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Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

writings.hongminhee.org

71–80 of 131 posts

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#71

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?

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 companies and get passive income.

Salary negotiations are also unequal - one side has much more information and almost always more time and monetary reserves.[1]

I am tired so i'll cut it short - there's inherent power imbalance in the employer-employee[2] relationship which makes the outcome inherently and unavoidably exploitative.

[0]: They'll often use the word illegal because they have been taught to follow rules but have not been taught about differentiating legality and morality.

[1]: Why do you think you come to the company to the interview instead of them asking to meet you at a restaurant like normal business deals might be discussed? It's so ingrained this is normal that what I said sounds absurd.

[2]: Have you ever thought what those words actually mean? Employees are literally being used, it's right in the name.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#73

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?

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.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#74
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 think the policy is there for a reason. I think it encourages more free discussion. I don't know if you are upset that there is a way for people to express thoughtful ideas without being bullied for doing wrongthink or havingt he wrong opinions.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#75

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 don't even know what this means. Were programming languages and compilers unavailable? I think this overstates the predicament that users were in quite a lot. In fact, I don't think any users even asked or wanted this really other than maybe very simple musings of wanting to say "computer, enhance" or something like that. I'm not sure how vibe-coding has now given the average user something that they know will not have their hands tied behind their backs. Most users will never vibecode anything and most of the non-technical people that will, will try it once or twice as a novelty or an attempt to solve a problem and then give up.

Now, what you might end up doing is removing the need for them to even have a computer to begin with. Someone without a job doesn't need business productivity software that much.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#76

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…

> Why does it have to be a world changing life altering experience?

Because of the amount of money riding on it to be a life/world-altering experience. A really helpful rubber duck is not worth the cost. The dreams of AGI is. This is from a stock market pov not dev, but market narratives dominate in the mainstream, not tech.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#77

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…

An excellent analogy. Everyone is an expert in taking the photo. But this does not make them a photographer. Even that expert claim is actually not fully true, the phone camera is woefully inadequate in many ways. But the main difference between a photographer and a layman like myself is the ability to produce output strongly linked with clear artistic intent.

Writing code is not the hard part and never has been. The hard part is having a clear understanding of how to solve a specific complex problem and being able to express that intent in code. Getting a decently exposed image was never the hard part.

Finally, there’s no scaling issues with cameras. You just make them better until it stops making economic sense. This is not true with code. To make llms better, good human-made code is needed for training. Better llms lead to less human-made code being available. This means there’s not an exponential growth in quality but a S-curve with a balance point. I’d say we are already there: innovation is shifting from the models to the ways of harnessing the models.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#78
There's another camp that don't care about the craft AND also don't care about the product. This camp, wielding power of AI, is making life worse for the other two camps. I've been getting so many code reviews that are generated by AI, but the author does not even has the decency to self review the generated code before they send out pull requests. It feels like an insult sometimes. For example, unit tests that basically assert if `a = 1` after setting a to 1.

Every PR now has lots of unit tests, but they test the implementation details, not the spec. So now every change that breaks their implementation details causes false positive test failures. This creates a self enforcing negative loop. Every PR now comes with tons of unit test fixes.

People start responding to PR comments with something along the line of: I ask AI but it was not able to solve the problem, if you have a solution, LMK. Or another variant I see often is: I think this is wrong, but AI says this is fine, so I'll leave it as is.

I see craft lovers or product people using AI effectively. I use AI daily too. But the above camp is making my day to day job sometimes unbearable.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

#80
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 they don't see the hours I put into selecting colors and choosing modular pieces that fit together perfectly for my space.

The future of woodworking is here, and most woodworkers aren't ready.

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