> The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have
My guess is that those people have different incentives. They need to build a portfolio of open-source contributions, so shame is not of their concern. So, yeah, where you stand depends on where you sit.
What I failed to understand is why only in the US the voting procedure is so controversial. Want paper vote? That's racism. Want counting in a day? That's xenophobia. Want to limit certain time window for counting? That's definitely racism. It's funny that the US criticized that EU countries were getting less democratic. Well, at least those countries have a much more sane voting process.
> Want paper vote? That's racism. Want counting in a day? That's xenophobia. Want to limit certain time window for counting? That's definitely racism.
This characterization is reductive and basically a straw-man.
The principle underlying opposition to "counting in one day" is basically that every vote that is correctly placed in time should be counted, and as many people as possible should have access to voting. Mail-in voting, for example, has been shown to increase voter turnout by making voting more convenient, but you have the question of what to do with ballots that are received late. There are pretty good arguments for counting all mail-in ballots that are postmarked before the election, and I don't think "xenophobia" is among them.
In America specifically, all decisions relating to access to voting are considered against a backdrop of our widespread and systematic attempt to restrict voting. A modern example of this is related to wide disparity in the number of polling places, and therefore the amount of time required to vote, in "urban" regions of some southern states as compared to rural regions.
I have never heard of a racism-based opposition to paper ballots. I think you just made that up.
I think these claims are badly miscontrued at best, and match one party's outlook. The Republican Party has tried inhibiting voting in ways that benefit them, often by making it more difficult for minorities to vote.
Many of those tactics existed on a large scale in the South before the Voting Rights Act, and when the Supreme Court recently invalidated the Act, many have returned. For example, reducing voting locations in minority areas so people have to travel far and wait longer. Texas and possibly other states have criminalized errors in voter registration (iirc), making it dangerous to register voters. Georgia, and others, conducted a large-scale purge of voting rolls, requiring people to re-register. Requiring government-issued ID prevents many people from voting, often poor people and immigrants who lack what wealthier people are accustomed to. Florida's voters passed a ballot measure enabling ex-felons to vote; the Republicans added a law requiring full restitution to be paid (iirc) before they could vote, effectively canceling the ballot measure vote. And these days almost any Democratic victory is called fraud; remember the 2000 election, the lawsuits, riots, threats against ordinary citizens working on local election boards and on elections, etc.
Directly addressing the parent's claims: I've never heard of paper votes being called racism - could you share something with us? Calls to limit counting are often accompanied by calls to limit the voting period, invalidate votes received later (e.g., due to US mail delays), and calls to greatly restrict mail-in voting - all things that make it more difficult for people working two-three jobs.
The Democrats have their flaws; I've never seen them try to limit voting. That should be something everyone in the US - and in the world - agrees on: Do all we can to enable everyone to vote.
There are historical factors that contribute to those things you brought up. American minorities are disproportionately affected by things like limited hours, for example. You'd know that if you were an American POC.
GP has also taken these issues and personalized them. They're about impact and access, not whether the person raising the idea is racist or a xenophobe or whatever.
You'll find those claims in sibling comments to yours, so they are clearly pretty real!
(At the time of writing this comment there's a sibling claiming that the comment cannot possibly understand this POV because they are not "an American POC.")
The specific comment by popalchemist you're referring to is actually fine (they're talking about voter suppression, which is a problem in the US), and isn't at all one of the claims that hintymad says people are making.
Politicians just use those accusations as cover for conducting fraud or enabling the conditions that they inherently benefit from. There's no reason to not use paper, ID checks, and same-day accounting.
> There's no reason to not use paper, ID checks, and same-day accounting.
Sure there is. ID checks make it impossible for people who don't have government-issued ID to vote, which is a lot of people; and furthermore ID checks don't actually improve election security. Same-day counting is impossible if you are going to count all mail-in votes that were sent before the deadline.
To be clear, I'm not saying that politicians aren't agitating for conditions that benefit them. That's there job. But I also believe in supporting access to voting and fair elections, and at least some of the politicians' arguments help achieve those ends.
Yeah, I forgot voter ID. All democratic countries mandate voter ID except the US and another couple(?). Yeah, as if only the US has the "voter access" problem
There are many reasons not to do those things, "lalala not listening" isn't an excuse.
It's usually very simple, too. For voting ID: ID isn't evenly distributed, and that's not an opinion, that's a fact.
So if you require ID, then obviously you will suppress some demographics more than others. That creates a bias. Again, not opinion.
This can be solved. You will notice none of the people championing voter ID make even a thinly-veiled attempt to solve it. Instead they say stupid things like "oh wow so black people can't get ID now? Uh, buddy, I think YOU'RE the racist one!"
Surely what you want is to enable everyone to vote, and then to count all the votes?
In the UK where I have most experience of this stuff, there are many, many small polling stations, and usually you just walk right in and vote without queueing. The longest I ever had to wait to vote was about 30 minutes. Votes are counted locally and results usually declared within a handful of hours. Some take longer due to recounts etc if the tally is very close in a certain area, but the whole thing is pretty uncontroversial and pretty low-effort.
Here in Australia, voting is compulsory, it's always on a Saturday, and there's usually a charity sausage-sizzle at the polling place, it's sorta fun. And again, AFAICT (I'm not a citizen yet) the infrastructure is over-provisioned so people aren't waiting around forever.
From what I hear about the US, in some places voting can take hours, it seems like the number of polling places is deliberately limited to make it hard for people to vote, and you have those weird/horrible rules cropping up like it being illegal to hand out water to people in line, which seems purely designed to discourage electoral participation. And then you have all these calls to stop the count after a certain time etc.
It's deeply weird from an outside perspective. If counts are taking too long, if people are having trouble voting, provision more... but of course it seems clear that there are motives for underprovisioning, because one or other group thinks it will benefit them.
> Want counting in a day? That's xenophobia. Want to limit certain time window for counting?
Why do either of these matter? If you assume paper voting in-person is secure, then there is zero reason to also limit the time spent counting or the time window for counting. Anything past that point is clearly trying to fill some sort of agenda for the sake of disenfranchising people who cannot adhere to the times you're trying to set.
Honest question: isn't it just a matter of time before US dollar loses its dominance, given that US has been losing its manufacturing business? I mean, can people really keep investing in the US market if they need less and less stuff produced by the US?
If The US goes to war against China, we are screwed, because we outsourced our manufacturing to China. We cannot quickly ramp up our manufacture of ships, tanks, aircraft or ammunition. Not only do we lack manufacturing capacity, the entire supply chain is in China / Asia.
In addition, China leads in the critical technologies need for drone oriented warfare, like we are seeing in Ukraine.
In particular, the pentagon has so many suppliers in China. Oh, the KPIs (key pharmaceutical ingredients) are produced by China too. We even had shortage of saline solution when China was having a supply crunch. So when a conflict, let alone a war, broke out with China, what do we do? We ask China to supply us the war logistics?
A fun story, China has the best automated seafood processing factories that meet all kinds of regulations in the world. It's cheaper, a lot cheaper, for Japan and Alaska to send their seafood to China to process, and then sell back to the domestic market. And it has nothing to do with cheap labor but deep R&D of China. So, when war broke out, many people won't be able to enjoy cheap seafood either.
I don't understand how people can ignore a simple fact (is it Milton who pointed that out?): Manufacturing is a "doing" business, not a "knowing" business. Our expertise is forged on the shop floor, not dreamed up in a boardroom, and certainly not bought through outsourcing. There is so much tacit knowledge that manufacturing capability is a living system. It lives in the collective experience of the workforce and the rhythm of the line, not in static documents.
Oh maybe this is the time to quota Thomas Joseph Dunning: With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will produce eagerness; 50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent. will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent., and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged.
Software can leave your country in a fraction of a second. Manufacturing is infrastructure. This is also basic. Manufacturing in the US is shrinking, comparatively with other countries that actually make things. People just think they can just play with numbers, categories and dollar values to hide it.
The US has been playing a currency game since 1980 to make up for the loss of the free money it got for reconstructing Europe and Japan, and using that money to buy things from impoverished workers in China. And as China got on its feet through careful planning and management, it moved to India, Pakistan, Mexico, Indonesia, the Philippines, anywhere that was willing to stomp on its workers and pollute its air and water.
Now China has gotten to the point that it is a viable alternative to the US, so the US can't unilaterally set terms anymore for its suppliers. It's dumping US treasuries. It's competing for natural resources in countries that the US just tried to topple and steal their natural resources through sieges that ironically served to cut the US's legs from under them, giving China a huge discount. The game is up.
China going from nowhere to the greatest economy on the planet in 50 years is what happens when you manage and cultivate manufacturing. US real estate and an economy run on luxury consumption is what you get when you outsource manufacturing and play word games to cover it up. We literally can't tariff China significantly, they could crush our economy just by embargoing us like we freely embargo everyone else. That's the power of a manufacturing base. We might want to fix our bridges, too.
Case in point, it's news that Canada leaned toward partnering with China when having dispute with the US, but it would be a joke 20 years ago. It's a humiliation that the US brought upon itself: you can't produce things that people need, then don't blame that people will have leverage in other places.
> Why is manufacturing so special? As opposed to something like software?
I assume that dollar will be strong if people want to buy stuff from the US, which requires using the US currency. Software indeed is a strong sector. I'm just not sure (as due to my ignorance) if they compensate sufficiently the trade deficit. For instance, if advertisers use Instagram in Europe, they wouldn't need the US dollar to pay for the service, right? If there's no virtual export happens, I'd assume there won't be any need for the US currency either.
> Also, manufacturing in the US is growing not shrinking. For a long time.
What about market share? I remember that the US had more than 65% of the manufacturing marketshare 25 years ago. Actually, I'm more concerned about the long-term national security and prosperity of the US, and I think they are tied to a robust manufacturing sector. But that's different topic.
A weak dollar is good for manufacturing and a strong dollar is bad for it. China tightly controls to the Yuan to purposely keep it's value low to benefit it's manufacturing. The current US administration wants to something similar for the US to boost manufacturing.
I think that's foolish and backwards thinking. The US doesn't really need more manufacturing; it had relatively low unemployment, a healthy economy, etc. The US is a service country. Apple is one of the richest companies in the world and does none of it's manufacturing in the US. Why wouldn't people invest in Apple?
It looks there's a difference this time: copying the details of other people's work has become exceedingly easy and reliable, at least for commonly tried use cases. Say I want to vibe code a dashboard, and AI codes it out. It works. In fact, it works so much better than I could ever build, because the AI was trained with the best dashboard code out there. Yes, I can't think of all the details of a world-class dashboard, but hey, someone else did and AI correctly responds to my prompt with those details. Such "copying" used to be really hard among humans. Without AI, I would have to learn so much first even if I can use the open-source code as the starting point: the APIs of the libraries, the basic concepts of web programming, and etc. Yet, the AI doesn't care. It's just a gigantic Bayesian machine that emits code that nearly probability 1 for common use cases.
So it is not that details don't matter, but that now people can easily transfer certain know-how from other great minds. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), most people's jobs are learning and replicating know-hows from others.
But the dashboard is not important at all, because everyone can have the same dashboard the same way you have it. It's like you are generating a static website using Hugo and apply a theme provided on it. The end product you get is something built by a streamline. No taste, no soul, no effort. (Of course, the effort is behind the design and produce of the streamline, but not the product produced by the streamline.)
Now, if you want to use the dashboard do something else really brilliant, it is good enough for means. Just make sure the dashboard is not the end.
Dashboard is just an example. The gist is how much of know-how that we use in our work can be replaced by AI transforming other people's existing work. I think it hinges on how many new problems or new business demands will show up. If we just work on small variations of existing business, then quickly our know-hows will converge (e.g. building a dashboard or a vanilla version of linear regression model), and AI will spew out such code for many of us.
I don't think anyone's job is copying "know-how". Knowing how goes a lot deeper than writing the code.
Especially in web, boilerplate/starters/generators that do exactly what you want with little to no code or familiarity has been the norm for at least a decade. This is the lifeblood of repos like npm.
What we have is better search for all this code and documentation that was already freely available and ready to go.
This wave of AI innovation reveals that a lot of activity in coding turns out to be of accidental complexity instead of essential. Or put it another way, a lot of tasks in coding is conceptual to human, but procedural to AI. Conceptual tasks require intuitive understanding, rigorous reasoning, and long-term planning. AI is not there yet. On the other hand, procedural tasks are low entropy with high priors: once a prompt is given, what follows is almost certain. For instance, one had to learn many concepts to write "public static void main(String[] args)" when writing Java code in the old days. But for AI, the conditional probability Pr(write "public static void main(String[] args)" | prompt = "write the entry method for a given class") is practically 1. Or if I'd like to use Python to implement linear regression, there will be pretty much one way to implement it right, and AI knows about it - nothing magical, but only because we human have been doing so for years and the optimal solution for most of the cases have converged, so it turns into procedural to AI.
Fortunate or unfortunate, many procedural tasks are extremely hard for humans to master, but easy to AI to generate. In the meantime, we structured our society to support such procedural work. As the wave of innovation spreads, many people will rise but many will also suffer.
You understate the capabilities of the latest gen LLMs. I can typically describe a user's bug in a few sentences or tell Claude to check fetch the 500 error in Cloud run logs and it will explain the root cause, propose a fix, and throw in new unit test in a two minutes.
Jevon's Paradox does not last forever in a single sector, right? Take manufacturing business for example. We can make more and more stuff with increasingly lower price, yet we ended up outsourcing our manufacturing and the entire sector withered. Manufacturing also gets less lucrative over the years, which means there has been less and less demand of labor.
You're right. I updated it to "in a single sector". The context is about the future demand of software engineers, hence I was wondering if it would be possible that we wouldn't have enough demand for such profession, despite that the entire society will benefit for the dropping unit cost and probably invented a lot of different demand in other fields.
I'm quite convinced that software (and, more broadly, implementing the systems and abstractions) seems to have virtually unlimited demand. AI raises the ceiling and broadens software's reach even further as problems that previously required some level of ingenuity or intelligence can be automated now.
> The total surface area of "stuff that needs building" keeps expanding.
I certainly hope so, but it depends on whether we will have more demand for such problems. AI can code out a complex project by itself because we humans do not care about many details. When we marvel that AI generates a working dashboard for us, we are really accepting that someone else has created a dashboard that meets our expectation. The layout, the color, the aesthetics, the way it interacts, the time series algorithms, and etc. We don't care, as it does better than we imagined. This, of course, is inevitable, as many of us do spend enormous time implementing what other people have done. Fortunately or unfortunately, it is very hard to human to repeat other people's work correctly, but it's a breeze for AI. The corollary is that AI will replace a lot of demand on software developers, if we don't have big enough problems to solve -- in the past 20 years we have internet, cloud, mobile, and machine learning. All big trends that require millions and millions of brilliant minds. Are we going to have the same luck in the coming years, I'm not so sure.
AI coding tools are effective for many because, unfortunately, our work has become increasingly repetitive. When someone marvels at how a brief prompt can produce functioning code, it simply means the AI has delivered a more imaginative or elaborate specification than that person could envision, even if the resulting code is merely a variation of what has already been written countless times before. Maybe there's nothing wrong with that, as not everyone is fortunate enough to work on new problems and get to implement new ideas. It's just that repetitive work is bound to be automated away and therefore we will see the problems in Rich's rants.
That said, luminaries like Rob Pike and Rich Hickey do not have the above problem. They have the calibre and the freedom to push the boundaries, so to them the above problem is even amplified.
Personally I wish the IT industry can move forward to solve large-scale new problems, just like we did in the past 20 years: internet, mobile, the cloud, the machine learning... They created enormous opportunities (or the enormous opportunities of having software eat the world called for the opportunities?). I'm not sure we will be so lucky for the coming years, but we certainly should try.
> Parsing a known HTML structure, transforming a table, running a financial simulation.
Transforming an arbitrary table is still hard, especially a table on a webpage or in a document. Sometimes I even struggle to find the right library. The effort does not seem worth it for one-off need of such transformation too. LLM can be a great tool for doing the tasks.
Maybe we can define what "mainstream" means? Maybe this is too anecdotal, but my personal experience is that most of the engineers are tweakers. They love building stuff and are good at it, but they simply are not into math-like rigorous thinking. Heck, it's so hard to even motivate them to use basic math like queuing theory and stats to help with their day-to-day work. I highly doubt that they would spend time picking up formal verification despite the help of AI
My guess is that those people have different incentives. They need to build a portfolio of open-source contributions, so shame is not of their concern. So, yeah, where you stand depends on where you sit.
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