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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

#671

Post by rkuodys »

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"?

What is the point on Musk you are making? The monetary success does not neccesserily correlate to the common good they have created. In case of Musk there is a lot of governement subsidies, lots of market manipulation and false claim s. So not all activieties that bring profit to the richest are good to the rest. And stats on inequality just highlights that trend

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

#672

Post by bonsai_spool »

7402 wrote: post #523
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…

Is it really so obvious? It didn’t seem AI-written to me. Every day I seem to encounter (and skip over in disgust) a dozen or so AI-generated articles at the top of web searches, but this wasn’t anything at all like those.

Even the title is likely AI-generated, as are all the subject headings. I worry we're all getting inured to these writing patterns.

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

#673

Post by rini17 »

slibhb wrote: post #639

Yes, and textile factories involved people "forgetting" how to weave. Whitehead: "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them" It remains to be seen whether this implies some kind of constraint on human progress. I doubt it.

If we suddenly needed huge amounts of textile or clothing, we would run into same issues. This is not about progress as such.

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

#674

Post by gopher_space »

t-3 wrote: post #305
vishnugupta wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> removing people and organizational slack You are spot on w.r.t every assertion you've made. When bean-counters took over the ecosystem they optimised immediate profitability over everything else. Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time. There's no room for experimentation, repair, or anything else. I've commented about lack of slack on several times here…

I think the bean counters get a bad rap for this a bit unfairly. The past century has seen more progress in knowledge and technology than the rest of human history combined. The world and business environment are changing too rapidly to make longtermist thinking practical. Few care if you have a lifetime warranty and excellent service or replacement parts if the majority will upgrade in a few years! Mature technologi…

> Developing education and training pipelines is wasting money if the skills you need are constantly changing! There is plenty of "slack" in the workforce so this works just fine in most cases - somebody will learn what they need to get paid. There are very few fields where qualified worker shortages are a real problem.

Here's the problem with your reasoning. This paragraph is simply wrong, with each sentence being untrue. Education and training are never wasted money, the skills aren't changing that quickly, there isn't any slack in the workforce, and qualified worker shortages are being reported in every trade across the board. Someone needs to solve the problems you hand-wave away.

> this works just fine in most cases - somebody will learn what they need to get paid.

That's me. I specialize in learning new domains. I cost like 8x more than the random junior you'd be able to hire with a functional onboarding program.

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

#675

Post by WalterBright »

kmijyiyxfbklao wrote: post #657
WalterBright wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can always trick investors. For example all the overpromising Musk has done over the years. Also when you are that famous you can sell lower quality goods for a higher price that people will buy because they are associated to you.

All true. That's why there are laws against fraud.

What do you think of the tricks that California pulled to have billions vanish with not a mile of track laid? Or all those hospices with no beds? Or this fun one:

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/does-noth...

Unfortunately, as a taxpayer, I am on the hook for those tricks. With a business, I can do some due diligence and then decide if I want to get in or not.

I suspect you and I are being fleeced far more by government waste and fraud than by businesses.

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

#676

Post by cramsession »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #620
cramsession wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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?

Yes. Again my job is to stay unexploited. Saying yes is the easiest option. I'll leave the worrying to the people making an order of magnitude more money than me.

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

#677

Post by WalterBright »

c22 wrote: post #665
WalterBright wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Where was all this wealth 200 years ago?

Inflation is caused by printing money not backed by goods and services. Inflation is another form of taxation.

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

#678

Post by WalterBright »

Yoric wrote: post #669
WalterBright wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What Soviet products did you see?

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

#679

Post by c22 »

WalterBright wrote: post #677
c22 wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Where was all this wealth 200 years ago? Inflation is caused by printing money not backed by goods and services. Inflation is another form of taxation.

The vast majority of it was stored underground as petrochemicals. A fact made immediately apparent by looking at like any chart. Is this a serious conversation?

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

#680

Post by p0w3n3d »

This Is exactly how civilizations die out. When AI was incoming I wrote similar predictions. This WILL happen, sooner or later. People will stop understanding what programming is. What is hard drive. Why storing files in cloud is not the same as having them on your HDD. And similar things
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