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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

#721

Post by KittenInABox »

WalterBright wrote: post #658
danmaz74 wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, productivity increase is hugely important, but if you only pursue profit maximization, then all the productivity increase goes into profits, which means that the general population doesn't increase their well being much if at all. The 40hr work week didn't come by as a consequence of the profit maximization mentality, but as a consequence of hard fought battles by the workers/employees against that mentality. A…

The Law of Supply and Demand is in play, and it means a company cannot dictate prices, wages, or working conditions in a free market economy. Rising productivity would have reduced the average work week regardless. If you still aren't convinced, consider that the benefits package routinely offered to employees is worth around 40% of their pay.

> Rising productivity would have reduced the average work week regardless.

Do you have evidence of this?

> consider that the benefits package routinely offered to employees is worth around 40% of their pay

Please define "routinely" and "employees". Part-time employees do not get benefits packages, much less benefits packages worth 40% of their pay. PTO, Sick time, family leave, and other "benefits" are actually legally mandated and I do not see any evidence that companies would offer this if they were not mandated to do so.

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

#722

Post by tjwebbnorfolk »

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #14
tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #3

You could say COBOL has had this "problem" for 40 years also. That's why we need to constantly be inventing new ways of making things. The old ways are always forgotten over time. If you REALLY need something long-forgotten, then you have lazy-load it back into being at significant cost. That's the price of constant progress.

The point of the article is that sometimes the "old ways" really means "not particularly profitable or necessary in the short term" but the bill comes due in a crisis. The reason US/EU manufacturing was "the old ways" is that people could make easier money with financial engineering, an insight that extended all the way to Raytheon. COBOL is a bad example, but higher-level languages vs. assembly is not. If you write…

> sometimes the "old ways" really means "not particularly profitable or necessary in the short term" but the bill comes due in a crisis.

yes of course. that's why I said > If you REALLY need something long-forgotten, then you have lazy-load it back into being at significant cost.

This is all known, because it's always been this way. You can't hire a blacksmith, you need to first REMAKE the blacksmith if you really need one. It's always been this way, and it will continue. There is a cost to resurrecting old processes. This cost is a fact of life and needs to be planned for.

It cannot be avoided except by maintaining some kind of "strategic reserve" of thousands or millions people who sit around building things nobody wants on the off chance they might be needed again -- which a democracy will not long have the patience to continue paying for.

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

#723

Post by wolvesechoes »

tim-projects wrote: post #406
wolvesechoes wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show us effects. What amazing breakthroughs were achieved thanks to brain juice freed by AI usage? What great works of art were created?

I'll bite. I've been writing music for decades but I can't sing. With ai I can write lyrics and generate ai vocals, then separate the stems and extract the vocals throwing away the rest. Add the vocals to my daw and create the rest the way I want. Saying its a great work of art is subjective, but for me I can make music I couldn't before now.

You didn't bite anything.

Parent suggests the perspective where using AI allows to free up the "brain juice", and utilize it elsewhere. What you describe is AI allowing you to mitigate some limitations that prevented you trying something. So not the same.

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

#724

Post by fluoridation »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #707
fluoridation wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you're optimizing for a system of self-deception. If you never check how the data is collated, but rather whether the collation appears consistent, you will eventually be left only with data that has the appearance of consistency, regardless of how correct it is.

Why would you think that? I said I cross check and validate to my confidence.

Yeah, I got it. That's what consistency means. But appearing consistent isn't the same as being correct. You can't check the latter without an exhaustive check on the data, but doing that kind of defeats the purpose of off-loading the query to an AI.

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

#725

Post by wolvesechoes »

dieortin wrote: post #489
kristofferR wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most software, other than Windows and macOS, seems to have gotten better more quickly lately. Hard to quantify though, as most, other than the AI companies don't usually advertise their AI usage.

Could you give some examples?

Of course not. If they could, they would already.

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

#726

Post by wolvesechoes »

orthecreedence wrote: post #659
wolvesechoes wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show us effects. What amazing breakthroughs were achieved thanks to brain juice freed by AI usage? What great works of art were created?

I've got one. I'm working on a cryptographic identity system in rust. One of the stricter iterations of it demanded creating a public version and private version of each type. The best way to accomplish this is a procedural macro. I don't know if you've written proc macros by hand in rust. I have, years ago, and it was somewhat torturous. I didn't want to relearn to do it all over again and spend what would have take…

Did it became noticeably better because you used LLM to make a proc macro, therefore freed up you creative and cognitive powers to deliver something much better than you would by writing this macro yourself?

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

#727

Post by rglover »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #498
rglover wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never worked in a corporate environment beyond client projects. Picked up a book on XHTML (no, that isn't a typo) and CSS in 2007, just kept trying to build stuff I wanted to build and backfilling knowledge as I went. Not only is it possible, it's preferred. ~20 years in and I've learned how to build my own full-stack JS framework, deployment infra, a CSS framework, and an embedded database to boot. Not one drop…

All of this is possible on a corporate track. Ability to build frameworks and tools do qualify a person as at least a solid mid-level professional, not having corporate experience and associated skills can be a pretty big gap in their CV.

Possibilities are not results.

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

#728

Post by tjwebbnorfolk »

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #14
tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #3

You could say COBOL has had this "problem" for 40 years also. That's why we need to constantly be inventing new ways of making things. The old ways are always forgotten over time. If you REALLY need something long-forgotten, then you have lazy-load it back into being at significant cost. That's the price of constant progress.

The point of the article is that sometimes the "old ways" really means "not particularly profitable or necessary in the short term" but the bill comes due in a crisis. The reason US/EU manufacturing was "the old ways" is that people could make easier money with financial engineering, an insight that extended all the way to Raytheon. COBOL is a bad example, but higher-level languages vs. assembly is not. If you write…

Many things we must know to do our jobs are themselves artifacts of historical decisions made in a time and place that no longer makes sense, but we have to know them to do our jobs.

Claude has allowed me to jettison many useless (IMO) skills I've developed over the years. I'm quite happy to let my bank of CSS and regex trivia expire from the cache, never to be reloaded again. I will never have to write another webpack.config.js as long as I live. So much time in programming is spent looking up SDK operations that I basically know, I just can't remember whether the dang method is called acquire_data() or load_data() .... etc

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

#729

Post by lowsong »

slibhb wrote: post #713
lowsong wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not talking about replacing "writing code", we're talking about replacing your ability to think about the problems critically at all.

People said the exact same thing about computers .

So?

The research on AI is showing again and again that people that use AI are losing their skills not just in the specific task but more generally. This isn't a "change of skills" it's a fundamental reduction in the skills of knowledge workers.

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

#730

Post by AngryData »

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"?

On the short term every economy is effectively zero sum. Even if you invented something magical that is worth trillions, the economy can't pull trillions of dollars out of nowhere in any short period of time without devaluing everything else.
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