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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

#61

Post by dijksterhuis »

operatingthetan wrote: post #33
4162-123w wrote: post #28

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.

> 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.

I feel it's possibly pertinent to point out that cars didn't use existing horses or bicycles as fuel/building materials/, whereas LLMs ingest the software people have written previously during their creation.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#62

Post by martin-t »

AngryData wrote: post #56
aeon_ai wrote: 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…

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.…

People should own the product of their work.

It's really that simple, all the inequality, injustice and exploitation that's been happening since the first industrial revolution keeps happening because people who do the work only get paid a fraction of the value they produced and only as long as they keep working while the surplus and ownership goes to people who don't do any work, can be used to make more money which gives them more ownership and is heritable.

BTW, I am really happy whenever I see another person who knows who the luddites really were. The rest are condemned to repeat this shit and we're all worse off because of them.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#63

Post by bakugo »

> Craft-lovers and make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation behind the work was invisible because the process was identical.

I do not agree with this assertion and I don't know why I don't see more pushback against it, neither here nor in the comments for the original post.

If you're a "craft-lover" sitting next to and working with a "make-it-go person", odds are you will be very much aware of it. Even non-technical leadership is likely to be able to notice it if they're perceptive enough.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#64

Post by auggierose »

martin-t wrote: post #62
AngryData wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

People should own the product of their work. It's really that simple, all the inequality, injustice and exploitation that's been happening since the first industrial revolution keeps happening because people who do the work only get paid a fraction of the value they produced and only as long as they keep working while the surplus and ownership goes to people who don't do any work, can be used to make more money which…

> People should own the product of their work.

You do own your work, but you agreed to sell it for a salary. Makes sense, because there is often no tangible "product" you could own otherwise. What should cleaners own?

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#65

Post by linguae »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #27
RagnarD wrote: post #8

One solution: do NOT just program for work. If it's not work related - where management can dictate how you work - you can whatever you want, and if what you want is to keep writing software and not outsource your brain to an AI, absolutely do so.

Fine that doesn't change the fact for a lot of people they felt they had "if you love what you do you don't work a day in your life" and now they don't. They aren't wrong to feel a sense of deep loss.

I wholeheartedly agree. Computing professions such as software engineering used to feel like, "Wow, they're paying me to do this!" Yes, there was real work involved, but for many of us it never felt like drudgery, and we produced, shipped, and made our customers, managers, and other stakeholders happy. I remember a time (roughly 20 years ago) when zealous enthusiasts would proudly profess that they'd work for companies like Apple or Google for free if they could work on their dream projects.

Times have changed. The field has become much more serious about making money; fantasies about volunteering at Apple have been replaced with fantasies about very large salaries and RSU grants. Simultaneously (and I don't think coincidentally), the field has become less fun. I recognized how privileged this sounds talking about "fun", given how for most of humanity, work isn't about having fun and personal fulfillment, but about making the money required to house, feed, and clothe themselves and their loved ones. Even with the drudgery of corporate life, it beats the work conditions and the abuse that many other occupations get.

Still, let's pour one out for a time when the interests and passions of computing enthusiasts did line up with the interests of the corporate world.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#66

Post by AngryData »

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.

Would you say mechanics, repairmen, and other trade workers are more valuable today? They have become rarer yes, and everyone thinks they must be making bank off their rarer skill set, and yet the actual wages those skilled people receive haven't gone up.

Sure sure you can point to some random plumber living in the heart of NYC that is sitting on a multimillion dollar piece of land to hold their supplies and vans as making a lot of money, but that doesn't make up for the other 99% of the plumbers of the nation who don't make such wages despite having just as valuable of a skill.

How many people here can frame a house? Meanwhile I stopped framing because I made more money driving a forklift around a warehouse. My father stopped wrenching because he made more money selling heavy equipment parts than he did fixing million dollar pieces of heavy equipment in shitty and hazardous environments.

When tools make skill less relevant, the skilled workers get the boot. Even if the skilled versus non-skilled ends up a wash in dollar per productivity so you think the lower quality would make the skilled workers preferable, the unskilled workers will still win out because they are far easier to replace. You fire the best cabinet maker around in 200 miles, you are in trouble. If you fire 10 doofuses a year for shitty work, you can just get 10 more within just a few days. Quality may suffer but volume makes up for it and will push out competition because quality is not easily measured or seen by customers who can't recognize it.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#67

Post by AngryData »

auggierose wrote: post #64
martin-t wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People should own the product of their work. It's really that simple, all the inequality, injustice and exploitation that's been happening since the first industrial revolution keeps happening because people who do the work only get paid a fraction of the value they produced and only as long as they keep working while the surplus and ownership goes to people who don't do any work, can be used to make more money which…

> People should own the product of their work. You do own your work, but you agreed to sell it for a salary. Makes sense, because there is often no tangible "product" you could own otherwise. What should cleaners own?

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.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#68

Post by TimTheTinker »

zdragnar wrote: post #59
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Wha…

> lose money

I think that's largely a myth. Anthropic charges something like 10x their internal $/MTok for external resellers.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#69

Post by juris »

i think anyone who feels dispossessed from the advance of technology should rekindle that spirit of hands-on adventure by looking at clay pots at the museum.

the souls of a thousand hours sit there behind glass and valued for their richness and simplicity, against all odds, and people to this day carry on those traditions to improve the art.

did the soul of pottery die with the industrial revolution? will your hand code? it won’t be for everyone, but it’s there for you.

find a book by Soetsu Yanagi on the subject of “min gei” and it will help you.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#70

Post by edgyquant »

snek_case wrote: post #29
burntoutgray wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way some people wield LLM, etc is like using a chainsaw to cut a dovetail because it is faster.

You're definitely going to get people using LLMs running on 8x $50K GPUs in a datacenter to do the job of a bash script.

I already see people using an agent to write a git commit
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