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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

#691

Post by yason »

mancerayder wrote: post #574
sph wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the west, government is optimizing for "loads and loads of moooney" More appropriately, government is optimizing for 4 year electoral terms. No one cares about longer timescales necessary to tackle hard problems. This is where autocracies like China, or monarchies for example, win over democracies.

Counter-examples are France and Japan. Democracies, electoral terms. High-speed rail that the world looks up to, investment in infrastructure everywhere. In France you have Grand Paris, a programme to transform the suburbs into denser housing and commercial space, a calculation and planning that INCLUDES public transport. And the green initiatives in France. These, transit, Grand Paris, and much more are initiatives…

Counter-examples are France and Japan. Democracies, electoral terms.

A democracy doesn't prevent long-term planning if only the electorate appreciates long-term projects. Democracies can build stuff across parliaments if differences between parties aren't so overwhelming so as to the majority of them can agree on developing something even if the relative power of elected parties varies over terms.

In a lot of countries the major parties agree on many core views and social code because they share a common nation/society, and the political differences happen merely on the edges or linings of the value spectrum. A government of highly polarised parties voted by a highly heterogeneous pool of voters is not ideal for long-term efforts.

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

#693

Post by contingencies »

WalterBright wrote: post #645
keeda wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your line of reasoning misses the clear example that China pulled 1.4 billion people out of poverty creating mass-literacy before embracing capitalism.

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

#694

Post by SquibblesRedux »

WalterBright wrote: post #663
SquibblesRedux wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I was not making an argument that the economy is zero-sum, or that Musk or Bezos did not build wealth. I merely pointed out methods they used to build their empires. For example, Musk did take advantage of government incentives, sidestepped regulations, etc.

Again, I never claimed there was any sort of zero-sum transfer of wealth. I'm simply pointing out there are varied ways to build up wealth; people have various opinions about those ways. It's right to call out misconceptions or outright falsehoods, but it's also good to understand what leads people to form or accept those misconceptions in the first place.

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

#695

Post by YZF »

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"?

These two positions are not mutually exclusive:

- Over-optimizing for short term profit can hurt innovation and value creation.

- The economy is not a zero sum game and new value is created out of thin air.

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

#696

Post by gzread »

pembrook wrote: post #570
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…

> Without people who have actually worked with the system, you end up with a loss of tacit knowledge—and eventually, declining productivity. > You are spot on w.r.t every assertion you've made. Huh? What happened to the concept of "debate" on HN. It's just a bunch of people agreeing with each other. Yet the data doesn't support any of OP's thesis. Here's a chart of the rise in productivity per hour worked in the Unit…

Most measurements measured in dollars are just stealth measurements of inflation. Even inflation adjusted measurements, because official inflation metrics are always lowball numbers with shady methodology.

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

#697

Post by cramsession »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #688
cramsession wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It seems you are either very unhappy at your job or just anti-work, that’s fine you do you/sorry if your work sucks, but there is a huge gradient between “completely not caring and doing the bare minimum to collect a paycheck” and “sacrificing everything for a company that does not care about me.” Many of us fall in that gradient. We do decent work and clock out when we’re done. If you want to phone it in or act your…

First of all, I don't agree with your implication that AI produced code is bad. It's as good as the developer prompting it in my experience. Secondly, yes I'm anti-work. Capitalism does not allow for what you are desiring. Capitalism is configured such that capital is seeking maximum return for minimal costs (my pay). I am incentivized to do the opposite. Wealth inequality is a multiplier on how hard I'm going to try to achieve my goal.

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

#698

Post by Forgeties79 »

cramsession wrote: post #697
Forgeties79 wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems you are either very unhappy at your job or just anti-work, that’s fine you do you/sorry if your work sucks, but there is a huge gradient between “completely not caring and doing the bare minimum to collect a paycheck” and “sacrificing everything for a company that does not care about me.” Many of us fall in that gradient. We do decent work and clock out when we’re done. If you want to phone it in or act your…

First of all, I don't agree with your implication that AI produced code is bad. It's as good as the developer prompting it in my experience. Secondly, yes I'm anti-work. Capitalism does not allow for what you are desiring. Capitalism is configured such that capital is seeking maximum return for minimal costs (my pay). I am incentivized to do the opposite. Wealth inequality is a multiplier on how hard I'm going to try…

> First of all, I don't agree with your implication that AI produced code is bad.

Never said that. I said generating code with an LLM then not looking at it at all and pushing it (which is what started this whole comment thread) is a selfish and lazy decision.

Not everyone prescribes to a strict anti-work stance. Most people don’t in fact. So we’re at quite an impasse and it doesn’t change the fact that your decisions become your colleagues’ problems and does nothing to deconstruct/fight capitalism. I feel sorry for anyone who works with you if this is not an internet routine and reflects how you actually operate.

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

#699

Post by cramsession »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #698
cramsession wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, I don't agree with your implication that AI produced code is bad. It's as good as the developer prompting it in my experience. Secondly, yes I'm anti-work. Capitalism does not allow for what you are desiring. Capitalism is configured such that capital is seeking maximum return for minimal costs (my pay). I am incentivized to do the opposite. Wealth inequality is a multiplier on how hard I'm going to try…

> First of all, I don't agree with your implication that AI produced code is bad. Never said that. I said generating code with an LLM then not looking at it at all and pushing it (which is what started this whole comment thread) is a selfish and lazy decision. Not everyone prescribes to a strict anti-work stance. Most people don’t in fact. So we’re at quite an impasse and it doesn’t change the fact that your decision…

And I don't agree with that. Who cares how the code got generated? Like I said most code that's written by AI is better than code written by humans.

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

#700

Post by Izkata »

irishcoffee wrote: post #488
wreath wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At work we are literally forced to use AI and it’s part of our performance review. Even though I really like coding by hand, I have to now use AI so I can keep my job. I will try this out though, 2 days per week using AI and the rest handcoding, enough to stave off the inevitable lay off perhaps.

Surely it can’t be hard to token max at work the same fucking way people have games Jira metrics for years and years. If I’m ever in that position (everything I work on it air-gapped, it’ll never happen) I would make it a priority to figure out how to game that bullshit metric so I could get on with solving actual problems. I imagine a lot of people do this. Metric becomes a target, etc.

I recommend trying "make this code more enterprise", it seems to pull in the joke and start overengineering everything and giving them absurd names.
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