[socialismisok]

Hey Ryan! Have you ever done any reading on the Luddites? They weren't the anti technology, anti progress social force people think they were.

They were highly skilled laborers who knew how to operate complex looms. When auto looms came along, factory owners decided they didn't want highly trained, knowledgeable workers they wanted highly disposable workers. The Luddites were happy to operate the new looms, they just wanted to realize some of the profit from the savings in labor along with the factory owners. When the factory owners said no, the Luddites smashed the new looms.

Genuinely, and I'm not trying to ask this with any snark, do you view the work you do as similar to the manufacturers of the auto looms? The opportunity to reduce labor but also further the strength of the owner vs the worker? I could see arguments being made both ways and I'm curious about how your thoughts fall.

[dmix]

What alternative are you suggesting?

Things turned out pretty great economy-wise for people in the UK. So that's a poor example even if Luddites didn't hate technology. Not working on the technology wouldn't have done the world any favours (nor the millions of people who wore the more affordable clothes it produced).

I personally think it'd be rewarding to make developers lives easier, essentially just saving the countless hours we spend googling + copy/pasting Stackoverflow answers.

Co-pilot is merely just one project in this technological development, even if a mega-corp like Microsoft doesn't do it ML is here to stay.

If you're concerned that software developers job security is at all at risk from co-pilot than you greatly misunderstand how software engineering works.

Auto-completing a few functions you'd copy/paste otherwise (or rewrite for the hundredth time) is a small part of building a piece of software. If they struggle with self-driving cars, I think you'll be alright.

At the end-of-the-day there's a big incentive for Github et al to solve this problem, a class action lawsuit is always an overhanging threat. Even if co-pilot doesn't make sense as a business and these pushback shut it down I doubt it will go away.

I'm personally confident the industry will eventually figure out the licensing issues. The industry will develop better automated detection systems and if it requires more explicit flagging, no-one is better positioned to apply that technologically than Github.

[yywwbbn]

The first few decades of the 19th century were exceptionally grim in the UK though. Poverty and inequality both increased and a reactionary government enacted draconian policies curtailing freedom of speech as Britain was probably closest to the brink of a social revolution as it ever was. It took several decades for things to actually start improving for most common people and most of the actual progress in that area only occurred in the 1940s and 50s.

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre for example

[tluyben2]

> If you're concerned that software developers job security is at all at risk from co-pilot than you greatly misunderstand how software engineering works.

I think you are vastly underestimating how many professionally employed software developers are replaceable by copilot at this very moment. The managers are not caught up yet and you seem to be lucky not having to work with this type of dev, but I have had 1000s of people I interacted with in a professional capacity over the decades who can be replaced today. Some of those realised this and moved to different positions (for instance, advising how to use ML to replace them: if you cannot beat them…).

I mean of course you are right in general but there are millions of ‘developers’ who just look everything up with Google/SO, copy paste and change until it works. You are saying this will make their lives better, I say it will terminate their employment.

Anecdote: I know a guy who makes a boatload of money in London programming but has no understanding of things like classes, functional constructs, functions, iterators (he kind of, sometimes, understands loops) etc. He simply copies things and changes them until it works: he moved to frontend (react) as there he is almost not distinguishable from his more capable colleagues because they are all in a ‘put code and see the result’ type of mode anyway and all structures look the same in that framework, so the skeleton function, useXXX etc is all copy paste mostly anyway.

[matwood]

> ‘put code and see the result’

Isn't this basically all UI programming? :D

Joking aside, I see this 'person X doesn't know anything, but they are still delivering' attitude quite a bit on HN now. They clearly know something, and projects like co-pilot will make them even more effective.

I think the opposite of you - that projects like co-pilot will further lower the barriers of entry to programming and expand those who program. I also think that like all ease of programming advances in the past, business requirements will continue to grow at the edges where those who care about the craft will still be required.

[tluyben2]

Oh I do believe you are right, I just don’t think this is a thing just anyone can learn: many ‘outsourcing’ programmers/coders don’t really understand what they are working on; they just finish tasks. I have no stats, but in companies I worked/work with, it is the vast majority. They don’t know or care about the business goals, they just perform tasks and then go home. This is almost already replaceable by copilot.

Like I said; it is a great thing for me but I don’t believe developers without talent and/or rigorous foundations will make it. Go on Upwork and try to find someone who can do more than the same work (mostly copy paste) that they always did. In an interview when you ask someone to use map/reduce to create a map/dict, they will glaze over. This is the norm, not the exception, no matter the pay. Some of them have 10 years experience but cannot do anything else than make crud pages. This will end as copilot makes lovely .reduce and linq art from a human language prompt.

[bamboozled]

Who or what would replace them ? If you got rid of these developers, how would those who did the firing know what they’re doing ?

[tluyben2]

I use copilot to do things that I would’ve hired people for. I create tests and put comments in my code and copilot comes up with pages of dreary boring shit that would take me 0 pleasure or brainpower but would take a lot of work to just go through.

A real good example is mapping objects: let’s say you have a deep nested object from an ERP and you need to map that to another system(s). This is horrible work and copilot just generates almost everything for it if it knows the input and output objects; it ‘knows’ that address = street and if it is not it will deduct it from the models or comments or both; if there is a separate house number and stuff, it’ll generate code to translate that. I used to hire people for that; no longer; it just pops, I run the tests and fix some thing here and there.

[bamboozled]

I have to be honest I've not used it but it truly sounds incredible that it can do things as well as you say.

So you write tests and copilot generates code you shove into production with little overhead ?

Do you read the code thoroughly (kind of negating having it generated for you?), or just have blind faith in it because tests are green and just YOLO it into production ?

I'd feel pretty uneasy deploying code that:

  * I, or a trusted peer has not written.

  * Hasn't been reviewed by my peers.

  * Code I, or my peers don't understand fairly well.

That's not to say I think me or my colleagues write code that doesn't have problems, but I like to think we at least understand the code we work with and I believe this has benefits beyond just getting stuff done quickly and cheaply.

In other words, I have no problem using code generated by co-pilot, but I'd feel the need to read and review it quite thoroughly and then I sort of feel that negates the purpose, and it also means it pulls my back into the role of doing work I'd hire someone else to do.

[tluyben2]

But I do review and test it and it is mostly 80% ok. It even learns your style of coding. Like said; it works best for stuff that is heavy on code but low on thought.

[thdespou]

So are you going to report him or you are just whining about why life is unfair? What he does in order to do his job is none of your business as you don't know how his life is behind the scenes.

[spockz]

I read the gp comment as an example of the type of engineer that can be replaced by copilot. Nothing more.

[tluyben2]

Indeed; that was the intended message. I don’t go reporting random people who slack off but yet complete their work; that would be a really busy job… I think there is even a word for that now in English (I am dutch). I will try to find it.

[UncleEntity]

Which doesn’t actually seem like a great loss imho…

I will admit I’m kind of a “throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks” kind of coder but nobody is paying me boatloads of money to poke at some program until it stops segfaulting, would be nice though.

[tluyben2]

Why would I report him? He is doing what he is asked to do?

[krageon]

The luddites were right. Everything is worse because they did not win, which is obvious if you spend a second thinking about what them not winning means: more concentrated wealth, more disenfranchised workers.

[cdogl]

It’s difficult for me to see how 2022 is worse than 1816 all things considered.

[aziaziazi]

Durability, quality and reparability. Most fabrics build today are so fragile and needs to be replaced soon, despite the advance in material and weaving.

Most highly qualified workers loves what they do and would stand for keeping they’re output quality up. On the contrary interchangeable cheap workers have no real incentive to that. The factory’s manager is left alone in charge to balance quality versus cheapness, and the last comes with obsolescence (planned or not), which is good for business.

[colinmhayes]

> Most fabrics build today are so fragile and needs to be replaced soon

Because that's what people want. You can get high quality clothes for much cheaper than you could in 1816, but people prefer disposable clothes so they can change their look more often. This is just producers responding to demand.

[aziaziazi]

“People want so producers responds” is a nice but candide eco theory, 2022 looks more like “producers pay for marketing that makes people want” oh and by the way, who’s really paying for the marketing at the end ?

[chopin]

Properly sourcing high quality stuff is incredibly difficult for consumers. Price is not a good discriminator, unfortunately. This is a problem everywhere but for clothes in particular.

[MSFT_Edging]

https://theweek.com/feature/briefing/1016752/the-real-cost-o...

Maybe not right this moment but our actions have consequences in the future.

For those who only see the next quarter, they're stoked.

For those who understand infinite growth is impossible and would simply like a livable world, they're horrified.

[andrepd]

It would indeed be an outstanding catastrophe if 200 years of the most incredible scientific and technological progress yielded a worse result. Of course, that is entirely not the point (none of the times this trope comes out). What is being argued is that 2022 as it is is worse than 2022 as it could be.

In other words: things improved because of technology and despite the societal/economic framework, not because of it.

[Moissanite]

Everything is worse than it could have been now, not directly compared to 200 years ago.

I find it very hard to believe you didn't understand the suggestion.

[abduhl]

>> Everything is worse than it could have been now

Prove it.

[quickthrower2]

Tax is supposed to deal with this to some extent but the rich have the resources to avoid it!

[Jochim]

We've also steadily lowered tax rates over the last 50 years. Many countries are at historically low tax burdens despite rising inequality and no evidence of this improving economic growth.

[eurasiantiger]

Yet the public narrative centers around perceived anti-technologism and implied anti-comfortism, wholly ignoring the societal underpinnings of the issue: an increase in power and income inequality amounting to disenfranchisement.

[MichaelCollins]

Who wrote and popularized that narrative? The industrialists with printing presses.

[andrepd]

> Not working on the technology wouldn't have done the world any favours (nor the millions of people who wore the more affordable clothes it produced).

Did you read the comment you're replying to at all? It says

>The Luddites were happy to operate the new looms, they just wanted to realize some of the profit from the savings in labor along with the factory owners.

Now maybe you agree maybe you disagree. But if you're just talking past the person you're replying to... what's the point?

[robertlagrant]

But - the only reason anyone makes money (other than tax money) is because they're useful to someone else. Almost all of the clothing industry companies make money from large numbers of people buying their clothes. So they are useful to us.

Similarly, the reason Europe put 30% of its populace "out of work" by industrialising agriculture is why we don't have to all go work in fields all day. It is a massive net positive for us all.

Moving ice from the arctic into America quickly enough before it melted was a big industry. The refrigerator put paid to that, and improved lives the world over.

Monks retained knowledge through careful copying and retransmission of knowledge during the medieval times in the UK. That knowledge was foundational in the incredible acceleration of development in the UK and neighbouring countries in the 18th and 19th centuries. But the printing press, that rendered those monks much less relevant to culture and academia, was still a very good idea that we all still benefit from today.

Soon, millions of car mechanics who specialise in ICE engines will have to retrain or, possibly, just be made redundant. That may be required for us to reduce our pollution output by a few percent globally, and we may well need to do that.

The exact moment in history when workers who've learned how to do one job are rendered obsolete is painful, yes, and they are well within their rights to what they can to retain a living. But that doesn't mean those workers are somehow right; nor that all subsequent generations should have to delay or forego the life improvement that a useful advance brings, nor all of the advances that would be built on that advance.

[latexr]

> the only reason anyone makes money (other than tax money) is because they're useful to someone else.

Stealing, scamming, gambling, inheriting, collecting interest, price gouging, slavery, underpaying workers, supporting laws to undermine competitors… Plenty of ways to make money without being useful—or by being actively harmful—to someone else.

> Almost all of the clothing industry companies make money from large numbers of people buying their clothes. So they are useful to us.

We don’t need all that clothing, made by monetarily exploiting people in poor countries and sold by emotionally exploiting people in rich countries under the guise of “fashion”. The usefulness line has long been crossed, it’s about profit profit profit.

[bryanrasmussen]

>sold by emotionally exploiting people in rich countries under the guise of “fashion”.

only emotionally crippled people like fashion, if they were healthy they would all dress in gray unitards and march in formation towards the glorious future!

hey I too have often been carried away by my own rhetoric but come on!

[latexr]

> only emotionally crippled people like fashion

Please don’t straw man¹. That’s neither what I said, nor what intended to convey, nor what I believe.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[andrepd]

We definitely don't need to change wardrobes entirely 2x per year, at great cost in externalities such as pollution from all the shipping. I'm sure you understood that this is the point.

[bryanrasmussen]

I assumed that this was the point but that latexr had been carried away by their rhetoric, like perhaps to the point of sounding a little bit loony, hence the line:

>hey I too have often been carried away by my own rhetoric but come on!

[hcrean]

This was an amusing comment.

[robertlagrant]

> Plenty of ways to make money without being useful—or by being actively harmful—to someone else.

I don't equate, say, "making money" with "stealing money". I mean the way people do things within the law. Inheriting is different; the money is already made. Interest is being useful to someone else, via the loan of capital.

[enragedcacti]

> I don't equate, say, "making money" with "stealing money". I mean the way people do things within the law.

Laws shouldn't be equated to ethics. There have been and will be countless ways to make money legally and unethically in any society.

[robertlagrant]

I've no idea what your point is in relation to the topic. Stealing money is against the law, so that already rules it out from "making money". That was my point.

[latexr]

> I mean the way people do things within the law.

The examples considered that: gambling, collecting interest, price gouging, underpaying workers, supporting laws to undermine competitors.

[robertlagrant]

As I say, interest is being useful to someone else, via the loan of capital.

Gambling - I don't do it, but I'd need more specifics to see why gambling is bad in this sense. It's a voluntary pursuit that I think is a bad idea, but that doesn't make it illegal.

Price gouging is still being useful, just at a higher price. Someone could charge me £10 for bread and if that was the cheapest bread available, I'd buy it. If it is excessive and for essential goods, it is increasingly illegal, however. 42 out of 50 states in the US have anti-gouging laws [0], which, as I say, isn't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about legal things.

Underpaying workers - this certainly isn't illegal, unless it's below minimum wage, but also "underpaying" is an arbitrary term. If there's a regulatory/legal/corrupt state environment in which it's hard to create competitors to established businesses, then that's bad because it drives wages down. Otherwise, wages are set by what both the worker and employer sides will bear. And, lest we forget, there is still money coming into the business by it being useful. Customers are paying it for something. The fact that it might make less profit by paying more doesn't undermine that fundamental fact.

As for supporting laws to undermine competitors, that is something people can do, yes. Microsoft, after their app store went nowhere, came out against Apple and Google charging 30% for apps. Probably more of a PR move than a legal one, but businesses trying to influence laws isn't bad, because they have a valid perspective on the world just as we all do, unless it's corruption. Which is (once more, with feeling) illegal, and so out of scope of my comment. And again, unless the laws are there to establish a monopoly incumbent, which is pretty rare, and definitely the fault of the government that passes the laws, the company is still only really in existence because it does something useful enough to its customers that they pay it money.

[0] https://www.law360.com/articles/1362471

[CPLX]

You see this argument over and over again but it’s the exception that proves the rule.

Most of the time when it’s made it’s just papering over yer another situation where a surplus is being squeezed out of a transaction by a parasitic manager class using principal-agent problem dynamics.

The people who invented this stuff are always trying to tell you they’ve invented the cotton gin or something when in fact they’ve just come up with a clever way to take someone else’s work and exploit it.

[robertlagrant]

What was described wasn't the principal-agent problem. If I'm an employee and my job becomes simpler or more productive through an automation investment by someone else, I don't think I deserve part of the increased profit unless I'm part of a profit-sharing agreement that would also see me absorb losses.

[andrepd]

> unless I'm part of a profit-sharing agreement that would also see me absorb losses

And how many workers even have the possibility of an arrangement like this, i.e. a worker-owned cooperative?

Yes, that is exactly the point. When a labour-saving technological development comes along, it's payday to the capital-having class and dreary times for the labour-doing class.

[robertlagrant]

And it's good for everyone down the line, because the good being produced becomes more affordable and better. It might be hard to zoom out from these current times when we can expect continual progress, but this is one of the only reasons why anything ever gets better.

I'm from the UK, and we used to make motorbikes. They got - correctly - outcompeted by Japanese bikes in the 1950s that were built with more modern investment and tooling. If Japan hadn't done that, we'd have more motorcycle jobs in the UK, and terrible motorcycles that still leaked oil because the seam of the crankcase would still be vertical and not horizontal.

I'm not saying anything about this process is perfect and pain-free, but it seems that a lot of the things we have now are because of processes like this. Should Tesla sell through dealerships instead of direct to consumers? I think the answer is, "Tesla should do what's best for its customers", and not "Tesla should act to keep dealership jobs and not worry about what's best for its customers."

Businesses exist for their customers and not their employees, and having just been part of a business that, shall we say, radically downsized, I've seen a little of the pain of that. Thankfully it was a high tech business, and as the best employment protection is other employers, and there are loads of employers wanting tech skills I've seen my great colleagues all get new jobs. But I think it's ultimately disempowering to think of your employer like a superior when it should feel like an equal whose goals happen to coincide with yours for a while.

[b3morales]

In the case of Copilot, the automation "investment" rides directly on the back of a large pile of code. And the creators of that code are receiving none of the fruits of this "investment".

[bamboozled]

Would for you to present a concrete example of this. Genuinely curious.

[tablespoon]

> But - the only reason anyone makes money (other than tax money) is because they're useful to someone else. Almost all of the clothing industry companies make money from large numbers of people buying their clothes. So they are useful to us.

No, that's not true. Capitalists make money from simply owning things, not because they're necessarily doing anything useful.

[robertlagrant]

> No, that's not true. Capitalists make money from simply owning things, not because they're necessarily doing anything useful.

Can you elaborate on this? How can I become a capitalist so all my possessions start earning me money?

[tablespoon]

> Can you elaborate on this? How can I become a capitalist so all my possessions start earning me money?

Capitalists make money from simply owning things, but that doesn't imply in the slightest that everything that can be owned produces income.

The classic example is a landlord: he collects income because he simply owns the land others need or want to use. He doesn't necessarily have do any work that's useful to anyone else, not even maintenance or "capital allocation."

[robertlagrant]

If the property isn't useful, then why is anyone renting it?

[carom]

I am violently opposed to copilot and it has nothing to do with feeling threatened. I would gladly use a model whose weights were open sourced or proprietary that paid for its training material.

[krab]

While an interesting take, it doesn't apply directly. In my opinion, the situation is more similar to search engines bringing you code snippets - they shouldn't be stripped of their original licenses. At least that's the legal framework we used to operate in.

Sure the legal framework can change, but such profound change will have surely many consequences we won't foresee, for good or bad.

[gernb]

what happened with auto looms is cloth became cheap which allowed more people to have clothing and expanded the fashion industry by 1000x

Sure glad thse Luddites didn't get their way

[soft_dev_person]

I can guess the modern slaves producing our cheap clothes would have an opinion on that.

[robertlagrant]

It's true that a lot of the fashion industry appears to be pretty disgusting. But that doesn't mean that it would be better if fewer of the steps were automated.

[MSFT_Edging]

Local communities would be stronger and more resilient with more local crafts-people providing meaningful labor within said communities.

Currently, everything is extraction and the US is rotting from the inside out because of it.

[robertlagrant]

People can do that right now; they just choose not to. I don't think you can do simple moralising at the state of things and point the blame at a single cause.

[colinmhayes]

Or people would consume less and therefore be poorer.

[vidarh]

So you read the comment which specifically made the argument that they didn't want to prevent the new looms from being used and concluded that they wanted to prevent the new looms from being used?

[bamboozled]

It's probably also opened up a whole niche market for artisan "handwoven" fabrics.

Sadly that's probably a modern thing and not something that people wanted / cared about immediately once everyone lost their jobs.

[CrimsonRain]

The Luddites can use auto looms on their own and be their own owners. Labor force wants salary + profit but entirely missing from accepting loss. Funny stuff.

[LtWorf]

"risk" -_-' Because no private business has ever been bailed out or received any public funding, right?

[robertlagrant]

Yes, that is also bad. Public bodies choosing to give private companies money because otherwise they'd fail is bad stewardship of our taxes.

But also this point is silly. Plenty of money and effort is risked and lost with no bailout. Bailouts are extremely unusual in the grand scheme of things.

[LtWorf]

Not rarer than bankrupcy.

[robertlagrant]

Are you sure? According to Statistica there were over 700k bankruptcies in the US from 2000-2020 [0]. How many bailouts have there been?

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/817918/number-of-busines...

[LtWorf]

A lot more. For example, but not only: https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/15639-trump-covid-19-sba-l...