121–130 of 221 posts
Really? The way a knowledge worker feels about their labor is different than a manufacturing worker? They don't or can't have similar pride in their labor? In their skills?
This is some seriously self-aggrandizing bullshit. Touch some grass.
> Knowledge workers hold a different relationship to their labor than manufacturing workers did. For a cognitive professional, expertise is not only an activity. It is a large part of the self. Really? The way a knowledge worker feels about their labor is different than a manufacturing worker? They don't or can't have similar pride in their labor? In their skills? This is some seriously self-aggrandizing bullshit. To…
It comes through even worse in this later sentence, which at the very least tells you the writer has never met a welder.
> Knowledge workers hold a different relationship to their labor than manufacturing workers did. For a cognitive professional, expertise is not only an activity. It is a large part of the self. Really? The way a knowledge worker feels about their labor is different than a manufacturing worker? They don't or can't have similar pride in their labor? In their skills? This is some seriously self-aggrandizing bullshit. To…
> Earlier automation targeted physical and manual labor, where a worker’s identity was at least partly separable from the output. A welder is not the weld. It comes through even worse in this later sentence, which at the very least tells you the writer has never met a welder.
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Such dismissive quip is unkind. The job has changed from a craft to operating an unreliable machine. Instead of satisfaction of solving challenging problems with your own skill and creativity, you babysit a text extruder and slog through mistakes in its generated output. Arguably this may make software cheaper to make and accessible to non-programmers, but for people who liked their job it's like being demoted from a…
Meh. Since when "typing" implies "solving challenging problems with your own skill and creativity". The "solving" and the "creativity" happen in your head while "typing" is a manual labor. I can contemplate multiple problems at the same time but I can only type one thing at a time. Writing code is like 10% of my programming job. I take an LLM to do the typing for me any day. I still solve challenging problems. Becaus…
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The idea that skilled people who work with their hands don't identify with their work is laughable.
OP did not say anything about skilled workers who make things with their hands. You are describing an artisan or craftsman, or at the very least a tradesman. The quote is talking about manufacturing labor. This is the guy on the assembly line who lowers the press, makes his thousandth widget for a day, and then lifts it up. Rinse and repeat.
Now that is happening to many kinds of knowledge workers. Assembly lines mechanized the work of artisans. LLMs are in the process of mechanizing knowledge and creative work, of certain kinds.
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> How utterly pointless. What would make it less pointless in your opinion?
If someone had written it. It's well curated slop, but it's still slop. Consider this bit: > A profession does not need to be eliminated to be mourned. It is enough for its center to fall out, leaving the people who built careers in that center with credentials that no longer map to a stable role. When AI threatens the work, it threatens the self, which is why the response looks less like ordinary job-loss fear and m…
That said, slop is going to be a massive, natural, and utterly predictable consequence of AI. I think if you are generally AI positive then you definitely don't get to complain about slop.
I've been calling it Deep Blue: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/deep-blue/
So you are saying in the end of that piece that chess players came out stronger? You know how? Because AI is forbidden in tournaments and there are plenty of idle rich sponsors in Chess (it is popular among autocrats). So you are envisioning a future of software development where we have coding competitions sponsored by MBS where AI is forbidden? Like your Pelican meme, which is designed to cutify AI, this is propaga…
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Such dismissive quip is unkind. The job has changed from a craft to operating an unreliable machine. Instead of satisfaction of solving challenging problems with your own skill and creativity, you babysit a text extruder and slog through mistakes in its generated output. Arguably this may make software cheaper to make and accessible to non-programmers, but for people who liked their job it's like being demoted from a…
Meh. Since when "typing" implies "solving challenging problems with your own skill and creativity". The "solving" and the "creativity" happen in your head while "typing" is a manual labor. I can contemplate multiple problems at the same time but I can only type one thing at a time. Writing code is like 10% of my programming job. I take an LLM to do the typing for me any day. I still solve challenging problems. Becaus…
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What are you saying, you want to type? You must be good at typing.
> What are you saying, you want to type? Nah, they want to think beyond the superficial prompting level. A lot of real programmers feel exactly the same. It is hard to notice this sometimes on HN because this site is rife with the very idea-man-VC-pilled-finance-bro-pseudo-hackers that over the past 15-20 years have turned the tech industry from one of optimism for a brighter future to one that most normal people now…
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What are you saying, you want to type? You must be good at typing.
Such dismissive quip is unkind. The job has changed from a craft to operating an unreliable machine. Instead of satisfaction of solving challenging problems with your own skill and creativity, you babysit a text extruder and slog through mistakes in its generated output. Arguably this may make software cheaper to make and accessible to non-programmers, but for people who liked their job it's like being demoted from a…
Instead of solving things yourself, you need to learn how to describe them in a way others can solve them. Otherwise you will just be fighting the instinct to just do it yourself.