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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

#71

Post by rezonant »

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 this is supposed to add gravitas, but it's very often done in places where that gravitas isn't needed, and it comes off as if I'm reading the script for an action movie trailer.

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

#73

Post by teiferer »

cladopa wrote: post #52

People are not perfect. I went to Ukraine just days before the invasion. Travel and Hotels in Kiev had become extremely cheap. You asked the Ukrainians about the possible invasion. "Not going to happen" everybody said."Russia talks always aggressively, but never does anything". They did not properly prepare and as a result lost 20% of its territory in days. Days after that I was back is Austria and could not stop thi…

In hindsight, it's easy to be smart. You picked two examples where somebody said "never gonna happen" and then it happened. How about the countless examples where somebody said the same and then the thing actually didn't happen?

Take millions playing the lottery. To each of them, I can confidently say "you won't win, not gonna happen". For almost all of them I'll be right. There will be one who wins, were I was wrong, and they will say "see, told you so". That doesn't mean my prediction was wrong. It means you are having a reporting bias.

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

#74

Post by gitowiec »

Nux wrote: post #18
whycombinetor wrote: post #8

>I read the Fogbank story and recognized it immediately. Not the nuclear material. The pattern. Build capability over decades. Find a cheaper substitute. Let the human pipeline atrophy. Enjoy the savings. Then watch it all collapse when a crisis demands what you optimized away. >In defense, the substitute was the peace dividend. In software, it’s AI. Before it was AI, the cheaper alternative was remote contract dev t…

India for the most part.

[flagged]

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

#75

Post by light_hue_1 »

> The West Forgot How to Make Things. Now It's Forgetting How to Code

Can we stop repeating this nonsense headline please? We did not stop manufacturing things.

Manufacturing is a huge industry in the West. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...

The US manufacturing sector is the biggest it has ever been. Exports are at all time record highs. The only thing that declined about manufacturing is the jobs. We build way more than we ever did but with far fewer people.

What we did do is decide that basic items aren't worth it. Our capacity is limited, our labor pool is limited, expenses are high, it doesn't make sense to make trinkets when we can make complex high precision parts and devices.

But no, we did not forget how to make things. We chose to use our capacity in a smarter way.

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

#76

Post by brrraaah »

stingraycharles wrote: post #63
brrraaah wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

A claim that fits every possible observation equally well isn’t an explanation. What does it help you predict, when everything falls under that label? How does it help you predict behavior of different institutions?

Given a sufficiently long timeline all predictions breakdown (see prior comment on attenuation and entropy and Nostradamus)

And on shorter timescales you aren't really predicting anything of consequence. You're just assuring all that effort trying to predict Apple's next move (for example) keeps Apple itself alive in the public debate whether they do the thing or not; they'll have missteps but our 24/7 fetishizing of what they'll do next, overall, just distracts us from our own lives and boosting the lives of the mega rich

You really don't seem to have a grasp of how gamified and propagandized you are

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

#77

Post by raincole »

First of all this is clearly AI-assist writing (being charitable here).

And the premise makes no sense anyway. The only risk of forgetting how to make shells is when other countries are making shells more efficiently. Non-western countries are not going to reject AI-coding, nor are they going to make software more efficiently by hand.

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

#78

Post by morningsam »

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.

Made me stop reading a few paragraphs in. I don't have a "problem" in the ethical sense either, but as the sibling comment notes, the way LLMs write is rather grating. To make matters worse, a) people seem to use them to add pointless volume / "filler" to their texts, so now I have to wade through pages and pages of this stuff, and b) I have no easy way to distinguish between an article at least based on novel human insights vs entirely LLM-generated from a "write me something about X topic" prompt. I don't think it's a stretch to say that the latter just isn't worth reading given the state of the art.
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