…

> Unlike household appliances, where consumers make decisions mostly on the basis of price and being $5 cheaper than the competition is what will get you the sale even if it means using plastic instead of cast or forged metal parts.

Some of this seems reverse causal to me. There were many consumers interested in options other than a race to the bottom. I certainly remember 90s Consumer Reports-era consciousness of consumers trying to find the best products as they all seemed to race to the bottom.

The irony seems to be that now that GE has sold GE Appliances they've been returning to higher quality and cutting fewer corners just because activist US shareholders wanted slightly higher dividends each quarter. It feels like only a matter of time before Heier finishes the next steps in the Lenovo playbook and stops paying GE to license their brand and stop giving credit to a US company that stopped caring about consumers and consumer product quality decades ago.

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

#614

Post by cyberax » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 5:45 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #189

swiftcoder wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did anything come out from those billions? Per wikipedia: IBM employees have garnered six Nobel Prizes, seven Turing Awards, 20 inductees into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame, 19 National Medals of Technology, five National Medals of Science and three Kavli Prizes. As of 2018, the company had generated more patents than any other business in each of 25 consecutive years.

The thing is, Nobel Prizes and other awards don't pay the bills. Patents do, but in most cases it's trivial patents or patents for a "mutually assured destruction" portfolio (aka, you keep them in hand should someone ever decide to sue you). That's a fundamental problem with how the Western sphere prioritizes and funds R&D. Either it has direct and massive ROI promises (that's how most pharma R&D works), some sort of…

mRNA is not a good example. If anything, it's a demonstration of why the Western capitalist model is superior to anything else. Most of the mRNA research was funded by venture capital as a high-risk high-reward investment.

In the world of government-sponsored research, mRNA likely would have been passed over in favor of funding research with more assured results.

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

#615

Post by coffeefirst » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

Forgeties79 wrote: post #484

WhatsTheBigIdea wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "fair" have to do with anything? This is exactly the issue the author is writing about. Take the easy way, reap the profits, then someone suffer the obviously predictable consequences at some point in the unforeseeable future... likely not you! "Fair" is not relevant. The original author points to the consolidation of military suppliers as a major issue, but the truth is that the economies of the western wo…

> What does "fair" have to do with anything? Not wasting other people’s time when they expect your work to at least pass a cursory check. It’s selfish and disrespectful. It reflects poorly on you. I don’t know about all that other stuff you wrote but it’s not really what I’m talking about so I’ll clarify. I don’t know what your high school/college was like, but we used to trade papers for editing. It was universally…

And this is the AI ethos: anti-contentiousness.

Is it correct? Is it any good? Should I subject another person to this? Is it profoundly rude to not even read their email and just have a robot respond automatically?

The slopmonger does not engage with the question at all, because they never cared.

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

#616

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 5:49 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#617

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 5:50 PM UTC

esseph wrote: post #284

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone wants to tag the evil with their opposition's name. The evil is concentration of power. But no one wants to call it that because then they can't pretend that it's something different when they're doing it themselves. Witness the people who keep proposing to solve market consolidation with higher taxes. Higher taxes go to the government, and therefore the interests that have captured the government. Are we go…

I'd argue we need both massive antitrust, and higher taxes on the wealthy to prevent them from amassing the power to prevent the antitrust.

The things amassing power to prevent antitrust are corporations, not individuals. It does nothing to make Bill Gates sell shares in Microsoft to pay taxes when the corporation stays the same size. If anything it makes it worse because then more corporations are controlled by Wall St rather than founders and they're significantly more inclined to turn the screws to juice short-term profits.

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

#618

Post by dismalaf » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 5:51 PM UTC

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 problem is that the west is fractured and sees itself only as individuals, corporations and nations.

China sees itself as a civilization. Russia does too, ish (look up Dugin's Eurasian Empire).

The West has a hard time believing anyone wants to destroy it, so doesn't take the threat seriously. Meanwhile other civilizations are working to both destroy the west and ensure their own place in the future.

So we were OK outsourcing our production and knowledge for a quick buck and it's coming back to haunt us.

Even now, we still don't see ourselves as a civilization, actively work to undermine ourselves and help our enemies who openly want to destroy us, and are barely doing anything to defend ourselves. We seem to have also given up on the idea of a "democratic world", which was in vogue when I was growing up (Bush 2 years).

As for the thesis of this article, the positive is that code and knowledge, because of the fact preserving it is basically free, is still there. AI hasn't been good enough to displace it. And our technological advantage is still pretty wide and our military industrial complex is, for better or worse, coming back.

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

#619

Post by WalterBright » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 5:51 PM UTC

wredcoll wrote: post #612

WalterBright wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you could sell it for more next week, that means the next week buyers are expecting higher profits.

No, it just means they're expecting someone else to buy it from them at a higher price. See also: bitcoin.

Bitcoin is not a company selling a product.

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

#620

Post by Forgeties79 » Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 5:53 PM UTC

cramsession wrote: post #605

Forgeties79 wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does "fair" have to do with anything? Not wasting other people’s time when they expect your work to at least pass a cursory check. It’s selfish and disrespectful. It reflects poorly on you. I don’t know about all that other stuff you wrote but it’s not really what I’m talking about so I’ll clarify. I don’t know what your high school/college was like, but we used to trade papers for editing. It was universally…

Are the people paying your paycheck being fair to you? Are the executives of your company paid orders of magnitude more than you are? Fairness starts from there. Your job is to be as unexploited as possible. I hope my coworkers also have this goal.

What does my relationship with the c-suite/my work have to do with a colleague dumping their unedited chatgpt crap on to me? I legitimately do not understand what point you’re trying to make. There seems to be a lot of assumptions here and I’m not sure what they are.

Sending your unedited LLM outputs to me is not sticking it to the execs. If you really want to play that game, you go ahead and ship that or hand it to someone who deals with the final output. That’s your prerogative and you can face the consequences. I am not here to clean up your AI slop. That’s not my job. At that point you are the problem, not the c-suite.

All I hear from AI evangelists is “it’s a tool! It’s not the problem! It’s people using it wrong!” Ok, then the people using it are the problem if something is wrong. So if you act this way, which is clearly not a productive use of the tool, you are the problem.

Edit: let me just ask you a somewhat multi-faceted question. If you ask me for a summary of something and I simply hand you what ChatGPT gave me, would you say “thanks” and be satisfied? Is that what you wanted me to do? Is there a reason you asked me to do it instead of prompting ChatGPT yourself?

What if I did this every time I had to write anything? Every email. Every summary. Every report. Just prompt, copy, paste, send to you.