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Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

(blog.yossarian.net)
431 points thunderbong | 5 comments | 11 Jan 25 04:13 UTC | HN request time: 1.024s | source
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mianos ◴[11 Jan 25 07:31 UTC] No.42664066[source]▶
I have an alternate theory: about 10% of developers can actually start something from scratch because they truly understand how things work (not that they always do it, but they could if needed). Another 40% can get the daily job done by copying and pasting code from local sources, Stack Overflow, GitHub, or an LLM—while kinda knowing what’s going on. That leaves 50% who don’t really know much beyond a few LeetCode puzzles and have no real grasp of what they’re copying and pasting.

Given that distribution, I’d guess that well over 50% of Makefiles are just random chunks of copied and pasted code that kinda work. If they’re lifted from something that already works, job done—next ticket.

I’m not blaming the tools themselves. Makefiles are well-known and not too verbose for smaller projects. They can be a bad choice for a 10,000-file monster—though I’ve seen some cleanly written Makefiles even for huge projects. Personally, it wouldn’t be my first choice. That said, I like Makefiles and have been using them on and off for at least 30 years.

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huijzer ◴[11 Jan 25 09:01 UTC] No.42664461[source]▶
> That leaves 50% who don’t really know much beyond a few LeetCode puzzles and have no real grasp of what they’re copying and pasting.

Small nuance: I think people often don’t know because they don’t have the time to figure it out. There are only so many battles you can fight during a day. For example if I’m a C++ programmer working on a ticket, how many layers of the stack should I know? For example, should I know how the CPU registers are called? And what should an AI researcher working always in Jupyter know? I completely encourage anyone to learn as much about the tools and stack as possible, but there is only so much time.

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silver_silver ◴[11 Jan 25 10:13 UTC] No.42664760[source]▶
We can’t really call the field engineering if this is the standard. A fundamental understanding of what one’s code actually makes the machine do is necessary to write quality code regardless of how high up the abstraction stack it is
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kragen ◴[11 Jan 25 11:12 UTC] No.42665077[source]▶
Steam engines predate the understanding of not just the crystalline structure of steel but even the basics of thermodynamics by quite a few decades.
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silver_silver ◴[11 Jan 25 12:20 UTC] No.42665397[source]▶
Yes and they’re far less efficient and require far more maintenance than an equivalent electric or even diesel engine, where equivalent power is even possible
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kragen ◴[11 Jan 25 16:56 UTC] No.42667136[source]▶
Steam engines currently power most of the world's electrical grid. The main reason for this is that, completely contrary to what you said, they are more efficient and more reliable than diesel engines. (Electric motors of course are not a heat engine at all and so are not comparable.)

Steam engines used to be very inefficient, in part because the underlying thermodynamic principles were not understood, but also because learning to build safe ones (largely a question of metallurgy) took a long time. Does that mean that designing them before those principles were known was "not engineering"? That seems like obvious nonsense to me.

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1. PaulHoule ◴[12 Jan 25 00:36 UTC] No.42670147[source]▶
Steam engines are thoroughly obsolete in the developed world where there are natural gas pipeline networks.

People quit building coal burning power plants in North America at the same time they quit burning nuclear power plants for the same reason. The power density difference between gas turbines and steam turbines is enough that the capital cost difference is huge. It would be hard to afford steam turbines if the heat was free.

Granted people have been building pulverized coal burning power plants in places like China where they'd have to run efficient power plants on super-expensive LNG. They thought in the 1970s it might be cheaper to gasify coal and burn it in a gas turbine but it's one of those technologies that "just doesn't work".

Nuclear isn't going to be affordable unless they can perfect something like

https://www.powermag.com/what-are-supercritical-co2-power-cy...

If you count the cost of the steam turbine plus the steam generators plus the civil works to enclose those, nuclear just can't be competitive.

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2. bluGill ◴[12 Jan 25 00:53 UTC] No.42670237[source]▶
Gas is often used to power the boilers because steam is so much better.
3. kragen ◴[12 Jan 25 01:36 UTC] No.42670458[source]▶
There is some truth in what you say. Though steam engines still power most of the power grid (especially in the "developed world") their capital costs are indeed too high to be economically competitive.

However, there are also some errors.

In 02022 24% of total US electrical power generation capacity was combined-cycle gas turbines (CCGT), https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=54539 which run the exhaust from a gas turbine through a boiler to run a steam turbine, thus increasing the efficiency by 50–60%. So in fact a lot of gas turbines are installed together with a comparable-capacity steam turbine, even today.

Syngas is not a technology that "just doesn't work". It's been in wide use for over two centuries, though its use declined precipitously in the 20th century with the advent of those natural-gas pipeline networks. The efficiency of the process has improved by an order of magnitude since the old gasworks you see the ruins of in many industrial cities. As you say, though, that isn't enough to make IGCC plants economically competitive.

The thing that makes steam engines economically uncompetitive today is renewable energy. Specifically, the precipitous drop in the price of solar power plants, especially PV modules, which are down to €0.10 per peak watt except in the US, about 15% of their cost ten years ago. This combines with rapidly dropping prices for batteries and for power electronics to undercut even the capex of thermal power generation rather badly, even (as you say) if the heat was free, whereas typically the fuel is actually about half the cost. I don't really understand what the prospects are for dramatically cheaper steam turbines, but given that the technology is over a century old, it seems likely that its cost will continue to improve only slowly.

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4. PaulHoule ◴[12 Jan 25 02:34 UTC] No.42670784[source]▶
Yeah, and people are talking about renewables as if the storage is free. Or people quote case 17 out of

https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost...

as if 1.5 hours of storage was going to cut it. I've been looking for a detailed analysis of what the generation + storage + transmission costs of a reliable renewable grid is that's less than 20 years old covering a whole year and I haven't seen one yet.

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5. kragen ◴[12 Jan 25 02:56 UTC] No.42670903{3}[source]▶
I haven't seen one either.

To be honest, I don't think anyone has any idea yet (other than crude upper bounds) because it depends a lot on things like how much demand response can help. Demand response doesn't have to mean "rolling blackouts"; it could mean "running the freezer during the day when electricity is free". Will people heat their houses in the winter with sand batteries? Will desiccant air conditioning pan out? Can nickel–iron batteries compete economically with BYD's gigafactories? What about sodium-ion? Nobody has any idea.

I was pleased to calculate recently that the EV transition, if it looks something like replacing each ICE vehicle with the BYD equivalent of a Tesla Model Y, would add several hours of distributed grid-scale storage, if car owners choose to sell it back to the grid. But that's still a far cry from what you need for a calm, cloudy week. Maybe HVDC will be the key, because it's never cloudy across all of China.

Sensible-heat seasonal thermal stores for domestic climate control (in some sense the most critical application) have been demonstrated to be economically feasible at the neighborhood scale. PCM or TCES could be an order of magnitude lower mass, but would the cost be low enough?