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We mourn our craft

nolanlawson.com

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Re: We mourn our craft

#161

Post by boxedemp »

Fraterkes wrote: post #94
iambateman wrote: post #9

I do not mourn. For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things. When I was a child, I found a cracked version of Photoshop and made images which seemed like magic. When I was in college, I learned to make websites through careful, painstaking effort. When I was a young professional, I used those skills and others to make websites for hospitals and summer camps and conferences. Then I learn…

I've seen a hundred ai-generated things, and they are rarely interesting. Not because the tools are insufficient, it's just that the kind of person that can't even stomach the charmed life of being a programmer will rarely be able to stomach the dull and hard work of actually being creative. Why should someone be interested in you creations? In what part of your new frictionless life would you've picked up something…

You may be mistaking some ai dev with non, because it doesn't have tell tails

Re: We mourn our craft

#162

Post by shepherdjerred »

terminalbraid wrote: post #77
0x696C6961 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but it's easy to check if it's incorrect and try again.

Forgive me if "just dig your way out of the hole" doesn't sound appealing.

Surely you, a programmer, can imagine a way to automate this process

Re: We mourn our craft

#163

Post by dham »

croes wrote: post #98
bnchrch wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. This sums up my own feeling. I joined this craft and love this craft for the simple ability to build beautiful and useful things. This new world makes me more effective at it. And this new world doesn’t prevent me from crafting elegant architectures either.

Wait 5 years and your skills are down

What infrastructure has gone through the last 15 years would like a word.

Half the people I work with can't do imperative jQuery interfaces. So what I guess. I can't code assembly.

Re: We mourn our craft

#164

Post by [deleted] »

iambateman wrote: post #9

I do not mourn. For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things. When I was a child, I found a cracked version of Photoshop and made images which seemed like magic. When I was in college, I learned to make websites through careful, painstaking effort. When I was a young professional, I used those skills and others to make websites for hospitals and summer camps and conferences. Then I learn…

[deleted]

Re: We mourn our craft

#165

Post by plagiarist »

sosomoxie wrote: post #10

I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing. I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of somet…

I didn't imagine I would be sending all my source code directly to a corporation for access to an irritatingly chipper personality that is confidently incorrect the way these things are.

There have been wild technological developments but we've lost privacy and autonomy across basically all devices (excepting the people who deliberately choose to forego the most capable devices, and even then there are firmware blobs). We've got the facial recognition and tracking so many sci-fi dystopias have warned us to avoid.

I'm having an easier time accomplishing more difficult technological tasks. But I lament what we have come to. I don't think we are in the Star Trek future and I imagined doing more drugs in a Neuromancer future. It's like a Snow Crash / 1984 corporate government collab out here, it kinda sucks.

Re: We mourn our craft

#166

Post by thwarted »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #46
boobsbr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never thought or felt myself as or my work as someone or something that "will automate your job away".

Agreed. I've always thought the purpose of all automation was to remove needless toil. I want computers to free people. I guess I subscribe to the theory of creative destruction.

Maybe it comes down to the definition of "toil". Some people find typing to be toiling, so they latch on to not having to type as much when using LLMs. Other people see "chores" as toiling, and so dream of household robots to take on the burden of that toil. Some people hate driving and consider that to be needless toil, so self-driving cars answer that—and the ads for Waymo latch onto this.

Personally, I am not stymied by typing nor chores nor driving. For me, typing is like playing a musical instrument: at some point you stop needing to think about how to play and you just play. The interaction and control of the instrument just comes out of your body. At some point in my life, all the "need to do things around the house" just became the things I do, and I'm not bothered by doing them, such that I barely notice doing them. But it's complex: the concept of "chores" is front and center when you're trying to get a teenager to be responsible for taking care of themselves (like having clean clothes, or how the bathroom is safer if it's not a complete mess) and participating in family/household responsibilities (like learning that if you don't make a mess, there's nothing to clean up). Can you really be effective at directing someone/something else without knowing how to do it yourself? Probably for some things, but not all.

Re: We mourn our craft

#167

Post by danny_codes »

lukekim wrote: post #95

Like other tech disrupted crafts before this, think furniture making or farming, that's how it goes. From hand-made craft, to mass production factories (last couple of decades) to fully automated production. The craft was dying long before LLMs. Started in dotcom, ZIRP added some beatings, then LLMs are finishing the job. This is fine, because like in furniture making, the true craftsmen will be even more valuable (o…

That’s not how it goes for the worker. If you are a capitalist then it doesn’t matter, you own the means of production. The laborer, however, has to learn new skills, which take time and money. If your profession no longer exists, unless you have enough capital to retool/be a capitalist, then you will personally get poorer.

Re: We mourn our craft

#168

Post by shepherdjerred »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #46
boobsbr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never thought or felt myself as or my work as someone or something that "will automate your job away".

Agreed. I've always thought the purpose of all automation was to remove needless toil. I want computers to free people. I guess I subscribe to the theory of creative destruction.

Computers are definitely on the path to freeing programmers from programming

Re: We mourn our craft

#169

Post by zeroonetwothree »

Nextgrid wrote: post #137

LLMs are only a threat if you see your job as a code monkey. In that case you're likely already obsoleted by outsourced staff who can do your job much cheaper. If you see your job as a "thinking about what code to write (or not)" monkey, then you're safe. I expect most seniors and above to be in this position, and LLMs are absolutely not replacing you here - they can augment you in certain situations. The perks of a…

I see my job as having many aspects. One of those aspects is coding. It is the aspect that gives me the most joy even if it's not the one I spend the most time on. And if you take that away then the remaining part of the job is just not very appealing anymore.

It used to be I didn't mind going through all the meetings, design discussions, debates with PMs, and such because I got to actually code something cool in the end. Now I get to... prompt the AI to code something cool. And that just doesn't feel very satisfying. It's the same reason I didn't want to be a "lead" or "manager", I want to actually be the one doing the thing.

Re: We mourn our craft

#170

Post by gugagore »

stevejb wrote: post #110
fastasucan wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It was, for me, never about the code. Then it wasn't your craft.

Isn't this like saying that if better woodworking tools come out, and you like woodworking, that woodworking somehow 'isn't your craft'. They said that their craft is about making things. There are woodworkers on YouTube who use CNC, some who use the best Festool stuff but nothing that moves on its own, and some who only use handtools. Where is the line at which woodworking is not their craft?

Woodworking is, like, the quintessential craft. I think it is very useful to bring it in when discussion "craft"!

I am not myself a woodworker, however I have understood that part of what makes it "crafty" is that the woodworker reads grain, adjusts cuts, and accepts that each board is different.

We can try to contrast that to whatever Ikea does with wood and mass production of furniture. I would bet that variation in materials is "noise" that the mass production process is made to "reject" (be insensitive to / be robust to).

But could we imagine an automated woodworking system that takes into account material variation, like wood grain, not in an aggregate sense (like I'm painting Ikea to do), but in an individual sense? That system would be making judgements that are woodworker-like.

The craft lives on. The system is informed by the judgement of the woodworker, and the craftperson enters an apprenticeship role for the automation... perhaps...

Until you can do RL on the outcome of the furniture. But you still need craft in designing the reward function.

Perhaps.

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