"Man vs Machine: Why Is Handmade Furniture Better?
February 10, 2022
Furniture is meant to last a lifetime, right? So what happened to that chair you bought last year from IKEA? Why does furniture sold by these large retailers break so easily? Do they not make them like they used to anymore?
These are all valid questions, but the answer is simple. Most of the low-cost and quality furniture we buy nowadays is mass-produced. This means that they’re all made in factories and most of the manufacturing and assembling of these items are done by machines.
Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Not all machine-made furniture is cheap and low in terms of quality, but you should expect that most of them are. It’s not only the labor aspect that makes them affordable but also because cheap materials are utilized for them.
Handmade furniture, on the other hand, is often far superior to factory-made counterparts."
AND this is part of an argument I would advance about 'No-Code' programming.
Certainly, having bought 10 wooden chairs (for my ESL school), I spent the better part of the week sanding off all the splinters and scaffy bits that were going to stick in kids' bums. Later, as the cheap glue dried out and legs and backs of the chairs began to come apart I spent more time with my electric drill and a box of high-quality wood screws making sure that would not happen repeatedly.
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I have, deployed across the computers in my 2 ESL schools, standalones (for Linux 32 and 64 bit) for kids to use to advance their English.
[This is called 'Content Delivery and Reinforcement' if you feel an urge to use slightly silly jargon.]
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These ACEPC machines measure about 5 by 5 inches and run Xubuntu Linux like a charm: so I was very happy to get my hands on 10 of them for 20 Euros each as they are now attached to the school walls, allowing children far more desk space for their notebooks and so on.
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These 60-odd standalones were developed 'by hand', in so far as I spent hours on both the coding and the interface design. They have all been made to connect directly with features of the curriculum I generally follow. Over the 18 years or so that I have been teaching ESL to children here in Bulgaria I have chucked out about 12 standalones (not needed, not effective, displaced by better standalones I have made later).
Now, I would like to imagine had those standalones (or, at least the source stacks they have been derived from) been assembled by
A.I.; I imagine I would have had to do nearly as much work on those stacks as I did hand coding them to get them exactly the way I wanted them, sand off any 'splinters' and so on.
So, I would imagine that A.I. [err, Xavvi] might be a bit like Google Translate: it would do a general botch job . . .
1. That might be good enough for running up a prototype to show your boss / sponsor / thesis supervisor.
2. That would need quite a lot of tweaking and polishing to get it up the the standard one requires.
So: gazing into my, fairly murky, crystal ball, I can see:
a. A plethora of third-rate apps suddenly flooding the market.
b. Lots of people who are employed in doing 'donkey work' re programming suddenly finding themselves out of work.
c. A few people adapting to the new situation and positioning themselves to be 'polishers' and 'correctors', and
expecting to be paid a lot more than they are at the moment.
d. A few (a dwindling number?) of programmers offering to do 'the whole thing', just like a soutar down the road from here shut up shop when the trickle of people making their way to his doors for handmade, bespoke shoes dried up completely.
HOWEVER, like a Google Translate 'production', sometimes sorting out the 'trashlate' is even more difficult than going back to the Ur text and doing the translation from that yourself.
