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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

#781

Post by orthecreedence »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #726
orthecreedence wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, it did.

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

#782

Post by peter_d_sherman »

>"Rebuilding Takes Years. Always.

[...]

Money was never the constraint. Knowledge was.

[...]

Now map that onto software. A junior developer needs three to five years to become a competent mid-level engineer. Five to eight years to become senior. Ten or more to become a principal or architect. That timeline can’t be compressed by throwing money at it. It can’t be compressed by AI either."

Well said!

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

#783

Post by mikewarot »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #742
aleqs wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, in the minds of these people 'firing at 100% all the time' generally means doing busywork and/or thinking of ways to cheat/manipulate their customers and the market for maximum gain whole delivering minimum value. I would have loved to be 100% engaged working on solving real problems in honest ways at some of my past jobs, but alas MBA/marketing leadership, which has taken over much of tech has very l…

> generally means doing busywork and/or thinking of ways to cheat/manipulate their customers and the market for maximum gain whole delivering minimum value When I read comments like this I can’t help but wonder where people like you work. It’s completely unrepeatable to me. I work with really good people, all the way to the tip, and no try to make money by increasing value for our customers. Apple, Google, Walmart, A…

>Apple, Google, Walmart, Amazon, Home Depot, Anthropic, Toyota, and a hundred other companies all offer me incredible value for so cheap.

Try to find something with Google these days. Try to use an Apple product past it's planned obsolescence. They crowd out innovation with their monopolistic rent seeking.

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

#784

Post by ryandrake »

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"?

When it comes to what actually matters, people's standards of living, what matters most is percentages, which are zero sum. In a simplified economy where 10 people have $100 each, everyone is worth 10% of the economy, have about equal buying power, equal standards of living, equal political power, and so on.

If one of those people suddenly "creates wealth" and now has $100,000, then the average value of the dollar goes down and the cost of everything goes up. Person X can trivially afford the increase, but the other nine now have lower buying power, lower standards of living, and the $100,000 now can exert coercive control over those with less.

We are all slightly worse off every time there is a new billionaire.

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

#785

Post by NateEag »

recury wrote: post #577
NateEag wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are these? I'm extremely curious.

It’s a puzzle piece shape cut out of polycarbonate with some meaningless “great work!” platitude printed on it: https://postimg.cc/v1v5VP2f

Thank you for satiating my curiosity.

I can see why GGP described it that way.

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

#786

Post by AlecSchueler »

liendolucas wrote: post #152

I still code daily without any coding assistance mostly because I believe this is the way to not forget how things are done, even trivial things. My main point against using AI is that I do not want to depend basically on anything when I'm in front of the screen (obviously not including, documentation, books, SO and alike). I closely see people that are 100% dependent on AI for literally everything, even the most tri…

> Giving away that at least for me means to become a dependent zombie.

I suppose people felt the same way in the agrarian revolution and later again with inventions like the plough. Suddenly a lot of people offloaded their food independence onto the work of a few.

What might it open up in our lives to be free of knowledge?

That said, these machines don't run themselves, if we disengage our minds we might get stuck in a dead end with them.

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

#788

Post by the_af »

ssl-3 wrote: post #768
the_af wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Desktop Linux has always been kind of a joke. It hasn't gotten better, the problems are all still there. Desktop Linux mostly works these days. It does everything most regular people would want of it, with zero fuss. Including playing games. In some respects, it's easier to use than Mac or Windows. When it has trouble with some things, one must remember neither Mac nor Windows is perfect, and they can be extremely…

You know, I think you're right. I set up Void Linux on my desktop a couple of years ago, using the plainest base image. I chose that path because ZFS is important to me, and systemd is ugly to me. I determined that this minimal start was the right confluence of those two preferences with the howto documentation available at the time, so that's what I did. So I'm going along in rolling releases for years, and even pla…

I mostly don't tweak anything at all these days.

Stock Ubuntu, binary NVIDIA drivers, no tearing on video, excellent frame rate on most games.

A few give me trouble (Space Marine II, one of the Need For Speeds). Sometimes the advice on ProtonDB works, sometimes it doesn't.

Beyond games, everything I want to do works out of the box, with some exceptions which I also remember from my Windows days.

No printer troubles (Mac sometimes gives me a headache here), no sound troubles.

Oh, there was some issue with bluetooth pairing. Which I sorted out.

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

#789

Post by maxnevermind »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #271

The defense analogy makes absolutely no sense. All the examples are of production shutdowns or reductions. Knowledge was lost because people retired and not replaced at all. None of it was lost to automation. Automation is the exact opposite of tying knowledge to people. It's extracting knowledge from people and transferring it to a machine that can continue to produce the goods. Yes, AI can lead to problems and some…

I'm also confused with that as well as the moral of the story as the whole. I get the sentiment but what is the lesson here, leave production capacity keep going as well as a "hiring pipeline" and just stock pile the output forever? Also, given article's take on the current situation of AI assisted coding, it seems to suggest that we need to apply that same logic to other industries too, so just don't let any industry/practice die and keep it alive? I would appreciate some inputs into some sort of actual solution or at least ideas of the solution but that is not present in the article.
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