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Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

writings.hongminhee.org

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Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#101

Post by Ekaros »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #3
jazz9k wrote: post #2

The 'make it go' people that I worked with usually didn't understand many of the underlying code, and the 'craft' people always need to fix it. Craft people aren't losing anything. If anything, they are more valuable because they need to fix the slopware written by AI and the 'make it go' developers.

Its one thing when code was hammered out by someone to just work, its worse fixing code that no one even wrote to begin with. This period of programming is going to produce a lot of code people dump and replace because its not worth fixing.

What I fear is that early or even current steps of this process is replacing parts of the code or all code wholesale. With as broken or just slightly less broken code. Albeit the way it is broken could be different each time. So problems are not fixed, they are just replaced with different problems. Ad nauseum...

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#102

Post by martin-t »

operatingthetan wrote: post #79
martin-t wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You did not address my point. None of those things are stopping the future you are apparently afraid of. They are simply a coping mechanism.

It's not about stopping progress, it's about 1) making sure the progress is in the right direction 2) rewarding the people who actually made the progress possible instead of those who have capital.

But of course, feel free to just join the winning side. But then if you don't stand up against injustice today, I won't stand up against it tomorrow when it's happening to you.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#103

Post by martin-t »

auggierose wrote: post #99
AngryData wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Co-op businesses seem to not have a problem sharing the profits on less tangible products and services. So I don't see why anyone should retain sole ownership of all profits from a business that they require others to do the work in.

I don't know how co-op businesses work. I think co-ops are hiring cheap third-party cleaners as well. Co-ops also have CEOs making a lot more than the rest of the "cooperative". > So I don't see why anyone should retain sole ownership of all profits from a business that they require others to do the work in. Because they are offering, and there are takers? Nobody is forced to work for your business.

> Nobody is forced to work for your business.

This is the root of the fallacy - nobody is forced to work for any particular business but everybody is forced to work for some business since 1) starting a new one is more costly than working for an existing one 2) we'd all end up working for 1-person businesses.

It's the same as people claiming they are sovereign citizens. It's a nice ideal but it doesn't work.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#104

Post by martin-t »

auggierose wrote: post #100
martin-t wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTW the company is part of the product. If certain work needs to be done, even if it's low-skill work, it contributes to the function of that company and should give fractional ownership according to amount worked and some coefficient accounting for relative skill.

Who decides who gets hired and fired at that company? How is the coefficient determined? Are we talking about amount of work, or how much your work has contributed to the bottom line of the company? I don't see that changing anything. As long as there is private property, and you can sell your work for compensation, the rest pretty much follows.

> How is the coefficient determined?

Negotiations, just like salary today, except all sides negotiate with the same leverage.

> As long as there is private property, and you can sell your work for compensation

And that's why I think work should automatically give ownership by law - and therefore decision making power. See, slavery used to be legal too but then enough people decided it's too exploitative, picked up rifles and changed it. Employment is similar, instead of owning a full person, rich people own the entire economic output for 8 hours a day and instead of flogging, they fire workers they don't want. It's less bad but the same principle with more indirection.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#105

Post by martin-t »

auggierose wrote: post #98
martin-t wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this fallacy all the time. Can a 40 year old man have sex with a 12 year old girl if she agrees? What if she's 18? The first is illegal and wrong. The second is legal but most people will tell you it's at least gross. Why? Because of the power differential. Starting a company takes investment (obviously money but also time spent on administrative tasks, hiring, marketing, etc.). Rich people can just buy compani…

There is no fallacy here. Just answer me this, instead of going on a rant tangent: Who does the cleaning? And what do they get for it?

They get ownership. The rest is determined from that, since owners collectively decide how much everyone gets paid.

(There might need to be further legal restrictions like minimum wage or tying wage to the skill coefficient used to determine rate of gaining ownership - see my other comments.)

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#106

Post by sph »

burntoutgray wrote: post #24

To use an analogy, back in the days of film cameras and before 1 hour labs, the "craftsman" photographer would carefully frame the shot, carefully setting the exposure, aperture and focus. The most meticulous would take notes in a notebook. There were only 36 frames to a roll of film and all going well, the photographer had to wait a couple of days to get back the proof sheet. Those were the days when expert photogra…

> These days, everybody is an expert photographer

No, everybody is a photographer, and a mediocre one at that. That's the point.

AI won't turn laypeople into expert programmers. Mediocrity might be just enough for the problem they need to solve, but quality and craftsmanship comes from dedication and hard work, not one-click solutions.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#107

Post by sph »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #3
jazz9k wrote: post #2

The 'make it go' people that I worked with usually didn't understand many of the underlying code, and the 'craft' people always need to fix it. Craft people aren't losing anything. If anything, they are more valuable because they need to fix the slopware written by AI and the 'make it go' developers.

Its one thing when code was hammered out by someone to just work, its worse fixing code that no one even wrote to begin with. This period of programming is going to produce a lot of code people dump and replace because its not worth fixing.

"Single-use applications" but instead of a bash script, it's a 250k lines monstrosity in Rust because "static typing"

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#108

Post by d--b »

tasuki wrote: post #92
d--b wrote: 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 wrote a comment on this thread. After reading yours I upvoted it and deleted mine: you clearly gave it more thought than I did and expressed my sentiment a lot clearer.

Thanks for the kind words :-)

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#109

Post by sph »

maplethorpe wrote: post #80
pclowes wrote: post #13

I do hand tool woodworking as a hobby. Aside from rough dimensioning, all the final cuts, planing, mortising, carving, dove tails etc are done by hand. Sometimes using tools over 100yrs old, not out of some fetish for the past, they are just better and cheaper than hand tools today. It takes forever but I want to work the wood and develop actual skill. I don't want to just push wood through a series of saws, sanders,…

For me, woodworking has never been about the "craft". It's been about holding that finished product in my hand. That's why I gave up manual woodworking and shifted to ordering finished pieces from IKEA. The speed with which I can now receive furniture delivered to my door far outpaces anything I could have ever done myself. Some people say this isn't actually woodworking — that it's just ordering stuff online — but t…

Same, I'm a painter, and these days I just order prints online. For me it's was always about seeing a beautiful painting before my eyes.

Some people say this isn't actually painting, but they don't see the hours and impeccable taste of mine involved in browsing the works of Canaletto and Botticelli.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#110

Post by auggierose »

martin-t wrote: post #103
auggierose wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how co-op businesses work. I think co-ops are hiring cheap third-party cleaners as well. Co-ops also have CEOs making a lot more than the rest of the "cooperative". > So I don't see why anyone should retain sole ownership of all profits from a business that they require others to do the work in. Because they are offering, and there are takers? Nobody is forced to work for your business.

> Nobody is forced to work for your business. This is the root of the fallacy - nobody is forced to work for any particular business but everybody is forced to work for some business since 1) starting a new one is more costly than working for an existing one 2) we'd all end up working for 1-person businesses. It's the same as people claiming they are sovereign citizens. It's a nice ideal but it doesn't work.

No, the mechanism is clear. What I don't understand is your use of the word fallacy. It is not a fallacy, it is the reality. Being an employee is not an ideal. It is the lived reality for most people.

So what are you going on about?

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