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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

#661

Post by Forgeties79 »

leptons wrote: post #655
Forgeties79 wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm the opposite I don't think I've read a single line of code I've shipped in over 6 months. This feels unfair to the people dealing with your (LLM’s) code. You don’t vet it at all? Or am I reading this wrong?

What makes you think the people dealing with the LLMs' code won't also be using LLMs to "deal with it"? We're all now basically junior coders who have no idea what is in the codebase. Without LLMs, we won't be able to "deal" with any of it. And I don't like it one bit.

Because you can’t assume everyone else is as indifferent about wasting people’s time as you are. Some of us don’t want to actively make our colleagues/customers miserable. That decision forces me to decide if I will be a part of the problem even if I generally do good work I can stand behind. You’re forcing me into a decision making process purely out of your desire to not do the bare minimum when working. That’s not right.

I also may be staring at consequences you are not. It’s passing the buck with no regard for who is left to deal with the results at the end.

What if we are working on, say, accessibility tasks? If I see your work won’t actually help those in society who seriously need these features, what am I supposed to do? My kneejerk is 1) fix it (more work for me, selfish on your part), 2) kick it back to your lazy hands that clearly doesn’t see this as an issue, or 3) send it up the chain where someone else has to ask these questions or - worse - it gets shipped and people who need this stuff are screwed. This is basic ethics.

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

#662

Post by AnthonyMouse »

don_esteban wrote: post #323
esseph wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And change in laws regarding the legalized corruption (Citizens United, ...). And fight for real freedom of speech. This is very complex problem that needs to be tackled from all sides simultaneously, the entrenched interests are already well setup to defend themselves.

Citizens United was a pretty pro-speech decision and is unfairly maligned, and "money is speech" predates it by quite a few years. The real problem is when huge corporations control the flow of information.

Which is a bigger problem, that corporations can pay for political ads, or that one corporation has 90% search market share? That there are political ads on Facebook or Twitter, or that those corporations control what's in the feed of hundreds of millions of people because use of their algorithm is tied to the network effect instead of having a federated system like RSS or email?

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

#663

Post by WalterBright »

SquibblesRedux wrote: post #656
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"?

Musk got a huge leg up through the government, whether it be tax credits, incentives, side-stepping regulations, etc. Bezos ran at a loss for so long it drove out actual and potential competitors. Most (or all?) of the recent titans seem like each has his own company town. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town ) While their activities certainly fall in the realm of capitalism, and are just blips at longer t…

> Musk got a huge leg up through the government, whether it be tax credits, incentives, side-stepping regulations, etc.

Nope. (Any government incentives were available to all the other car companies.)

> Bezos ran at a loss for so long it drove out actual and potential competitors.

Where do you think he got the money to sustain those losses? Investors! Including me. That is not a "transfer" of wealth, as in exchange the investors received an ownership share of the company.

> Regarding the money invested in AI, it all gives me "irrational exuberance" vibes.

It still is the opposite of short term thinking.

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

#664

Post by justsomehnguy »

defrost wrote: post #324
brabel wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it’s what about ism but I really hope you apply the same logic when Cuba once more tried to enter an alliance with Russia or China to defend itself against a larger aggressor next door. So while I agree that Russia should allow Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO, I also think that’s only fair if countries like Brazil, Cuba and Venezuela are freely allowed to determine their futures by joining Russia, China and I…

As you've chosen to address me directly I'll reply honestly, I have zero concern about Cuba, Venezuela, any of the 190+ countries on the planet, wanting to join or form BRICs. I have considerably more concern about the ability of a post MAGA USofA to successfully navigate such a world via soft power as they appear to have flushed all the competent diplomatic talent down a golden toilet.

> I have zero concern about Cuba, Venezuela, any of the 190+ countries on the planet

But somehow you are extremely concerned about one country which is on the other side of planet of you.

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

#665

Post by c22 »

WalterBright wrote: post #643
cowmix wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wealth is not created, it's stripped from the natural commons and it is, despite being massive, obviously finite. What you're referring to is "value creation"--the transformation of this natural wealth into a form that some other humans find valuable at a point in time. This value creation is rewarded via capitalism by the accumulation of monetary instruments which very much represent an appropriation of this wealth. If this system wasn't zero sum then we wouldn't have inflation?

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

#666

Post by mandolin4 »

rvba wrote: post #136
acomjean wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll note at the end of the last century I worked at IBM research which had a budget of 6 Billion dollars. Management was trying very hard to get better return on that investment. Even today IBM though often ridiculed in the tech space (sometimes they do deserve it) spends a lot on R&D.

Did anything come out from those billions?

Toshiba, IBM and Siemens had a DRAM joint development program 1993-1998. Several generations of DRAM was developed there. Also, while IBM exited the DRAM business, the knowledge survived in Rambus to an extent.

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

#667

Post by noisy_boy »

gyomu wrote: post #231
mawadev wrote: post #156

I highly question the ability of companies to gauge the level of experience of any dev. The distinction between junior, mid, senior, lead is a facade. It is a soft gradient that spans multiple areas, but is tainted and skewed by the technology du jour. Technically you don't have to be an employed developer to become a senior developer. It boils down to your personal willingness to learn and invest time building. What…

There are two kinds of developers. There's the kind that, when given a problem, will jump in, learn what they need to learn to solve the parts they don't fully understand yet, deliver meaningful iterative results, talk to people as needed, keep you posted on their progress, loop in other team members and offer/request help to/from them, take initiative on the obvious missing parts that would benefit the project as a…

> There's the kind that, when given a problem, will jump in, learn what they need to learn to solve the parts they don't fully understand yet, deliver meaningful iterative results, talk to people as needed, keep you posted on their progress, loop in other team members and offer/request help to/from them, take initiative on the obvious missing parts that would benefit the project as a whole, etc.

I would rather tweak that a bit and say, we need a kind that has two things: 1. aptitude - not genius or 10x something just plain being able to think clearly and having problem solving skills 2. care i.e. not just dump whatever hack works in the short-term and declare victory. It doesn't imply that you obsess over perfection and ignore deadlines etc. But basic care about the solution being sensible, good code quality and not causing a new set of problem due to shortcuts. Both are things we routinely expect from programmers and I see less and less of them. #2 is rarer than #1.

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

#669

Post by Yoric »

WalterBright wrote: post #660
striking wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which country experiencing communism at any point in time didn't export any products?

The Soviet Union. I don't recall ever seeing USSR products in stores, while plenty of manufactured goods from other countries were. (By products I meant manufactured products, not extracted resources like oil.)

I did, so it probably depends of where you live.

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

#670

Post by bonsai_spool »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #564
bonsai_spool wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the obvious tells? List them, because I think our sense of the tells may not overlap. This article is clearly LLM-generated, even the title. A key indicator is that it almost makes sense: we forgot how to manufacture because that got sent to a different nation. The coding thing isn’t getting sent anywhere, so humanity is forgetting how to code. The distinction undermines a lot of the emotional baggage about…

There are quite a lot of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing But it's really just the usual ones that are truly obvious. "Not X but Y," em-dashes, "underscores the significance of X," and so forth. A terse sentence structure can be a tell, but, IMO, it's a weak one.

> There are quite a lot of them

I agree - and they're on clear display in this article, I would say

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