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by lioeters14 hours ago |
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upvoteby tempaccount505014 hours ago|
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Software companies have been about automating human labor since the invention of computers. It's the whole damn point. Why do you think finance used to be (sometimes still is) the head of the IT dept? Because we automated accounting away. Then typists. Then secretaries. Then drafting. Etc etc.
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upvoteby wiseowise14 hours ago|
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> It's the whole damn point.

Believe it or not, for some of us it’s not “the whole damn point”.

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upvoteby tempaccount505014 hours ago|
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Whether or not you want to admit that is up to you. If you're selling automation or efficiency gains, you're removing human labor.
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upvoteby gravypod10 hours ago|
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My first "job" in computing, where someone else paid me for code, was in a research context where we were modeling radio propagation. Nothing about that was removing human labor. It in face eventually called for a bunch of humans to interact with each other. See: https://www.hamsci.org/basic-project/2017-total-solar-eclips...

I don't think it is fair to claim computers are about putting people out of jobs.

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upvoteby tempaccount50509 hours ago|
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I think it is. Before computers you would have had to write all that down on paper logs. By using code, you saved yourself time. If it wasn't less labor, you wouldn't have done it that way.
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upvoteby oarsinsync1 hours ago|
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> Before computers

Computer used to mean "human who does math". Before machine computers, we had human computers. Machine computers replaced all of these human computers.

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upvoteby dash28 hours ago|
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Before it was less labor, they might not have done it at all. Computers let you do things quicker. So you do more things.
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upvoteby casey25 hours ago|
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Ok, then go work on homelessness or political corruption. It's not like we have a dearth of problems. Coding is solved.
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upvoteby gravypod7 hours ago|
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People *did* write down these logs, manually, and submit them.
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upvoteby tempaccount50507 hours ago|
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And without software, what then, make a bunch of books and mail it to all these people? On this site of all sites, it's blowing my mind that this kind of thing isn't obvious to everyone. I guess maybe it isn't if you were born before the internet, but man, I'm really surprised by some of these comments.
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upvoteby Georgelemental10 hours ago|
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Human labor could do the math by hand
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upvoteby aaomidi9 hours ago|
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And in fact, was how it was done.
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upvoteby skeledrew10 hours ago|
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Why else would one create software, if not to do something that a human does/did?
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upvoteby moring25 minutes ago|
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To do things that a human could have done in theory, but did not do because it would have been too expensive.
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upvoteby matt_kantor9 hours ago|
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A few off the top of my head:

- Video games

- Medical device firmware

- Synthesizers

- Detailed universe-scale physics simulations

- Mars rover control software

- The Linux kernel

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upvoteby skeledrew6 hours ago|
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- Video games - only feasible because of computers.

- Medical device firmware - hardware control layer for medical devices, which are used to aid in medical procedures.

- Synthesizers - help to make music.

- Detailed universe-scale physics simulations - help to make certain physics problems more tractable.

- Mars rover control software - helps to remote control rovers.

- The Linux kernel - control layer that sits between firmware and actual applications, pretty much just a common shared library so apps don't have to each ship with a full stack.

I don't really see your point here. None of these examples counter the argument that software is created to automate human labour as much as is practical.

Video games are an interesting category since they're entirely enabled by software: I can't imagine anyone driving a video game manually (note I don't consider things like Chess, etc software to be video games in this context; more things like FPS, racing, etc). I do remember as a kid I thought that there were actually little people doing the stuff in video games though.

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upvoteby tempaccount50507 hours ago|
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This list is funny.

All of these things existed in pre computer form.

A scheduler used to be a person putting punch cards into a machine.

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upvoteby TheRoque6 hours ago|
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What's the human form of a video game ?
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upvoteby brabel4 hours ago|
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Board games? All sorts of toys?
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upvoteby TheRoque2 hours ago|
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Well not really, since the board game itself doesn't need a paid human to work. It's been crafted by a human, but video games are also crafted by (arguably many more) humans. The closest would be escape games, or larger scale games maybe
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upvoteby nly2 hours ago|
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To do new things no number of humans can do
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upvoteby grim_io14 hours ago|
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No one is taking away programming as a hobby from you :)
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upvoteby sdevonoes14 hours ago|
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There are software components out there that are the backbone of our industry, and they are not governed by multibillion dollar companies. Linux, postgres, HTTP, TCP/IP, qemu,…

It’s not that anthropic/google/openai/etc are unavoidable

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upvoteby tomnipotent14 hours ago|
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> they are not governed by multibillion dollar companies

Every tech you mentioned is absolutely governed by multibillion dollar companies. Something like 75-85% of OSS code is contributed by employees doing their day job. Most Linux and Postgres contributions come from those same employees. HTTP and TCP/IP are managed by standard bodies and industry working groups that, you guessed it, are governed by multibillion dollar companies. Red Hat and IBM are responsible for 40-60% of contributions to Qemu.

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upvoteby raj129813 hours ago|
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The usual model for OSS projects is that initially they are written for free. Then an inner circle forms and exploits the second generation of idealists who write entire large features without ever getting the same rights.

Some of the inner circle move to corporations to increase their power and are joined by corporate developers (sometimes their bosses) to take over the project.

A lot of corporate OSS development are entirely unnecessary rewrites or simple things like release management. So I'd put the number of useful code by employees much lower.

But governed, hell yeah, I agree. The corporations crack the whip and oppress real contributors.

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upvoteby claude_delusion14 hours ago|
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[flagged]
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upvoteby satvikpendem12 hours ago|
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Don't make accounts just to add comments for a specific thread, you will get flagged.
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upvoteby tempaccount505013 hours ago|
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"ok guys, that's enough progress since now it's my job at stake, we can stop."
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upvoteby shmichael43 minutes ago|
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So you argue we discriminate based on who/what wrote the code, instead of what's in it?

Let's take this to a different domain, self driving cars. Would you equally argue for human driving? I'm pretty sure over time it will become clear to everyone that machines will be able to outperform humans consistently at this task, to the degree that human driving will become illegal. But for now the press likes to focus on any failure of machine driving, taking for granted human drivers are the largest or second largest cause of premature death in many countries.

Coding (in many ways, but not all) is a more open ended and versatile task than driving, so it's natural that current iterations seem untrustworthy, but ignoring the trajectory is erring on conservatism, and doesn't seem to me to be grounded in any sound reasoning.

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upvoteby foxes13 hours ago|
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How could it possibly be open source if it requires proprietary models developed by a few companies to writs the code.

Seems like that would make open source entirely controlled by open ai, anthropic et al.

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upvoteby brabel4 hours ago|
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Open source and open weight models are already really good. I don’t think anyone really depends on the big AI companies anymore, if they go away, the open source models seem to be already sufficiently good to take the torch and will continue to improve thanks to research. They may require money to train , but the cost of that is already covered quite well and if these model became the mainstream way to use AI , more money from governments and research institutions would be poured into them.

That is actually a very plausible scenario!

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upvoteby andy_ppp10 hours ago|
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It isn’t really slop anymore and it will keep improving.
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