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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

#851

Post by whywhywhywhy »

cableshaft wrote: post #409
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the opposite I don't think I've read a single line of code I've shipped in over 6 months. I'd say it's far more tiring working that way though, you're breaking the satisfaction loop so you never really get the dopamine you used to get coding by hand, when you had a problem figuring it out was like solving a puzzle and you feel satisfaction at the end of it. With AI it feels most of my day is spent being a QA than…

Agree with you for my day job (which is coding corporate web app), for sure. I'm still letting A.I. drive more nowadays, but it does feel less fulfilling than it used to. But for my personal projects, I work on games, and by offloading a lot of the coding work to A.I., my puzzle solving is no longer 'how to fix this stupid library spitting stupid errors at me' or 'how to get this shader working' or 'why is this upgra…

The puzzle thought was mostly me trying to figure out why AI coding was more emotionally tiring when I'm literally doing less and creating more, maybe it's something else.

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

#852

Post by vader_n »

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…

Really?

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

#853

Post by sofixa »

_heimdall wrote: post #427
anonymars wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the US warned, days before, of the imminent invasion, the broad reaction was still one of "the boy who cried wolf"

And I didn't understand why anyone thought the warning was wrong. Who sends their navy around Europe, collects 100k troops on the border, and ships blood reserves to the front for a training exercise?

Because it was just so dumb. Putin had previously done things to sabre rattle to get concessions, and talks were happening at the same time, so many thought he wouldn't be dumb enough to invade, but just wants more to negotiate.

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

#854

Post by Yizahi »

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"?

It transferred from the S&P-493, obviously :) .

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

#855

Post by notepad0x90 »

willhslade wrote: post #791
notepad0x90 wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what other civilizations died out this way?

The bronze age collapse? The end of Rome?

I thought the cause of the bronze age collapse wasn't known (it wasn't a single civilization either), and the end of Rome, whichever "end" you ascribe to isn't caused by failure to manage or adapt to new technology. they weren't out-teched by anyone, or forgot how to do some technical work.

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

#856

Post by [deleted] »

WalterBright wrote: post #811
breezybottom wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what Elon Musk said, and yet DOGE has lead to zero fraud lawsuits

In the article I linked to, $8 million disappeared without a trace. I doubt anyone will be prosecuted over that. I'm not sure why. How about Caltrain producing 0 miles of track? Nobody is being prosecuted over that, either. Or the $100 million raised by Fire Aid (to aid the victims of the Palisades fire), and nobody knows what happened to the money. Do you believe that means there's no hanky panky going on?

[deleted]

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

#857

Post by Forgeties79 »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #849
Forgeties79 wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm the opposite I don't think I've read a single line of code I've shipped in over 6 months. This feels unfair to the people dealing with your (LLM’s) code. You don’t vet it at all? Or am I reading this wrong?

My boss gets annoyed if I try and do things without AI so eventually I caved but I don't see the point in reading it if thats the culture at the company being pushed. Also anyone else dealing with it is just gonna be dealing with it via AI so it doesn't really matter. If I worked somewhere where the CEO cared about hand written code I would be writing it and reading it but I don't.

Not all of us downstream of you are using AI to sort everything nor is it always applicable.

I do video editing primarily. Your unedited AI trash = more interpretation by me, which means more work.

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

#858

Post by Bluestrike2 »

sinuhe69 wrote: post #848
watt wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is full of these short sentences that AI writing loves, sort of to feel "punchy". Normally you would copy-edit that stuff, join them up, have the writing have some rhythm. I agree with GP, the article is hard to read because it seems to have a lot of https://tropes.fyi/

I love writing these short, punchy sentences. It makes the impact much better IMO. But maybe it’s just me.

Try for too much impact, and you end up browbeating the reader until they're little more than metaphorical pulp. A human writer might like using those types of sentences--or any of the obvious LLM writing tropes--in specific contexts, but they'll usually recognize the need to avoid overusing them.

LLMs don't, and so the tropes get repeated ad nauseam. It doesn't help that social media posts are a huge part of their training data, and there's a large body of research on how Twitter and social media in general have altered grammar and sentence construction towards patterns more commonly found in oral-based traditions as users sought out ways to make their voices heard.

It's easy to imagine a more polished version of a line like "It's not X. It's Y!" being tossed out during a speech precisely because it can be dramatic and punchy. When it's done in every other paragraph, however, it can become rather disconcerting.

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

#859

Post by ryandrake »

WalterBright wrote: post #819
ryandrake wrote: post #784

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 go…

> We are all slightly worse off every time there is a new billionaire. I responded to the zero sum theory in another reply. I'll just say that every country that decided to get rid of its wealthy people wound up poorer, a lot poorer. For a specific example, Massachusetts has a luxury yacht industry. The government decided that they wanted to tax the wealthy, and slapped a hefty tax on yachts. The billionaires simply…

> I responded to the zero sum theory in another reply.

You have ~40 responses in this thread in defense of billionaires, not sure which one exactly you're talking about.

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

#860

Post by wolvesechoes »

orthecreedence wrote: post #781
wolvesechoes wrote: post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How have you measured it?
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