hnthrow0287345

>It is like growing food on industrial scale.

How many people do you think know how to do that today? It's in the millions (probably 10s to 100s), scattered all across the globe because we all need to eat. Not to mention all of the publications on the topic in many different languages. The only credible case for everyone forgetting how to farm is nuclear doomsday and at that point we'll all be dead anyway.

>If it breaks now with the knowledge gone and we have to learn it again it will end the civilization as we know it.

I don't think there is a single piece of technology that is so critical to civilization that everyone alive easily forgets how to do it and there is also zero documentation on how it works.

These vague doomsday scenarios around losing knowledge and crashing civilization just have zero plausibility to me.

>But the number will dwindle and we'll ironically be unable to build what our ancestors did, utterly dependent on the AI artifacts to do it for us.

That's only a brief moment in time. We learned it once, we can learn it again if we have to. People will tinker with those things as hobbies and they'll broadcast that out too. Worst case we hobble along until we get better at it. And if we have to hobble along and it's important, someone's going to be paying well for learning all of that stuff from zero, so the motivation will be there.

Why do people worry about a potential, temporary loss of skill?

>I'd end with some noble call for the U.S. media industry to do better, but it's abundantly clear they don't want to.

Yeah, shrinking revenue, lawsuits, death threats, buyouts and takeovers, government strong-arming all contribute to not really wanting to fight the fight that they need to.

There isn't a solution to this as you can't bankroll media outlets or journalists and not expect to be considered biased. The revenue has to come from every day people. So if the revenue isn't there to pay the best people, you're simply not going to have a good, independent media industry any more. Any very-rich person bankrolling that probably also has political affiliations, which again introduces bias.

With rising cost of living, the population will clearly cut out the media subscriptions thinking that the free journalism slop is enough to keep them informed.

I don't see this bubble really popping as-in sinking the economy. Some circular investing and enough write offs will happen to avoid the largest recession indicators from informing the general population that there's actually a recession. You also have a government willing to do shady shit for their own benefit at the expense of responsible governing and ethics, and we have already seen the business leaders of the biggest tech companies cozy up to the administration.

My guess is that cloud companies will scoop up the data centers for pennies on the dollar and the GPUs get written off or fire-sold to enthusiasts still wanting to run local models. Then they can offer exceptionally low initial prices to new customers and get more people to be locked in. Or maybe we see a couple of new cloud companies start up but that would likely need lower interest rates.

You can easily defend that for only 6k with 'but we like it and we'll be more productive with it and we won't hate our jobs'

>trying to get visibility

They could review PRs and commits and specs to get visibility and reduce comms overhead, if they had the skills and time.

The non-technical manager also takes great conveniences in making technical people spend their time translating things. But no one ever asks the manager to learn new skills as much as they make developers do it.

I'm certainly not listening to someone who thinks vi is used by every developer

RTO would be much more popular if people were actually coming back to an individual office instead of the cubicle farm

Businesses and commercial real estate did this to themselves. I especially hope commercial real estate enters a death spiral and we stop building offices unless they are absolutely needed and free up some of the land for residential use (and not converting the buildings).

It means for most specs, you can just use an average solution, or a most-popular solution.

I'm absolutely on board with that. We probably need less weird and outlier decisions in designs for something that is a boring ass business website.

Their core argument is that we could increase supply but choose not to, and that we should be maximizing supply (as an ethical and moral mandate, but that is not a tenant of capitalism really) because housing is an essential thing like food and water. FWIW we don't maximize food/water production either for various reasons, which would also drive food/water prices down.

Maximizing supply can mean other things than building like taxing unoccupied homes by large amounts making them unpalatable to own as a second (or higher) home, thus putting them back on the market. However these aren't all good because obviously our economy deals with more effects than just simple supply and demand, like maximizing the amount of loans given to people wanting housing regardless of the ability to repay is known to be a bad idea.

If you throttle the supply you can clearly control the price and the people you're talking about believe there is a concerted effort to control that supply. This can happen directly (choosing not to build as soon as land is available to build on) or indirectly (e.g. politics, mass media influencing people to vote to not increase supply).

What people generally hate is production of essentials not being maximized which would give us the actual lowest price, and maybe we as a society should be maximizing that supply to arrive at the lowest cost for a given house with given features.

And then the rebuttal to that is usually "tough shit lol" which is why people coming out with simple supply and demand replies are generally seen as derisive.

Sounds like a FactoryFactory to me which tells me Java developers have always been mad

>Of course if you're building some crud app it's all already tread ground, and you probably can just throw a prompt at an LLM and get something acceptable out.

This is what I think most people who haven't had boring CRUD jobs just don't get - the impact of having some deep technical knowledge goes to waste if all you're struggling with is dumb stuff like bad database design and basic security vulnerabilities everywhere. This was all done by people who are no longer there and were just in it for the paycheck. But also no one who is good is doing these jobs because the pay is too low compared to what they can get.

I'm sure all of this is true if you are teaching at MIT or are working anywhere near people who have gone there though.

>Reviewing this junk has become exhausting.

Nitpick it to death. Ask the reviewer questions on how everything works. Even if it looks good, flip a coin and reject it anyway. Drag that review time out. You don't want unlucky PRs going through after all.

Corporate is not going to wake up and do the sensible thing on its own.

Similar to how music changes perceptions of movie scenes (it's usually silly but the effect is there), newsrooms have been decorated to look like a crisis center with the choice of colors and words.

People are naturally prone to pointing their attention at sources of alarm. And attention is important for advertisements which pay the bills.

News was not produced or directed back then like it is today.

>I'm not convinced software developers will be replaced

Most of us will probably need to shift to security. While you can probably build AI specifically to make things more secure, that implies it could also attack things as well, so it ends up being a cat-and-mouse game that adjusts to what options are available.

People have cried wolf or been wrong about incoming crashes and bubble pops so many times that this signal -- whether it's a good signal or not -- simply won't change anything I do.

I'm sure someone somewhere could make a trade off of this article and this signal is definitely for them.

>requires an amount of time approaching the time spent if they had just done it themselves.

I would actually say having at least 2 people on any given work item should probably be the norm at Amazon's size if you also want to churn through people as Amazon does and also want quality.

Doing code reviews are not as highly valued in terms of incentives to the employees and it blocks them working on things they would get more compensation for.

This still seems like technical debt to me. It's just debt with a much higher compounding interest rate and/or shorter due date. Credit cards vs. traditional loans or mortgages.

>And six months later you discover you’ve built exactly what the spec said — and nothing the customer actually wanted.

That's not a developer problem, it's a PM/business problem. Your PM or equivalent should be neck deep in finding out what to build. Some developers like doing that (likely for free) but they can't spend as much time on it as a PM because they have other responsibilities, so they are not as likely not as good at it.

If you are building POCs (and everyone understands it's a POC), then AI is actually better getting those built as long as you clean it up afterwards. Having something to interact with is still way better than passively staring at designs or mockup slides.

Developers being able to spend less time on code that is helpful but likely to be thrown away is a good thing IMO.

>Instead of engineers inventing 50 different frameworks and conventions for any given language or platform, maybe that energy will be directed to creating better AI tools.

I think this will happen since one of the reason for new frameworks and languages was improving the human experience of coding, but now that friction goes away and AI doesn't feel that.

Although we might need to study which language AI is best at, and possibly invent new ones to maximize that.

This stupid industry doesn't have the wherewithal to actually make a good credential and training process like medicine and law, and instead lets everyone come up with their own process to vet people. We could even do it as an apprenticeship model, not like that hasn't served humanity throughout the ages.

I should have a credential I have to maintain every few years, one or two interviews, and that should get me a job.

Surely more and harder leetcode interviews will prevent this from happening

They also want to get as close to a skeleton crew as possible. They believe developers can do everything while simultaneously driving down the cost of developers.

They've been boiling the frog with increasing job requirements since at least one or two decades ago, and AI is conveniently aligned towards this goal.

If we believe that, then the real question/answer for the OP's worries is that software development is in a race to the bottom, and then the advice becomes "have you tried switching to hard-to-automate-and-outsource industry?" because you are certainly never going to get respect by volunteering to be paid less just to remain competitive with cheaper workers

>If you're in this position (relied upon, validated, powerless), you're not imagining it. And it's not a communication problem. "Just communicate better" is the advice equivalent of "have you tried not being depressed?"

How about "have you tried unionizing?" Because the common theme here is lack of respect which is ultimately limited by your own bargaining power. That means it's only your individual value against the collective will of the company, and the individual is going to lose that fight more often than not (with very rare exceptions for extremely talented and smart people who won the life lottery who are smarter than everyone at a company).

>Most assume the truck driver is being inconsiderate.

You could probably add a whole section of specifically learning to drive a car with trucks on the road to driver education programs and it would do wonders for traffic.

>Anti-idle ordinances exist in several US states and EU regulation is moving in this direction.

Yep, grab a sleeping bag or take your clothes off and use evaporation cooling on yourself. The good news is that car/van camping stuff can apply to trucking as well and that is fairly popular these days.

Another option is simply having places to sleep outside of the truck that are powered by solar/wind and don't cost anything to truckers, but that's only viable when we actually care about reducing emissions over profit.

>Every kilogram you add to the vehicle is a kilogram you can’t carry as freight.

You can save a bunch of weight by not having the sleeper cab if you can readily stop somewhere for a safe place to sleep. There's quite a bit of frontier savings you can do by externalizing costs of transporting stuff to other industries (aforementioned free hotel rooms) and getting tax payers to pay for it, which makes a ton of sense here since trucks are transporting all of the food we eat.

Praise the Omnissiah

People aren't interested in long-term thinking when companies are doing layoffs for bullshit reasons and making vague threats about how most of us will have to go find a new career which causes a heck of a lot of stress and financial costs. That isn't being petty, it's having self-respect. They get the quality when the companies treat the craftspeople with respect.

>They’re failing to save because the world is rough, and their institutions don’t do enough to help them weather it.

Well, America is rough. It turned on hardcore capitalism mode for itself because a significant portion of its population wants to try and solo socioeconomic hardships and hates any one who doesn't want the same challenge.

But not to just blame the voter, lots of money is spent for setting up systems to be amenable to acquiring more money. The very richest have correctly made a bet that uprisings to displace the wealthy and politicians just don't occur here these days, and therefore there is no real threat or need to change the way things have been going for the last 25 years or so.

It fits because now you can start up the conquering war machine and have a bunch of soldiers who're willing to kill in another country before starving in theirs

Good drivers sometimes miss their turn. Bad drivers never miss their turn.