[bruce511]

Goods are usually (although not always) inferior when made by a machine. A hand-crafted solid wood table is still superior to something from Ikea.

Of course hand made tables are expensive. They service a sliver of the market. Ikea serves the rest of us who'd prefer not to eat off the floor.

Fundamentally, Luddites didn't like being replaced by a machine. They were skilled workers, who used to have very desirable skills. Most people didn't need their standard of quality (but customers had no choice.)

Their name is well known today because we never stopped replacing people with machines. Every industry as been "optimized" over and over again since the Luddite times.

AI is the first threat to the Artisans of today (ie programmers). We are just the most recent in a long history of Luddites.

In every change of this nature, some move on embracing the change, others do not. Some will find other jobs, possibly new jobs, others won't. Carriage drivers became Chauffeurs, some grooms became mechanics.

So sure, I'm a Luddite - I don't want to see my skills become cheap - but I'm also pragmatic. The change is here. I'd rather adapt than die.

[IdiotSavage]

> Goods are usually (although not always) inferior when made by a machine.

This is only true in the beginning, when machines are still primitive (e.g. first automatic looms). Nowadays machines mostly yield much better quality than any human can produce (e.g. automated welding, anything CNC controlled). Many things are only possible to build with machines (e.g. semiconductors).

> A hand-crafted solid wood table is still superior to something from Ikea.

This is by choice. Ikea chooses to produce the cheapest furniture possible, using cheap, crappy materials. Other manufacturers still produce high quality furniture, which is much more expensive.

[sgarland]

I know you said “mostly,” but wood is a huge outlier. It’s too heterogeneous to be accurately worked by machines at the level of accuracy that truly fine craftsmanship demands. To be clear, I’m talking about the level where a single chair can cost $20K, and represents hundreds of hours of labor. My FIL is at that level, and the stuff he makes is insane. The market for it is of course tiny, and I’d wager most of his buyers don’t even appreciate the attention to detail he puts into it, but yeah - there are no machines that I’m aware of that can feel perturbations at the sub-mm level and adjust the tool head on the fly, but he can.

This may simply be due to a lack of demand, but regardless, I assure you that machine-produced furniture can’t touch human-produced at the apex of fine craftsmanship.

[Voultapher]

Even something as "simple" as a kitchen knife - the same basic concept found in ancient roman everyday kitchens - can't be made to the same quality by a machine as per hand. CNC can't do the tolerances needed behind the apex. Even ignoring the story attached to a specific maker and going solely by cutting ability the really top end hand-made stuff noticeably outperforms everything mass-produced.

[IdiotSavage]

Are you talking about a chef's knife? If well done, I see no reason why it should be any worse than a high end knife made by a skilled human.

Have a look at this if you're interested:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5lq2d-03T0

[morberg]

I watched the video, but don’t understand the point you are trying to make. It was only a How things are made collage from some factory.

[IdiotSavage]

The point was to show that machines can produce knifes with precision. The other commenter stated that "CNC can't do the tolerances needed behind the apex.", whatever that means exactly.

[Voultapher]

Long story short, your point was that machines can do many things better than humans and I argue they can't even do kitchen knives better. How easily and well you cut through things depends on the thickness of the blade wedging them apart. Especially noticeable on denser food like carrots. The apex is the actual pointy part of the blade, and the thickness of the part after the apex and overall blade geometry dictate the cutting experience. Getting the front part thin is usually done via hand-grinding even in the video you shared, a fully controlled process would use something like C&C, but that tech currently can't get things thin enough to be a good knive.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

John Grimsmo's knifemaking business has a Kern which is perfectly capable of doing the tolerances needed behind the apex. That's a very expensive CNC machine, but it's capable of precision & accuracy well beyond what's possible to achieve by hand.

[Voultapher]

https://grimsmoknives.com/products/norseman-8359-8730526 look at those steps, calling this "precision & accuracy well beyond what's possible to achieve by hand" has to be a joke. Their other non CNC knives look much cleaner.

[kay_o]

Ikea does sell both ends of range; its has solid wood and particle boards.

[IdiotSavage]

They have "bottom of the barrel" and slightly better quality products. But the better products are nowhere near the (top) end of the range.

[ahartmetz]

No, really: They have pretty decent quality, too. Much better than slightly better than bottom the barrel anyway.

[IdiotSavage]

But can you show me a "top of the range" product? Not Ikea's top range, but "high end" in the common sense.

[ahartmetz]

They don't have particularly high end products, which is not what I claimed anyway. But they have good quality for the price, which extends to medium prices.

[t-3]

> Goods are usually (although not always) inferior when made by a machine. A hand-crafted solid wood table is still superior to something from Ikea.

False. Ikea is not representative of machine-made products, just their own brand of cheap and poorly-designed machine-made products which outsource assembly to the customer for novelty value. Machines are much more precise than humans and do tedious and complex work without cutting corners or getting tired. Buying handcrafted wooden furniture is a class and wealth flex, just like buying any other customized product. The superiority, if any, is entirely in the materials and bespoke design rather than the work - machines can do almost any of the work involved much better than humans.

[Earw0rm]

Seems we've fallen straight back into false dichotomy land.

In that there are a dozen shades of grey between "fully-automated, no humans assembly line" and "person using only hand tools maintained by hand". Tools _are_ machines, are technology, they've just been around so long we forgot that industrially forged steel needs an industrial steel forge.

Probably the best quality product you'll get is from a person who cares, sourcing materials they care about, working with it using their expertise and discernment, and using the most effective tools to get the job done - most, but not all of which will be power or machine tools.

But the point is that the human needs to direct the machines - sometimes that's just a thinking task, and sometimes it's a bunch more physically hands-on.

[tavavex]

I know it's not the point of the conversation, but this is very overly harsh to Ikea. Their products are cheap (or, at least, they focus on cheap products), but why poorly-designed? I never had any of their furniture fail on me, and the concessions they make to get the lower price are really not deal-breakers in 99% of cases. It's really not bad at all. Also, selling disassembled furniture saves them a fortune on shipping, they don't do it because they think it's funny or quirky or something.

[Ekaros]

I wonder what percentage of wooden furniture is truly hand-crafted in whole chain. That is felled with hand-made tools by hand. Transportation maybe can be ignored. Then hand sawed without power tools. All other tools after that being hand made from ground up. Like saws, planes, sand paper, glues(most likely at least some parts are glued together wood)... Most likely vanishingly small number.

[fingerlocks]

Anything “live edge” is often done by hand. Also true for end grain cutting boards, end grain anything really, and any furniture made with mostly burl and heartwood. Coffee tables are common.

The reason is that knotted wood is dangerously unwieldy to machine without a lot of additional preparation. End grain work is just hard to automate. Lots of gluing into a shape that can’t be planed easily and prone to exploding if one is careless.

If you want to peek in to the weird long tail, the guys over at Sawmill Creek love to one-up each other in a never ending contest to be the king of traditional wood working.

[zdragnar]

Head out to Amish country, there's plenty to be found if you look for it. With that said, depending on the community, they may use tools powered by belt driven by or air compressed by non-electrical means. Each community decides where to draw the line of acceptable modern tech, so you'd need to ask how they build their products.

[torben-friis]

>Of course hand made tables are expensive. They service a sliver of the market. Ikea serves the rest of us who'd prefer not to eat off the floor.

And yet my working class grandparents didn't eat off the floor, they had great quality tables.

Mine is made of disguised cardboard.

This is a big part of the problem, there is zero trust that any potential improvement in cost or access will reach consumers. Companies don't even bother telling us it will.

We will just be slowly moved into accepting a degradation as the new normal.

[scrollaway]

The cost improvements reached you, you just don't see them in the table quality.

You see them in the fact that every single home you'll visit to buy or rent has a fully equipped kitchen including a fridge, oven, likely a microwave, dishwasher and even a washing machine (which alone has a huge economic impact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gvsz_vc7B0)

You see it in the fact that your home is safer from fires than it ever has been. That hot water is a cheap passive thing you don't even think about, rather than something you have to plan for. That a TV is a nice add-on to it all, rather than a huge deal to get.

Your grandparents' table was more expensive because they had less things, and the massive wood table that they saved months for was what was kept and stood the test of time for you to see today. Because let's not forget, this is also what furnishing 100 years ago can look like:

https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod/images/furnishing-for-h...

[BoingBoomTschak]

The real problem is that today, you rarely can pay more to get better. If you pay 3x more for your appliances (TV, dishwasher, oven, etc...) you don't get something 3x more reliable/better engineered.

Because that requires manufacturers ready to give up stealth corner cutting as the cornerstone of their earnings in favour of the hard and long task of developing an image of reliability.

------

Three cases I know enough about: cars, loudspeakers and computer monitors.

You can still buy some Mazda/Toyota models to really get more thoughtful engineering and QC for your money, but the Germans with a similar image of quality (Mercedes, BMW) have partially or fully shed the underlying quality.

Genelec remains the only (non-PA) loudspeaker manufacturer you can sincerely trust to take reliability, performance and transparency seriously. There was also Klein + Hummel (K+H) but since being bought by Sennheiser and integrated with Neumann, things have been going downhill... to the point where some curious people found CapXon caps (bottom of the barrel) in their KH80s.

Computer monitors? Since Panasonic (Eizo's supplier of yore) exited the panel market and left it as LG vs Samsung, it's been a complete disaster. Oh, you wanna pay 1~2k $currency for a fancy OLED monitor? Get used to appalling panel QC (banding, uniformity), VRR flicker and DSC crap.

The available choice for "pay more to get better" continues to dwindle...

[tardedmeme]

And when you do pay more, you're paying more to someone who has figured out how to make you think you are getting better quality, not to someone who is giving you better quality. This is the "market for lemons" effect.

[Earw0rm]

"If you pay 3x more for your appliances (TV, dishwasher, oven, etc...) you don't get something 3x more reliable/better engineered."

You do at the bottom of unregulated markets. For dishwashers and ovens, safety regs generally impose a high floor on the market. There is no $40 oven, because it's physically impossible to make a safety-compliant oven for $40. If it weren't for market regulation, $40 death-trap ovens would be a thing for sure.

The very cheapest compliant unit isn't _much_ worse than a mid-market unit, it might be a bit flimsier and wear out sooner; high-end luxury units aren't much better than mid-market units - because there's not much innovation driving progress at the top end. AEG and Bosch are still generally solid engineering, but there's not much point in paying more than that unless you like the aesthetics.

Mercedes and BMW - small-volume performance models aside - are like the big fashion brands, Vuitton etc., they're selling the idea of luxury to people who aren't even nouveau-riche, more like borrowing money to cosplay loudly as nouveau-riche. Compare old 1970s Merc convertibles with today's, the modern ones are just kind of ugly, aggressive and sad.

ADAM Audio loudspeakers are pretty good or were last time I bought a pair. They're designed as studio monitors but great for listening too. Perhaps they've gone downhill since being bought by a listed company a few years ago?

[BoingBoomTschak]

>ADAM Audio loudspeakers are pretty good or were last time I bought a pair. They're designed as studio monitors but great for listening too. Perhaps they've gone downhill since being bought by a listed company a few years ago?

The Focusrite buyout (unless there was another after it) seem to have improved quality and transparency (i.e. publicly available official measurements for their current range). Still, performance remains lacking for the asking price of the A/S models; the A7V has a massive port resonance near 650 Hz, for example.

Interesting post about an old Adam engineer reminiscing about A5X issues: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/a...

[jltsiren]

And my dinner table is solid wood from IKEA.

Affordable quality is perhaps harder to find in the US than in some other countries. Because professional salaries are so high, the top 10% is responsible for ~50% of consumer spending. That makes middle spenders a less lucrative market than in countries with more equal incomes.

[Freak_NL]

So many posters here going on about cheap IKEA tables. Did they ever visit IKEA? I have an IKEA wooden dinner table with the top made from sturdy panels of solid wood bars glued together for eternity. We've only had it for twenty years of course, so who can tell if it is any good…

Sure, the LACK coffee table is recycled honeycombed cardboard. That's on purpose, and totally fine. I hope people don't eat their dinner of those outside of student life though.

[ponector]

How many hours it was required for them to work to earn money for that table?

The truth is people mostly want not an improved version but cheaper one.

[roland35]

Its interesting, I think people sometimes think there is some binary existence of furniture sometimes! What's nice about todays modern economy is that there is a whole spectrum of tables I can purchase.

I can get a ultra cheap mdf Walmart table, a slightly less cheap Ikea table, maybe a midrange crate and barrel table, or a very expensive hard wood table from the local furniture store. Here in the Midwest we even have hand made Amish furniture available. So buy what you want!

[gymbeaux]

I think of housing as a better example- KB Home cookie cutter special for $400k or 100-year-old craftsman house for $800k. Most are okay with the $400k cookie cutter special that probably has piss in the walls, because $800k is such a huge increase. I fear most companies won’t want to pay the extra cost for “the same software” to be written by hand.

[nathan_compton]

But there was also a lot of hard work to push legal reforms and protections to ensure quality and a good living for people displaced by or pressed into work by the new models. It isn't just an "adapt or die" situation on a personal level. Society itself must adapt to produce a healthy human condition.

[maeln]

> Goods are usually (although not always) inferior when made by a machine. A hand-crafted solid wood table is still superior to something from Ikea.

I would argue that this is quite the opposite. We may have this perception due to how mass-manufactured product are pushed to insane cost-saving measure due to harsh competition. But machine are far, far more accurate than human, and have been for years. A commercial CNC has insane tolerance, a pick and place machine can accurately place parts that human can barely see, a miter saw can make straight and angle cut that would be very hard using hand tools, ...

And I would argue that your example is even wrong. Almost all Ikea furniture use MDF, which is very dimensionally stable, and once protected with a veneer, is decently resistant to moisture. A solid wood table will contract, warp, etc, depending on the grain of the wood, the humidity, ... And will require much more care and regular use of surface treatment. Of course, "real" wood has its own advantage, but it is a matter of requirement. And even that "hand-craft" table is not hand-crafted. Any woodworking shop today use machines. Circular saw of many types, power drill, planing machines, ... Which are faster and more accurate than hand tool (although hand tool still have their place).

> Fundamentally, Luddites didn't like being replaced by a machine. They were skilled workers, who used to have very desirable skills. Most people didn't need their standard of quality (but customers had no choice.)

And that's the thing. As you mentioned, very few go to a woodworker to buy a several k$ furniture. Most go to mass-produces-cheap-but-decent furniture companies like Ikea because they don't have a whole month of salary to put in furniture. Machine can absolutely help create far better quality product. But the way of the world has always been to favor cheap but good enough goods.

The big difference with LLMs and "IA" is that they are not a circular saw, they are not a CNC, etc. They are not a tool made for a specific purpose and optimize for it that can reach insane tolerances that no human could match (and especially not as fast). They are, as the post mentioned, "a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of programming". There is not really any equivalent in human history. This is a bullshit machine that is scarily good at producing valid output.

It's why I think it is so controversial and why the dust still hasn't settled and why the usefulness of LLM are still subject of such heated debate. A miter saw will cut your plank at a 45-degree angle very fast and very accurately. If you do a lot of that, the benefit is obvious. But if you had a “magical” woodworking tool that could cut at an angle, drill counter-sink, glue veneer, etc, all-in-one but the tolerances are completely random, how useful would that be ? How much time would it save you ? It would be really tough to say.

[pyrale]

> Most people didn't need their standard of quality (but customers had no choice.)

Customers don't really have a choice either way. Good luck finding quality clothing, services with decent customer support, etc.

Supply chains supporting quality work are destroyed when an industry gets commoditized, and whenever a company doing quality stuff emerges, it eventually gets bought out and the product gets watered down in order to milk its reputation with inferior product.