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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

#771

Post by WalterBright »

AngryData wrote: post #733
WalterBright wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working long hours was necessary in those days because productivity was much lower. Productivity has gone up so much people can work a lot less, and vast part of the population doesn't work at all.

Working long hours was not necessary in those days, it was forced upon people by declining wages as profit was transferred from individuals, families, and small businesses towards the capital class. The entire movement to introduce the 40 hour work week was based on people wanting to reduce their hours towards what their grandparents worked and survived on. The entire luddite movement was based on declining wages and…

I don't know where you're getting that information from, but analysis of the bones of American colonists shows they worked themselves to an early death.

Life expectancy and average height improved throughout the 19th century.

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

#772

Post by resonancel »

roenxi wrote: post #51
collinfunk wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You see zero similarities between Hitler invading Poland and Putin invading Ukraine?

There are some pretty substantial differences. Russia is on the strategic back foot here trying to figure out a way to stop NATO's advance. They've only turned to violence after long attempts at resolving the tension diplomatically and the US has been implacable. Putin's actually been pretty hesitant in his escalations so far; he's 70 and has a long history of trying to avoid war. Hitler was more about wanting more l…

Did Putin do anything meaningful to stop "NATO's advance" into the Baltic Sea? Maybe Putin was so pacifist that he let Sweden and Finland join the NATO with impunity.

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

#773

Post by doubled112 »

applied_heat wrote: post #539
TeMPOraL wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And in the background of this something ominous: Companies can't just pivot back to higher quality after they've destroyed all their inhouse knowledge. (...) They can't move back upmarket after that's done. The knowledge isn't the problem. It can be quickly regained, and progress of science and technology often offer new paths to even better quality, which limits the need for recovering details of old process. The…

10 year warranty on appliances instead of 1 would show the manufacturer was serious about quality !

Or that it was so cheap to manufacture they still expect it not to be a problem.

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

#774

Post by throwaway219450 »

bonsai_spool wrote: post #410
throwaway219450 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These patterns are learned from magazine articles and other long-form publications. The tendency to have unnecessarily pithy/hooky section titles is one that particularly irks me, but it's not like AI invented that. I was reading some DIY books that are published by a company that does a lot of web/magazine work and they structure the text in the same way (this is all pre-LLM). Content creators are starting to includ…

> Content creators are starting to include these traits into their scripts now, too. Why would you assume this when the more likely reasonable is that the 'content creators' are just pasting LLM output?

I'm sure that's exactly what people are doing, but it's more difficult to tell from a recited script until someone drops a "It's not x, but Y".

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

#775

Post by CMay »

brabel wrote: post #157
pelorat wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of the military I'd say the real reason is political. After the fall of the Berlin wall, Europe collectively agreed (knowingly or not) that war is now a thing of the past and the goal should be the complete dismantling of militaries worldwide, starting with Europe. Lead by example, etc.

They agreed that war was a thing of the past, but still continued to push for NATO to allow new members anyway, ironically causing Russia (and China and everyone who is NOT in NATO) to suspect that war was NOT a thing of the past and therefore never quite abandoning their military completely. Unpopular opinion: the West should either NEVER have abandoned its military production (so as to maintain NATO actual prepared…

After the USSR fell, they left behind many countries abused by Russia that didn't believe it would leave them alone. Those countries wanted defense guarantees in case of future Russian aggression.

NATO wanted to be deliberate and slow about admitting any new members, but countries that wanted to join felt that anyone who didn't join might get attacked or face hybrid measures from Russia to prevent them from joining next. So they grouped up and 7 countries joined NATO simultaneously. NATO was never begging them to join, they wanted to join NATO.

People push this vision of NATO being some hungry bastard that can't get enough, but it's largely outside pressures pushing countries to want to join it.

Sure enough they were right. Russia invaded both Georgia and Ukraine, which wanted to join already because Russia kept interfering in their societies.

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

#776

Post by Yoric »

WalterBright wrote: post #765
Yoric wrote: post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that profit maximization has had very many effects. On the one side, it has succeeded at reducing costs, which has indeed given rich societies unprecedented access to consumer goods. On the other, it has outsourced from us both jobs and knowledge, which has resulted in higher unemployment and dissatisfaction, with as consequences the political dominoes we see falling internationally. That and the shoddy…

Outsourcing happens when it is cheaper to build something somewhere else. Tariffs can compensate for that. Where are the starving people in capitalist countries? The US health care system is pretty much run by the government. It is not a result of free markets. A large part of profit maximization (i.e. optimizing) usually means reducing the amount of material needed. Isn't that a good thing? The people who "rough it"…

> Outsourcing happens when it is cheaper to build something somewhere else. Tariffs can compensate for that.

Is that free market?

> Where are the starving people in capitalist countries?

The first example from the top of my head is Argentina.

> A large part of profit maximization (i.e. optimizing) usually means reducing the amount of material needed. Isn't that a good thing?

This very much depends on the industry. In software, for instance, it's exactly the opposite.

> The people who "rough it" in the wilderness still seem to be backpacking in hi tech equipment. I read about the kit that Lewis & Clark carried. No thanks. (Even on that "Alone" show, they bring hi tech equipment.)

No idea what you're talking about.

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

#777

Post by nobodyandproud »

WalterBright wrote: post #766
nobodyandproud wrote: post #748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A free market is bound by the rules of the market, which is trade agreements and government. Meaning it can be changed and adjusted.

Nobody has ever succeeded adjusting the Law of Supply & Demand. Not even the die hard communists.

I’ll be sure to bring a posse of gunmen to my next negotiation.

Every well functioning market has ground rules. We call that laws.

And every well-functioning market has enforcer of said ground rules. We call that government.

Believing that the market is unregulated is faith-driven nonsense, which flies in the face of evidence.

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

#778

Post by Unmotivator2677 »

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"?

I don't know but I will speak:

Cantillon Effect

How much does your bread cost and how much did it cost in the 90s? Where do you think all that value gone? Has bread some what become much better quality or something? Are they lacing it with gold?

They are stealing from your pocket, in many ways than one.

Another point to consider is that musk wealth is on paper only, real value if he wanted to cash out would turn much smaller, it's all hypothetical.

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

#779

Post by samrus »

Aurornis wrote: post #594
jdw64 wrote: post #17

The real issue, in my view, is not AI itself. The problem is a management pattern: removing people and organizational slack because they don’t generate immediate profit, and then expecting the knowledge to still be there when it’s needed. Short-term cost cutting leads to less junior hiring, and removes the slack that experienced engineers need in order to teach. As a result, tacit knowledge stops being transferred. W…

> The core problem is that decision-makers—often far removed from actual engineering work— believe that tacit knowledge can be replaced with documentation, tools, and processes.ti cannot. You need some experienced people around, but companies that rely on institutional knowledge to get everything done have always been doomed to fail. Even before AI, turnover was a real thing. People churn jobs a lot in tech even when…

Companies that have too much tribal knowledge obviously do fail. But for a company to run well, some institutional knowledge will be there. And this will be the most subtle and implicit stuff that really isnt feasible to put down on paper. Or even if it is documented, its hard to understand without building alot of context. Even if that context is present in the docs, its not really possible to internalize it without actually seeing things at work.

All that is what takes time to learn and it cant really be eliminated either because thats what is critical for you company to run on

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

#780

Post by oxag3n »

aldanor wrote: post #359
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…

Not the factory floor. The receiving end. It wasn’t one bottleneck. It was all of them. Not the nuclear material. The pattern. Money was never the constraint. Knowledge was. ...

On the other hand articles mistakes (missing the, a or wrong the). So it'z not AI translated, but also not fully AI generated...
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