Dude, I think it's worse. Some carpenters still make a living creating high-end furniture, or straight-up art pieces. I can't quite imagine a future where a hand-crafted app will ever be a status-symbol. The people who love coding for code's sake are (economically) screwed.
I agree with all of that, but I think there's a bit of "ball-hiding" going on in most of these conversations. It isn't only that programmers crave(d) praise or social recognition (though maybe that's it for some), but they're also having to come to terms with the fact that their "art-form" suddenly has much, much less economic value. They were able, for a long time, to (and I say this absolutely non-pejoratively - in fact, just the opposite) have their cake and eat it too, by being virtually guaranteed to make a living (in practice, in the demographic most represented on this board, a very good one) doing a thing they love to do. It's gauche, in Anglo-Saxon countries, to talk openly about one's own financial circumstances, so that mostly doesn't get raised in these threads, but I can hear it in the background of most of them, like "whaddya mean no one's gonna pay me to solve interesting problems with code any more? Now I've gotta do that, if I'm ever going to do that at all, in my spare time, for free?"
And I so, so, so sympathize with that. I devoted 25 years of my life to the performing arts, from which - as a very unattached young man - I was able scrape an exceedingly frugal living. That, in the arts, is a success story - the vast majority make no living from doing it at all, in fact probably the reverse. Coders arguably have it worse: it's hard to see anyone making any money from "writing code", ever again. It's not surprising to me that they're confused and hurt right now: they have, quickly, sadly, and unexpectedly been pushed into the economic corner other artists always have occupied.
Hmm, game design is a little different to other forms of software, and DF in particular since it's a niche interest that happened gained a following and became profitable. Would a temple-os be exhibited in MoMA?
Oh, you're not going to bait me into that one! "What is Art?" is the central 20th century aesthetic question, which no one ever answered to anyone else's satisfaction. Nowadays artists and critics have mostly stopped addressing it, because it's just exhausting, and everyone gets on with whatever it is they do. (But, yes: every profession can be Art is one of the answers some people propose! You can make your own mind up about that.)
What I observe, however, is that the people on this board who most mourn the end of hand-coding talk about code much like artists talk about art. It also, if it is to continue, looks like it will be an aesthetics-driven pursuit, appreciated by its practioners and a small cognoscenti. However you care to define the practice itself, economically speaking, that's an art market.
Probably, those folks are in an even worse position than that. Though I've written some software I'm proud of, I wouldn't describe myself as a particularly competent developer, and while I can appreciate clean code, and love 'the story of Mel', and all that, would I pay extra for an artisanal, organic, free-range, hand-coded app or whatever? No, I frankly wouldn't - and I'm to the right of probably 98% of the general population on the appreciates-software-aesthetics curve. The fine arts world depends on the money it generates from its own rightmost 2%, but are there enough wealthy patrons for whom hand-crafted software will be a prestige marker? That's difficult to imagine.
but it's you throwing around the term. e.g. "economically speaking, that's an art market" - in what sense? How do you define an "art market"? It all seems very tautological.
> aesthetics-driven pursuit
aesthetics can usually biased by utility, to the extent of being a proxy for it. You can find the aerodynamics of a aeroplane or hummingbird wing beautiful, but there is still functionality driving it.
aesthetics is not the opposite of instrumental value; perhaps affective value, or sentimentality is?
> would I pay extra for an artisanal, organic, free-range, hand-coded app
what is artisanal code? I think talking about ux design conflates things, consider only backend code.
A slightly silly synonym for "hand-written code" - ie, not made with the assistance of AI. That's what I've been talking about all along.
> How do you define an "art market"?
In the preceding sentence:
> an aesthetics-driven pursuit, appreciated by its practioners and a small cognoscenti.
It's the cognoscenti who make the market, in case that sentence wasn't quite clear. I expanded that thought more thoroughly in the next paragraph, but I can see how the transition was a bit ambiguous.
> consider only backend code.
Sure, that's what I actually was thinking about. Where is the market for hand-written back-end code going to be? What will induce someone to pay more for it than for in-elegant but equally-functional AI code? Who's going to be able to make a living writing code by hand?
I'm not really a developer, but when I read good ones on this board lamenting the de-valuing of their craft, and the necessity to adapt to an AI-aided method of working, I hear echoes of the weavers forced from their looms and into the factories. Handweavers today are hobbyists or "textile artists", and the everyday fabrics we all wear are made by soul-less machines. That's where those developers believe they are headed, and I'm sympathetic to them, especially so because think they're more fucked than they even realise.
Aye, and amid all of the (admittedly annoying) word salad, the "Claude" in this satire identified the reason the requested change was hard: someone(s) at some point had hijacked the button markup for other purposes. Un-doing all of that kind of mess is never a trivial change, and probably requires someone with more coding expertise / knowledge of the code than the given prompts reveal the putative user to be.
AI isn't magic, and it won't (or, at least, doesn't yet) enable anyone to do All The Things.
I'm deliberately not addressing the article as a whole, but I'd like to engage with your smaller point. My parents viewed all day care as "dumping [their] kid in an institution" and made massive sacrifices so that my mum could housewife for a decade+ with me and my younger sister. My wife and I have made a different choice with our son, and I honestly wish my parents had done the same - at least after we were two or three.
Admittedly, my wife and I are fortunate to be able to pay for him to go to an excellent pre-school (though the one local to my parents was similarly good), and I see him naturally acquiring a social fluency and confidence with his peers that I didn't have (if I even do!) until I was an adult. Furthermore, had I been cared for outside the home, my mum would have spent vastly more time with my sister when she was an infant and toddler, which I think would have been a lifelong benefit to her. I also think my mum would have been personally better off getting back to full-time work ~5 years earlier than she did: full-time parenting wore on her, and she and my dad would have been able to retire a few years sooner.
Those are all highly-dependent personal circumstances, so I'm not going to draw a universal rule - but I'm telling you this in order to caution you against doing the same. All families, and all individual circumstances, are different.
[Second thought] I am going to make one general point: the benefit my son draws is highly dependent upon attending a good school. Institutions absolutely exist where "dumping them" is an appropriate epithet to apply, but there is no reason why that has to be the case. I don't know where you live, but in my country the "pro-natalist" political party is also devoted to policies which make schools worse (cutting funding, lowering teacher pay, meddling with curricula, etc), which seems to me to be perverse.
actually, i strongly believe that the most benefits come from how (not how much) parents interact with and care for their children. i went to kindergarten too, and i grew up spending a lot of tome outside with other kids with plenty of opportunity to socialize, both supervised and unsupervised, but lack of my parents availability (to put it mildly) created an anxiety that completely ruined any social ability that i would have been able to acquire otherwise.
so sure, each case is different, and you are not wrong, but you are putting to much value on good institutions. the heavy lifting still comes from the parents. your children are doing well because you care that they do.
I do agree with you about that. It sucks that you had parents who weren't there for you in the way you needed. I'm doing my damndest not to repeat the mistakes my own parents made, and we'll see in twenty years or so how that goes.
But, that was part of my point above. My sister to this day feels like she never had the supportive and attentive relationship with our late mother that she needed. (For what it's worth, I agree with her.) In my imaginary reality, at least, if she'd been the only child at home for a few days a week, while I was at day-care and then school, maybe she'd have grown up feeling differently.
I see good parenting and good institutions - that's schools, but also parks and pools and little leagues and libraries, and, hell, even good policing - as mutually supportive. It's unfair to expect one side of the individual / community matrix to make up for all of the shortcomings of the other, but each can strengthen the other side.
Oh, absolutely! But, so are most of the lessons we draw from life experience, instead of, like, science. That doesn't make them unimportant to talk about, so long as we approach them - and each other - with appropriate degrees of humility and good will.
I took a look at this over the weekend, and it's not really for me. Thanks for recommending it, though: I hope it hit with at least one other reader on here.
> the supernatural events described on stage are very difficult to pull off even with modern effects. But they were impossible with Jacobean setups
Speaking generally, as a former theatre professional, using onstage "effects" is less effective than firing the audience's imagination, and inviting them to do the work - which, of course, Jacobean artists were well able to do, and their audiences arguably more prepared to accept. The best plays - and I do think Maccers is among them, although the three productions of it I've been in were mediocre to dire - give huge scope for that.
This was a wonderful article, that nails what's wonderful - and frustrating - about the show.
Thanks for this. I'll give it a try, though I'm not someone who experiences much frustration with Finder, because I maintain a solid folder structure, and use Alfred (first) for virtually all file interactions.
The deciders for me, in case you're interested:
- Privacy. It doesn't look like you are trying to get my data. I'll be using network monitoring to verify.
- Automatically groups like files, regardless of file location. Yes, I know I can do this manually with tags, but I... don't.
- Polish. The screenshots make it look like a native interface. Bonus points if I can set it to hide until mouseover, like my dock bar.
I'm most curious about how it will function alongside Dropbox, particularly with cloud-stored files. I have several times my HDD in Dropbox (largely in folders shared with me); I know Keptor won't be able to read stub files, but if it greedily downloads and fills up my HDD it'll be an instant day-killer and uninstall. If it reads on-device files, and then stores a sparse representation so it can still present them in a list once they've been removed to the cloud it'll be great; I will manually sync and de-sync some folders to get them into the data. (If it incrementally syncs cloud files to my device, reads them, and then pushes them back up it'd be amazing, and I'll buy a lifetime license immediately - but I'm not sure those permissions exist.)
I'm with you, though I do it differently. I have a git-status plug-in in my editor that shows me what directories -> files have been changed, and then which lines when I open them. Scanning the sidebar is the same as running "git status" first, but I prefer the visual representation.
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