Is google sending in drones to destroy peoples homes? Is google bombing schools? Is google torturing folks in secret locations?
No? Google has changed its search algorithm? Oh, how is that a ‘war’ on anything?
Please stop using hyper-sensational titles to get on the front page of HN. And stop using the term ‘war’ unless people are really dying - it doesn’t matter whether they be ‘freedom fighters’ or soldiers or just plain civilians, if people are dying (directly) then that might be a ‘war’, everything else is probably just profiteering.
Those are examples of war crimes, not war "proper" I'd say.
And is anyone actually training troops to fight in this "war", or did they just use the word?
In addition to the primary definition, the dictionary also offers "a struggle or competition between opposing forces or for a particular end". And we all know and constantly discuss what Google is doing. Nobody was baited into clicking this because they thought there was actual shooting going on.
If you pee on grass, does that make the dandelion that grows there later artificial? If you plant and grow a potato, is that an artificial potato?
The term “natural” is meaningless when used in ways like on “all natural juice” labels, because the line is arbitrary and suits whatever the argument is (usually by being a fancy substitute for “good”).
There are uses for the term, like in “natural sciences” (as opposed to philosophy, for example). Incidentally, the core limitation of natural sciences is related to the contention of “natural juice”: we are part of nature, and so when it comes to studying some aspects of nature it becomes circular and unproductively self-referential.
The line between ourselves and nature is paradoxical and it is worth pondering why we draw it at all.
"As strange as it seems now, the notion of “clean” nuclear weapons was taken fairly seriously in the late 1950s and early 1960s. U.S. government officials had been interested in the possibility of such nuclear weapons, which they believed would produce far less radioactive fallout than standard “dirty” thermonuclear weapons."
You can drastically change the amount of fallout with materials and design decisions, so it's worth considering.
For example, tsar bomba was tested with a lead tamper instead of uranium; this reduced the yield, but also the fallout. The Ripple design has no tamper, was used in the last US airdrop test, and produces very little fallout compared to other designs.
A limited fallout design allows for occupation and/or resettlement after an attack, so it seems useful to consider.
Yes, yes, it didn't make a practical difference because MAD makes them all unusable.
They also wanted these for domestic use. No fallout means making a new Panama Canal, or removing a pesky mountain, are just nuclear construction projects.
Yeah... the problem is if you were to use them for excavating, you have to explode them on, in, or near the ground which will generate lots of fallout from neutron irradiation of the ground materials.
Clean H-bombs are only clean if used for air bursts, but air bursts aren't effective for excavation.
Diamonds are also product of nature, but when we grow them in a lab they aren't often considered to be "naturally formed". It's just that the lab we used in this instance was part of the Jornada del Muerto.
> when we grow them in a lab they aren't often considered to be "naturally formed"
Isn't this solely because De Beers wants to keep the product of their mines artificially priced higher? So they come up with phrases to make lab grown diamonds sound less than the ones they mine?
I think sometimes the distinction is made between natural and artificial (human made) as a way to sway an argument. In many of these cases, the reasoning is tenuous if we examine with an understanding that the difference is sometimes arbitrary.
If anything, we should be more careful with our use of language. For instance; 'naturally ocurring' vs. 'human made'.
A similar one is synthetic. We've used that label for things like synthetic oil, but there are a lot of other things that are synthesized because it is too difficult to get the material naturally.
> Things have jobs: pillows are made for comfort, scissors are sharp, and digital devices are made to track your every move
I think this assertion is false in the sense the digital devices weren't designed to track you, they have evolved to being able to do that. The first mobile phones did not have GPS or mobile data, they were simply there to make calls. Even SMS was an after thought.
Pillows were definitely designed to make your head comfortable while they can also be used for pillow fights. But they evolved into being used for pillow fights.
I think the author is externalising prejudices that we have towards the tools and objects that surround us. Tools aren't conscious and aren't making those decisions (how we use the tools) for us.
On the other hand, a hammer does not wake me in the middle of the night to tell me to hammer nails into wood. And this is were are digital devices are beginning to mutate from being mere tools to be being, in some sense, conscious entities telling us what we should be doing: "you should now answer this email" or "you should be preparing for that meeting" or "there is this call here, you have to answer it".
I wonder what the relationship is between the word engineering in the sense used here and software engineering?
I am amazed how bad software engineering has become with constant updates of software because of “improvements” or because there has to be constant release cycle else the software is unmaintained or bad.
While this kind of engineering is designed to be untouched for the next 15 to 30 years. Minimal maintenance is needed and certainly the concrete doesn’t need updating every second week because concrete has suddenly “improved” or there was a bug in it.
It’s become the norm to release bad software and fix it later, I hope this norm does not make it to real engineering.
Do you have a source for how little maintenance this will need? I imagine there will be teams of people continually employed for regular maintenance and operations. Concrete does develop “bugs” in the form of cracks, chips, or other damage that needs to be repaired.
While software engineering certainly deals with different constraints, I don’t think this is a fair comparison. When stakes are low (as they are for most software engineering), different precautions are appropriate. The aerospace or financial software engineering worlds might be more comparable here, and the engineering for those systems looks quite different as a result.
> Do you have a source for how little maintenance this will need?
In Germany, twice a year inspection is mandatory for infrastructure [1] but this is only a visual inspection. Once every 6 years you got a large inspection [2] that includes a full go over everything including functionality checks plus a review of documentation (if it is still up to code) and of accident documentation, as well as a "knock test" on every m² of surface [3]. Fire safety systems are checked every quarter [4].
And out of these reports then you get action items. Depending on the severity of findings, it can be anything from "someone needs to do this until the next major inspection" to "holy cow stop ALL traffic NOW".
The problem is, it was known that the bridge was structurally unsound thanks to its age, but the elements that corroded and actually caused the damage could not be inspected at all. The report [1] is quite fascinating, the meat is on page 53/54:
> Auf Grundlage der gewonnenen Erkenntnisse und der positiven Berechnungsergebnisse wurde in der Gesamtbetrachtung weder ein akuter Handlungsbedarf festgestellt noch eine Verstärkung als erforderlich erachtet
> (Based on observation results and positive simulations no need to act was derived, nor was an increase in observation deemed to be necessary)
The root cause is deemed to be errors made all the way back during construction, most probably too long exposure of the steel cables to the environment (see page 108).
Only thanks to this desaster the actual failure mode and how to spot it got known in the first place. The report suggests (page 110) that bridges of a similar construction type (and thus, the same weakness) be retrofitted with acoustic monitoring to detect snapping cables.
Definitely I am making a broad assumption with many specifies where one can say "but what about X,Y,Z". Certainly, there are buildings that fall down and bridges collapse but what is the trend? Is software engineering getting better or worse?
From the linked article:
> And I would say that the success of AI coding agents has proved once and for all that we had successfully built an engineering discipline so strong that we are also the first discipline that has been able to successfully run AI at large scale within our discipline.
Yet we have no real clue how AI works or how to debug it, it's a brute force solution to everyday problems. Daily there are new examples of AI "escaping" its enforced cage. Why? Why doesn't AI "just work"? Because we don't truly understand AI.
I think AI is exactly the opposite to "true" engineering where one understands the system and can reproduce it. After all, retraining the AI will probably give you a completely different AI even if the training data was the same.
> Certainly, there are buildings that fall down and bridges collapse but what is the trend?
The trend is that they don’t because there’s a continuous maintenance happening on all of those. There’s an army of people doing checks and repairs all the time. Even then, it happens, like in Genoa.
The relationship is that software developers co-opted the term because it has excellent reputation and trust. In real life there is almost zero overlap in the how engineers and software developers work and develop their methods.
Software is super complex and cheap to update. Engineering like this, however difficult, is not that complex and it's very expensive and difficult to update.
We take advantage of the situation. If we invented some way of e.g. "growing" structures that turned out to be much cheaper we'd probably adapt our attitude to changing them.
When you say Engineering is not that complex, have you taken into account corrosive sea water, pressure, currents, what it means to make repairs and maintainance down there etc? It is difficult, because it deals with a very complex world full of physics, chemistry and even biology in a way that does not allow errors.
Engineering doesn't seem complex because there are centuries of learnings behind it. Those learnings become rules and suddenly it appears "simple" because no one debates whether to use wood or concrete when building an undersea tunnel!
....however that really is a kind of simplicity. Your training is relevant throughout your career. In software that is much less so. I think Comsci is a worthwhile degree but mine was really only a starting point.
Software does allow errors hence, IMO, we overload the complexity and "underload" the proof of correctness. We're not really that afraid of failures most of the time.
Software isn't inherently complex, it becomes complex. Because it is iterative. Because we keep making demands of it that weren't planned.
Imagining building a bridge and then in the middle someone comes along and says it should also be a tunnel. I think therein lies a main difference to engineering and software engineering: planning and sticking to a plan.
Another thing are incentives: real engineering has real incentives to do it right, else you will get sued - by the families of those that died. Software engineering does not have this incentive to get it right.
Imagining building a bridge and then in the middle someone comes along and says it should also be a tunnel
While converting a bridge to tunnel mid-construction doesn't happen, what does often happen is that design assumes a particular construction technique can be used, construction starts with that technique, and midway through it's determined that an entirely different technique is required. This results in a bunch of redesign, remobilization, etc. Just like with software, construction often does not survive first contact with reality.
I'm disappointed and jaded by the state of our craft like you. But I'm also very suspicious of claims that other disciplines are somehow these much more earnest, pristine, derived-from-first-principles things. It just doesn't fit my view of human nature.
If you're coding by hand, then you're that carpenter before IKEA came along. Now the market wants bland machine-built functional furniture that gets replaced every five to ten years. If every tenth piece is broken or slightly off, doesn't matter, mass production has lowered the price that a replacement is available for free and you're still making a profit.
Time to become a "product engineer" and watch the hyper-agile agents putting up digital post-it notes on digital pin-boards discussing how much each post-it is worth in digital scrum meetings. Meanwhile the agents keep wasting more and more time so that their owners make less and less of a lose, until eventually a profit is made.
Until the costs become prohibitive and humans become cheaper than the agents that replaced them. Once the agents are replaced by the humans, the next hype bubble awaits around the bend.
In particular if that steady-state requires 4 to 40GB blob of binary code to be installed or an internet connection to an AI SaaS provider and a credit card.
I remember when coding was free as in beer and freedom!
It's okay. In the near future people will not own a computer of significant capability at all, so it's not like they'd even be able to develop without a cloud connection in the first place.
And, for the most part, they will be okay with this. Gen Alpha or Beta will tell each other how morally wrong it is to expect for everyone to own a computer or even a smartphone, citing the environmental impacts, slaves mining coltan, and the toxic emotional effects upon people who grew up in the Social Media Dark Ages. Much like present-day Hackernews feels about personal automobile ownership.
I think your answer is the reason why. LLM performance is fine when applied to everything they can do.
Take LLM out that safe space and suddenly they are no silver bullet, in fact they are unless.
So of course those making the 10x claim mean in the safe space where LLM can handle all activities required. You can’t have it both ways 10x and difficult and confusing tasks for LLMs.
Right, I get that. I'm just saying it seems wrong to throw up minority examples. Nobody is pumping out AAA games at speed with LLMs, nor is anyone claiming to do so. There will likely always be some areas where LLMs are bad or useless.
How many people are writing crud apps using mainstream languages vs COBOL though? You don't need 100% silver bullet 1-shot everything, just to recognize the signals that for many use cases, there's a significant shift happening. The safe space is expanding and velocity is increasing.
Definitely the safe space is expanding but how fragile and expensive is this expansion?
AI requires a larger amount of fragile resources to work as opposed to an editor, keyboard and a human.
It some sense it’s a bit like the bitcoin revolution that slowed down once transaction times ballooned out. And blockchains didn’t replace databases as expected. Probably for very good reasons: resources required v. results delivered.
I personally agree that AI is great technology for some great new tools. But we still haven’t found its limits: cost v. results. That happened with bitcoins and blockchains is still outstanding for AIs.
The resources are definitely an issue. I'm still sucking from the corporate teat, but my hope is that by the time the frontier race slows down and they tighten the screws too much, the local models will be good enough. It sounds like recent local models are already getting pretty good for normal duties, but honestly, if it all goes away tomorrow, that's fine too. I'll go back to the old ways. I'd miss the informational capabilities more than the coding capabilities, but I'm no stranger to man pages.
As an aside, I still think there's a place for blockchains. They're not a good replacement for a typical database, but I think some of the concepts are useful. The idea of distributed ledgers and smart contracts have a lot of applications IMHO, particularly in government. The traceability of transactions seems like a great fit to enable transparency of government spending. Of course, governments are allergic to that idea for the usual reasons, but it's still a nice idea. Distributed computing is hard, and it's a shame that blockchains were usurped by crypto bro scams. I'm still rooting for the folks who are trying to push distributed technology forward though.
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