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Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

writings.hongminhee.org

51–60 of 131 posts

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#51
All the whingers about AI - if it is as bad as you say, then you don't have a problem

On the other hand, if it is not, then stop wasting effort arguing against the inevitable and use that effort to get ahead of the curve.

Either way, whinging about it is the least effective use of your skills and time.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#52
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New accounts created to shovel a narrative of neo-luddite nonsense into the discourse without addressing a single point with substantiation. "IP Theft" is a loaded term that has already been determined to be unfounded in US law. Alsup stated that models were one of the most transformative uses of content he may ever see in his lifetime, and deemed it fair use. No matter how you slice it, this technology and capabilit…

Apologies to the user if they aren't an alt and this is just their genuine first post, but: We really ought to delegitimize the whole "creating alts to post unpopular opinions" trend. I know HN is very privacy-centric, but it just seems wrong to me when someone isn't willing to stake their reputation on (what I charitably assume are) genuinely held controversial opinions.

I mean I assume it's a bot comment. It has that LLM stink to it in writing style even without the "new account" signal.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#53

There is indeed a painful dissonance here. I like this new world, but feel sorrow for the loss of something. I try to remember how empowering AI is. It is already allowing millions of people to finally use the devices they've been sitting in front of all these years. No longer do they have to feel constrained by software creators who have made choices for them. Now it is their tool through-and-through, and they can c…

I disagree. There's definitely _some_ who will use these tools to build systems for themselves. But do you think the chef who's been pulling insane hours in the restaurant wants to come home and build his own software? Or the teacher who just had to deal with an annoying classroom all day? People want software that just works, they'll pay for it, they don't want to use their computers to build their own software. Tha…

We’re not there yet, but that chef or that teacher definitely would want an AI voice assistant as good as the computer in Star Trek. Maybe to achieve that, a language model builds software entirely autonomously and runs it to carry out the user’s command. Or maybe they want the computer to build them software that they can then use to do their own work more efficiently.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#54
post #36

It’s called karma? We, software developers, as a profession took over countless crafts. It started with people doing calculations by hand, then moved on to people typing on typewriters and continued from there. People used to edit films with scissors and scotch tape. People used to place lead fonts on a matrix to print news articles. Databases used to be little cards made carefully by people whose job it was to organ…

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Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#55

These kind of inevitability articles always citing the same bloggers are just there to support AI. They never address: - Real developers like Rob Pike who hate AI. - The IP theft that powers the models. - The actual useful output of LLMs that is very low. - The fact that 99.9999% of useful software was produced before AI. - The fact that "nostalgic developers" are not interested in "writing" code, but understanding a…

All of your bullet points look deceptive or dishonest to me. They are either untrue or something that won't stop the march of progress. When the car was invented was it a useful counter-argument to suggest 99.9999% of miles traveled so far were horses or bicycles? No.

No, you're the dishonest one. The only bullet point a reasonable person might disagree with it "99.9999%". The rest is true.

- Many real devs criticize "AI". Documented: https://bsky.app/profile/robpike.io/post/3matwg6w3ic2s?ref=i...

- LLMs are trained without respecting the licenses of the original work, not even giving attribution which almost all OSS licenses require. AGPL required derivative works to be also AGPL - this should include the model and all its output for any reasonable meaning of derived work.

- SOTA models even today produce absolute garbage. A week ago, Claude Sonnet 4.6 tried to call one constructor from the body of another in C# using syntax which doesn't exist. Less glaring issues are completely normalized. This is why "agentic" generation is so popular today - it puts guard rails around the slop.

- I and other devs I've talked to are not interested in the mechanical writing of code but in the additional understanding which comes from engaging deeply with the problem and solution.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#56
post #40

These kind of inevitability articles always citing the same bloggers are just there to support AI. They never address: - Real developers like Rob Pike who hate AI. - The IP theft that powers the models. - The actual useful output of LLMs that is very low. - The fact that 99.9999% of useful software was produced before AI. - The fact that "nostalgic developers" are not interested in "writing" code, but understanding a…

New accounts created to shovel a narrative of neo-luddite nonsense into the discourse without addressing a single point with substantiation. "IP Theft" is a loaded term that has already been determined to be unfounded in US law. Alsup stated that models were one of the most transformative uses of content he may ever see in his lifetime, and deemed it fair use. No matter how you slice it, this technology and capabilit…

Whats wrong with the original luddites that you would try and use them to disparage modern worker rights advocates? They were right. Automation did reduce their quality of life and destroy their wages, and it is only through the luddites and other worker rights organizations making their demands unignorable that gave workers more modern and fair standards like 40 hour weeks, vacations, safety regulations, and unions.

You know who built the looms that the luddites later broke? The luddites themselves. They were the one building automated looms under promises that they would make more money and have cheaper fabric. Instead what they got was towns suffering in poverty under garbage wages, shitty working conditions with longer hours, and worse quality fabric as the corporate looms penny pinched their fibre and fabric more and more.

If the benefits of automated looms were actually shared with the luddites to start with, maybe their society wouldn't have gone down the toilet and they wouldn't have been so pissed. And today corporations are far more powerful than the capitalists back in the luddite days, both monetarily and legally.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#57
post #40

These kind of inevitability articles always citing the same bloggers are just there to support AI. They never address: - Real developers like Rob Pike who hate AI. - The IP theft that powers the models. - The actual useful output of LLMs that is very low. - The fact that 99.9999% of useful software was produced before AI. - The fact that "nostalgic developers" are not interested in "writing" code, but understanding a…

New accounts created to shovel a narrative of neo-luddite nonsense into the discourse without addressing a single point with substantiation. "IP Theft" is a loaded term that has already been determined to be unfounded in US law. Alsup stated that models were one of the most transformative uses of content he may ever see in his lifetime, and deemed it fair use. No matter how you slice it, this technology and capabilit…

IP was the wrong tool for code from the start, it was just convenient to use because it already existed.

What should be protected is human work (it and natural resources are the only things to which humanity ascribes inherent value, all other value is built on top of those).

LLMs are trained on millions of lifetimes of human work while all the income from them goes to the rich at the top. If you don't see an issue with this, not only do you not care about fairness and justice, you also haven't even gamed out in your head what happens 5 or maybe 15 years down the line.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#58
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New accounts created to shovel a narrative of neo-luddite nonsense into the discourse without addressing a single point with substantiation. "IP Theft" is a loaded term that has already been determined to be unfounded in US law. Alsup stated that models were one of the most transformative uses of content he may ever see in his lifetime, and deemed it fair use. No matter how you slice it, this technology and capabilit…

Apologies to the user if they aren't an alt and this is just their genuine first post, but: We really ought to delegitimize the whole "creating alts to post unpopular opinions" trend. I know HN is very privacy-centric, but it just seems wrong to me when someone isn't willing to stake their reputation on (what I charitably assume are) genuinely held controversial opinions.

That's kind of the point - encouraging people to post genuine thoughts that they otherwise wouldn't because of the fear that they might suffer for it later. Sure, it doesn't always encourage the most well thought-out comments, but raising the bar for new commenters with no/low reputation is how you end up with echo chambers.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#59

These kind of inevitability articles always citing the same bloggers are just there to support AI. They never address: - Real developers like Rob Pike who hate AI. - The IP theft that powers the models. - The actual useful output of LLMs that is very low. - The fact that 99.9999% of useful software was produced before AI. - The fact that "nostalgic developers" are not interested in "writing" code, but understanding a…

IDK… I don’t care. I think there is an unheard number of people that think vibe coding is fucking stupid and knows it doesn’t work. While also being really thankful for the small task automation that AI nails every single time. Why does it have to be a world changing life altering experience? Why can’t I just like have a really helpful rubber duck that will find all the missing references or clean up merge issues for…

The cost of growing and running large LLMs far exceeds the economic value of small task automation.

Small, targeted, on-device, cheap to run models make sense in some places. General purpose LLMs that take many gigawatt data centers to lose money producing questionable output don't.

We are finding ourselves simultaneously trying to divest from fossil fuels while increasing our energy consumption faster than ever. What are we getting for it? Slop, sycophantic rubber ducks, and merge conflict Clippy.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#60
post #36

It’s called karma? We, software developers, as a profession took over countless crafts. It started with people doing calculations by hand, then moved on to people typing on typewriters and continued from there. People used to edit films with scissors and scotch tape. People used to place lead fonts on a matrix to print news articles. Databases used to be little cards made carefully by people whose job it was to organ…

I think this is a bit facetious. Although software had a bunch of localized impacts, it killed only a handful of mainstream professions. People still had to typeset articles, there was just less lead involved. For a writer, switching from a typewriter to a keyboard didn't mean you somehow needed less skill to write.

That said, I'm with you that it's tacky for software engineers to complain about their own hardships. We are some of the wealthiest and most pampered white collar workers out there, and we're not exactly innocent bystanders.

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