Right. That's the problem. In the non-coding world it's the idea that your pile of crap expands into the available space. So, if you get a garage that is twice as large, it will eventually be just as overloaded and piled-up with crap as the first, smaller, space.

The secret to happiness is to control how much crap you put on your pile. It can be that simple. Or, live with the crap you have and maybe a little bit more, but not 40x more.

I manufacture products. I have been in manufacturing for decades. These are products with electronics, mechanical assemblies, software, etc.

I used to manufacture in the US. For a while, this worked out OK.

The competitors started to move production to China, one by one.

I continued to manufacture here, lowered my prices, which lowered my margins, but I accepted that against keeping people employed here.

At some point this was not sustainable and I had to layoff a few people. I bought subassemblies made in China for less and continued to assemble in the US.

That, too, became unsustainable.

Today, I have no choice but to manufacture in China. There is no way. None. No path. No way to manufacture in the US (or Europe). The supply chain is gone, it does not exist here. Our insistence in committing suicide by raising minimum wage instead of lowering our costs (lower taxes, investing in reindustrialization, etc.) has made it impossible to manufacture here. I can't pay someone $25/hour to put screws into holes or push cables into connectors. Not when everyone else is paying a very small fraction of that manufacturing in China and customers will not pay double or triple for the same product.

Do tariffs help?

I am sure that, in the mid term (a few years) they probably help a few industries. What they don't do and can't do is materially expand our industrial base. My opinion is that we have already gone too far and this is impossible to bring back.

What would we have to do to fix it?

In short, the impossible.

We would have to implement almost zero taxes, materially reduce or eliminate minimum wage, materially reduce or eliminate regulatory burden across the board, heavily subsidize a planned re-industrialization strategy and actually execute at scale and at speed.

Importantly, we would have to also create a large cultural change away from the crazy anti-business mentality that seems to prevail in certain circles and towards a maniacal entrepreneurial culture. We would have to put in systems, tools and funding to support entrepreneurship at levels that have never been seen in this country.

Again, the impossible.

And, if we actually did this we would have to sustain it for at least 25 years and, with luck, we could come out ahead.

My go-to example of just how bad things have gotten is the insanity of the California high speed train project. This is emblematic of just how badly this nation has degraded.

Anyone who has studied and actually used statistics beyond toy exercises understands how these single variable statements are 100% misplaced. I won't go into the details because it might be pointless and I have to get work done. The main point is that grabbing this magical single variable 5% unemployment number to explain 50 years of deindustrialization is, well, nonsensical.

It's like the old example about the fallacy of averages being applied to the entire sample: A billionaire and a minimum wage worker walk into a room. Someone comments that the average net worth in that room is half a billion dollars.

Right.

The "didn't want to pay for American labour" idea is a false reality. Nobody makes decisions like that. This is preposterous.

Business decisions are made against the competitive landscape. In that chess game, if you can come up with a way to deliver the same goods for less --regardless of where they are made-- you could win greater market share, beat your competitors, etc. That's it. There is no "I don't want to pay for labor" in that decision.

Also, the mechanism I explained is one where once there's a first mover in an industry, it quickly becomes a chain reaction from there. There's no explicit plan or malice at all on the part of those who are facing a binary choice: do the same or shut down the business.

Here's an example that has nothing to do with China (at least now): Software manufacturing.

Companies are having to face competitors who, using AI, are able to manufacture software faster and with less people. We know this isn't smooth sailing yet, but it is happening and it is the way this is going to go.

If you run a software company and your competitors are using AI effectively with less people, all else being equal, you have a few options:

  1- Adopt AI and lower your head count
  2- Double (or more) your head count to be able to keep up
  3- Hire a large team at a region with lower costs
  4- Give up and shut down the company

Yeah, sure, you can add features, try to deliver a better product, etc. At the end of the day, a shop using AI well will be able to replicate everything you can throw at the market, do it quickly and at a lower cost.

So, that's it. It isn't that you are saying "I don't want to pay software engineer wages". It's a competitive environment that forces decisions on you.

Someone once told me: A business is a living organism that tells you what you are going to do every day. You don't have the control you think you have.

I was young and stupid and did not understand what he said so many decades ago. Over time I would learn he was 100% correct.

Someone without the experience of running a non-trivial business likely isn't equipped to understand the hundreds of variables that drive the beast as you try to ride it and stay on top. From the context of someone with this experience, the single variable "don't want to pay labor" idea is nothing less than, to be kind, completely inaccurate.

That's not true. Reality is far more nuanced than that. Sadly, it is the equivalent of a bunch of Dodo birds falling off a cliff. And this applies to every industry, not just automobiles.

The simplified version goes something like this:

Three companies manufacture forks and knives in the US. They share the market equally. Each has 1/3 market share.

One of them decides they can be clever, manufacture in China, reduce the price of their products and get more than 1/3 share.

Their plan succeeds. Their market share goes up to 1/2 and the other two companies down to 1/4 each

Try as they might to compete, they cannot, the cost basis in the US is higher.

One of them decides "We can be just as clever" and they start manufacturing in China.

Now two of the companies, on account of their lower prices, have 2/5 of the market each. The third company is down to 1/5 share.

The last company has no choice at all, they have to manufacture in China or shut their doors.

With all three companies manufacturing in China, we are now back to each having 1/3 of the market again. Except that, due to the price war, they are now selling the same product they were selling before the transition for half the price. And, of course, their margins are no better, maybe even worse.

And now, the grand finale: The industrial development all three companies effectively funded in China has taught one or more factories how to make these products. Now the Chinese companies enter the market directly, compete with their customers and drop the prices even more. All three companies go out of business. One of the companies is acquired in bankruptcy by one of the Chinese factories who sell the same product for less under the same brand.

Ironically, the reason (one of them) consumers are at the breaking point is because this chain reaction --which required consumers to prefer cheaper goods from abroad-- managed to destroy untold number of industries everywhere. This destroyed jobs by the millions. And here we are.

In some ways this is no different from the race for higher minimum wage. The huge sucking sound you are hearing are the millions of jobs that are being lost because of it.

He, the CEO, saw this as saving $40K per year. Until I asked simple questions:

What happens when Joe leaves?

When he goes on vacation?

If he has a health emergency?

The LLM isn't going to magically maintain the software, evolve, fix or support it.

What are you going to do?

The obvious conclusion was that he likely had to hire another person to work with Joe on this in-house CRM and, at a minimum, have redundant project ownership. Backup for development, maintenance and support.

The easy conclusion was: This will save him $40K a year until he decides to hire another person, at which point this "free" software will cost him $150K per year, $110K/year more than what he was paying Salesforce. If he does not hire a second person to work in the internal CRM, he might get lucky and things could be fine for a few years or he will have to face a crisis at some point when Joe is no longer around and nobody knows the first thing about his mini-CRM, not even the LLM.

I wonder how many people are falling for this trap these days. The allure of zero-cost software vs. the reality of introducing risk, technical debt and organizational risk.

To be sure, we are using LLM's extensively. However, until this is better understood, in the realm of software development it is constrained to what I would call "advanced auto complete" at the file level rather than anything resembling project-wide work. When we do write full applications, they are often relatively trivial internal tools that a person could complete in not much more than one week. In other words, easy to understand and code if another engineer had to jump in and none of these utilities are mission critical.

Laptop?

OK, I've made that mistake before. I understand modern laptops are powerful, but nobody wanting to do serious AI/ML work should be using a laptop for anything other than SSH or similar low-performance access into a proper system.

Years ago I fried two laptops just doing finite element analysis work running 18+ hours per day. It was one of those "I'm giving you all she's got, Captain!" workloads. They fried, even with powerful fans cooling them. I should have known better. Such workloads belong on purpose built systems.

Given all other truly useful things you could implement as well as bug fixes, why did you think that investing time and money on Liquid Glass would deliver useful value to users?

I wonder how much time and money they wasted on something that nobody wanted, cared for, needed or solved any real problem?

Sure, but your list should also include the most fundamental distinction: AI does not know what it is saying, understands nothing, has no real connections to reality and can easily degenerate in all kinds of undesirable directions.

That said, learning APL isn't about learning the symbols any more than learning mathematics is not about learning the meaning of the various symbols it uses. To continue with that parallel, it also isn't about memorizing formulas. It is about using the tools to solve problems and, over time, changing the way you solve problems...now in 3D.

I learned APL in the early 80's and used it professionally for about ten years. The way I think of solving problems is fundamentally different in many ways because of this experience.

This is the case of two people at a company using LLM's extensively for email communications. Over time, the LLM being used by the Boss, has been tuned to interpret emails from the Worker, as being negative, aggressive, inappropriate, etc.

I should add that, before LLM's the Boss was not a writer or reader. In other words, not great at creating or reading written communications. As a result, as soon as LLM's entered the picture, the Boss jumped in head-first and every single email the Boss writes is visibly created by an LLM.

The Death Spiral refers to this effect whereby this situation, through a negative feedback loop, degrades over time. Every Worker email is interpreted in an increasingly negative light, no matter how carefully crafted it might be. The situation got so bad that the Worker got written-up and threatened with firing.

This almost became a perfect embodiment of Plato's Allegory of the Cave. The Boss was, after a few iterations, only seeing the shadows on the wall cast by the LLM effectively trained by the Boss through interaction.

I wonder how much of this might be going on in this brave new paradigm, with the potential of LLM's truly damaging human relations and by, effectively, largely removing the human factor from communications.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225521

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

I think of it as what happens in the show Survivor, where people sometimes team-up and vote out the strongest players because they perceive them as a threat, rather than taking advantage of them to help the team advance in the game. In other words, it's human nature.

In my experience, the asshole label, when faced with competence comes from people who are incompetent, insecure or, very often, both. I've seen this in action more than once.

When someone who is --to generalize-- one standard deviation more competent than a group comes into that group, they tend to be attacked like white blood cells attack foreign matter. Office politics and culture can be brutal and destructive this way. If everyone is comfortable, professionally non-threatening and at the same relative competence level, all is well. Smooth sailing. Introduce someone significantly better and you have a problem.

Think clearly, correctly and grounded in reality.

Stop voting for the people who have consistently allowed this to happen. We give them a tremendous amount of money. They misallocate it, waste it and allow fraud to happen to the tune of billions.

This has nothing to do with this communist/socialist view of the world that I see emanate from your comment. This is plain and simple: Government incompetence, fraud and theft.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with private industry.

This also has nothing whatsoever to do with unemployment rate. You are not going to take a 57 year old bank teller who was let go and put her to work fixing potholes on the highway.

And the connection to maximizing profits is even funnier. Do you realize that a company that maximizes profits pays more taxes? Do you realize that a person who maximizes profits through higher salaries or investments pays more taxes? Which means that the government has more money to allocate towards fixing the problems you noted?

Politicians enjoy a pile of benefits and privileges that the average citizen has no access to at all.

Simple example: They can lie to you and suffer no consequences. If you lie to them, even a minor lie, you can end up with serious criminal charges.

You took the list as literally applying to average citizens.

You took this part:

"In other words, like any real job by average citizens."

and completely ignored the next sentence:

"They should not be a privileged and protected class."

That's the point.

They are supposed to work for us and represent us, and yet they fly far above us at so many levels it is incredible. This is what students should be demonstrating about. It is destructive and equally corrupt regardless of political party.

In other words, it should be a universal truth (no party exceptions) that politicians should not exist as a class above those who elect them. Simple examples are health insurance, consequences for lies, fully paid lifetime benefits and pensions, etc. This is wrong.

Both for Senators and Representatives:

- Term limits (2 consecutive terms max) - No stock market participation in any form during office - No corporate or PAC contributions - Prison for lying to the public or during the course of their work (hearings, media, etc.) - Serious legal consequences for defamation or libel - No special medical/healthcare insurance, accounts or treatment - Pensions only bases on their own contributions, nothing else - No lifetime pensions or healthcare - This one is tough: Consequences for campaign promises not met (part of no lies) - Consequences for shutting down government - Serious consequences for not balancing the budget or driving meaningful reductions that will result in a balanced budget in short order - No media-related jobs for five years after leaving office - No book deals for five years after leaving office - No movie deals for five years after leaving office - No fancy office anything that costs more than your average Ikea/Walmart office furniture - Severe consequences for illicit enrichment; a bartender cannot come out of Congress a multi-millionaire, period.

In other words, like any real job by average citizens. They should not be a privileged and protected class.

Let's see Europe protect itself. Let's see the Middle East decide if they are a region that wants to support world terrorism or --on their own-- achieve peace. Let's see if China helps anybody.

I am perfectly comfortable with at least a one decade pullback. I see no reason for US citizens to subsidize countries all over the world to the tune of over $80 billion dollars and absolutely burn far more than that protecting Europe and others. Pull that back 100% and let's see what the world looks like. Invest that money internally on real infrastructure (not California bullshit projects that never get done), education, healthcare, housing and so many things we need far more than protecting the universe.

Yeah, I'd vote for that. I am sick un thankless nations always pointing a finger at the US. Let's eliminate that target and see how places like Spain and the UK and others do when they need help and we are busy watching it from across the ocean.

So be it. You are free to believe whatever you wish.