Claude made this point while reviewing my blog for me: the mechanization of farms created a whole lot more specialization of roles. The person editing CAD diagrams of next year's combine harvester may not be a farmer strictly speaking, but farming is still where their livelihood comes from.
> Strictly speaking, farming is where all our livelihoods come from, in the greatest part. We're all living off the surplus value of food production.
I don't think farming is special here, because food isn't special. You could make exactly the same argument for water (or even air) instead of food, and all of a sudden all our livelihoods would derive ultimately from the local municipal waterworks.
Whether that's a reductio ad absurdum of the original argument, or a valuable new perspective on the local waterworks is left as an exercise to the reader.
Water largely isn't fundamenally transformed with use (unless it's involved in a chemical reaction, though that's a minute fraction of all water usage), though it may be dispersed or degraded (usually contaminated with something). But it can recover its earlier state with appropriate applications of process and energy. Water (and much else we consume) is a material input rather than an energy input.
With energy inputs it is the energy potential itself which provides value, and that potential is intrinsically consumed in their use. Water, wood, iron, aluminium, lithium, helium, etc., can all be recycled, restored to their useful state, at comparatively little cost.
Collecting the waste products of food don't give you that, on two counts. First, most of the actual metabolic output is gaseous and lost to the atmosphere at large (CO2 and water vapour in your breath), and to the extent that solid and liquid human waste are useful in producing new food, it's a nutrient fertilisers which enable energy conversion of sunlight to fuel, and not the primary energy input itself (sunlight).
I think you would want to be talking about entropy, not energy?
Recycling all the materials you mentioned costs 'energy' (to use your terminology). The same for food: we can use used-up food and a lot of energy and grow new food.
The process for 'recycling' wood is basically the same that for recycling food: you grow some plants. The waste products of used up wood are also basically the same as those for used up food.
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In any case, I don't see how any of this makes food more special than eg petrol or sunlight?
And you can argue that food is only useful, if we have air, ie oxygen to burn it with.
Except in a few places drinkable water is in such abundance that nobody every spent significant effort trying to get it. Likewise for air, few people have ever spent much effort getting air to breathe - even in the worst polluted areas bottled air was reserved for airplanes, hospitals (and a few people with medical conditions), and scuba divers.
And food is now in such abundance (at least in the western world) that we don't spend much effort on it, either. Or at least, if you only care about energy and nutrition, you can get it for really cheap. If you want something tastier, you can pay more. Exactly the same with drinks.
You could argue that water being so cheap is exactly what you'd expect when the surplus value of water production is sky-high: people only spend a fraction of their income on both food and water production, exactly because the surplus is so high.
Thus if water isn't the basis for all our livelihoods, neither is food production these days.
Removing jobs that could only be performed by those living near the particular fields with those that can be done anywhere makes jobs for the person willing to take the least satisfactory compensation for the most skill and work.
Working the summer fields was one of the least desirable jobs but still gave local students with no particular skills a good supplemental income appropriate for whichever region.
depending on the job, it may also allow you to select for talent much better, which creates intense competition and raises salaries significantly.
A good example of this phenomenon is sports. Even thought it can't be done remotely, it's so talent dependent that it's often better to find a great player in a foreign country and ask them to work for you, rather than relying exclusively on local talent. If it could be a remote job, this effect would be even greater.
Increasing total prosperity is the wrong goal if distribution is completely unregulated. Investor and real estate owning classes like the 1% get more, the salaries can trend down because food costs are down, in a deflation spiral the youth are perpetual dependents and/or debtors who can't possibly earn enough over day to day costs given global competition includes people with no debts or debts from an economy that was less wealthy.
Yeah I think the combine-harvester analogy is tempting because it's so easy to visualize how wheat can scale over a big square field and project that visual onto lines of code generated on a big square screen... forgetting that lines-of-code-generated is not inherently useful.
An interesting parallel because there were undoubtedly some people who worried we would lose something important in the craft of instruction-level programming, and almost certainly we have in relative terms. But in absolute numbers I am confident we have more low-level programmers than we did before Fortran.
And if I were to jump into instruction-level programming today I would start by asking an LLM where to begin...
Hi all - I write a lot for myself but typically don't share, hence the stream-of-consciousness style.
But I thought this might be worth blogifying just for the sake of adding some counter-narrative to the doomerism I see a lot regarding the value of software developers. Feel free to tear it apart :)
At WHOI we frequently run into some of these issues. Ocean-going projects often have long periods of disconnect, or have just a tiny bandwidth-capped connections that are meant for sending home critical data and not for automated software updates...
So much software also just takes for granted that it should be allowed on the Internet.
You're telling me. Being on HN and working on remote autonomous systems is such a dichotomy. We measure transmission rates in Kb still and costs in thousands of dollars. Not to mention power consumption. Sometimes I wish there was a conference for people working on these kinds of projects. "The union of Luddite scientists annual meeting" or something.
I would like to be able to use a gui to set up parameter sweeps based on info pulled from argparse and then convert back to a shell script that runs and saves the output sensibly.
A WYSIWYG editor that spits out a CLI you mean? That would pretty neat, though I think would necessarily be kind of constrained. I wonder who has tried that approach, I can't think of any examples
Actually, something like a "zotero for argparse" would be cool. Where you enter arguments, their type, help string, defaults etc in a gui and then you can check the ones you need for a given python script and copy the relevant python code into your paste buffer.
I don't think it would be a massive time saver however what I usually do now is find some previous script that had similar arguments and copy them, and then copy-paste-edit to add new arguments.
The other advantage is you could enter the arguments agnostically and export as whatever language you're working in.
how? you're going to modify the binary so that it can accept command line parameters? or clone the GUI's functionality in a CLI? that's akin to just creating the application from scratch.
