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Rolling the ladder up behind us

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Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#91

Post by kevmo314 »

sundaeofshock wrote: post #46
kevmo314 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that's totally possible but I suspect if AI really does take over software, the number of people who will riot over software quality is going to be dwarfed by the number of people who are happier that they can get their chats GPT'd faster.

What makes you think that capitalists will stop with software developers? If AI can truly eliminate software jobs, then most knowledge based jobs will be at risk of elimination. Let’s be honest; capital wants to eliminate all labor, and damn the consequences. People are not going to willingly give up lives of comfort for abject squalor. This will not go well.

I don't think they will but I also don't think abject squalor is the way to describe artisanal work.

On top of that, I agree that capitalists continue to eliminate jobs but I also think they create jobs in other sectors. The reason I don't buy into doomsday scenarios is I don't believe they will eliminate all the jobs at once.

I only happen to be a software engineer. If I was born 250 years ago, I'm sure I would've found a creative innovation outlet through another industry.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#92

Post by edwardbernays »

boogieknite wrote: post #83
edwardbernays wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're in America, there probably will not be a chill-out. Look into the philosophy of Curtis Yarvin, whom has been cited favorably by J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel. We are heading towards techno-fascism. The working population which would have been furloughed is probably going to be redirected to the manual labor jobs currently being vacated by the aggressive deportation of "the worst of the worst" immigrant workers…

thank you for the recommendation and holy god this is grim

It's grim but understandable in a way. I was writing quickly but I can expound more on any point if you want. I don't think we're locked into it yet, but if you read into Curtis Yarvin then you will see he was extremely prescient in the 2010s era. I refer to this brand of technofascist monarchism, self-branded as The Dark Enlightenment, as Yarvinism.

He is not the only one, but he is the most prominent. I've been considering starting a website to track things like The New Apostolic Reformation, The Seven Mountains Mandate, Curtis Yarvin, the two billionaires trying to get rid of the separation of church and State in Texas, and others.

There is a right-wing christofascist movement attempting to bulldoze democracy via technology. Peter Thiel is basically running the surveillance tech of our government. Look into what he's said about bulldozing government with technology. He knows his ideas are so unpalatable that he has to subvert democracy to get his ideas implemented.

This is the most prominent threat to our secular, freedom-loving, democratic way of life. It unfortunately receives very little air time.

EDIT: also look into this account's namesake, Edward Bernays, aka the father of modern propaganda.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#93

Post by fragmede »

WalterBright wrote: post #72
stego-tech wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Mr. Bright has a long, storied comment history of neolibertarian fantasies being wielded as a cudgel against anyone who dares envision a future that does not align with his own. Speaking from experience with them in another thread. Your best bet is to ignore the bait and move on to more fruitful discussions.

I merely point out that economic history shows that economic freedom works better than any other system. Besides, I enjoy debate, like other people enjoy playing football. If you don't, why are you here?

With all due respect, and I mean that sincerely as you've accomplished far more than I have, you aren't here for debate. Your viewpoint is stuck in the cold war mentality where Soviet communism was a failure (it did, but that doesn't mean that everything they touched was bad) and America and its brand of Free Market capitalism is perfect (it isn't) and responding to your comments is like talking to a brick wall for all the "debate" that actually occurs. Other long time posters here know better than to engage, but hey, you caught me waiting on Claude.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#94

Post by threetonesun »

tptacek wrote: post #36

As a software security person, I don't think the security objections to LLMs are going to pan out. I think LLMs are going to be a strong net positive for security: * The tooling and integration stuff people complain about now ("the S in MCP") isn't really load-bearing yet, and a cottage industry of professional services and product work will go into giving it the same overcomplicated IAM guardrails everything else ha…

I'm not terribly worried about code generated security vulnerabilities, but point 3 feels like a cat and mouse game that most companies won't have the resources to stay on top of, so they'll have to outsource it to one of the existing cloud or AI providers. Maybe that's a reality even without AI but it feels like we're heading towards full on extortion from about 4 major companies.

Also I don't think you covered my biggest concern with LLM security, a company making an Amazon basics version of your business model and claiming "AI did it". I'm 50/50 on that one though, it's also possible everyone things with AI you can go full NIH syndrome and take back all the software that we've handed off to various SAAS providers.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#95

Post by deadbabe »

blibble wrote: post #61
deadbabe wrote: post #14

Vibe coding is not going to go away. Just as alchemists always dreamed of turning lead into gold, there is a dream that people have had for decades of writing less and less code: Open source. Scaffolds. Code generators. No-code tools. Coding Agent LLMs. If vibe coding goes away, it will be because it has been replaced with something even more hands off. Perhaps vibe prompting. Or even code farming: just have AI agent…

> Or even code farming: just have AI agents constantly build totally random shit and go through and see if any of it is useful for something. so you're saying the venture capitalists will soon be out of a job? what a shame

Venture capitalists are basically startup farmers.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#96

Post by jdee »

thmsths wrote: post #71
whatshisface wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess universities will eventually backfill that gap with training that focuses on senior skills. Eventually.

We already require juniors to go through a 4 years university degree. It takes a fair bit of time of real world work to get to the senior level. So unless we expect people to do another 5 years of schooling, I am not sure how this will happen (and even in that scenario I believe there is a difference between hands on, on the job experience and classroom experience).

it happened with architecture degrees in the uk. it went from 3 years to 7 years, as the skill levels and implicit knowledge required increased over time.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#97

Post by brooke2k »

WalterBright wrote: post #85
brooke2k wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel this is a slightly disingenuous argument - mismanagement and poor planning can happen in both the public and private sectors. The US healthcare system is just one fantastic example of the private sector absolutely failing to deliver even a bare minimum standard of service. Gas lines are one thing - waiting fifteen hours in the emergency room to be seen, only to be charged thousands of dollars for some tylenol…

> mismanagement and poor planning can happen in both the public and private sectors Absolutely correct. But public regulation is quite resistant to course correction. Private companies have to face competitors and adapt or fail. > The US healthcare system is just one fantastic example of the private sector absolutely failing to deliver even a bare minimum standard of service The US healthcare system is massively regu…

Public regulation also course-corrects, it just does so through democracy rather than competition.

I would argue that democracy is a superior method in most instances, because its motives are driven by the motives of the population as a whole, whereas capitalist competition is ultimately driven by exactly one thing: profit for the capital owners.

Where we agree I think is in the assertion that United States government tends to run things very poorly. In my opinion, however, this is not because central planning is inherently bad, but because our democracy is very weak, and we allow politicians to be controlled by corporate interests rather than the interests of the people that they represent.

EDIT: Oh, and for the record I disagree with the take that the US healthcare system is bad because it has too much regulation - but that's an entirely separate discussion that I don't think is worth going into.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#98

Post by AnIrishDuck »

AnIrishDuck wrote: post #87
WalterBright wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lived through the gas shortages. I remember the day the gas lines ended. They never returned in the 45 years since, despite all sorts of wars and global crises and exploding oil refineries and Hooties shooting at tankers. All gone literally overnight with the stroke of Reagan's pen. The gas shortages never existed before Nixon imposed price and allocation controls on gas, either. (Except during WW2, where gas short…

Well first, we have this: > The Jimmy Carter administration began a phased deregulation of oil prices on April 5, 1979, when the average price of crude oil was US$15.85 per barrel ($100/m3). So, the process wasn't really an instant wave of a wand, or stroke of a pen. We also have this: > Starting with the Iranian revolution, the price of crude oil rose to $39.50 per barrel ($248/m3) over the next 12 months (its all-t…

I'll also note that all of this still mostly reinforces your main thesis.

One major issue with central planning is that it usually lacks the internal feedback mechanisms necessary to properly account for all of these factors.

Price signals usually work faster, and thus more efficiently! The USSR even had an economic reform where they introduced mechanisms that could be described as "shadow prices" within their own system [1]. It was the driving force behind one of the independent discoveries of linear programming.

I'd highly recommend "In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You" [2] and the novel (historical economic fiction, a nerd's nerd literary category if there ever was one) Red Plenty to learn more.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_Soviet_economic_reform 2. https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimiz...

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#99

Post by duskwuff »

djoldman wrote: post #90

There are a lot of issues brought up in this post, but I want to discuss one in particular: technological progress and its economic and societal ramifications. We can say that technological progress occurs when a new method is employed to deliver a product or service with some "more desirable" blend of qualities: it's created/delivered faster, cheaper, with a more desirable mix of resource inputs, and/or results in a…

> technological progress and its economic and societal ramifications

I seem to recall that a mathematician wrote a paper about this around 1995 which got a lot of press attention. I'm not sure I agree with all of his conclusions, though. Nor his methods.

Re: Rolling the ladder up behind us

#100

Post by duskwuff »

Veedrac wrote: post #55

A defense of the Luddites against sewing machines was honestly not something I expected. Support for the Luddites in general, sure I can predict that, but the claim that sewing machines are bad, exploitative, produce "shitty" cloth, serve only the pursuit of profit...

Power looms are not the same thing as sewing machines. Not even close.
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