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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

#641

Post by keeda »

WalterBright wrote: post #557
aleqs wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I think it's more accurate to say it is a process that has resulted in our high standard of living faster than other processes... so far.

There is no guarantee it will keep working for the majority of us going forward; as is becoming very clear all around the world, it also has downsides especially without checks and balances (which was predicted and observed in the past, which is why other processes were conceptualized in the first place!)

As a trivial example, profit maximization is directly responsible for the enshittification we're seeing everywhere, which definitely is negatively impacting our standard of living.

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

#643

Post by WalterBright »

cowmix wrote: post #637
WalterBright wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think the economy is zero sum? For example, who was Elon Musk's wealth transferred from? What do you think about all that money being invested into AI? Is that "extreme short term profit maximization"?

I don’t know who his wealth was transferred from, exactly. But I do know what he’s using it for now: as a gravitational force to unilaterally screw with public institutions and systems the rest of us depend on. Even if you agree with some of DOGE projects’s goals, the way it operated was wildly thoughtless about consequences beyond Musk’s personal wishes, and almost completely unaccountable. I’m honestly sick that my…

Musk's money came from creating a business that was worth a lot of money. I.e. he created his wealth.

It was not transferred to him.

The same goes for Bezos, Jobs, Gates, etc.

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

#644

Post by ijk »

rezonant wrote: post #71
allending wrote: post #32

There's a certain irony in that the article itself is quite clearly assisted by AI. Not a criticism per se as I don't have a problem with AI assistance, but food for thought given the material being commented on.

The tropes that AI introduces into articles are very noticeable, quite annoying, and very unnatural -- they unfortunately don't write well. It seems people use them to "polish" up their writing but in reality it would have read better if they hadn't. My current pet peave is using period instead of comma, as in: > My people lived the other side of this equation. Not the factory floor. The receiving end. Ostensibly thi…

It really feels sometimes like they were trained on too much short-form fiction or something. Really stunts their sentence and paragraph texture.

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

#645

Post by WalterBright »

keeda wrote: post #641
WalterBright wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profit maximization is a continuous process that has generated our high standard of living. P.S. I welcome all attempts to prove me wrong!

I think it's more accurate to say it is a process that has resulted in our high standard of living faster than other processes ... so far. There is no guarantee it will keep working for the majority of us going forward; as is becoming very clear all around the world, it also has downsides especially without checks and balances (which was predicted and observed in the past, which is why other processes were conceptual…

> I think it's more accurate to say it is a process that has resulted in our high standard of living faster than other processes... so far.

Nobody has found a better process. Not even close.

> As a trivial example

It's not an example, it's a generalization. If you have a specific example, let's have a look at it!

Have you ever wondered why communist countries never exported products?

Also, if you want better products and believe people will want to buy them, go into business making them and make yourself wealthy!

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

#646

Post by ijk »

bonsai_spool wrote: post #410
throwaway219450 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These patterns are learned from magazine articles and other long-form publications. The tendency to have unnecessarily pithy/hooky section titles is one that particularly irks me, but it's not like AI invented that. I was reading some DIY books that are published by a company that does a lot of web/magazine work and they structure the text in the same way (this is all pre-LLM). Content creators are starting to includ…

> Content creators are starting to include these traits into their scripts now, too. Why would you assume this when the more likely reasonable is that the 'content creators' are just pasting LLM output?

I feel like the problem is that it's both. We're sanding off the long tail of human expression. It's not profitable this quarter, you see. Faster to let the AI do it.

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

#647

Post by [deleted] »

WalterBright wrote: post #600
spiorf wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the process has impeded even higher standard of living, because it misallocates resources from value generation to value appropriation. It's the extreme short term profit maximization that makes the economy a zero sum game. Otherwise it is not.

Do you really think the economy is zero sum? For example, who was Elon Musk's wealth transferred from? What do you think about all that money being invested into AI? Is that "extreme short term profit maximization"?

[deleted]

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

#648

Post by sutterd »

I’m working on a side project and AI is writing all the code. The code it produces is not good, and this comes from someone who has experience producing bad code. One thing I’m worried about is places like GitHub being full of AI code, which leads to AI being trained on AI code. It seems like this will lead to a downward spiral.

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

#649

Post by gamblor956 »

America still makes a ton of stuff. California is still one of the leading manufacturing locations in the world. California isn't #1 in any industry (outside of aerospace) but is in the top 10 for pretty much everything else (in the U.S.). It's been the world's #4-6 economy for the past two decades.

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

#650

Post by aidenn0 »

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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