Survived

Good or bad, converting craft work to production work is not making the craft worker more productive, it's eliminating the craft worker.

The unskilled operator's position is also precarious, as you point out, but while it lasts, it's a different and (arguably) less satisfying form of work.

The LLM is not a table saw that makes a carpenter faster, it's an automatic machine that makes an owner's capital more efficient.

A LLM is more like a CNC panel saw; feed a sheet in one end, stack up parts from the other.

It reduces craftsmanship to unskilled labor.

The design work and thinking happen somewhere else. The operator comes in, punches a clock, and chokes on MDF dust for 8 hours.

Dude, some skeezy used car salesman type bought the bike and made a 350 pound profit.

Literally no one involved cared about getting the best price except the bottom-feeders attending the auction.

I'd have spent my twenties writing free software if I could count on $1500/month.

It would have been so great.

For cars that are out of warranty, it is an advantage, as the car will be scrapped sooner, thereby opening up a hole in the market that needs to be filled with a new car.

An advantage to the manufacturer, that is. For the consumer, it leads to never ending car payments for life, or surprise bills that approach the cost of a replacement vehicle.

I think Bonhoeffer was referring to an acquired or affected stupidity; a position adopted defensively to fit into a social or political situation.

If the truth becomes dangerous or unpopular, a decent defense is adopting stupidity. I think that is subtly different from ignorance, which implies never knowing, as opposed to a rejection of truth.

Like much cognitive dissonance, it can be easiest to live with if you just change your beliefs rather than trying to rail against it.

The danger is, once truth is denied, reality becomes disconnected and atrocity much more abstract.

Maybe there is a better name yet for the phenomenon.

Many years ago, when I was a very young man, out late one night walking home from the bar, I happened upon a man standing outside the railing of the bridge I was crossing.

Without really thinking about it, I stopped, asked him if he needed help, tried to get him talking. He did talk to me for a while, but when I looked away to try and get a passing car to call for some help, he jumped.

I told my coworkers about it the next day, and it just seemed to make them uncomfortable. I didn't feel quite right about what had happened, but I wasn't sure why.

I had had a pretty crappy youth, my mom died when I was ten years old, and that was followed by a solid decade of rough times. I was no stranger to serious depression and had, by then, consciously decided I would not kill myself, after giving it serious thought.

I called a close friend of mine and told him the story. He had also lost his mother young. He just asked me one question and I immediately understood. He asked "Why did you stop?"

I myself had decided not to take my own life, but I believed I had the right to do so. Here I was, insinuating myself into a most intense and private moment this stranger to me was having. I would not have wanted that for myself.

I don't regret stopping that night. I would however, do things differently should it happen again.

I realize that some words on your screen are unlikely to make you feel much better about it, but I hope you do.

Now the shitball who yelled "jump" out of his window as he drove by, I hope that asshole is wracked with guilt still, twenty-five years later. Probably not though, feeling bad, like you have been, is the sign of a good person.