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Your comment made me think of the Japanese. They have a highly industrialised society, but they also value greatly hand-made products from food and clothes to woodwork and houses.

And they also like to emphasise how long it takes for someone to become a master at a given trade.

It was really eye opening seeing they’re able to eat raw eggs and (to maybe a lesser degree of safety) raw chicken because their society requires high standards of cleanliness in food production. We are literal cattle over here in the states.

Though, given Amodei and Altman’s behavior (along with the rest of the billionaire class) that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.

Eggs in the UK are safe to eat raw (and I presume the EU as well [but please verify before doing so!]).

Finland too. Fundamentally it is putting food safety over profits. Eggs being salmonella free is based on regular testing and culling infected flocks. It is a process that need constant work.

Germans even eat raw pork. Plus it has nothing to do with the parent comment.

You could eat raw eggs in most modern countries and be mostly fine. It’s not as uncommon as you would think. There are many drink recipes with raw eggs as an ingredient. You just happened to be exposed to it in Japan.

Eating raw chicken is risky even in Japan. There are cultures that eat raw chicken, pork, and other meat products by choice but it’s always a risk. There are outbreaks of serious food borne illness in Japan from raw chicken: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18406474/

Japan is struggling to get new blood into the traditional crafts, unfortunately. They are slowly losing that as well.

That's because they spent a couple hundred years with a society structured around low/no growth and enforced familial occupations. There isn't much to do in such a society other than refine your craft aesthetically and wait for the growth-structured countries to come knocking.

LLMs are yet another example of science and technology leading to growth. Which means it's STUPID to restructure society into a low/no growth model like the smelly Europeans degrowthers want. On our current trajectory the only time it makes sense to degrowth is few hundred years after we make a dyson sphere or until FTL travel becomes possible.

only code anyone will be touching in a museum in 800 years will be the good code. I hope they don't talk about what great craftsmen we all were because someone saw an original Fabrice Bellard at the Louvre.

Survivor bias plays a role in glorifying the past.

Agreed, I think the good gained by wool mills is greater in that little Timmy is less likely to lose a leg to frostbite than the bad loss of my scarf not passing through a ring.

Long term though, I’ve always wondered if the Amish turn out to be the only survivors.

I am kind of lost here on this whole scarf through a ring thing as well. This is just a function of the thickness of the scarf? My wife went through a scarf phase about a decade ago, and I am pretty sure a Pucci scarf could easily fit through a typical sized ring meant to go on a finger?

Its entirely possible that old manufacturing methods produced things that are different, but I would be entirely surprised if they are entirely better overall. If the defining metric for scarves is how well they fit through rings, I am sure they would all be made so you could fit 3 through a ring if people were willing to pony up for that. If you look at a lot of old clothes, they are generally a lot heavier, but I am not sure I would really want to wear them, they look quite uncomfortable. I also think its wonderful that today you can get a set of clothes for a few hours of minimum wage work while in the past this was a major investment. You can also choose to pay thousands for a shirt if you wish, but from 10 feet away its going to be hard to tell the difference.

A full size wool scarf cannot go thorough a ring. You are probably thinking of a silk scarf. I have a wool scarf next to me from Kashmir and it went down about 25 cm. The full scarf is a bit over a meter.

Looked up Pucci - looks like a designer that makes silk scarves. Silk is a totally different material. The Luddites were wool and cotton weavers.

Making wool thin enough for a meter long scarf to go thorough a ring requires the individual strand of wool to be very thin. Both making it thin and weaving that thin strand is the craft that was lost. Go look at wool yarn next time you are at a store and see how thin they can get it.

As for "Are they better?" Yes. Thinner wool is incredible, soft. High quality merino wool is one of the most expensive fabrics. Look up this brand "Made in Rosia Montana" if you are curious. It's not like what the Luddites made, but its as good as it gets in the modern world. Getting stuff from the Kashmir region is difficult - I got mine because I knew someone who ran a school in the area. Most "Cashmere" stuff in department stores is fake/chemically processed for fake softness which makes it nice but it doesn't last. Real quality wool lasts a lifetime. The chemically processed stuff is ok if you want to see how it "feels"

EDIT: also, wool is naturally waterproof! I can walk in the rain with my scarf from kashmir on my head, its pretty thin but absolutely no water goes through even in heavy rain. it has to do with the springiness of the fibers and its natural oils. I will stop nerding out on fibers now!!

Appreciate the clarification. I guess its a case of I don't know what I don't know, but the choice of metric around quality was just an odd one. And yeah I assumed silk because I can't imagine a wool scarf going through a ring.

oh man wait until you find out what happened to little timmy in the textile mills...

You're right in that we kept the best examples (as coding museums will do in the future) but the best of something is a benchmark. It is striking that modern automation, even hundreds of years later, can't touch what a skilled craftsman could do in the past.

With programming, we documented a lot of it, so it's unlikely to go the way of fine weaving. People will always be able to learn to think and be great programmers.

Maybe if the wool weavers had internet, they could have blogged, made youtube videos, and cataloged their profession so it could last Millenia.

I think you are going to enjoy this talk by Jonathan Blow - Preventing the Collapse of Civilization:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

I've had this talk in mind during the past 2/3 years of AI boom, and it feels like rewatching a video from the 80s about the dangers of global warming. Prescient, and perhaps a bit quaint in its optimism that somehow we won't make things even worse for ourselves.

Now we're way past the point of no return.

Software engineers are anything but Luddites.

This labeling tactic became pretty common and tries to build a narrative that software engineers are going away. Artisan coders, craftsmen,

First and foremost, wool craftsmen are not engineers (which doesn't make their work less valuable).

Second, most software engineers, especially not in FAANG-like companies, don't engineer a shit. My spouse worked at a large telecom company in US and employees with "software engineer" title were doing mechanical tasks following some scripts, like daily system reload - run the script, verify status, open a ticket for a sub-contractor if anything is wrong, support the contractor via the ticket system until it's resolved. To be fair, two of my close family members work in FAANG and say COVID over-hire created a similar landscape there too.

My point is, creating CRUD internal tools was not an engineering to begin with, it was a craft, matching most craftsmen features such as small-scale, bespoke work, hands-on practice, tacit knowledge, apprenticeship-like learning (even if it's SO or tutorial), iterative refinement, tool mastery, adaptation during build.

So only FAANG does engineering now? Pretty elitist take. Would you happen to have a FAANG company in your resume, by any chance?

Yes, non tech companies tend to care less about the technical end of things. They, we, "don't do engineering" in the sense of dealing with large scale systems, optimization, etc. Still have to understand the product, and translate business requirements into code and systems, often running with budget constraints. If that's not engineering, I don't know what is.

> So only FAANG does engineering now?

No, my opinion is that most engineering is done in startups. Few people I know went to startups and had to engineer real systems end-to-end. These weren't usually FAANG-scale monsters and single node could handle all projected load.

> Would you happen to have a FAANG company in your resume, by any chance?

No, I went to academia instead. But my spouse and brother in law are in FAANG (two different companies), and my husband admits he hadn't engineered a shit for years (and he's not a manager), but there was a glimpse of real engineering over the years, especially pre-2020.

> most software engineers, especially not in FAANG-like companies, don't engineer a shit.

true for FAANG as well

Before mass production, the women of the household would be forced to spend every free moment of their day, outside of their other work, making fabric.

Before mechanised farming, the men were forced to spend all day in the fields.

Never again.

And yet many of us would prefer to be in a field instead of behind a laptop screen all day.

There's a big difference between being in a field versus working in a field, from dawn to dusk, every day, regardless of the weather or sickness, in order to produce just enough food to feed you and your family, knowing that a single failed harvest (due to conditions like weather and pests that you have no control over) will leave you starving, watching helplessly as your children, spouse, friends and neighbours slowly weaken and die, knowing that even if you survive, you will face the same thing again the next year, and the next, for the rest of your lives, which will likely be short, due to the constant, exhausting labour, frequent bouts of malnutrition, and nonexistent medical care.

No one is stopping you, and maybe it's worth trying out!

Have you ever tried it? I did, and sure as hell wouldn't.

Nobody's really stopping you from studying agriculture and working in that proverbial field either.

This is just unrealistic day dreaming. You can go be in a field picking produce for work - we have a shortage of these laborers. Most people don’t actually want to do that, they want a cushy office job that doesn’t wear down their body and that offers them the ability to increase their skill and value over time.

The software engineer who thinks they’d be happier working in a field is largely just a grass is always greener phenomenon. It turns out that for most people, they don’t like work whatever it is, because work is done not by choice but by necessity.

A set of clothing used to cost a month's wages. Yearning for the pre-industrialised era is an unintended pean to aristocracy, whitewashed by fiction and movies to be clean and virtuous.

At the moment, a single line of production code costs hundreds of dollars. I'm not talking about the bedrock of technology, like compilers, mysql, the Linux kernel, which represent hundreds of billions of value. I'm talking about the shitty code that powers Salesforce and ERP integration, Drupal modules, intranet customisation, insurance company call centre agent policy workflows, the thrice cursed apps that ship with cheap Chinese android phones, the putrid code to analyse our shopping loyalty card purchases and turn it into business insights.

All that code is shit, and it costs a fortune. Meanwhile regular people have no code. Even I run my life on almost no code, I have to use SaaS (like Gmail and Docs). If I want something like a financial analysis to be understood by my family I don't code it in python, I use Excel. I use whatever automation comes in my car. But once simple code becomes a process of thinking about what you want rather than knowing esoterica like calling conventions, allocation lifetimes etc, then we have made custom software accessible to billions of people, people who are clever and industrious.

So stay in your cathedral and illuminate your manuscript if you like, there is a need for excellent code, and tooling like Lean that can define what correct means, but let the people eat.

I found that it normally takes one prompt early-on to go from 'vibe-coded spaghetti' to something having a decent architecture.

I cap my effort at 2-3 prompts. One to investigate obvious mistakes with a top model, 1-2 to try to fix them.

I love this comment. Thank you for your provocative first sentence, esoteric historical anecdote, and nuanced take. Goddamn Hacker News rules.

> Another interesting thing is that we do not know how they made them so fine. The technique was never recorded or documented in detail, as it was passed down from parent to child. So the knowledge is actually lost forever.

This is a rather extreme failure on their part. There’s nothing admirable about hoarding knowledge and forcing it to only be passed down in person.

I don’t see this as the Luddites being right at all because they were clearly incredibly wrong about their chosen method of knowledge storage. This was a highly predictable and preventable outcome. If we were talking about a company today that forgot how to manage their servers because they refused to document anything and only passed it down from person to person we wouldn’t be speaking in awe and wonder, we’d be rightly criticizing their terrible decision making.

That aside, every time I hear that knowledge has been lost forever it turns out to be an exaggeration from those trying to amplify the mystique of the past. If we wanted to make ultra-thin scarves we could do it. We could study those ultra thin museum pieces with our endless array of modern tools and then use our vast quantities of modern wool to experiment until we got something similar.

But you missed the reason why we wouldn’t want to: An ultra-thin scarf isn’t going to work as well as a thicker one for keeping someone warm. It will be less durable. It would be a fundamentally inferior product. It’s interesting to see as a museum antique that has to be treated with utmost delicacy, but not so much as a practical garment.

If you buy real handcrafted scarves they are both thinner and warmer than anything factory made bcz of their choice of pashmina wool.

A big difference is cutting quality for the sake of mass production when it enables creating more necessities for people to live is a good thing. It is a good tradeoff. Cutting quality to make previously deterministic software more non deterministic does not improve anyones life except Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and the rest of the billionaire class.

I have no doubt in the future there will be a class of vibe software and it will be known as distinctly lower quality than human understood software. I do think the example you describe is a good use of vibing. I also think tech orgs mandating 100% LLM code generation are short sighted and stupid.

A lot of this push for “slop” is downstream of our K shaped economy. Give the people more money and quality becomes a lot more important. Give them less, and you’re selling to their boss who is often insulated from the effects of low quality.

Was software authorship ever deterministic? Whether it be human or AI, the output can vary wildly, and is constrained by the finite specifications provided.

Sure, technically nothing is. Adding AI reduces the level of determinism is my primary point.

Agreed. Those expensive silk scarves are worth exactly zilch to the average person if they'll never see one in their entire life. They might as well not exist.

Mass production makes things accesible, and if the handmade product cannot compete relative to it, then it's clearly not that much better or some people would still pay that premium to keep it around.

With programming that's very much the case, nobody's gonna vibe code a self driving car stack or a production grade DBMS. Even the cheapest scarf still works as a scarf in 99.9% of use cases though, if maybe not for as long.

    luddites were right

And yet in the 200 years since human civilization has improved by every imaginable metric, in most cases by orders of magnitude. The difference between 2026 and 1826 is nearly incomprehensible. I suspect most people scarcely imagine how horrific the average life was in 1826, relatively speaking. And between then and now were the industrial revolution, multiple world wars, and generally some of the most terrible events, crooked politicians, and life changing technological forces. And here we are, mostly fine in most places.

I get there are many things happening today that are frustrating or moving some element of human life in negative or ambiguous directions, but we really have to keep perspective on these things.

Nearly every problem today is a problem with a solution.

The feelings of panic we have that things are going wrong are useful signals to help guide and motivate us to implement those solutions, but we really must avoid letting the doomerism dominate. Just because we hear constant negative news doesn't mean things are lost. Doesn't even mean things are bad.

It just means we have been hearing a lot of negative news.

This is what it looks like for progress to not be monotonically increasing.

try reading :)

Got any recommendations?

If progress had been limited to solving people's problems, we would be fine.

> The feelings of panic > It just means we have been hearing a lot of negative news.

This is part of the problem at hand, not just a footnote.

You're right. Automation often trades quality for speed and quantity.

The difference between automating the creation of software and automating the creation of physical products is that software is everywhere. It is relied on for most tools and processes that keep our civilization alive. Cutting corners on that front, and deciding to entrust our collective future to tech bros and VC firms fiending for their next payout, seems like an incredibly dumb and risky proposition.

> One of the claims of the Luddites is that quality would go down, because their craft took half a lifetime to master (it was passed down from parent to chile.)

Sounds like a tautology. If you deliberately hoard knowledge of course it’s going to be hard to obtain.

closed source

You talking about the billion dollar model training efforts done in secret?

>the Luddites were right

The Luddites were right in the sense that the social order had changed in a negative way. In a careless way.

In the same way that we look at America now that has effectively put a plutocracy in absolute control of the country, at the same time that there is going to be a massive devaluing of labour. Elon Musk likes to talk about the coming golden age of automation, but I hope Americans realize that unless they happen to be a billionaire, they will enjoy zero fruits of that advance. Quite contrary, plump yourself up to be Soylent Green because it turns out that giving a bunch of psychopaths/sociopaths absolute control of government isn't good for the average person.

>One of the claims of the Luddites is that quality would go down

Then people will choose the better quality items and it will be easy for them to compete? Right?