Isn't this like saying that if better woodworking tools come out, and you like woodworking, that woodworking somehow 'isn't your craft'. They said that their craft is about making things.
There are woodworkers on YouTube who use CNC, some who use the best Festool stuff but nothing that moves on its own, and some who only use handtools. Where is the line at which woodworking is not their craft?
The better analogy is you're now a shop manager or even just QA. You don't need to touch, look at, or think about the production process past asking for something and seeing if the final result fits the bill.
You get something that looks like a cabinet because you asked for a cabinet. I don't consider that "woodworking craft", power tools or otherwise.
I'm pretty sure at least the better woodworking shop managers and QA people all have experience with woodworking and probably would also consider this their craft if asked.
If it looks like a cabinet, works as a cabinet and doesn’t fall apart, by all intents and purposes it’s a cabinet. 99% of people out there won’t care if it was a “craftsman” or a robot built it. Just like most people buy furniture at Ikea.
The difference is that the person who was a woodworker is no longer needed. Why can’t the customer just walk up to a kiosk and ask the machine to start building? The machine or another one specialized for QA can then assess if it fits all the technical requirements which the customer doesn’t necessarily understand. This is what most people here are worried about, eventually the professional human being will no longer be needed by businesses which can produce everything with neither customer nor business owner being in need of specialized knowledge which they previously needed to acquire by hiring professionals.
The analogy you're making is that wiring a taskrabbit to assemble Ikea furniture is woodworking.
There's a market for Ikea. It's put woodworkers out of business, effectively. The only woodworkers that make reasonable wages from their craft are influencers. Their money comes from YouTube ads.
There's no shame in just wanting things without going to the effort of making them.
Love this extension of the analogy, particularly. Especially because, like a woodworker inspecting IKEA assembled by a taskrabbit, the craftsmanship of a finished product becomes less and less impressive the longer you inspect it
I think a better comparison is painting and photography. Prior to the invention of photography, painting portraits of individuals and families was a real profession. Today it’s practically unheard of outside of heads of state and the like. Sure, there are plenty of people who could afford to commission a painted portrait but few do when a quick session in a photographer’s studio is so much cheaper and more convenient.
Woodworking is, like, the quintessential craft. I think it is very useful to bring it in when discussion "craft"!
I am not myself a woodworker, however I have understood that part of what makes it "crafty" is that the woodworker reads grain, adjusts cuts, and accepts that each board is different.
We can try to contrast that to whatever Ikea does with wood and mass production of furniture. I would bet that variation in materials is "noise" that the mass production process is made to "reject" (be insensitive to / be robust to).
But could we imagine an automated woodworking system that takes into account material variation, like wood grain, not in an aggregate sense (like I'm painting Ikea to do), but in an individual sense? That system would be making judgements that are woodworker-like.
The craft lives on. The system is informed by the judgement of the woodworker, and the craftperson enters an apprenticeship role for the automation... perhaps...
Until you can do RL on the outcome of the furniture. But you still need craft in designing the reward function.
Hey! I built a Lego technic car once 20 years ago. I am fully confident that I can build an actual road worthy electric vehicle. It's just a couple of edge cases and a bit bigger right? /s
That's really helpful, actually, as you may be able to give me some other ideas for projects.
So, things you don't think I or my coursemates could do include writing a C compiler that builds a Linux kernel.
What else do you think we couldn't do? I ask because there are various projects I'll probably get to at some point.
Things on that list include (a) writing an OS microkernel and some of the other components of an OS. Don't know how far I'll take it, but certainly a working microkernel for one machine, if I have time I'll build most of the stack up to a window manager. (b) implementing an LLM training and inference stack. I don't know how close to the metal I'd go, I've done some low level CUDA a long time ago when it was very new and low-level, depends on time. I'll probably start the LLM stuff pretty soon as I'm keen to learn.
Are these also impossible? What other things would you add to the impossible list?
Building a microkernel based OS feels feasible because it’s actually quite open ended. An “OS” could be anything from single user DOS to a full blown Unix implementation, with plenty in between.
Amiga OS is basically a microkernel and that was built 40 years ago. There are also many other examples, like Minix. Do I think most people could build a full microkernel based mini Unix? No. But they could get “something” working that would qualify as an OS.
On the other hand, there are not many C compilers that build Linux. There are many implementations of C compilers, however. The goal of “build Linux” is much more specific.
Officially, it's against TOS. I'm told you can still make it work by adding this to ~/.config/opencode/opencode.json but it risks a ban and you definitely shouldn't do it.
Ah interesting. I have been using OpenCode more and more and I prefer it to Claude Code. I use OpenCode with Sonnet and/or Opus (among other models) with Bedrock, but paying metered rates for Opus is a way to go bankrupt fast!
Most AI agents have a 'bash mode' and, you can use Warp terminal which is terminal first, but easy to activate the AI from the terminal. For example, if you mangle a jq command, it will use AI to suggest the right way to do it.
Using the Propser.com data set (a peer-to-peer lending market), I used MTurk to analyze the images of people applying for a loan. This was used in a finance research project with 3 University of Washington professors of Finance.
The idea was that the Prosper data set contained all of the information that a lending officer would have, but they also had user-submitted pictures. We wanted to see if there was value in the information conveyed in the pictures. For example, if they had a puppy or a child in the picture, did this increase the probability that the loan would get funded? That sort of thing. It was a very fun project!
How so? Read the paper. The methodology was entirely observational. They did not intervene in the prosper.com loan market or interact with the borrowers. If anything, the paper identified a form of bias that exists in the real world, namely that people commonly "perceived" as less trustworthy are penalized despite their actual creditworthiness.
The paper is a study of an existing market. They looked at data about people who had requested loans and data about which of those loans were funded, with the intent of seeing whether or not lenders were being biased by requester photos. They found that they were.
Say more about how studying that bias is hurting people?
Yeah, whenever there are human subjects there is an IRB which is necessary. But, beyond that, we didn't participate in the market in any way. We wanted to see if there was bias there, and how much of it. I think I may have used the word 'value' in a bad way in my description. Not 'value' as in 'can we exploit people?' but value as in statistical significance. E.g. if you applied for a loan and your profile picture contained yourself with a child, did that help you, hurt you, or was it neutral?
On the show Full House S05E25 the character Michelle was learning to cook. She made tuna flavored ice cream. Uncle Jesse says something to the effect of "It's great that you like tuna and great that you like ice cream. You don't have to combine them."
I try to remember that episode when building tech products. We all like solar. We all like trains. It doesn't mean that we need to have solar panels between the train tracks.
I think that although it could be cool, it seems like train right-of-ways is a particularly harsh environment for solar panels. There's dust, harsh vibrations, heavy cast iron components, and other things right next to a sensitive bit of electronics. It seems like it would be more economical to have a solar farm managed by the train company. This way the panels can be easily cleaned, angled properly, and maintained not in the proximity of giant rolling metal boxes.
It isn't clear that 'conserve water' is a reasonable default position. Perhaps 'keep doing what it was programmed to be doing' would be a better position?
Depends... the focus here isn't on convenience or utility, but on safety.
The furnace defaults to on to save the water pipes. The sprinkler defaults to off to conserve water as the system is potentially unmonitored and a burst pipe could cause issues.
Defaulting a furnace to on certainly shouldn't be considered safe. What if it's leaking CO into your house, what if it gets dangerously hot and causes a fire?
A thermostat and controls are a necessary requirement for HVAC systems and defaulting anything to "run" if your control plane doesn't exist anymore is definitely not the safe option.
The other issue is that in almost all situations (like this one) what you think is a safe and sane default won't align with what other people think.
There should be defaults and they should be clearly defined, but I don't think it's always obvious to determine what they are.
While I agree with your overall point, this clause is irrelevant to/not supportive of it. The presence of a thermostat wasn't going to help you here either and there are vastly more furnaces with connected thermostats than disconnected to worry about.
CO detectors and alarms are needed to address this risk.
Your thermostat is in a far less likely place to be overloaded with CO should the alarms start going off, though. If the thermostat is gone, you have to physically go to the furnace itself or shut off power at the circuit breaker.
Freezing water pipes are bad, but a furnace running non-stop is going to exceed its duty cycle and pose a greater hazard.
Whatever was implemented as this poorly-thought-through fail-safe would be implemented in the furnace itself, thus that furnace implementation could manage any safety-related concerns, though heating equipment is overwhelmingly rated to 100% duty cycle already. (My goal for my boiler is to have at least 22 hours per day of heating demand to ensure that I'm using the exact minimum temperature water to maintain temp in the house, to maximize efficiency.)
My furnace runs pretty close to non-stop when it’s below -30 outside, I imagine a bigger concern than duty cycles if it did that when it wasn’t -30 would be that it would still be pushing the indoor temperature to 50°C above the outdoor temp.
If something is leaking CO into your house, then it's a major safety issue and needs to be immediately scrapped. Whether or not it's internet connected is the least of your worries.
> What if it's leaking CO into your house, what if it gets dangerously hot and causes a fire?
Furnaces have multiple checks when they turned on, even on the dumbest furnaces. There are multiple safety mechanisms preventing it from getting too hot. CO leak - what thermostat will do for you here?
> The sprinkler defaults to off to conserve water as the system is potentially unmonitored and a burst pipe could cause issues.
I had a friend in Australia who ran cattle on his farm. Failing open would waste water, but failing closed would mean dead cattle (and hundreds of thousands in losses). It depends on the application.
Amazon's revenue in 2024 was about the size of Belgium's GDP. Higher than Sweden or Ireland. It makes a profit similar to Norway, without drilling for offshore oil or maintaining a navy. I think they've got plenty of juice left.
You’re right about that. I guess what I mean is, how long will people be enthusiastic about AWS and its ability to innovate. But AWS undeniably has some really strong product offerings - it’s just that their pace of innovation has slowed. Their managed solutions for open source applications is generally good, but some of their bespoke alternatives are lacking over the last few years (ecs kinesis code* tools) - it wasn’t always like that (sqs ddb s3 ec2).
The universe's metaphysical poeticism holds that it's slightly more likely than it otherwise would be that the company that replaced Sears would one day go the way of Sears.
Ha! I started with CHV, then moved to Bloglines, then to Google Reader, then to NewsBlur, then to TT-RSS, then to Feedly, then to Inoreader, where I've stayed since 2016. I get an itch every time one of these RSS discussions happens, but it passes.
There are woodworkers on YouTube who use CNC, some who use the best Festool stuff but nothing that moves on its own, and some who only use handtools. Where is the line at which woodworking is not their craft?
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