huurtehoog

Yeah I know I'm talking about it being training for war time anchor dragging.

It's entirely clear that they cut cables and intend to cut more. It's not training, it's current aggression.

Doesn't make any sense to have merchants dragging anchor in active war. These actions are meeting their goals, not serving as preparation.

Maps, compass, and celestial navigation.

As they say in scandinavia, there's no bad weather only bad clothes.

Suit up and brace yourself is all I can say. We should all be concerned in protecting our communities from the adjustment. Not in an doomerist way but you know prepare to weather a storm. I think it will be worse than 2008. But I also think that the next boom will be very very interesting and with a lot of great opportunities to advance humanity and technology.

The next turn of the spiral will always be higher and wider.

The way I see it LLMs are accelerating trends that have been at play for a decade or two now.

I think we are seeing bloat accelerating and the boom will eventually go bust.

My hope is that from the ashes of the current boom/bust cycle we might actually get "software engineering" once the dust settles and society catches up with technology in terms of culture, regulations, education etc.

I agree. There is a lot of accumulated bloat and a lot of newly accreted bloat from the tools built to accelerate on the recent trends.

It seems to me that a big bust is about to follow the 15 year boom that started out as "web 2.0" and saw the rise of web app framework, "front end" development, "x as a service", start ups "pivoting" to software tooling creating bloat to tackle problems created by bloat etc.

A lot of jobs will be removed from the tech industry, I think. But the work in software development will be more interesting 5/10 years from now than it is now. Paid more in line with the rest of the economy and thus not attracting so many uninterested actors, and more aligned with market demand instead of driven by a labor oligopsony, held more to account once regulation catches up with technology etc. I think we might actually get "software engineering" after this.

Software development is not one thing. Some work like configuring frameworks is proving tractable to automation. But there's a lot more to software than writing glue code.

We may never again have as many "software developers" as we did in early 2020s. That shift is sure to have severe economic, political, social, and cultural consequences.

I am especially interested in how the work in security, assurance, performance, and such hard problems will evolve in respect to the large amounts of LLM-generated code. I see a lot of opportunities there. Not in terms of how many people will be able to work on that but in terms of how much income those competent enough will command. Individuals and teams. There are some really interesting developments in spaces that have historically been shunned by the framework configuration crowd. It seems to me that the advocates of speed over quality in software development are about to be swallowed whole by the tide of code they unleashed.

There is overemployment in software development right now and a correction is coming. Automation is just a part of it, because automated systems displace jobs and create new ones. The biggest problem, in my view, is that large swathes of software development jobs were created under ZIRP and subsidized by excess profits to suppress competition and shore up those excess profits.

Technology is a convenient escape goat and a lot of glue-code gigs were made possible by the market distortions I mentioned. But I do think a big correction is taking place and we may have passed the high water mark of employment in software development. Especially cushy jobs being overpaid to configure frameworks, as this sort of work is proving quite tractable for LLMs.

I do think there will be more opportunities in high skill software engineering created by the new tooling on both sides - demand for building and maintaining automated systems as well as dealing with the consequences security, reliability, etc, wise. At this level the industry has been short staffed for several years and that trend should intensify I believe. There is lots of money to be made in being very knowledgeable on fundamentals and detail oriented. That has been true for a while and it seems to me that it will be only more so for the foreseeable future.

You are focusing too much on an informal letter. There are lots - I am talking dozens - of peer-reviewed papers discussing the so-called "productivity paradox"

There is a lot more to this discussion than one time series from the BLS, I have linked just 4 that are worth skimming elsewhere in this thread.

I am not trying to prove a point one way or the other. The topic interests me and there is a lot of analysis available on the problem of finding the productivity growth in economic data corresponding to the ever increasing investment in computer technology.

To me it is clear that it is an open problem, and the literature available is a great reflection on statistical methodology in economics.

> But if the question is whether there has been any productivity impact at all, I would say there are multiple indications of that.

That is indeed the question, and I have not found one paper that conclusively states that there is clear evidence or clear absence of a measured statistical effect.

Thank you for checking the source. Celebrating that is more important than me being right so kudos.

If we're going by anecdote I know way more people who quit caffeine than nicotine.

I'm sorry I don't understand what you mean when you discriminate productivity growth from productivity improvement.

> So what is astounding is that the effects of the AI revolution may be visible in national-level economics data after only 2 - 4 years since the technology was introduced, and we're already wondering if we have shifted into a "high productivity growth era"!

I feel compelled to repeat the conclusion from the letter I linked. I used it as an example of how much of an open contention the productivity-from-computer-technology issue remains

> As more data become available, it will be important to continue to monitor whether current patterns represent the early stages of a new era of booming productivity or merely a temporary uptick in an otherwise slow-growth environment.

Yes. I do agree with you on

> The idea that the US lost its manufacturing is not based in reality.

But I disagree with your claim that people are right in being extremely dismissive of losses in US manufacturing.

>> Absolutely people were extremely dismissive to anyone saying that we're losing the ability to make things in this country!

Interpreting that as a complete loss of manufacture capacity I agree with you, with the qualification that concerns of relative decline were justified since there was a definite decline in aggregate.

I have to say that overall I don't think economies and citizens of these economies should prefer certain economic activities over others. In principle I think specialization is a good thing. On the other hand, I do think that the US has committed some strategy mistakes in terms of how much manufacturing activity was moved out of the country and how dependent it has come to be on foreign supplies of, for instance, rare earths and advanced IC.

But that analysis is predicated on US strategic goals and geopolitical intent. The coming impasse over Taiwan with China is almost completely self imposed due to the prioritization of short term corporate profit over strategic goals.

But that is a different conversation altogether. I think data from the past 30 years show that alarmism over de-industrialization was overblown as you said AND that there has been nonetheless a significant decline in the previously absolutely dominant position of the US economy in global manufacturing. If that is good or bad, to whom or to what ends, is way outside the scope of internet forum messages.