Notices by emilygorcenski (emilygorcenski@indieweb.social)

It turns out, actual engineering is a lot harder than software engineering, and this is something you should keep in mind as people start to claim ChatGPT can do a better job.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/22/23770260/titanic-tour-titan-submersible-catastrophic-implosion-oceangate

I’m not going to exhume the old ridiculous debates over the word “engineer,” but I am going to say this. I studied aeronautical and mechanical engineering and computational mathematics in university, worked as an aeronautical engineer for several years, and have also worked in software for many years.

Nothing, no single thing I have done in the entirety of my career in software has matched the difficulty or rigor of my third year coursework in my aero program, which was less complex than what I did professionally.

The only aspect of software development that came close was safety critical software, which unsurprisingly follows standards that emerge from electrical engineer practices.

Modern software development lacks the rigor, depth, and complexity of physical engineering.

This is not a flex.

This is saying that the management practices and work culture that we have developed for software development, which are perfectly suited for that space, are equally in magnitude unsuited for designing physical systems.

Every aspect, from testing to user experience to documentation and more.

It’s sad, because the former billionaire CEO of OceanGate had more than enough capital to do it the right way. But today’s billionaires pull themselves up by moving fast, eschewing rigor and expertise, and discarding all of the cultural philosophies required to make an engineering team work right.

Doing things rigorously doesn’t earn you the big gains today’s billionaires seek. This sub design was simply virtue signaling to other billionaires.

In Engineering school, regardless of your discipline, you’ll be taught about the time someone fucked up and killed people. Software has these studies, too, but far fewer of them, and the culture of the field is completely opposite from what we see in other fields.

Every so often I talk about THERAC-25 and ask if people know about it. A lot of people do, and the response is usually something like, “oh yeah the software was bad.”

The mindset is that it was lack of competence, not lack of care.

This I find troubling because it presumes that defects can be resolved through sheer skill, despite the fact that the software industry’s own research shows this not to be the case. Nevertheless, the myth persists.

You bring this mindset into building a submarine and people are going to die.

When you learn about engineering failures in school you quickly understand that it’s not that people were unintelligent, it’s because they were careless. And good engineering practice builds layers to make sure that carelessness doesn’t propagate.

The rigor of engineering is not the technical complexity of the problem space, it’s everything else around it.

In other words, literally everything the silicon valley grindset devalues.

I’m not super concerned about ChatGPT replacing writing as craft, not currently, and probably not in the future. It’s great at replacing the sort of bland, empty writing we have to do from time to time, and I think that the flood of low-quality, bland content will put a premium on actually good writing.

English is a much harder language to write in than most native English speakers realize. The more I work in another language and the more I review things written by non-native English speakers the more I realize this. ChatGPT produces text that is grammatically correct and even decently structured, but it is not *good* writing.

There’s this thing that people do in writing and presentations that drives me bonkers, and that’s when they follow a formulaic approach with no context whatsoever. Like in school you learn the five paragraph essay format and the first one is an introduction and the last is a conclusion and then somehow it sticks that that’s how good writing works.

But it’s so featureless. Read good writing. It has breaks and unreliable narrators or starts in media res or deceives the reader, it foreshadows and uses metaphor and symbolism, and it can do all of those things even in nonfiction writing.

Have you ever seen this image?

ChatGPT feels like the first, even when you are prompt engineering to get it not to be.

I just read Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and it’s fantastic how he uses language in that book, in ways that a computer will never be able to do.

ChatGPT won’t replace the craft of writing. It will replace bullshit writing, the kind of writing we have do to but don’t find any joy in. It replaces writing the letter to the judge asking to be excused from jury duty because of a doctor’s appointment. It replaces formulaic text that offers no pleasure.

The most powerful AIs in the world, ranked:

100. amazon’s product recommender that recommends you more socks when you just bought socks
99. The algorithm that decides what far right topic to make trending on Twitter
98. Facebook’s memories feature that reminds you of how your dog died 7 years ago
97. ChatGPT
…
1. The AI the New York Times uses to track you across countries and devices to find out you used up all your free articles this month

Hi! I am a computer science person, and I believe I have found a solution to a problem way outside my field that can help hundreds of thousands of people. To prove it, I ran a wildly unethical experiment. It should only be seen as a coincidence that my way of helping hundreds of thousands of people will also make me incredibly rich.