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Why craft-lovers are losing their craft
91–100 of 131 posts
Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft
#92It’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.
Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft
#93To 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 If that were true there would be no wedding photographer's or any sales of high end DSLR's. The barrier of entry may have fallen but the need for real experts and tools still exists. I expect AI's will cause a similar shift, lower barrier to entry but still requiring the hand of the expert in critical situations.
This fails to take into account a pervasive, global lowering of standards on all fronts.
Who will retain the good taste to keep paying a premium for professional photographers, etc?
Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
What’s wrong with that? The agent session had all the business context, knows what changed, and how we verified it. It takes 5s to turn that into a PR desc vs 10-100x that by hand
Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
> These days, everybody is an expert photographer If that were true there would be no wedding photographer's or any sales of high end DSLR's. The barrier of entry may have fallen but the need for real experts and tools still exists. I expect AI's will cause a similar shift, lower barrier to entry but still requiring the hand of the expert in critical situations.
This fails to take into account a pervasive, global lowering of standards on all fronts. Who will retain the good taste to keep paying a premium for professional photographers, etc?
We shot our wedding (2021) entirely on film. Some medium format, some 35mm, some instant film (polaroid and instax mini)
Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I already see people using an agent to write a git commit
What’s wrong with that? The agent session had all the business context, knows what changed, and how we verified it. It takes 5s to turn that into a PR desc vs 10-100x that by hand
Because it's not perfect and it still fabricates things from time to time.
I have coworkers who do this and it sucks to be on the receiving end of. It means I now need to read every commit message with skepticism.
It's an example of using AI to save energy for yourself while simultaneously increasing the energy expenditure of your coworkers.
Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft
#97The '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…
This is why “worse is better” always wins eventually.
Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 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?
Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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.
Re: Why craft-lovers are losing their craft
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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.