I wish the author could address whether or not people can buy a house and raise a family by making hypercubes. The potter was able to make cups and pots because that's what the people needed. In this future of manufactured ceramics the author envisions, what is the material reality who dedicated themselves to the craft of pottery? How many ceramic factories do we really need?
I think the author also misses that humans still make mugs. They're just low-skill, low-craft jobs in a factory instead. The parts that easy have been automated, while humans still handle the tough bits. The jobs have also been centralized and moved to a factory in a third-world country instead of being distributed, in every other town across the world.
To push <profession> the way of the potter is to commodify it, underpay the workers while draining the job of its craft and creativity. Then charge comparably wealthy people for the privilege of doing it for 2hrs a week as a recreational activity. A dozen people in major cities can get really good at it then have boutique studios where they charge wealthy people 100x the commodified price to be able to buy the same product but locally made.
We can't easily close Pandora's box of globalism and automation, but let's not glorify the destruction of craft and artisanship without recognition of the trade society made.
It seems silly to blame globalism and automation. These should be good things. More production with less should be good. There is another culprit, one that has been smoldering for centuries. Most creative work has already been commodified, because capitalism is incapable of seeing value in art other than what is can be exploited for and the system is very unkind to whomever is not productive in a very specific way. AI is just very potent accelerant.
I guess it really is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Type systems are orthogonal topic. I’d argue that the biggest hypers of AI are in the static types camp, because it allows them to iterate quickly and more safely than using dynamic types.
Yeah I described trends in software development is like the length of skirts. They both have the same logic behind the changes. But I don't consider type systems to be hype. I think they're frequently poorly implemented with a mathematically illiterate notation but they're so damn useful went done reasonably right
Most of my understanding on type systems comes from taking a course on the calculation of programs from the author of this book.
To be blunt, this course and the understanding this book gave me crystallized why I was unhappy with the current state of software development and it was one more nudge pushing me out of the field. I caution others that reading and understanding this book may change your understanding of the software development world enough that you don't want to be part of it either.
Programming in the 1990s: An Introduction to the Calculation of Programs | Springer Nature Link (formerly SpringerLink) https://share.google/K81ZlVTbfoR2oeYLh
Also, not just followers. There’s a kinda “merchant” behaviour too I think … signalling and trading in hype perspectives.
But to be fair, I’m not sure what the average dev/eng is supposed to do against a climate of regular change, many disparate opinionated groups with disparate tech stacks, and, IMO a pretty ~~pure~~ poor engineering culture of actually weighing the value of tech/methods against relevant constraints and trade offs.
Clay comes from the earth, has great plastic deformation properties, and when heated sufficiently it turns to ceramic--whereafter it can never be turned back to clay. We humans have been doing ceramics for over 30,000 years. Yet, there is no undo in the process of pottery, and much of the process requires experience to know, in the most inexact sense of knowing, what the result will actually look like. Clay exists as a physical medium, and while knowledge of chemistry and physics can certainly inform your usage of clay, in actuality the chemical interactions that occur during a firing are still complicated enough that we in the industry still refer to them as "kiln magic".
Programming, conversely, is primarily a logical thought experiment. Most of the programs I have written have almost no physical representation. There is no material to coding, even assembly programmers work at the top of a heap of mental and physical abstractions. The process itself is rife with tooling between the user and the medium, correcting our mistakes and suggesting alternative ideas. There is always very quick feedback as to the result of a program. And the field, although still full of open questions, is largely well specified, in spite of it being an incredibly young field of study!
As far as mediums for expression go it would, in my opinion, be rare to find two that are more different. I can't help but think of the old phrase, "the map is not the territory."
It's really only safe to assume clay=code in the context that the author provided. Even then, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
It's easy to assume that because this person is a coder that they are also careful with logic, but it doesn't seem to be the case.
My take: clay coders are on the way out (or shape shifting) as AI becomes capable of writing code that can be thought of as clay. I hope to see you on the other side where we'll talk about systems that outpace the analogy.
Imagine calling a circle a sphere. But a circle is 2D projection of a sphere.
I suppose we are comfortable calling a 3D projection of a hypercube by its 4D name because there really is no 4D context which we can readily slip into. That and no shorter name than "3D projection of a hypercube".
I'm not a mathematician and I'm certainly guilty of uncareful thinking. And I'm not certain that careful thinking and speech is always necessary.
Maybe I just missed the whole point of this article. I have a math fetish and IRL hobbies with my wife, now listen to what I have to say about what code and AI are up to?
Code is clay. Code is foam. Code is water. Code is paper. Code is wood.
Why can't it just be code? Is it that hard to conceptualize? Is the point of the article to rage-bait nerds by making a loose comparison that might not hold up under scrutiny?
Just grumbling in the hopes that someone else will grumble and I won't feel like the only one. My apologies to those who really needed to read this article and feel insulted by my take.
That's a fair response. I think I was trying to make a point which may be a bit more subtle than my questions suggest when taken at face value.
I'll attempt to explain.
From reading the article, I presume that at some point, all the people who think of code as clay will migrate out of this profession and set up shop in some mall somewhere helping married people renew their ties by making code artifacts by hand. As the article suggests, code (for them) will go the way that clay has went.
Also per the article, AI will be making some other portion of the low-hanging fruit code which business people can't justify hiring humans for.
And then perhaps there will be me and other people like me getting paid to work on things which require an understanding that code is quite unlike any medium humanity has seen before.
For the later group, code is not for everyone, it's beyond what AI can produce by itself, it's not a fetish, it's not cool, it's not fun, and it's one of the only ways to do the things we can do with it.
I sometimes think I'm addressing that later group of people when I type into this box, but maybe that's a bit naive of me.
It could have been safer for me to state that I find it unwise to make these analogies without being careful about the dangers in doing so.
The article did not do it for you. Do not apologize and thanks for sharing why he did not do it for you. It did not do it for me neither, for other reasons (I don't care that much about code, as a non-coder)
I'm an experienced software engineer and ceramicist and I enjoyed this essay. I have stuff to say.
There are some wonderful industrial ceramic designs, e.g. Royal Copenhagen. But most of it is cold. Despite that people still become attached to their factory-produced porcelain mugs, because we want our daily objects to be our life-companions. We demand certain qualities that lead to intimacy. Studio pottery is a direct line to these deeper relationships, so when people own studio pottery for the first time they rarely want to go back. It's a red pill moment.
Studio pottery is not a luxury. You can buy a mug from one of the finest potters in the world for £50, and you can buy a beautiful piece for £25-£30. These might bring years of pleasure, and that registers with our customers as fantastic value. So there are plenty of studio potters all over the world who make a living with their craft.
However the product of craft-produced code and AI-produced code are, for a customer, mostly the same. So my fear is that writing code by hand will become little more than a challenging and pleasurable distraction, like a big-brained version of solving sudoku, whereas making pottery will always have a value that outstrips it's factory-produced counterparts.
But I think there is a parallel between clay and code here. There are night-school potters who just love making and getting away from their fucking screens. I have love for every one of these people. And there are those who take it much further, who read the books and design the kilns, who wood-fire in shifts over many days, who study glaze chemistry, who create objects no one has imagined before. And in software there are the line-of-business enterprise coders, and often they're handle turners who would really rather be doing something else but there are those who take it much further, who read the books and language specs, who work on foundational open source tools and study compiler design, who create idioms and paradigms no one has yet conceived of.
All that's very interesting. But for me the commercial side is prosaic and a bit dull. The pleasures of both are the creativity, which is itself a way of re-enchanting my materialist and bewildering late-capitalist way of life.
I feel that this article (like many other endeavors) has been derailed by the whole AI thing. Let's ignore that part.
The major point is that yes both clay and code are mediums for expression and they have advantages and drawbacks - for expression, for monetization, for utility and so on. I myself are quite interested in how these (and other) different mediums affect the author (artist/designer/potter/coder etc) in how they think, what they think about, and how that mediates their relation with the world around them - and indeed the consequent cultures emerging therein.
To paraphrase a wise bot: like everything else in life, coding is just a primitive, degenerate form of bending.
Humans relate concepts to established concepts and world views, it’s a form of prejudice, and has philosophical resonance with premature optimization being the root of some not great thinking.
> Honestly I think I'm going to like it more. I got into programming because I liked building things, not because I wanted to type boilerplate for the rest of my life.
Sounds to me like OP wanted to be the executive ordering his engineer team to build something rather than him being the engineer that actually builds it.
Also, "But clay didn't go away. Ceramics studios are everywhere now. People pay good money to throw pots on weekends.". What misguided statement. The population of full-time pottery workers didn't all open studios (likely a tiny percentage but it is more likely that the pottery studio people do not come from a pottery factory background) and those who opened them are likely not able to obtain a full-time equivalent level of income by catering to people like OP.
The article reads like a privileged person who lacks the ability to empathize with the disenfranchised.
They’re right. Try making a living using pottery compared to programming. These days (prior to LLMs, at least) you could get 6 figure job by completing a bootcamp.
I wish the author could address whether or not people can buy a house and raise a family by making hypercubes. The potter was able to make cups and pots because that's what the people needed. In this future of manufactured ceramics the author envisions, what is the material reality who dedicated themselves to the craft of pottery? How many ceramic factories do we really need?
I think the author also misses that humans still make mugs. They're just low-skill, low-craft jobs in a factory instead. The parts that easy have been automated, while humans still handle the tough bits. The jobs have also been centralized and moved to a factory in a third-world country instead of being distributed, in every other town across the world.
To push <profession> the way of the potter is to commodify it, underpay the workers while draining the job of its craft and creativity. Then charge comparably wealthy people for the privilege of doing it for 2hrs a week as a recreational activity. A dozen people in major cities can get really good at it then have boutique studios where they charge wealthy people 100x the commodified price to be able to buy the same product but locally made.
We can't easily close Pandora's box of globalism and automation, but let's not glorify the destruction of craft and artisanship without recognition of the trade society made.
It seems silly to blame globalism and automation. These should be good things. More production with less should be good. There is another culprit, one that has been smoldering for centuries. Most creative work has already been commodified, because capitalism is incapable of seeing value in art other than what is can be exploited for and the system is very unkind to whomever is not productive in a very specific way. AI is just very potent accelerant.
I guess it really is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Just curious, what's the alternative to capitalism that has employed more creatives or produced more creative works across history?
Pick a metric of your chosing if mine don't work. I'm just genuinely curious what capitalism alternative is best for creatives.
Catholics?
Sure. You could buy a house and raise a family by making hypercubes. It won't be easy though.
I have empathy for my fellow potters. But to deny the factory down the street exists is foolish.
A house is a hypercube that houses 1000s of people.
It's funny how it went from "everything needs to be strongly typed" and "even C++ isn't enough we need Rust for everything" to this...
A good chunk of our profession is just hype-followers at this point.
Type systems are orthogonal topic. I’d argue that the biggest hypers of AI are in the static types camp, because it allows them to iterate quickly and more safely than using dynamic types.
Yeah I described trends in software development is like the length of skirts. They both have the same logic behind the changes. But I don't consider type systems to be hype. I think they're frequently poorly implemented with a mathematically illiterate notation but they're so damn useful went done reasonably right
Most of my understanding on type systems comes from taking a course on the calculation of programs from the author of this book.
To be blunt, this course and the understanding this book gave me crystallized why I was unhappy with the current state of software development and it was one more nudge pushing me out of the field. I caution others that reading and understanding this book may change your understanding of the software development world enough that you don't want to be part of it either.
Programming in the 1990s: An Introduction to the Calculation of Programs | Springer Nature Link (formerly SpringerLink) https://share.google/K81ZlVTbfoR2oeYLh
Also, not just followers. There’s a kinda “merchant” behaviour too I think … signalling and trading in hype perspectives.
But to be fair, I’m not sure what the average dev/eng is supposed to do against a climate of regular change, many disparate opinionated groups with disparate tech stacks, and, IMO a pretty ~~pure~~ poor engineering culture of actually weighing the value of tech/methods against relevant constraints and trade offs.
The title of this blog post immediately reminded me of "Big Ball of Mud":
http://laputan.org/mud/
That was a fun read, maybe worthy of its own post (presumably again, if it’s been long enough)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46571730
Is clay like code?
Clay comes from the earth, has great plastic deformation properties, and when heated sufficiently it turns to ceramic--whereafter it can never be turned back to clay. We humans have been doing ceramics for over 30,000 years. Yet, there is no undo in the process of pottery, and much of the process requires experience to know, in the most inexact sense of knowing, what the result will actually look like. Clay exists as a physical medium, and while knowledge of chemistry and physics can certainly inform your usage of clay, in actuality the chemical interactions that occur during a firing are still complicated enough that we in the industry still refer to them as "kiln magic".
Programming, conversely, is primarily a logical thought experiment. Most of the programs I have written have almost no physical representation. There is no material to coding, even assembly programmers work at the top of a heap of mental and physical abstractions. The process itself is rife with tooling between the user and the medium, correcting our mistakes and suggesting alternative ideas. There is always very quick feedback as to the result of a program. And the field, although still full of open questions, is largely well specified, in spite of it being an incredibly young field of study!
As far as mediums for expression go it would, in my opinion, be rare to find two that are more different. I can't help but think of the old phrase, "the map is not the territory."
It's really only safe to assume clay=code in the context that the author provided. Even then, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
It's easy to assume that because this person is a coder that they are also careful with logic, but it doesn't seem to be the case.
My take: clay coders are on the way out (or shape shifting) as AI becomes capable of writing code that can be thought of as clay. I hope to see you on the other side where we'll talk about systems that outpace the analogy.
Imagine calling a circle a sphere. But a circle is 2D projection of a sphere.
I suppose we are comfortable calling a 3D projection of a hypercube by its 4D name because there really is no 4D context which we can readily slip into. That and no shorter name than "3D projection of a hypercube".
I'm not a mathematician and I'm certainly guilty of uncareful thinking. And I'm not certain that careful thinking and speech is always necessary.
Maybe I just missed the whole point of this article. I have a math fetish and IRL hobbies with my wife, now listen to what I have to say about what code and AI are up to?
Code is clay. Code is foam. Code is water. Code is paper. Code is wood.
Why can't it just be code? Is it that hard to conceptualize? Is the point of the article to rage-bait nerds by making a loose comparison that might not hold up under scrutiny?
Just grumbling in the hopes that someone else will grumble and I won't feel like the only one. My apologies to those who really needed to read this article and feel insulted by my take.
>Why can't it just be code? Is it that hard to conceptualize?
Because the transference of human intelligence is quite often done by analogy.
That's a fair response. I think I was trying to make a point which may be a bit more subtle than my questions suggest when taken at face value.
I'll attempt to explain.
From reading the article, I presume that at some point, all the people who think of code as clay will migrate out of this profession and set up shop in some mall somewhere helping married people renew their ties by making code artifacts by hand. As the article suggests, code (for them) will go the way that clay has went.
Also per the article, AI will be making some other portion of the low-hanging fruit code which business people can't justify hiring humans for.
And then perhaps there will be me and other people like me getting paid to work on things which require an understanding that code is quite unlike any medium humanity has seen before.
For the later group, code is not for everyone, it's beyond what AI can produce by itself, it's not a fetish, it's not cool, it's not fun, and it's one of the only ways to do the things we can do with it.
I sometimes think I'm addressing that later group of people when I type into this box, but maybe that's a bit naive of me.
It could have been safer for me to state that I find it unwise to make these analogies without being careful about the dangers in doing so.
The article did not do it for you. Do not apologize and thanks for sharing why he did not do it for you. It did not do it for me neither, for other reasons (I don't care that much about code, as a non-coder)
it's okay !
Thanks for taking the time to respond. Where I come from, apologies are a dime a dozen.
It's a bit more than it not doing it for me. I'm a bit tired of "AI and coding" takes over the past few years.
You are right. I don't have to agree and I don't have to be quiet about it. But it's going to be okay.
Sweet visuals! How'd you do them?
Hey Culi thanks, it's all react-three-fiber! https://github.com/ecto/campedersen.com/blob/master/src/post...
Hey Cam :) Wasn't sure if you'd recognize me, long time no see!
That's awesome, I've got to start playing around with r3f. It seems your repo's private btw
I'm an experienced software engineer and ceramicist and I enjoyed this essay. I have stuff to say.
There are some wonderful industrial ceramic designs, e.g. Royal Copenhagen. But most of it is cold. Despite that people still become attached to their factory-produced porcelain mugs, because we want our daily objects to be our life-companions. We demand certain qualities that lead to intimacy. Studio pottery is a direct line to these deeper relationships, so when people own studio pottery for the first time they rarely want to go back. It's a red pill moment.
Studio pottery is not a luxury. You can buy a mug from one of the finest potters in the world for £50, and you can buy a beautiful piece for £25-£30. These might bring years of pleasure, and that registers with our customers as fantastic value. So there are plenty of studio potters all over the world who make a living with their craft.
However the product of craft-produced code and AI-produced code are, for a customer, mostly the same. So my fear is that writing code by hand will become little more than a challenging and pleasurable distraction, like a big-brained version of solving sudoku, whereas making pottery will always have a value that outstrips it's factory-produced counterparts.
But I think there is a parallel between clay and code here. There are night-school potters who just love making and getting away from their fucking screens. I have love for every one of these people. And there are those who take it much further, who read the books and design the kilns, who wood-fire in shifts over many days, who study glaze chemistry, who create objects no one has imagined before. And in software there are the line-of-business enterprise coders, and often they're handle turners who would really rather be doing something else but there are those who take it much further, who read the books and language specs, who work on foundational open source tools and study compiler design, who create idioms and paradigms no one has yet conceived of.
All that's very interesting. But for me the commercial side is prosaic and a bit dull. The pleasures of both are the creativity, which is itself a way of re-enchanting my materialist and bewildering late-capitalist way of life.
I feel that this article (like many other endeavors) has been derailed by the whole AI thing. Let's ignore that part.
The major point is that yes both clay and code are mediums for expression and they have advantages and drawbacks - for expression, for monetization, for utility and so on. I myself are quite interested in how these (and other) different mediums affect the author (artist/designer/potter/coder etc) in how they think, what they think about, and how that mediates their relation with the world around them - and indeed the consequent cultures emerging therein.
I'm a coder, potter, and (sometimes) writer. This post is content-free, insight-free nonsense.
You can find parallels between any two things if you strain hard enough, but just listing them doesn't necessarily convey any new ideas.
Code is nothing like clay, and coding is nothing like potting.
To paraphrase a wise bot: like everything else in life, coding is just a primitive, degenerate form of bending.
Humans relate concepts to established concepts and world views, it’s a form of prejudice, and has philosophical resonance with premature optimization being the root of some not great thinking.
images don't work
Actually, clay does not require an intellect, whereas code does. That's a world of difference. Code is vastly crude, relatively speaking, in that way.
Have you ever tried to make anything nontrivial out of clay? It’s not intellectually straightforward merely because it’s done with your hands.
Ya, I have.
Instead of looking for why I'm wrong, look for why I'm right.
Why are you right?
My dog is a fantastic potter.
> Honestly I think I'm going to like it more. I got into programming because I liked building things, not because I wanted to type boilerplate for the rest of my life.
Sounds to me like OP wanted to be the executive ordering his engineer team to build something rather than him being the engineer that actually builds it.
Also, "But clay didn't go away. Ceramics studios are everywhere now. People pay good money to throw pots on weekends.". What misguided statement. The population of full-time pottery workers didn't all open studios (likely a tiny percentage but it is more likely that the pottery studio people do not come from a pottery factory background) and those who opened them are likely not able to obtain a full-time equivalent level of income by catering to people like OP.
The article reads like a privileged person who lacks the ability to empathize with the disenfranchised.
Harsh words bossyTeacher.
I don't think you're right though.
Please consider the human next time :)
They’re right. Try making a living using pottery compared to programming. These days (prior to LLMs, at least) you could get 6 figure job by completing a bootcamp.