Most software development was either huge custom business systems or packaged desktop software complex enough to warrant fifty-dollar or more price tags at a time when $50 was worth a lot more than it is today.
Programming was in some ways far more and in other ways far less accessible to get into, and there weren’t software developers around every corner. Someone who could _use_ a computer with a modicum of fluency was a rarity, let alone someone who could program one.
It would be like asking whether accountants should fear for their jobs after the invention of the calculator.
Even MS Access (introduced something like a decade later) or the roughly equivalent FileMaker Pro were ways to build custom software for companies that would never have been able to afford the SWE team to build something from scratch. (And Access in particular tended to be wielded by people unfamiliar with relational database normalization in ways that made it a bit of a time-delayed footgun.)
Access is probably the best analogy for vibe coding in that sense — really good for building something small and custom for someone who couldn’t code it from scratch themselves. Yet not really suited for building large, complex production-grade (let alone “enterprise-grade”) systems — you could try, but you would come to regret it soon enough.
The main difference being that somehow a lot of software companies have managed to fall for the idea that it doesn’t have such limitations.
Unions were a big part of what kept the proceeds of that economic boom from accruing benefits almost exclusively to those already at the top. And helped sustain said boom by ensuring a much larger swath of the population had disposable income to grow a consumption economy.
Unions are very good at taking credit for things that would have happened anyway.
In a competitive labor market the company that's too stingy can't find/keep workers. What unions are good at is preventing machinery replacing workers until the industry is so far behind that they fail.
I read 3 'It's not X it's Y' sentences in a span of just 4 sentences total. Unfortunate that this is how they choose to present this product because I think the idea is good, but it seems that it's not interesting enough to WP to justify actually writing about it themselves.
Hand recounts are almost never performed. So tampering with tabulation machines could easily sway an election.
I’m the last person to believe the Jan 6 conspiracy theory (I’m more inclined to think the accusations of fraud were a pre-emptive strike to discredit anyone challenging the next election). But there is absolutely positively incentive for both domestic and foreign interests to interfere with the machines.
The ProPublica article specifically said "hand recount". That was in April of 2021, as I read The Internet.
There's also risk limiting audits done by most or all vote-by-mail states. The selection of ballots that are used in the audit is via randomly seeded RNG. I've only looked at Colorado:s RLA in detail, but it seems like RLA would be done by hand. I wrote a program to simulate CO's RLA algorithm so I can understand it. It detected "wrong candidate won" with far fewer audited ballots than "correct candidate won".
I agree about the incentive to tamper. Qanon Tina Peters did so, as did a Republican team led by Sidney "release the kraken" Powell, in Coffee County, GA in 2021.
TFA may have been about a hand recount, but the comment I was originally responding to seemed to suggest the existence of paper ballots negated the incentive to tamper with the computers.
Do those vote by mail states that audit audit only mail ballots? Or also ballots tallied at polling places? Because there are very few states that are mail-only; and mail ballots typically reflect different demographics and thus different voting tendencies than in-person ballots.
My state tallies paper ballots by machine, and doesn’t even show me whether it read my ballot correctly. I just have to take it on faith that tallies are correct and never tampered with.
Sorry, I misread you. Paper ballots don't eliminate incentives for tampering, but they certainly lessen them, and make it harder. Paper ballots can be recounted, by hand if need be, and audited (risk limiting audits). Nothing will eliminate the incentive to tamper if ideology pushes it (Qanon) or policy positions are religious doctrine, but very unpopular (use imagination). We can certainly decrease the incentives.
My state (CO) emails me when my ballot is in the mail, when they receive it back from me, and after it's counted. Practices vary, I guess.
This raises another question: what happens to mail in ballots of Trump and Project 2025 destroy or privatize the USPS?
Telling you the ballot has been counted isn’t the same as counting it, counting it correctly, or protecting the count from tampering.
Paper ballots and the possibility of a recount decreases the tampering incentive only if there’s sufficient reason to expect a recount. Given the rarity of recounts, that doesn’t seem to me like much of a deterrent.
ETA: re mail-in ballots and the USPS, that’s an incentive to vote in person if you can. It’s a legit concern for those for whom voting in person is problematic. I’m personally far more worried about the integrity of the count — and frankly, whether we’ll get to vote in a “free and fair” election at all. After all, even Russia still has “elections”.
Thank you for trying! I first built it as 'detect the human' response, but that was counter to the 'slop or not' framing. Yeah I'm also observing the same based on the first few hundred people's results. The harder models seem to write almost too well and that's generally not how humans write on the internet unless it is a blog post/essay. The easier models seem to be the ones that are tripping people the most.
Prepare for a major drop in what was already spread-too-thin enforcement of what are fairly low quality and safety standards relative to the rest of the developed world.
Interesting. In my experience, the US still has one of highest food qualities in the world, especially when you take into account it's diversity and variety. Sure, some things get missed here and there, but it's also a lot easier to be safe and consistent if you aren't producing the types of food the US is.
I guess it depends on what you mean by safe. My wife gets a lot of migraines from a lot of foods in the US (less so if she can get organic). When we travel through Europe she can eat anything without triggering a migraine. I’ve read the US allows about 10X more chemicals (pesticides? fertilizers?) than the EU, so we assume this is the difference.
With poor enforcement, it would be nice if at least I could buy my meat directly from the farmer I know where at least I can see the facilities for myself, but they have made that illegal -- no you must buy it through one of the poorly enforced USDA approved slaughterhouses that I have no personal connection to.
Your comment reminded me of this book called, "everything I want to do is illegal" [1] written by a farmer that talks about his annoyances with the US food system and how regulations favor corporate farming.
Yeah one of my friends is bashing her head against the wall about this. She’s a small farmer up on the Olympic peninsula where there are no approved slaughterhouses for small farmers to use to process meat, so them selling the meat locally to people around them is illegal. So she is trying to build one for the surrounding area, except all the regulations that exist are for insanely scaled operations and make no sense for a small scale… so she has to keep petitioning the county about different things.
We have the Food Freedom Act in Wyoming [1]. It technically requires meat be sold "for future delivery provided that the processing of the animals is done by the purchaser or by a Wyoming or federally licensed processing facility."
But in my experience, ranchers are liberal with how they define me "processing" my meat. (In one case, he pointed out the bits of silver skin he hadn't trimmed. So I "processed" those off at home.)
I buy beef in bulk from a rancher, who sends me to get it from a USDA approved slaughterhouse. Which is a small family operation, so I've gotten to know them well too. They raise the most delicious lamb I've ever tasted.
Do you think “have a personal relationship with the farmer, slaughterhouse, and butcher” is a scalable solution? And if you happen to live near a cattle ranch and know your supply chain for beef, how are you going to establish a relationship with the guy selling you fish as well? Will you be making road trips to the coast to talk to some fishermen and ride along on their boats?
The instinct to see a bureaucratic system working poorly and resolving to opt out instead of fixing it is precisely why everything sucks right now. You can’t just work and vibe and spend your way out of living in an advanced industrial society.
lol yes what we really need right now is unregulated interstate sales of raw milk. Luckily that was introduced in 2024 (last congress) and went nowhere.
Interesting, where are you running into trouble buying meat from local farmers? I've often visit rural farms that have a store houses. Nearly all of them haver refrigerators and freezers with meat to buy.
That's about as useful and true as "a programmer losing his/her job to AI is always a good thing".
There certainly exist bad regulations and bad bureaucrats, but many (most?) regulations are written in blood, whether it be from employees, customers, or merely innocent bystanders, and there needs to be a group of people who facilitate said regulations.
I'm all for aggressive and continuous re-evaluation of regulations and downsizing bloated bureaucracies, but blanket "all bueeaucrats/regulations are bad" sentiments gets us ineffectual and grifting BS like DOGE, and it creates the very real possibility we'll have to re-learn bloody lessons down the road.
Knee-capping the USDA will almost certainly to lead to some very painful education in the future.
