12,453 karma · joined October 22, 2018
The latter being vastly more effective at honing good design because more decisions are made in retrospect.
I find that a spike or a spike PR to demonstrate a new approach (if a software design decision is controversial) is 10x as valuable.
Did not give more power to everyone. At best you could say that it shifted power from landed gentry to industrialists. Even that switchover was less of a change than you'd think.
The practical upshot of the beginning of industrialization was very negative. The enclosure movement stripped families of their land to push them to work in the factories where they would never go willingly. The famines in Ireland and Ukraine were both triggered by redirecting grain to export in order to fund domestic industrial expansion.
The most brutal two wars in human history were that brutal precisely because industrialization made it possible.
>instead lifted the masses from poverty (after some initial turbulent period).
What lifted the masses from poverty wasnt the factories it was the labor movement which occurred in response to horrific working conditions and the reliance those factory workers had on mass labor (specifically coal mining which was incredibly labor intensive and a key economic chokepoint).
The whole of that is glossed over by right wing libertarian propaganda but that last part is particularly underemphasized.
>Contrary to leftist propaganda, the rich are not some cartoon villains and psychopaths
Do you look at peter thiel and elon musk or the robber barons and see anything else?
The few billionaires ive encountered personally were no less sociopathic but they kept it hidden better. Power corrupts. Immense wealth corrupts. That isnt a leftist thing, that's a human thing.
>The reason why the rich currently exploit the poor is because doing so provides them with significant material gains. Once they can obtain the same or even better material gains by "exploiting" robotic labor instead of human labor, the logical outcome is not further abuse
False. It just shifts the focus of their exploitation from human labor to natural resources.
They'll fight over oil and minerals and gas and water resources and at best leave us to rot (homelessness will skyrocket) and at worst they'll find some excuse to exterminate those of us they particularly dislike (Gaza serves as a model here).
The world economy's reliance on human labor has been the best inducement to peace there is. It's no coincidence that all of the countries in the world with lots of natural resources and no industry are the biggest shitholes and vice versa.
>That is (partly) true, but only in the current economic system. Widespread human-level AI changes the equation, and not necessarily in favor of those who are currently rich.
Human level AI (assuming it ever happens) will simply make the fight over natural resources that much more intense because labor will matter that much less.
You're living at the tail end of a relatively golden period in a country where labor was the economic bottleneck and natural resources were relatively plentiful. Venezuela and Angola and Iraq are models of what happens when that equation is reversed.
Nobody gives a shit about appeasing the people who live in those countries, their labor is virtually worthless. They are a model for how the rest of us will be treated in a world where human labor loses its value.
Theyre never going to use that power to provide basic income for everybody. You cannot wave a wand to make them do that. Theyre going to use that power to accumulate even more resources and raw materials and impoverish/expel the "useless" labor.
Realistically our leverage over the powers that be is mostly about our labor and our ability to withdraw it.
Most of the human written code was slop, but the really fundamental and successful stuff we relied upon and which we didnt want to throw away? yeah, not so much. most of that was actually really good.
those EJB monstrosities were routinely swapped out by some saas written in python by somebody who did it properly and werent responsible for a lot of late and over budget projects which barely worked or didnt work.
Is impoverishing them supposed to encourage progress in the arts and sciences?
Whatever it started out as (and I have my doubts it was ever a tool to help artists), it's now primarily a tool corporations use to milk creativity for profit and squash it where it might interfere with that profit.
If I put some devs in front of a customer I'd be very much afraid of them doing what they ask rather than what they want, for instance, or overindexing on one particular customer's problem.
If the devs understand and can empathise with the users and there aren't a lot of them, sure, maybe but on most projects it's more effective to have the distilled and filtered customer feedback from a PM who is good at being a PM.
I doubt 99% of what a nurse does would be meaningfully aided by an LLM and where it would help it'd probably be a crappy band aid around a bigger festering issue anyway (e.g. poorly managed IT, deliberately confusing insurance processes).
the point of view was that they already aren't.
for the authors themselves I don't see much difference between having no copyright at all and being thrown a few pennies on their work from amazon. either way the ability to make a living from those pennies clearly isnt motivating them.
the future jk rowlings of the world will still buy lottery tickets to fame and fortune whether or not she ends up being worth $20 million (weak/no copyright) or $1 billion (strong copyright).
(at least, this is what ive seen)
* A way of matching requirement use cases to tests.
* to modulate the number of tests written not only to make sure you have enough coverage but also to make sure you don't pointlessly cover the same edge cases multiple times.
* a way to cheaply provide feedback and validation on code as you are writing it.
With AI the ability to churn out useless tests has exploded (both with TDD done badly and with no TDD at all) and that has actually incurred a new type of cost we didnt have to face before.
the overwhelming response apparently was:
* we don't have particular concerns about how the license fee is spent.
* we mainly just want that money back
the boss's wallet and plenty of economists who made their career off supporting it were very upset about that one and tried to deny it.
I thought they'd come up with a neat mechanism that looked at actual wages in real companies where automation was introduced, but no. It's all spherical cows.
IME vibe coding isnt just not capable of building these foundations, it actively chips away at them where they already exist. shrug
If you understand the codebase deeply and have trust in it can roll out changes quickly without manual testing you can run circles around the people scratching their heads wondering if this vibe coded 2,500 pull request is going to be the one that takes down the system for a day.
Especially since users do prefer a native experience and having their RAM conserved.
Some landlords believe that because it brutally eats into their profits and because it's a band aid which addresses the cost of housing without magically fixing supply shortages that it ought to be scrapped with extreme prejudice.
"Sure, it would be a tragedy if I tossed the nurse out of her apartment but has anybody considered the plight of the junior investment banker looking for a place to rent who could pay me more?"
The reality is that curtailment of abusive zero hours contracts provided by the employment rights legislation was direly needed and renters desperately needed protection against landlords who would habitually jack up rents and kick you out.
These are probably the only two good bits of legislation done in the last few years.
The renters rights act has led to buy to let landlords selling up all over leading to a decline in property prices. It's hardly feel good - it means first time buyers can get on the property ladder easier and renters cant be kicked out as easily.
As a technological innovation theyre a bit like amphetamines for code. Sure, maybe some people are using the "tankers chocolate" their employer handed them responsibly...I guess.
There are certainly a lot of people online who have gone all in who swear blind theyre not abusing them.
i think we're in that (quite long) stage with AI right now where most halfway smart people "know" but they're still invested due to the greater fool theory and still talking their book.
I dont think Zitron has predicted anything 5 years too early. 1 or 2 at the outside is probably the limit.
I remember during the original internet boom the people who were given the most shit were the ones who predicted the bubble popping a year or two early.
Zitron fits quite neatly in this category: most of the predictions of his Ive seen that are "wrong" are things which could still happen and things where he gave wrong timelines.
Realistically identifying a bubble and the stupidity associated with it just requires an ability to do the research and see through bullshit. identifying even roughly when it will pop really needs a crystal ball. Mass human delusions do not collapse in a predictable way.
How can it do that?