The west is not merely forgetting to code. It is creating systems that can code. They aren't standing still. They are progressing to a higher level of production.

It doesn’t seem much like defense industry problems.

Shells are not needed once they are not in needed. Code does not: customer need is always there.

Before forgotting how to code, The West will first get round up by their own Monsanto, voluntarily.

> Salesforce said it won’t hire more software engineers in 2025.

Some headline somewhere reported this, but Salesforce plenty of engineers (in the US at least) in 2025. One of them is a junior engineer on one of my scrum teams.

I see a talent pipeline collapse in next 5 years. "Software engineering is over coding is a solved problem" as being chanted by semi literate media and the AI grifter's marketing departments would further scare away the allocation of human capital to software engineering easily commanding 3x rise in salaries due to resource shortage.

What America did with developing Shale Oil to become viable, so quickly is one example.

So there was this: "I run engineering teams in Ukraine. My people lived the other side of this equation. Not the factory floor. The receiving end. While Raytheon was struggling to restart production from forty-year-old blueprints, the US was shipping thousands of Stingers to Ukraine. RTX CEO Greg Hayes: ten months of war burned through thirteen years’ worth of Stinger production. I’ve seen this pattern before. It’s happening in my industry right now."

The filter flashed the warning on the telltale signs and I stopped reading. Now I've got the puzzle I don't want to do. Did someone trying to argue against "AI assisted" coding use an LLM to author that argument?

But this is HN, I can also just move on to the next story.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47881805

Not really since they are always pushing for more wars.

If the author sincerely believes the thesis that AI makes you vulnerable / dumb, they are either incredibly hypocritical. But more likely, they're just cynical and trying to get traffic to their website. And you're not getting back the time you spent reading this and arguing with it.

There will be always a room for good developers.

With all due respect, but many european taxpayers help pay for Ukraine. I am not disagreeing on the premise of the West killing itself via systematic recessions - Trump invading Iran leading to inflation as an example - so a lot of things are going on that show a ton of incompetency both in the USA and the EU, but at the same time I also get question marks in my eyes when this criticism comes from a country that receives money from others. That money could instead go to make EU countries more competitive, for instance. I am not saying this should necessarily be the case, mind you; I fully understand the nature of Putin's imperialism. But we need to really consider all factors when it comes to strategic mistakes with regards to production - and that includes taking up debts all the time. There are always a few who benefit in war, just as they benefit from subsidies from taxpayers (inside and outside as well).

People come and go at rates that would not be sustainable in any manufacturing business.

The opening paragraph is ridiculous. The FIM-92 Stinger is obsolete. It was replaced by FGM-148 Javelin. DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) didn't forget how to make things. They are still world class for manufacturing. (Northern Italy is also economically part of that manufacturing mega-hub.)

There are plenty of NLAWs (much cheaper than Javelin, and only slightly less capable) in EU/Nato stocks to satisfy Ukraine needs against Russian heavily armed main battle tanks. For everything else, you can use one or two suicide drones to kill anything with a motor.

And now to give credit where credit is due:

Looking at his (assumed) LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/denjkestetskov/

It looks like he was educated in Ukraine, so likely a Ukrainan national. If I were a Ukrainan, then I too would be publishing rage bait like this in an attempt to pressure allies to provide more funding, weapons, and gear.

As a final suggestion, the writer can visually spice up his blog post with one of my all time favourite military photos from Wiki: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AFIM-92_Stinger_USM...

That doesn't mean that MAME is a trivial project. Far from it. It'll take you several years to get proficient with the whole codebase.

Just that unlike manufacturing, the software is much more self contained and everything is in those files including how to build them.

You are, of course, free to disagree and make your point, but ignoring the argument does not advance the discussion.

- Knowledge of how to make Fogbank etc. was lost when the people retired and or died. AI will make things worse, especially for code.

In reality if they'd used AI the knowledge in it would still be there as it doesn't retire or die or need paying a salary. I guess you have to keep a copy of the model file.

The article seems AI written with punch sentances and mixed up logic.

This article passes blame to AI for developers not learning because they are not being actively hired. You do not need to be hired to learn something. You need to learn something in order to be hired.

We’ll see, but right now I now see developers 24/7 hooked onto their agents and in the future we will experience a de-skilling problem which clean code, best practices, security and avoiding NIH syndrome will be all flushed down the toilet.

Software developers have been learning what they needed to know to do the job the whole time. That’s pretty much the job description.

What you need to know has changed a lot recently. Like always.

> The combination of technical skill and the judgment to know when the AI is wrong barely exists in the market anymore.

That’s certainly not true. I’d take a hard look at my hiring process if it was performing this inefficiently.

The history of technology is the replacement of manual processes with automated ones.

Consider a very basic process: checkout of a restaurant.

Writing the price of each item on a sheet of paper, manually adding them and writing the total was replaced with typing in the prices and eventually with just pushing the button for the item. Paper still exists for jotting down your order but within seconds of leaving the table it’s transitioned to computer.

This has enabled lots of desirable advances- speed, accuracy, new payment rails, and increasingly, elimination of the server in checkout- you tap a credit card on a tabletop device.

Did we “forget” how to do checkout? No. We purposely changed it.

But if the internet connection goes down or the backend server powering the cash register app goes down, there is an atrophied and not-regularly exercised skill set (maybe not even trained, IDK) that has to be implemented on-the-fly and it’s slow and frustrating for everyone.

Businesses don’t exercise (or perhaps even train) this process because it’s just not needed enough to warrant the cost.

Military procurement of weapons systems is hardly the place to point to as a technological tradition. There are lots of cases where no one pays the money to keep a production process in place; the reasons are all related to shortsighted “cost savings” or failing to anticipate changing needs.

With coding today, we are seeing the same kind of shift in priorities as my restaurant example. Having humans write code in the 2020 (pre-GPT) tradition was extremely inefficient in terms of time-from-idea-to-implementation.

We’ve found a new way to do the mundane part of that task (the mechanics of translating spec to implementation).

We are figuring out how to do that while preserving quality (and a lot of it is learning how to specify appropriately).

Will we “forget” how to “build” code?

No, but the skills to generate source code by hand will atrophy just as the skills to draw blueprints by hand atrophied with the advent of CAD.

Will we find examples where someone prematurely optimized away knowledge of a skill or process, incorrectly thinking it was no longer needed? Of course.

But the productivity gains we get will be so great on average that no one will go back to doing things the old way.

There will be old-timers and hobbyists who will preserve some of that knowledge; for most it will just be a curiosity.

[...]

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!

I love this articles who all the coders read but none of the management.

If possible, be a mercenary and put a high number on your expertise, so we can solve this management blind spot faster.

If you can't, let your life/work's passion be "not starving to death", and try to change it politics-side.

>

> In defense, the substitute was the peace dividend. In software, it’s AI.

LLMs are a magnificent tool if you use them correctly. They enable deep work like nothing before.

The problem is the education system focused on passivity (obeyance), memorization, and standardized testing. And worst of all, aiming for the lowest common denominator. So most people are mentally lazy and go for the easy win, almost cheating. You get school and interview cheating and vivecoders.

But it's not the only way to use LLMs.

Similarly, in Wikipedia you can spend hours reading banal pop-slop content or instead spend that time reading amazing articles about history, literature, arts, and science.

The rise of coding bootcamps destroyed the historic knowledge and expertise of professional software developers. Waves and waves of people joined the tech workforce, without taking the years of experience required to learn how programming, and professional software development, should work. The result was a lot of really bad code, and a lot of reeeeeally bad product decisions.

Since 2018 I haven't met anyone who has read an entire technical manual on a framework, library, or tool that they use every day. By 2020 I was meeting engineering managers who said they wouldn't let engineers use a technology if they couldn't find StackOverflow snippets for it. I still meet "Senior" engineers who don't understand the most basic professional methods, like how Scrum, Agile, or Kanban actually work, and why you shouldn't just make things up as you go. Hell, the entire industry developed a collective psychosis preventing them from understanding the word "DevOps", because everyone switched entirely to learning by reading false blog posts written by clueless amateurs and upvoted in an echo chamber. If you never learn properly, and repeat misconceptions, you won't do good work.

We neeed a professional software development license, the same way the Trades have licensed plumbers and electricians and framers. We need people to apprentice under a master engineer, so they are guided by people who know what to do and what not to do. And we need formal tests to ensure businesses don't hire clueless people who passed a two week course to write critical software. Of course nobody wants to do this, and that's why it's so necessary.

It's minor but this is just wrong. If you're going to hire 4 candidates, there could be 2,253 perfectly qualified candidates even if only 0.18% get hired. The conversion rate is meaningless; it just tells us how many jobs were on offer. There is no way that the skills this fellow wanted were so rare and difficult that only 1/500 candidates could possibly handle the job. Humans even in the 1/20 mark are pretty competent if you're willing to train them and legitimate geniuses crop up at around 1/200.

Same thing that happened to the unfortunate Dr. Jekyll!

In the end of the day, Russia burnt through their entire Soviet stocks in roughly 2-2.5 years, while US spent a very small proportion of theirs and Europe, maybe about half. And now consumption on both sides is similar with expenses on the Western side to feed that machine being almost invisibly small. Nothing bad happened.

> I will begin with what I said in my address on February 21, 2022. I spoke about our biggest concerns and worries, and about the fundamental threats which irresponsible Western politicians created for Russia consistently, rudely and unceremoniously from year to year. I am referring to the eastward expansion of NATO, which is moving its military infrastructure ever closer to the Russian border.

They're claiming the NATO thing is relevant. Opening paragraph justification.

[0] http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/67843

Also the number who turned their offers down (and perhaps the number they disqualified due to being overqualified and too expensive).

Ultimately kind of a meaningless metric.

- Knowledge of how to make Fogbank etc. was lost when the people retired and or died. AI will make things worse, especially for code.

In reality if they'd used AI, the knowledge in it would still be there as it doesn't retire or die or need paying a salary. I guess you have to keep a copy of the model file.

The article seems AI written with punchy sentences and mixed up logic.

This kind of forgetting is normal. It's how things work when time and resources are finite. The only problem here is the belief that you can keep capacity to do something without actively exercising it, and thus the expectation that you can "just" resume doing things after a long break, without paying up a cold-start cost.

But you can't, and there's no reason to be surprised. I bet the Pentagon and the EU weren't. They didn't need those Stingers and shells for decades, didn't expect to need them soon - but they knew they could get them if they really needed them, but it's gonna be costly.

I don't get why people think this is unusual or surprising, or somehow outrageous and proves something about society or "mindsets of elites" - other than positive aspects like adaptability and resilience.

This is true at all scales. Your body and brain optimizes aggressively, too. An individual saying "I need to warm up" or "I need to hit the gym a few times and then I'll be able", or "yes, I can, but I haven't done it for years so I need an hour with a book/documentation..." - all that is exactly the same as EU going "yes we can make artillery shells... though we haven't in a while so we need some time and some millions of EUR to get our supply chain sorted out first".

Another reason is that LLMs train on the existing code we already know, don't expect new programming languages or frameworks this means that the software engineering skills that exist today will be relevant for a long time.

What’s really happening is that we are all forgetting how to think

You mean the world?

Deepseek was being glazed here, Im sure chinese programmers use it like CC

It's kind of insane how much knowledge a human being needs to have to build certain technologies and it's taken for granted.

AI might make the knowledge easier to acquire but it's still a lot of knowledge that people have to internalize.

Good, knowledgable employees are not fungible. The in-house culture that built the engineering takes an entire generation to build.

The winner-take-all MBA class of the 1980s to the 2000s and the congressional leadership developed during this era are squarely at fault and their policies need to be replaced.

For the actual problem, I fear this can't be solved by warning people, the pain will need to be felt. The system we live in, basically free market capitalism, cannot do anything else except local optimization. Maybe it's for the best, I don't know. The alternative of top down planning wouldn't have this problem, but it would have other problems. I work for a mid size somewhat luxury brand, and the major goal right now is cost cutting and AI for efficiency everywhere instead of using it to create better products or better ways to reach out customers. When I think about who will buy our luxury products if all jobs were optimized out of existence, I don't have an answer, but again I think the pain will need to be felt to change course.

I see this as a sign of increase in productivity, the important software will still have a human centered development team, but we don't need another dev team on say, tinder for dogs.

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them"

It remains to be seen whether this implies some kind of constraint on human progress. I doubt it.

Did I forget everyone's phone numbers when cell phones came out? Yes.

But this is different. Coding is my passion. I was doing it before I got paid to do it and I'll be doing it after they no longer pay people to do it anymore.

The junior hiring collapse compounds this. Senior engineers develop judgment partly by watching juniors make mistakes and correcting them. Remove that loop and you don't just lose future seniors — you quietly degrade the current ones.

The 0.18% recruiting conversion rate mentioned here tracks with what I see in compliance and security engineering too. "Can you tell when the AI is confidently wrong?" is now the most important interview question, and almost nobody can answer it well.

The outsourcing was shedding more of the trivial jobs, while trying to keep key positions at home, but increasingly, it also started to lose the key positions too. It's possible that AI can make it so that the key positions will be harder to justify to outsource... but, who knows... maybe not.

This is weird, but does seem a common result.

-> AI generates a ton of code fast, but then the human takes a long time to review. Every time the prompt changes. The AI takes a few minutes to generate code that the human will take hour to review.

The reviewing is taking longer than if human just did the code. So why is it so difficult to go back to coding instead of prompting.?

I'm far removed from the conflict in Ukraine, but from the reporting it seems like they are making extremely good use of well understood, inexpensive technologies like drones with mundane munitions.

I'm sure Stinger missiles have their place in the battlefield there, but a $120K stinger doesn't seem like a very good countermeasure against a few thousand dollar drone.

So, counterpoint: We also need to understand how to embrace the changing face of software.

Probably we are going to be fine with AI abstraction too. People will use it, stuck with problems, dig deeper, learn, improve, same as we had with frameworks and its source code.

To the extent that AI is analogous to automation in manufacturing, and "writing code" to working on an assembly line, it's hard to argue the West is any thing other than a global leader in "software tool & die", so to speak.

4a. "If a process is unlikely to be needed any time soon, shutting it down and then paying cold-start costs if and when it's needed again, is better than keeping it going and wasting resources better used elsewhere", and

4b. "There's an infinitely long tail of low-probability problems, and you can't possibly afford to maintain advance readiness for any of them".

Also on the overall sentiment:

4c. "Paying a cold-start cost isn't a penalty or sign of bad planning. It's just a cost."

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.

https://medium.com/@trezzescience/the-ai-that-invented-its-o...

I have considerably more concern about the ability of a post MAGA USofA to successfully navigate such a world via soft power as they appear to have flushed all the competent diplomatic talent down a golden toilet.

It’s a 85/15 rule. These big companies hire hundreds, possibly thousands, of developers but most of them cannot code. Some of them struggle to write emails. About 15% of those people provide 85% of the value.

Here is where it all went wrong. The goal of software, the only goal, is automation. That means eliminating human labor. The goal of these big companies is hiring, which is mostly the opposite of eliminating labor. That conflict results in people who cannot do the jobs they are hired to perform and whose goals are to retain employment in preference to automating anything.

Worse still is that you can’t talk about if 85% of the people doing that work find this very subject completely hostile.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. Upton Sinclair.

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.

What remains is documentation and automation.

But documentation is not the same as field experience. Automation is not the same as judgment. Without people who have actually worked with the system, you end up with a loss of tacit knowledge—and eventually, declining productivity.

AI is following the same pattern.

What AI is being sold as right now is not really productivity. In many domains, productivity is already sufficient. What’s being sold is workforce reduction.

The West has seen this before, especially in the case of General Electric.

GE pursued aggressive short-term financial optimization, cutting costs, focusing on quarterly results, and maximizing shareholder returns. In the process, it hollowed out its own long-term capabilities. It effectively traded its future for short-term gains.

The same mindset is visible today.

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.

Tacit knowledge comes from direct experience with real systems over time. If you remove the people and the learning pipeline, that knowledge does not stay in the organization. It disappears.

Now? Seems like code quality is outdated and uninteresting all of a sudden. Everything is about agentic coding, harnesses, paying hundreds of dollars to Anthropic to let their LLM do the coding for you or perhaps using a 128 GB Mac to run a local model. Do you know your code base? Doesn't matter, if there are any bugs in the future Claude will fix them! Tokenmaxxing is the new paradigm, who cares about the end result as long as it's runs for now and passes all (AI written) tests!

But don't suggest these people shouldn't get $100k+ salaries, after all, they still "software engineers" in their minds, they're running the agent orchestration harness in the terminal after all, not everyone anywhere in the world could do that! They're special and deserve to be well compensated for their hard vibe coding work!

This industry is rotting from the inside.

I got my highest-paying numerical programming contract (in the US) just because I knew (from high school math table experience) how to use LUTs to calculate a lot of useful stuff i.e quarter squares.

Modernization is great and all. However, it's disappointing to know lots of new programmers are oblivious of the fundamentals.

But civilisations have always forgotten things and then had to re-engineer them. We only recently recreated Roman-equivalent concrete; knowledge required to create the Saturn V rockets had to be re-engineered; we can't recreate medieval stained glass exactly, or Viking Ulfberht Swords; we would struggle to create Betamax tape today.

Many of the examples I found (as expected) relate to military or commercially sensitive technology that did not get written down (for obvious reasons).

It also reminded me when I read Thomas Thwaites' "The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch", where to make a smelter from scratch he relied on a 450 year old book ("De re metallica" by Georgius Agricola), as well as a friendly Metallurgist.

We already lost the widespread ability to write assembler in an artisinal way. Now we have AI we will also be lazy about how we write individual bits of artisinal code. So what? Yes it will cost more (in time and money) when we need to re-engineer, but how much would it cost to keep alive all the knowledge and skills we might possibly need in the future?

We had better make sure we write down and preserve the recorded data though :)

AI has been an effective coding tool for, what, 2 years at most? We've collectively forgotten all of our skills in those 2 years? Really?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...

There will always be specialists who can really debug stuff. Mechanics, etc. Time moves on, and we need to move with it.

I’m amazed at this “end-of-world” crap. People use AI to write this shit, to make it even crazier.

Can we stop repeating this nonsense headline please? We did not stop manufacturing things.

Manufacturing is a huge industry in the West. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...

The US manufacturing sector is the biggest it has ever been. Exports are at all time record highs. The only thing that declined about manufacturing is the jobs. We build way more than we ever did but with far fewer people.

What we did do is decide that basic items aren't worth it. Our capacity is limited, our labor pool is limited, expenses are high, it doesn't make sense to make trinkets when we can make complex high precision parts and devices.

But no, we did not forget how to make things. We chose to use our capacity in a smarter way.

But now that the time has comes for us to automate and change, we’re all up in arms and using ridiculous arguments like this post to fight it.

The hypocrisy is mind blowing

I mean beyond the obvious hacker news bias.

If you like it nobody will remove it to you as a hobby. But the artisanal aspect of coding as a production mechansim is dying, and it was about time.

Right now, silicon dominance is what's keeping silicon valley afloat. that and the power of the American consumer base. The world is having to adapt to not relying on the US for consumption due to tariffs among other things. Not only that, attempts to curb competition from China by restricting chip exports, and imports of their tech (I don't disagree in principle with either) has led them to be more self-reliant and invest more on domestic R&D.

All this to say, there is no way around winning, and the fact of the competition is also real. You can't deny the competitive advantage proper use of LLMs brings. It's also hard to deny the destructive power of LLMs to societies.

In China, companies are heavily regulated by the state. This means being competitive against the west is a state matter, it also means harming citizens is somewhat tolerated if the economic benefit to the whole country is good, but companies chasing their own profit at the expense of the public good isn't tolerated. I don't agree with their way of doing things, but the only thing limiting their victory over the west is their hesitation and intolerance to all things outside of the SE-Asian sphere of influence. But then again, the anti-migration trend of the US also removes that slight technical advantage the US always held.

There are many problems that can't be solved by LLMs, and expecting developers' value to be the number of lines they type is silly. It doesn't matter so much if you use LLMs or don't use them, what matters is results. Westerners attitude in general is to resist LLMs. This is partly a result of (in my opinion), not realizing that there is non-western competition. It is absolutely possible to use LLMs to ship high-quality, performant and secure code, you just don't take the dumb approach of letting LLMs do everything and a human "reviews it"; how exactly depends on each development team and company.

Keep in mind, that for decades outsourcing developers offshore -- where usually sub-par code is tolerated because of lower cost to ship -- has been a prevalent trend. If companies can't get Western devs to learn to use LLMs, then they can just ship it offshore to companies that do use it. That didn't lead to the west forgetting to code, and LLMs won't either.

What will hopefully happen is you'll get less developers learning to code, which means the developers that do the work, will get paid better (it's been on the downturn) so long as they learn to sue LLMs.

What people are having a hard time coping with, is the expectation of needing armies of developers to get things done being an antiquated concept. Computers, and then the internet have done this to many industries. You used to have lots of travel agents in the past, you still do, but very few.

The bigger issue is refusal to learn from history. Concepts like capitalism, communism, market economy, centrally planned economy, etc.. are like half a century out of date. There was no "capitalism" 200 years ago (not in so many words at least). Economists and politicians aren't catching up to changes in technology. Historically, adapting to these changes has been brutal.

I won't claim to predict what will happen, but one way or the other, LLMs won't go away in response to resistance from western workers, similar to how other changes in tech didn't go away like that. Economies will have to adapt or get decimated until they do. In the mean time, there is ample opportunity for the dominance of the west to fade within our lifetime, should that opportunity be taken advantage of by the competition. If China starts being less dependent on local companies, and starts importing a lot more, they can displace US and EU consumption needs, and perhaps even force the west to be producers for their domestic demand. unregulated western companies (from Coca cola to Disney!) have been trying to achieve just that, because of the large earning potential in China. But again, China could take advantage of all that, they could have more influence over the west, but they're too inward thinking. They're so afraid of relying on a hostile west, they're preventing the west from becoming reliant on them completely. But this new image of an ineffective and declining US/West, and perhaps some success over Taiwan, and establishing a solid non-western global trade economy can give them that extra confidence?

What a bright future!

But the rest is a big no from my side.

"In hindsight" - Southpark, please take over.

What if there was a continuation of producing unused weapons during the last 20 years? "Waste of money", "Old tech", "useless" - dilemma.

Also the generalization is awfully misleading: "The west".

Let's say all are suffering from military dementia the same way. Who do think has an easier time to recover? USA or Europe? Europe relied and relies or freeloads on USA in especially military affairs.

As you wrote: some veterans teach building, handling cruse missiles to young guns like having an exciting time with the boy scouts.

Germany? "Never again! Demilitarize Germany." Decades long hatred towards USA was pretty much summed up with the slur "Ami go home!" which was a phrase used to protest US military bases in Germany - and then, when most of them finally left, it was all just fun and games (losers).

So USA has some sort of infrastructure and intellectual property to recover and never stopped treasure it as part of the country's history: Veterans' Days, Unknown Soldier, Arlington - Hegseth did a great job stopping the decline here.

Meanwhile Europe: You couldn't have a hold out in secrecy. Some enquete commission would investigate, and addresses would be leaked and people doxed.

Have a look at the representatives of the Germany Army: overweight nice guys. Sorry to say, but I think there is something wrong with this picture.

Europe has nothing to restart. They never had in the first place. Many tend to forget that the US provided massive supply to all allies during WW2. Russia would have been wiped out if it wasn't for the US logistics and money. After the war there was a joke told by survivors of the Eastern front: The first Sherman got shot on the Eastern front not the West.

Europe was always on life support. France military forces outnumbered Germany at the start of WW2. But they were tired and instead of fighting build a wall so to say. Netherlands and Denmark was taken without any resistance.

And it is the same for programming. How many European companies dominate globally like FAANG? Exactly. None. 30 years of Internet and it is getting lonely at the top for the US.

"The West"? Nope.

During the 80th, while Chucky Cheese was all the rage, in Germany you got massively socially ostracised for showing your interest in computers. Playing electronic handhelds put you up on notice by teachers, demanding correction by the school administration - true stories.

Another one: What do all FAANG like companies have in common? The founders and top managers have a background in CS. What do European managers have in common? They haven't heard of CS so far.

Europe is a mess. US is maybe having a cold start but gets its shit done.

Germany killed of its industrial sector. Energy producers as well. Germany does what Morgentau had in mind but what off the table: no more wars and weapons, just farmers and horses.

USA is save in every regard. It is not that something has been lost. This happens or why do we don't know anything about Rome?

You have to distinguish recovering from losing. Once you were at the top, at least you know how to get there while others in most cases will never get there.

These are different abilities: conserving knowledge and rebuilding it. USA needs to reactivate, while Europe needs to build from the ground up without any starting point - without money, energy, moral support, nothing.

USA is already the winner here. And this pattern keeps repeating. 250 years and what we have is an epoch were USA saw kingdoms rise and fall, USA is the only constant there is.

Treasure it. You are in a save spot despite all the dire circumstances. A blessing in disguise.

？

Putin's propagandist, or just useful idiot.

Exactly. In direct contrast to this would be how Xerox and Bell funded laboratories just to pursue knowledge, without demands of profit. They ended up creating incredibly profitable things when driven my knowledge, and not profit.

I also read a book about math where the author argued that while the Greeks were driven to pursue truth for truth's sake, they ended up being far more productive and innovative. The Romans who were more driven to work for solutions to immediate practical needs, ended up being not so productive and innovative. He used this as a defense for efforts in pure math that seems to have no immediate application but ends up being massively, surprisingly powerful and productive for practical applications down the road. I think the same could be said for software development focussed on truth and correctness, rather than immediate productivity.

I see many peers getting worse in their abilities. It's especially disheartening to see people I admired for their problem solving devolve into someone who delegates more and more of their reasoning to LLMs. It really negatively affects working with them. If you have a concern or criticism of "their" approach to a problem they either dismiss it off hand as invalid, or they go discuss it with their LLM of choice making themselves a bottleneck to collaboration.

As the article suggests I suspect we're in for a real dark age of software as companies struggle to know who to keep, if they can even trust that those who have vital knowledge and skill today will retain it going forward.

No, the problem is much more far-reaching than being limited to just corporations - it's a societal problem.

The article says the west is forgetting how to code, but actually the west is forgetting how to do math, how to draw and edit images, how to make music, how to write, how to read and even how to think.

And have you interacted with any kids recently? They're doing ALL their homework using ChatGPT. Forget kids, adults are even worse. At least kids can be supervised, but who's supervising the adults? How many of us have enough self-control to not reach out to the convenient AI app in our phones for every little thing?

This has massive repurcarions for our society as a whole. The bleak future depicted in Idocracy is becoming more and more of a surefire reality.

Quarterly financial reporting is an obvious target for a rethink. Managers get instantaneous readings from dashboards, but they also like the room for shenanigans that quarterly reporting to shareholders enables. It's going to be hard to get management to give up information asymmetry.

Also modern managers: You were in the bathroom for six minutes. I'm docking your pay.

No idea how this should take form, though, and if it’s even realistic. But it seems like due to AI, formal specs and all kinds of “old school” techniques are having a renaissance while we figure out how to distribute load between people and AI.

China sees itself as a civilization. Russia does too, ish (look up Dugin's Eurasian Empire).

The West has a hard time believing anyone wants to destroy it, so doesn't take the threat seriously. Meanwhile other civilizations are working to both destroy the west and ensure their own place in the future.

So we were OK outsourcing our production and knowledge for a quick buck and it's coming back to haunt us.

Even now, we still don't see ourselves as a civilization, actively work to undermine ourselves and help our enemies who openly want to destroy us, and are barely doing anything to defend ourselves. We seem to have also given up on the idea of a "democratic world", which was in vogue when I was growing up (Bush 2 years).

As for the thesis of this article, the positive is that code and knowledge, because of the fact preserving it is basically free, is still there. AI hasn't been good enough to displace it. And our technological advantage is still pretty wide and our military industrial complex is, for better or worse, coming back.

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 the pay is good. They get bored and jump companies, leave to join their friends' startup, or move to another city.

Every company I've worked for that operated on a belief that institutional knowledge was king and documentation and processes couldn't replace it eventually had to face the music when key employees left. Ironically this problem was at its worst at a company that compensated very well, because those key employees would often realize they had enough money to retire early or go take some risky startup job instead of sticking around to be the insitutional knowledge base.

Even if it were, creating good documentation or assessing its quality requires experience in using good and bad documentation. And how would juniors build up that experience if they are using AI for everything.

A runbook can tell you what usually works, but it cannot tell you when the situation is no longer “usual.” That kind of judgment mostly comes from seeing real systems fail in messy ways over time.

Tools are still valuable, of course. But they work best when they help experienced people transfer knowledge, not when they are used as a reason to remove the people who understand the system.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/does-noth...

my promotion packet at work always included how great of a document-er i am

https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....

In my experience, documentation is unwanted because it creates work and no revenue. Which makes the tacit knowledge all the more valuable.

I'm actually very optimistic about LLMs/AI for basically the opposite reason tech leadership/MBAs are - I think it will allow us to overcome organizational/business/marketing ing hurdles that tech companies rely on short-sighted MBA-style 'leadership' for in the first place. And not because I believe in OpenAI and Anthropic - I think the future is self-hosted or community -hosted open models, and open collaboration among willing peers, building open software to solve real problems in honest ways, rather than hierarchical top-down corporate hellholes pumping out pre-enshitified crapware full of ads, tracking and dark patterns.

in shootings technically the guns are not the issue since they dont fire on their own.. they do enable the ability to shoot though

Any exec using AI to pay fewer people lacks imagination.

But applying the military hardware stuff to software is IMO a bit of a leap; I get the similarities, but where demand for software hasn't slowed down at all, demand for military hardware and ammunition just wasn't there.

The alternative would have been to keep all the factories alive, maintained, staff employed (or training staff ready to onboard rapidly hired staff when capacity had to go up), supplied stockpiled (and rotated), etc. And who would be willing to pay for that?

In times of peace the voter wouldn't want the government to spend billions on the military if it wasn't necessary... except for the US which still spends billions a year on the military even in peacetime. But not on their production facilities it seems.

the consequences are significant

Companies can grow organically or through strategy and adding new verticals to a point. Eventually they're too large for that. They own the whole market, they can't get regulatory approval for acquisitions and so on. At this point they only really grow at the same rate the industry or the economy does.

At this point (or often long before), the only way to increase profits is to raise prices and/or reduce costs. Profits tend to decline over time so there is constant pressure to reduce costs to statisfy the insatiable need for increasing profits.

This is the real product AI is selling: cutting wages. It's a combination of displacing workers (which, thus far, hasn't been all that successful). Where it is successful is to have the threat of layoffs hanging over your workers, getting them to do extra unpaid work for the same wages and making sure they can't ask for raises.

That's what's paying for all this AI investment.

So I agree with you: the real problem isn't AI. It's capitalism.

It's always seemed to me that the problem is corporate profit and personal profit above all. 'Management' is a subset of this, and so is pretty much everything else, including the current drive for AI.

It's the Western, perhaps American, approach to business and emphasived by MBAs and the media. Lowering costs, driving share price, dividends and corporate profit.

This race over the few decades has hollowed out most Western companies.

Listen to any entrepreneur podcast, or read any website, and it's all about 'how quickly can I get to exit', i.e. personal profit.

Capitalism is the worst form of economic system, apart from all the rest.

I think that's still a symptom. The real problem is ideology: the monomaniacal focus on profit-making business, which infects our political leaders, down to capitalists and business leaders, down to the indoctrinated rank-and-file. Towards the end of the cold war, the last constraint on it were abolished, the the victory over the Soviet Union made it unquestioned.

The Chinese don't have that ideological problem. Their government appears to not give a shit about how much profit individual business make, they care about building out supply chains and a capabilities. They will bury the West, so long as the West remains in the thrall of libertarian business ideology.

And workforce reduction is a nobel goal. In fact, I think it's one of the most important things humanity should focus on. We should strive for a workforce of zero. Humans currently was an enormous amount of their life working instead of more worthwhile pursuits.

I despise the rhetoric around this, we didn't "lose jobs" over AI, we saved ourselves a lot of work. What it does do is highlight a problem in our current society: the link between labour and the access to resources (e.g. money).

I don't think that AI is the ultimate answer to the problem of work, but it can contribute to it.

In this analogy, the individual app represents a company, and the Play Store represents the broader US market. Silicon Valley’s highly liquid labor market allows talent to flow freely, which opens up and elevates the baseline of the overall market. However, that is entirely distinct from the fact that individual companies are suffering severe drops in internal quality and productivity.

Furthermore, in software architecture, 'productivity' and 'quality' are rarely directly proportional. With AI coding tools, we can ship an app orders of magnitude faster. Historically, it took me three months to write 60,000 lines of code; recently, I am generating that same volume in just two weeks. My productivity has undeniably spiked, but can I confidently claim the code quality is better than when I manually scrutinized every single line?

The real issue is not whether the broader economy has grown more productive since 1947. The core issue is whether a specific organization bleeds capability when the exact people who understand its real-world constraints, failure modes, and operational history walk out the door.

Both realities can co-exist: National productivity can trend upwards, while individual companies simultaneously suffer operational regressions due to botched migrations, failed refactors, or the loss of tacit knowledge.

I agree that 'institutional knowledge' is sometimes weaponized to defend unnecessary complexity. However, the opposite fallacy is treating all localized, domain-specific knowledge as worthless. While some of it is merely job-security folklore, the rest is literally the only surviving documentation of why the system functions in the first place

Whether the reason of strategic (like your example), internal politics, insufficient knowledge.... The point is that there is a local equilibrium, and most mature firms are at this equilibrium.

More resources via Ai, at first order, goes after that diminishing returns part of the curve... which is a cliff especially for highly resourced firms topping the S&P500.

A lot of Ai-optimist:s " mental model" of the economy do not account for this stuff at all.

"Save time/money" outcomes are not similar at all to "make more stuff" outcomes. Firing employees does freeze up labour... but reutilizing this labour is non-trivial... as this article demonstrates quite well.

Cutting slack gets you quarterly bonuses.

When you plan working 3-5 years in a single company you don’t care if it crashes and burns month after you leave just to burn down next one.

Conversely we see the same dynamic with engineers, they build stuff to prop up their CV and don't care if company still supports crap they did after they leave.

It's the danger of data driven decision making. Cutting people and resources right now gets you a measurable gain. Not cutting them gets you a gain tomorrow.

But, that gain is unmeasurable! Because in order to measure it you would need to know what happens in an alternate universe where you cut those people. So, if you're only making data driven decisions, you would cut the people 100% of the time.

But that's why companies aren't run by algorithms, they're run by people. The algorithm would run the company into the ground.

I think if they did this they'd get buried by the market. Your slack is someone else's opportunity to undercut you. It's a systemic problem, it's in every individual's self interest to work towards instability.

It's not terribly difficult to imagine someone optimizing for, say, a bonus at the end of the year.

This is a classic Goldratt / Theory of Constraints mistake.

In those filthy low margin industries that HN loves to regulated across the oceans out of sight out of mind capital investments have service lives measured in decades.

Plus, of course, each European country has to support their own defense industry, so each one of them needs to have their own howitzer/tank/whatever and they can't agree on common approach that would actually allow for the economy of scale.

Prior to LLMs the idea was to involve juniors in the engineering process to give them an opportunity to learn rather than necessarily to improve the team's immediate productivity. Some companies famously (and consciously) refused to hire juniors to avoid the performance hit even prior to genAI (eg Netflix).

Involving LLMs in our engineering processes has very suspect implications for both productivity and quality of our output, since unlike juniors the LLMs don't even learn.

they do the dirty work

This is the same with compilers. Most of the time a programmer needs to know only the high-level language that is used for writing the program. Nevertheless, when there is a subtle bug or just the desired performance cannot be reached, a programmer who also understands the machine language of the processor has a great advantage by being able to solve the bug or the performance problem, which without such knowledge would be solved in much more time or never.

It also makes me hate communicating with them because they'll (somewhat obviously) prompt the LLM to make the conclusion they want. For example, "respond to this jira with why this isn't an issue"

Are you sure it won't?

Hacky things will make their way in because it takes a month to do the documentable thing and a week to ship the hacky thing.

It takes a lot of skilled people from varying disciplines to figure out what things are going to survive long enough and be important enough to spend the resources doing the right thing instead of the hacks.

It bites both ways. I’ve seen core business products crippled by years of digital duct tape, but I’ve also seen internal tooling that never really becomes useful because they insist on doing the “correct” thing and it’s constantly a year behind what we need it to do.

You need an integral part that knows what the entire chain reaction time is. But if you don't have a buffer, you can't do that part, you can only react strictly to the conditions your suppliers have right now.

A derivative part seems quite useless in a non-coordinated game. But it could in theory pass a "message" upchain that they need to start reacting. Anyway in any real situation it will be easier to pass a message around by telling stuff to people.

At the end of the day, the relative penalty for storage or non-delivery is what will dictate the optimum play style. But it's perfectly viable to use buffers to attenuate the bullwhip instead of making it larger.

I don't think so: the problem is that there exist lots of parts in the system that are quite complicated but which one very rarely has to touch - except in the rare (but happening) case that something deep in such a part goes wrong a for requirement for this part pops up.

If you "learned by doing" instead of reading, you are suddenly confronted with a very subtle and complicated subsystem.

In other words: there mostly exist two kinds of tasks:

- easy, regular adjustments

- deep changes that require a really good understanding of the system

Besides that, the U.S. stock market went up over several decades while manufacturing capabilities were transferred overseas. That has had, and will continue to have, domestic ramifications that might not be captured by investor profits.

I thought stock prices were based one what I thought I could sell it for next week.

If you were to explain the costs of knowledge lost, of training, of taking a risk on a new unknown person, of relationships, there's no answer because it doesn't show up in any operating expense worksheet.

What you're supposed to do is find another job, and explain that you love this job so much, but the other offer is really good, can they come up close to it and you'll stay. Repeat this every few years or find a new job and move to it.

Before investing to employees I think it should revisit management practices and strategies, which starts in MBA and university.

Instead of teaching how to increase shareholder value in the short term, it should also teach how to increase value to the society in the long term as well (and focus on it highly) - not just say: if you win society wins kind of generic fluff.

Without changing management strategies everything becomes short term after a while

Because some problems that many companies in very specialized industries work on are so special that outside of this industry, nearly all people won't even have heard about them.

Additionally, many problems companies have where research would make sense are not the kind of problems that are a good fit for universities.

And universities research capabilities are being destroyed too right now.

Here's the problem with your reasoning. This paragraph is simply wrong, with each sentence being untrue. Education and training are never wasted money, the skills aren't changing that quickly, there isn't any slack in the workforce, and qualified worker shortages are being reported in every trade across the board. Someone needs to solve the problems you hand-wave away.

> this works just fine in most cases - somebody will learn what they need to get paid.

That's me. I specialize in learning new domains. I cost like 8x more than the random junior you'd be able to hire with a functional onboarding program.

Bell Labs greatest work came out when AT&T was a monopoly. Once they were broken up (1984?) they started feeling the pain.

When the Lucent spinoff took place, the new entities had no Monopoly money to fund unconstrained research while management's behaviour never changed.

I don't know how BL fared under Alcatel and now Nokia, but haven't heard of anything interesting for years.

The AI companies have taken all the wrong lessons from social media and learned how to make their products addictive and sticky.

I’m a certified hater, but even I’ve fallen into the exact trap you’re describing. Late last year I was in the process of buying a house that had a few known issues with a 30 day close. I had a couple sleepless nights because I had asked ChatGPT or Claude about some peculiar situation and the bots would tell me that I was completely screwed and give me advice to get out of the contract or draft a letter to the seller begging for some concession or more time. Then the next day I’d get a call from the mortgage guy or the attorney or the insurance broker and turns out, the people who actually knew what they were doing fixed my problem in 5 minutes.

I think if we want newcomers to lead with human interactions, the onus is on us community leaders/elders/whatever need to be a little warmer, understanding and forgiving. (Of course, some communities and venues are already very good about all of this and I'm generalizing to make the larger point.)

A lot of the passerbys nowadays feel like trolls. They come in copy pasting chatgpt responses spamming they need help instead of chit chatting asking questions. We fix their problems, they don't trust us or understand at all. Or worse we tell them their situation is unreasonably bad and they should start over, they scream at us about how some unimaginably bad code passes tests and compiles just fine and how we are dumb.

They tell us we don't need to exist anymore in one way or another. They try to show off terrible code we try to offer real suggestions to improve it, they don't care. Then they leave the community once their vibe/agentic coding leaves that part of their code base. Complete waste of time, they learned nothing, contribute nothing, no fun was had, no ah-hahs, just grimey interactions.

From what little I understood from OpenWRT everything looked fine, but nothing worked. I still to this day have no idea what I (or ChatGPT) did wrong.

I just reset the router, actually took the time to do everything by the docs, and then it worked.

Debugging someone's broken code that never worked is a nightmare I wouldn't wish on anyone.

Russia has no need for Eastern Europe (they have enough land and resources, why saddle yourself with hostile population?), as long as the said Easter Europe is not threatening them with NATO bases/missiles (US has repeatedly shown that they do not hesitate to use their muscle if they think they can get away with it, so Russia's paranoia is not entirely unfounded).

Even if Russia somehow took over Eastern Europe (most likely way: they learn from US how to do soft 'regime change'), they have no chance against China (China is just so much bigger and better organized; the population's mentality also matters a lot). China and Russia are rather complementary, there is not reason for confrontation between them.

But you are correct, what US is doing is really totally stupid ... although it seems designed by Netanyahu, not Putin.

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.

In the world of government-sponsored research, mRNA likely would have been passed over in favor of funding research with more assured results.

And the green initiatives in France. These, transit, Grand Paris, and much more are initiatives that take many years to realize.

Now let's move over to New Jersey and New York City. The most densely populated state (NJ) has some of the worst transit despite being in the NYC greater metropolitan area. An old tunnel between the two needs to be replaced, but politicians with four year mental horizons canned it until recently (ARC project). Infrastructure is a fight between Federal, two states and a city politically and partially from a funding perspective.

We could go on, but I just wanted to point out that the United States is a poor example of good governance. And that we don't need to live in a totalitarian nightmare just because we acknowledge the US fails to produce innovation and investment for the public good.

And let's not talk about debt, as if it is a unique problem to France or anything new.

Autocracies like China, are able to plan longer term. But, because they don't regularly change their leadership like a democracy, the leaders become old, tired, schlerotic and surrounded by 'yes men'. Hence "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.".

Corporations promote people to Principal or distinguished engineer only when they prove their worth by running long running large scale projects.

But when it comes to governing the whole country: lobby, marketing and boom, you are a president for next 4 years, which is anyway not enough to deliver anything big and see the impact. (Except the destruction, destruction is easy to cause)

I believe one important factor for a democracy to work properly, is to have a large number of citizens who 1) can stand up and push back when they feel something is wrong, and 2) is sufficiently knowledgeable. We don’t have that anymore. Of course I’m also to be blamed for that.

This is the wrong characterization, and in fact it's where monarchies lost out to democracies. Without an organized system of replacement in response to poor performance, autocracies with a poor leader are stuck with that poor leader for life. Ask North Korea how that's going. The upside is that if you have a brilliant leader, then you also get the benefit of that brilliant leader for life. The variance in an autocracy is absolutely huge, and that's their weakness in the long term. Democracies take the edge off, and are intentionally designed to have both less upside and less downside, trading performance for stability. Xi Jinping looks good comparatively because we have gormless losers like Trump and Biden to compare to him to, but he makes plenty of his own mistakes as well (the whole Taiwan situation is a unforced error driven by his own ego, similar to Putin with Ukraine), and we've seen historically what China looks like when it's stuck with a shit leader for decades (Great Leap Forward, anyone?).

"Can they really breathe fire or did we make that up?"

P.S. I welcome all attempts to prove me wrong!

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, Amazon, Home Depot, Anthropic, Toyota, and a hundred other companies all offer me incredible value for so cheap. Why are people so cynical about a world that offers them unimaginable riches everywhere they look.

Sure there are bad companies. And if you work at one of those, go get a new job.

> the CEO can't take actions that intentionally hurt the company

And who gets to define what "hurt" means?

While it sounds counter intuitive, it maintains a good distribution of talent across the industry.

But that system would only work if healthy competition was the goal, not moneymaking.

Vision for the future is limited to grandiose fantasies straight out of 1950s pulps and the "heroic" creation of narcissistic corporations that are cynically extractive and treat employees and customers with equal contempt.

The differences which used to provide a convincing cover story - no single Great Leader, a functional consumer economy, votes that appear to make a difference - are being dismantled now.

What's left are the same mechanisms of total monitoring (updated with modern tech) and reality-denying totalitarian oppression, run for the exclusive benefit of a tiny oligarchy which self-selects the very worst people in the system.

You just described Lucent.

This is only an illusion created by the fact that the communists were careful to rename all important things, to fool the weaker minds that the renamed things are something else than what they really are.

In reality, the "socialist" economies were more capitalist than the capitalist economies of USA and Western Europe. They behaved exactly like the final stage of capitalism, where monopolies control every market and there is no longer any competition.

Unfortunately, after a huge sequence of mergers and acquisitions started in the late nineties of the last century, the economies of USA and of the EU states resemble more and more every year the former socialist economies, instead of resembling the US and W. European economies of a few decades ago.

Social security is the biggest of them. Older people have more wealth than younger people on net and social security is structured to make higher payments to people who made more money when they were younger, which is significantly correlated with having more wealth right now. So it's a massive transfer payment system that transfers money from the poor to the rich. Meanwhile it uses its own special tax which is significantly more regressive than the ordinary income tax and doesn't tax corporate income at all. Notice in particular that we could instead be solving "grandma doesn't starve" with a UBI that makes uniform payments to everyone and not disproportionate payments to the rich, and comes from a tax which is also paid by corporations.

Net interest is a naked transfer to people with enough capital to invest in government bonds.

Most of the military and VA budgets go to government contractors who work hard to sustain an uncompetitive bidding process with thick margins.

Medicare uses the same bad tax as social security and those dollars go to the healthcare industry which has thoroughly captured the government. The AMA lobbies to limit the number of medical residency slots and sustain a doctor shortage and healthcare corporations have established a thicket of laws to limit competition, impair price transparency and promote over-consumption.

That's where the majority of the government budget goes, and the remaining minority of the money is also going in significant part to government contractors and regulatory capture industries. The government takes tax money from the middle class and gives it to the rich and huge corporations.

We don't need any more "redistribution" like that. If you think you can get the government to stop doing that and instead give the money the poor and middle class then first prove you can do it with the existing money before even thinking about collecting more. You have a nutrient deficiency because you're infested with tapeworms, not because you don't have enough food.

I started at the tail of one research group’s mass exodus. It was like a bomb had gone off; the people left behind were trying to pick up the pieces. In essence, this group developed a sophisticated new technique, which the company urged them to commercialize. Pivoting to commercialization was a big effort, and not naturally within the expertise of this group, but they did it, largely at the expense of their own research productivity—for several years. They even hired programmers (ie, not people who are primarily computer scientists) and got it done. But just before launch, IBM pulled the plug.

This infuriated the researchers in the group. Keep in mind that career advancement in research is largely predicated on producing new research. In effect, IBM asked people to take a time out and then punished them for agreeing to do it. The whole group was extremely demoralized. Google was the largest beneficiary of this misstep.

I also had a similar, frustrating experience working for Microsoft, so it’s not just IBM, but the same dynamics were at work: bean counters asking researchers to commercialize something and then axing a project as it becomes deliverable.

If AI replaces any role in the company of the future, please let it be the managerial class.

Desktop Linux has gotten better, though much of the improvement happened decades ago. I believe the first person to prematurely declare "the year of Linux on the desktop" was Dirk Hohndel in 1999: https://www.linux.com/news/23-years-terrible-linux-predictio...

And speaking as someone who was running desktop Linux in 1999, I remember just how bad it was. Xfce, XFree86 config files, and endless messing around with everything. The most impressive Linux video game of 2000 was Tux Racer.

But over the next 10 years, Gnome and KDE matured, X learned how to auto-detect most hardware, and more-and-more installs started working out of the box.

By the mid-2010s, I could go to Dell's Ubuntu Linux page and buy a Linux laptop that Just Worked, and that came with next day on-site support. I went through a couple of those machines, and they were nearly hassle free over their entire operational life. (I think one needed an afternoon of work after an Ubuntu LTS upgrade.)

The big recent improvement has been largely thanks to Valve, and especially the Steam Deck. Valve has been pushing Proton, and they're encouraging Steam Deck support. So the big change in recent years is that more and more new game releases Just Work on Linux.

Is it perfect? No. Desktop Linux is still kind of shit. For examples, Chrome sometimes loses the ability to use hardware acceleration for WebGPU-style features. But I also have a Mac sitting on my desk, and that Mac also has plenty of weird interactions with Chrome, ones where audio or video just stops working. The Mac is slightly less shit, but not magically so.

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 actual problem is, there is no market to go up to anymore. Once everyone is used to garbage being the only thing on offer, and adjust to cope with it, you cannot compete on quality anymore. Customers won't be able to tell whether you're honest, or just trying to charge suckers for the same garbage with a nicer finish, like every other brand that promises quality. It would take years of effort and low sales to convince the customers to start believing you're the real deal, which (as beancounters will happily tell you) you cannot afford. And even if you could, how are you going to convince people you're not going to start cutting corners again a few years down the line? In fact, how do you convince yourself? If it happened once, if it keeps happening everywhere around across all economy, it's bound to happen to your business too.

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 frustrating at times.

Time to update those prejudices!

And yet I run it every day, and it's by FAR the most enjoyable platform and tooling to use (for me).

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.

We will see whether the new realities of the war in Ukraine and Trump's approach to Europe will substantially change that.

The whole economic and societal tensions in the west make things tougher...

  > Russia's paranoia about the west is really strong, well founded and well documented.

This is very complex problem that needs to be tackled from all sides simultaneously, the entrenched interests are already well setup to defend themselves.

They're not. I'm using them as an example of the "bad" in Open Source development.

But it's also not so much the individual OS components that are a problem, their interactions are just as fragile and usually subject to neither party taking ownership of the problem.

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. And when I say "hard fought" I mean in the literal sense, with at least 1,000 workers killed just in the US in those days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_deaths_in_Unite...

Most people do a lot of work themselves that the Richie Rich would pay somebody else to do, like cooking, cleaning, childcare, gardening, etc. If it counts as work when you hire somebody to do it, it should equally count as work if you do it yourself.

Maybe, but as they say, "Past Performance Is Not Indicative of Future Results." The point was, this process may work up to a point, then it may work more against the interests of the population.

I mean, history is already littered with examples of the downsides of this process, like all the rampant anti-worker things profit maximizers tried to get away with that had to be fought literally with blood. Without that bloodshed it is highly likely the average standards of living of the general population would be much, much lower.

You don't even have to look at history, the process is literally playing out right now in various countries.

> It's not an example, it's a generalization. If you have a specific example, let's have a look at it!

I thought enshittification was a pretty specific example? You can find the many articles written about the various ways things are degrading on the Internet with a Google search (the experience of which is probably an even more specific example in itself ;-))

I chose that example because I think it's a microcosm of this process: in the beginning, the profit motive creates great innovation and products. But at some point, like when the market is saturated or monopolized, the profit incentive creates anti-consumer dynamics because companies turn to extractive methods rather than innovative ones.

I can see why GGP described it that way.

Suppose you don't own a major media outlet or social media company and you have something to say that the major media outlets and social media companies don't like. What are your options for getting more than six people to hear what you have to say if you're not allowed to spend money?

> It is a standard practice to drown the unwanted speech in the noise of the paid-for 'speech'.

This is literally the opposite of what happens. The companies that own distribution channels can make speech they don't like disappear, or even just speech that doesn't drive sufficient "engagement", by putting it at the end of the feed behind six trillion lolcats and enough rage bait to keep everyone glued to the screen. Then the only way to be seen when your message isn't a dopamine hit is to pay money.

> Furthermore, Citizen's United makes it harder to make any necessary legislative changes. Including the anti-trust.

Citizens United has very little to say about anti-trust. What argument are you making that it would prevent e.g. laws requiring adversarial interoperability or break ups of large companies? For that matter, much of the interoperability problem comes from companies using laws like the CFAA and DMCA 1201, and then you don't even need laws to be passed, you need them to be repealed.

Yes. Part time work.

Google sez: "Total compensation generally exceeds base salary by 30% to 50% for many roles, meaning salary often represents only 60% to 70% of an employee's total worth to the company."

Google sez total compensation includes bonuses, commission, stock options, employer-paid insurance (health, life, disability), retirement contributions, paid time off, tuition reimbursement, student loan assistance, gym memberships, employee discounts, Childcare assistance, commuter benefits, and relocation expenses.

None of those are mandated by law.

Russians are paranoid, among other things, about nuclear decapitation strikes. For the same reasons, they have repeatedly explicitly strongly opposed missile sites in Poland and Romania.

I am really curious, what do you think the west should have done? Bomb Russians directly? I mean, what else is left?

I bought some Soviet stuff after the fall of the USSR, because it was unique and interesting. One item was a telescope, one was a brand new rotary dial telephone manufactured in the 1950s, and one was a mechanical clock reputed to be from a submarine.

I'm only sad that I abandoned my phone line (as I only received spam calls on it) and so my Commie Phone is a nice, but useless, desk ornament.

Even if you agree with some of DOGE projects’s goals, the way it operated was wildly thoughtless about consequences beyond Musk’s personal wishes, and almost completely unaccountable.

I’m honestly sick that my personal Model Y purchase helped add to that power.

And I say that as someone who was a huge Musk fan for years, despite the warning signs — the Thai “pedo” comments, and his very public turn during COVID.

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.

- Over-optimizing for short term profit can hurt innovation and value creation.

- The economy is not a zero sum game and new value is created out of thin air.

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.

Bezos ran at a loss for so long it drove out actual and potential competitors.

Most (or all?) of the recent titans seem like each has his own company town. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town )

While their activities certainly fall in the realm of capitalism, and are just blips at longer time scales, it certainly feels like capitalism has been a bit under the weather for the past couple decades.

Regarding the money invested in AI, it all gives me "irrational exuberance" vibes.

Obviously not. The investors got their share, and employees got their stock options.

> But we treat him as if he had all of the ideas and wrote all of the code, and that's simply not true.

What were the names of the crew of Captain Cook's ship? Who was under the command of General Sherman? Who won the battle of Yorktown? Who created Standard Oil? We give credit to the head of something, not to the people under his command.

> If it weren't them it would have been someone else.

Nobody knows that.

> And even that much is more luck than skill.

If I hit a home run once, I would attribute it to luck. If I hit a home run 3 times, then I have skillz.

Gates maneuvered 3 dramatic changes in Microsoft, where other companies failed at the transition. Jobs made 3 fortunes. Musk has made several diverse fortunes.

At some point, you're going to have to give these people credit.

Musk has created a million times more wealth than others. If his life story was a novel, I would have put it down as absurd.

As for "sidestepped regulations", you'll need to be more specific. He did have some court battles with regulators, and won them.

A check against fraud and protection of property rights can be achieved through force and violence and the threat of violence, so that answer seems inadequate.

Likewise, supply and demand is definitely affected by government policies. The supply of labor, for example, by allowing or disallowing near shore or off-shore work with steep penalties. Or allowing/disallowing gambling.

So that also flies in the face of evidence.

It’s a self-serving, faith-based belief that that desires to put “market forces” beyond the reach of voters. It’s also a colossal delusion.

I'd deny even that. He made enough dumb decisions that he was forced out and got rich primarily because of other peoples' good ideas/decisions.

> Musk helped put Trump back in power, and the relationship looks openly transactional.

Both parties accept help from wealthy people, and yes, they do expect something in return. I don't see that Musk got anything out of it, though. Musk received 0 benefit from DOGE.

> But that does not make up for the harm, distortion, and unaccountable power being exercised now.

What power do you think Musk is exercising now?

> He is also benefiting from an administration where white collar crime and regulatory accountability seem to have basically stopped being real things.

I gave you examples of no accountability in government things. I don't see any decrease in accountability.

> Even today, Tesla appears to be the highest P/E outlier in the S&P 500 among profitable companies. So the market is not just valuing the current business. It is valuing the story, the hype,

Sure. And I bought TSLA years ago. I didn't believe his FSD hype. But he delivered on it anyway. If TSLA stock implodes, it's only going to hurt the shareholders, not you.

> and increasingly Musk’s ability to buy influence to stay outta trouble.

What influence is he buying?

Inflation is caused by printing money not backed by goods and services. Inflation is another form of taxation.

This is an entirely mutually voluntary arrangement.

If the company does not deliver on its contractual obligations to you, you can take them to court, and you'll win.

If you don't get more than you accepted in the contract, you have no cause to claim being "screwed over".

If you don't read the contract before you sign it, that's on you.

P.S. I've added adendums to employment contracts listing the separate intellectual property that was mine and would remain mine. I never got any pushback on that. Also, I've started side projects while employed, and before working on them, I'd get a signoff from an executive that it was not covered by my employment contract. And I never got "screwed over".

What do you think of the tricks that California pulled to have billions vanish with not a mile of track laid? Or all those hospices with no beds? Or this fun one:

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/does-noth...

Unfortunately, as a taxpayer, I am on the hook for those tricks. With a business, I can do some due diligence and then decide if I want to get in or not.

I suspect you and I are being fleeced far more by government waste and fraud than by businesses.

I think the reason (for me, at least) is that my markers of success were always perched precariously atop a mountain of systems that I had varying levels of understanding of anyway. Seeing a pipeline "doing the thing" is satisfying regardless of how I sorted it out.

But if I didn't need those things, and there was a simple pseudolang syntax which acted exactly the same in all versions, didn't have any breaking changes, I would argue I'd be much better at it now.

Internet, search etc is needed to understand how to setup libs/frameworks/APIs, but logic at itself isn't something that I could possibly forget. AI will help to get those setups quicker without me having to search, but arguably it's all useless information, that will get out of date, that I really don't even need to know. I don't need to know top of my head what the perfect modern tsconfig setup should look like or what is the best monorepo framework and how to set it up, so it would scalably support all different coding languages for different purposes.

I disagree with the premise that "we" are all OK with AI slop computer code however. Even if it's just for consumption by machines, for at least some developers it is a creative outlet.

I'm not trying to defend the blog post, but I gave Slop Cop 775 words of an essay by Schopenhauer (translated into English) and got "15 patterns detected."

I fear we're approaching the point where AI-written text grows indistinguishable from human-written text, unless the AI-user is exceptionally lazy and uses an obsolete model...

I'm not racist. I don't care about race. I do care about culture a lot. By culture I mean a set of "default behaviors" and values that people from said culture are more likely to exhibit. That's where my issues with Indians began and continue. Of course you are right that generalizing over 1+ billion people is a futile exercise. Intellectually, I agree. And yet, in my personal experience, certain behaviors and attitudes they have just keep coming up with frequency, that just doesn't match any other group of people I have been interacting with. I live a rather international life. I interact with people from many, many cultures. I currently live in a culture, that is completely alien to my own, and I love it. It's not a problem of closed mind or some kind of supremacy thinking. I am free from that.

Specifically about Indians - I find that great many of them prefer memorizing over thinking. In the IT consulting days of my career, I noticed that they seemed to have 4-5 solutions, that they would apply to all problems. Whether the solution would fit the problem or solve it, was secondary. If it did, great. If it didn't, well that was someone else's problem. Half of my job was fixing stuff that an Indian "fixed" before me. The appearance of having fixed something was much more important than the actual fixing. It was all about appearances with them. While people in general seek recognition, I have never met another group of people who are so eager to lie and cover things up to gain some perception of short-term bump in status. It's not isolated to work environment. You see, I suspected myself of perhaps being racist in the end, so I would challenge myself to befriend Indians if I met any - just to see. Maybe I was being judgmental and wrong? The last time I tried it, the Indian man I met kept kissing my ass so much I had to cut him off. Why did he do that? Based on what he was saying, he saw me as someone from an "upper caste" (he projected his ideals of a successful businessman on me) and desperately wanted me to know how much I have done for him (I haven't done anything other than having a few conversations about life and business in general). Took me a while to understand that all this excessive praise and ass kissing was an attempt to elevate himself by proximity to something great. Needless to say I am nowhere as great as he portrayed me to be. Later I also found that half the stuff he shared with me was made up to impress me.

Another feature of their culture is extreme pride. They will never stop talking about India, Indian culture, Indian food, etc. They expect you to praise it, be in awe. If you aren't, they will pressure you to change your mind. Since working with them was a universally appalling experience, I wasn't impressed, so that came up a lot. You see this pride and attention seeking everywhere online. A normal person will say "Hello", "Good morning". An Indian will say "Good morning FROM INDIA". It must be mentioned, because it must be noticed and praised. It's just tiring. There is a reason why so many are waiting for country-based filters on Twitter. You wouldn't have guessed which countries are most upset about this.

I am certain that there are reasons and explanations for all of this and that there are many exceptions. As you have mentioned, there are so many of them, they can't all be like that. And fair enough. I just find all of this so tiring, that I don't want to deal with them at all. If 1 out of a 100 is a smart and pleasant person, they are still surrounded by 99 that I don't want to deal with. It might be sad, but it is what it is.

I think it's all bad and counter-productive toward a stable society though. I think economic sacrifices likely have to be made to ensure long-term viability. What we're doing now is accelerating the demise of everything. The entire planet even.

That's not to say the country wasn't prepared though. If the GP did talk to people on the ground days before it started, saying it won't happen would match the public propaganda at the time coming out of the Ukrainian government and their allies. They knew it was coming and seemed to decide they were better to faint like the weren't ready and avoid public panic before it started.

If I’m ever in that position (everything I work on it air-gapped, it’ll never happen) I would make it a priority to figure out how to game that bullshit metric so I could get on with solving actual problems.

I imagine a lot of people do this. Metric becomes a target, etc.