[ok_dad]

Is woodworking valid with power tools or is the tool doing the art? What about a CNC in the workshop? I think it’s all valid because the art is in the planning and resulting furniture. Same thing for coding. Even an LLM needs human creative input.

[moffkalast]

It depends purely on the level of snobbery you want to strive for.

[slowhadoken]

It’s not snobbery, it’s knowledge and craft. You depend on the transfer of that knowledge from one generation to the next.

[fragmede]

Except we don't, because technology advances and techniques get lost because they're no longer useful. I have no idea how to make a buggy whip or drive a horse to market, because we don't do that anymore. I'm sure someone can find a manufacturer that survived the downturn but a lot of that knowledge has simply been lost to the sands of time.

Fortunately we have YouTube University and (for now) the Internet Archive, where hopefully current techniques won't be lost, but we'll just have to see how the future goes.

The privilege to use old timey techniques and then sell furniture on the basis that no power tools were used in the making of it is practically the definition of snobby, as if using power tools to make furniture lead to bad energy being imbued in the table that makes it unsuitable for being used as a table. You don't have to buy any furniture if you don't want it, especially if it's poorly made, but power tools don't automatically mean it's poorly made. You can make really shite furniture with hand tools just as much as with power tools.

[slowhadoken]

Knowledge transfer is a serious thing in important companies. Technology advances but it’s based on the same logical and mathematical principals. Techniques aren’t lost, they’re warehoused. I’ve rewritten advanced data structures that were purposed in the 1960’s, successfully applied in the 1990’s, and they’re still relevant and cutting edge today.

[ok_dad]

I hate saying that anything is no longer useful, but the commenter above has a point about how tech will get lost as it becomes outdated and useless. Your example, for instance, shows that those data structures were useful, because they were warehoused and saved in some way. You don't see people using a lot of magnetic core memory these days, even in space. Using a handsaw is still useful today, even for non-snobby furniture, because there are some cuts that a power tool cannot replicate accurately. A hand plane is still valuable in the workshop for many things. One thing you see less and less of today is a hand drill, however, because they are objectively less good at drilling accurate holes than a power drill of some type. I wouldn't call the users of hand drills snobs, because some people prefer hand tools for many reasons, such as being quieter, but they are definitely not using a hand drill to gain an advantage over power tools.

[slowhadoken]

I get that hardware changes but some of the most impressive projects I’ve seen involve the programmer understanding the hardware of the day. There are young programmers right now writing to the PlayStation 1. And again the principals of space and time complexity don’t change. Dijkstra wrote his shortest path finding algorithm in 1956 and it’s still useful today. But the idea of irrelevance still continues to throw fear into good programmers.