I disagree with the premise - interesting but I interpret the same fact pattern differently.
The history of technology is the replacement of manual processes with automated ones.
Consider a very basic process: checkout of a restaurant.
Writing the price of each item on a sheet of paper, manually adding them and writing the total was replaced with typing in the prices and eventually with just pushing the button for the item. Paper still exists for jotting down your order but within seconds of leaving the table it’s transitioned to computer.
This has enabled lots of desirable advances- speed, accuracy, new payment rails, and increasingly, elimination of the server in checkout- you tap a credit card on a tabletop device.
Did we “forget” how to do checkout? No. We purposely changed it.
But if the internet connection goes down or the backend server powering the cash register app goes down, there is an atrophied and not-regularly exercised skill set (maybe not even trained, IDK) that has to be implemented on-the-fly and it’s slow and frustrating for everyone.
Businesses don’t exercise (or perhaps even train) this process because it’s just not needed enough to warrant the cost.
Military procurement of weapons systems is hardly the place to point to as a technological tradition. There are lots of cases where no one pays the money to keep a production process in place; the reasons are all related to shortsighted “cost savings” or failing to anticipate changing needs.
With coding today, we are seeing the same kind of shift in priorities as my restaurant example. Having humans write code in the 2020 (pre-GPT) tradition was extremely inefficient in terms of time-from-idea-to-implementation.
We’ve found a new way to do the mundane part of that task (the mechanics of translating spec to implementation).
We are figuring out how to do that while preserving quality (and a lot of it is learning how to specify appropriately).
Will we “forget” how to “build” code?
No, but the skills to generate source code by hand will atrophy just as the skills to draw blueprints by hand atrophied with the advent of CAD.
Will we find examples where someone prematurely optimized away knowledge of a skill or process, incorrectly thinking it was no longer needed? Of course.
But the productivity gains we get will be so great on average that no one will go back to doing things the old way.
There will be old-timers and hobbyists who will preserve some of that knowledge; for most it will just be a curiosity.
Everyone is taught at a young age how to do basic addition and multiplication. That's all check out requires. People are not taught at a young age how Rust lifetimes work or how to write human maintainable code.
I agree, as with everything in 2026, the reality lands somewhere in the middle of the discourse online. But pretending this is in practice anything like the check out example is wrong.
Though I do believe you are making them in good faith, I find those comparisons do not hold.
CAD still requires you know what to do, and without CAD you can still draw blueprints by hand because you know what the result should be. Checkout is basic arithmetic you can do on a paper or even your personal phone. In both cases it is clear what the process is and what the output should be, and it doesn’t replace knowledge and training and certification.
With coding, none of that is true. By and large, there is a trend of people who don’t know what they’re doing shitting out software, or people who should know better not verifying the very flawed output they get. That is already having negative consequences in people’s lives.
My father, who was a mechanical engineer, has noted an instance of "brainrot" occurring with younger engineers: they are instructed in how to design parts, but not how to machine them, so they lack physical intuition about what kind of finish and tolerance is appropriate for a given part. This isn't really the fault of the young engineers, nor is it the fault of CAD which is still mainly a more efficient, more expensive draftsman's pencil, just a consequence of the fact that engineering curricula have largely optimized away the craftsmanship aspects of actually building things, leaving mechanical design work to be a mainly theoretical exercise.
With AI-assisted development we are at risk of something similar happening; the promise of LLM-based programming assistance is the ability to very rapidly knock together something according to a high-level specification without developing the craftsman's "feel" for how it actually runs. The scope of what's passed on in the discipline is narrowing, and people are forgetting essential skills they used to rely on in order to craft quality software.
The point you seem to be missing is that focusing only on optimization makes us all fragile to system shocks.
> Businesses don’t exercise (or perhaps even train) this process because it’s just not needed enough to warrant the cost.
Until a crisis hits. Covid and supply chain failures. Iran war and straight of Hormuz. Prolonged War in Europe with no production pipeline available. Banks collapsing after unsustainable overleveraging in supposedly "safe" mortgages.
For every optimization and cost-saving measure that is deployed, there should be a backup plan in place. MBA types and "technologists" keep missing this. What is the backup plan for the case where most of the economy activity is built on software produced by business who overleveraged on LLM for code generation?
AI layoffs are very shortsighted IMO and should be viewed by investors as a sign of weakness in management or the business itself.
If everyone is going to increase productivity by some factor k per employee, then kx is the new norm of overall productivity of x employees.
If you lay off some percentage Y of your work force, then your expected gains will only be k(x(100-y)/100). In other words, you will not recognize the same productivity gains as your competitors that chose not to lay off.
Yes I realize it is more complex than that, because of reduced opex, but there are diminishing returns very quickly.
Mixing in geothermal and hydro really distorts the story. Although technically correct, the common usage connotation of “renewable energy “ today is “wind and solar”.
Perhaps not, However Gamification of fitness is huge motivation for many people to keep exercising and maintaining the rhythm which in fitness is quite important.
Such social sharing + gamification systems are no different than Github contribution streak or StackOverflow awards for streaks etc. Those streak award only benefited the platform, while awarding us fake points and badges, the fitness streak rewards and social sharing benefits the users health so arguably has a stronger case for being gamified.
We can argue all day that people should want to do fitness to be healthy, not on how they look or other people see them or their fitness, but reality is that the social component of fitness is a big part for many people be it at the gym or in an app.
Logging is one thing, syncing it to the cloud is unnecessary and shouldn’t even be the default; making any of the location data available publicly is just terrible. If you want to share an individual workout map so you can say you circumnavigated Manhattan or whatever, fine! Share that one workout with your friends! (And ideally as a freaking screenshot rather than some database) Anything else is far too risky.
It doesn't need to be anything nearly that dramatic as assassins, because economies of scale both lower the bar and make most attacks impersonal. Consider how odd it would be for someone in 2025 to say: "Computer security?I haven't done anything to personally offend a genius hacker."
Imagine this data going to a burglar, who has a digital dashboard of nearby one-person properties and when the owner is likely to be out, able to act with confidence they can leave before the victim could return.
Sure, sophisticated international hitmen won't have any interest in catching you in ambush... but that doesn't make you safe from a local rapist of opportunity.
They are. A related example is criminal gangs tageting gun owners in France after the dataleak at the sport shooting federation. This one has been well covered. There have been a few hundred targeted robberies (on old people mostly) and one or two deaths (predictably).
In Western Europe there are also foreign burglar gangs that go on sprees for a few weeks. They're well organised but don't have time to do the stalking. They use publicly available data as much as they can.
do you have any evidence to back your claim? gangs employing teams of underage burglars assisted by risk averse adults with skills for entry and targeting are a thing. everyone has a mobile phone.
> Most of us aren't being pursued by stalkers or assassins.
Most of us, but for those that are...
However, in the world we live in today, the various LEOs are using this type of data to find people they do not like. It's getting to the point that I pine for the days of good ol' 1985 where you could just be another anonymous person in public with no tracking of your every move.
Fwiw, from the people I know using Strava, it's less about the sharing/reading other's efforts aspect that makes them use it, and more because of the analysis, dashboards and stuff like that.
For me it's both. I compare my runs on routes and segments going back years. The social part is nice to share info about trail conditions and see when my friends hit a big effort or PR.
Sure, but many people want to use Strava for more than one purpose.
a) Analysis and tracking of your own personal goals. (Some of the tools are better than the stuff available on the device itself.)
b) Sharing and socialising some other activities.
You can be careful and only allow certain activities to be public but you'll make mistakes and eventually many people will just think "whatever, I'll just default to public and remember to hide the ones I don't want to be public" and then it's even easier to make mistakes.
Defaulting to "opt-in" is all well and good until a human makes a mistake.
imho with unusually sensitive things like precise location data it could just not let you opt-in to making it all public, and make it much easier to share with a specific named friends than to share on a public directory
I really don't understand these criticisms of Strava, it has excellent privacy controls so you can share as little or as much as you want. You can already choose to share your activities with only your friends (followers). Or keep your activities private or hide the location data.
It does but my point is that your settings are applied to all activities.
Here's a few examples that might help demonstrate my point:
I used to do parkrun regularly. I had no problem sharing my Strava activities for parkrun because me doing it wasn't a secret, nor was the location secret, nor was my time secret. All of these things could be found from the parkrun website once the results had come up. John Doe was at this location at 9am and ran this route with 400 others in a time of 26 minutes or whatever.
I was also part of a cycling club that did a regular "club run" on a Sunday. 5-15 of us all doing the same route. It was good for club morale for us all to upload our rides to help show how popular it was and encourage other club members to come along. They could see that we weren't going at a silly pace and that we stopped regularly to regroup as we had riders of all abilities and speeds riding with us.
But then I also helped out with my kids running club at school, taking a bunch of 7-11 year old's on a 20 minute jog/run (depending on how quick they were) around the local area. This absolutely should not appear on Strava (public or not). The running club wasn't a secret (everyone at the school knew since they had the option of letting their kid do it) but that's a whole world of difference from having it public on Strava showing the usual start time, the various routes we used to take, where we stopped, etc. Privacy zones can help hide the start/end but that wouldn't help hide everything.
We just made sure that all of the parents who helped out knew that we shouldn't even record it with their smartwatch. I just used to create a manual entry of "Morning run" with approximate distance and time. That was good enough for my training stats.
There's no one privacy setting that handles all of this. Whatever setting you use relies on me to manually adjust the activities that don't fit that setting. The problem is that humans are fallible, so remembering to make it private or hide the location data isn't entirely reliable. You're also at the mercy of Strava (or whatever) not doing something stupid and accidentally making private data visible due to some bug, glitch or leak.
Right, requiring human intervention to share a run (other than maybe with eg a specific small circle of mutual friends) seems like it solves all those problems, other than perhaps being annoyed that you forgot to manually share a run.
But at least that's a failure you can fix once you notice, as opposed to making something public that shouldn't have been. Letting people opt in to automatically sharing runs to the public just seems like something designed to get people to share stuff without thinking about it.
I'm saying something a bit different: that even letting people opt in to sharing every run they track publicly is just asking for trouble. It's setting people up for their information to be made public when they forget to turn it off or that they turned it on in the first place.
Maybe "automatically share everything to the globe" should just not be an option for sensitive data like this.
Which if you've ever had a Garmin device + tried Strava, you'd realize that perhaps Strava provides additional insights on top of what Garmin provides?
Same argument applies. Driving slowly for 1km 0.01 under the speed limit, over legal blood alco limit is safer than driving at the speed limit for 10kms just under the alco limit.
It's very easy to come up with thought experiments to show that technically illegal scenarios are not necessarily more dangerous than some legal scenarios.
The law is often made to be easy to apply, not for precision. Hard to see how anyone could see otherwise.
That's not say that the laws are necessarily problematic. You have to draw the line somewhere.
The history of technology is the replacement of manual processes with automated ones.
Consider a very basic process: checkout of a restaurant.
Writing the price of each item on a sheet of paper, manually adding them and writing the total was replaced with typing in the prices and eventually with just pushing the button for the item. Paper still exists for jotting down your order but within seconds of leaving the table it’s transitioned to computer.
This has enabled lots of desirable advances- speed, accuracy, new payment rails, and increasingly, elimination of the server in checkout- you tap a credit card on a tabletop device.
Did we “forget” how to do checkout? No. We purposely changed it.
But if the internet connection goes down or the backend server powering the cash register app goes down, there is an atrophied and not-regularly exercised skill set (maybe not even trained, IDK) that has to be implemented on-the-fly and it’s slow and frustrating for everyone.
Businesses don’t exercise (or perhaps even train) this process because it’s just not needed enough to warrant the cost.
Military procurement of weapons systems is hardly the place to point to as a technological tradition. There are lots of cases where no one pays the money to keep a production process in place; the reasons are all related to shortsighted “cost savings” or failing to anticipate changing needs.
With coding today, we are seeing the same kind of shift in priorities as my restaurant example. Having humans write code in the 2020 (pre-GPT) tradition was extremely inefficient in terms of time-from-idea-to-implementation.
We’ve found a new way to do the mundane part of that task (the mechanics of translating spec to implementation).
We are figuring out how to do that while preserving quality (and a lot of it is learning how to specify appropriately).
Will we “forget” how to “build” code?
No, but the skills to generate source code by hand will atrophy just as the skills to draw blueprints by hand atrophied with the advent of CAD.
Will we find examples where someone prematurely optimized away knowledge of a skill or process, incorrectly thinking it was no longer needed? Of course.
But the productivity gains we get will be so great on average that no one will go back to doing things the old way.
There will be old-timers and hobbyists who will preserve some of that knowledge; for most it will just be a curiosity.
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