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Comment by mattpallissard | Hacker News Reader

I do so many things manually that have been successfully automated for a long time. Washing dishes, splitting firewood, grinding coffee, owning manual transmission cars, I could go on. Some things are subjectively better like splitting firewood; It's more work but quieter. Some things are objectively better; washing dished by hand are cleaner. I don't think about it too much.

I guess I'll just add programming to that list and not think about it too much.

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I gotta side with the dishwasher. Mine heats the dishes so hot my hands would burn off doing it, and it uses 5 gallons of water for a full load.

Dont forget the chemicals that would also hurt your hands.

washing dishes by hand are absolutely NOT cleaner and ultimately extremely wasteful in terms of water used.

use a dishwasher from the last 20 years.

Clearly you have not seen the dishwasher in my apartment. Trust me, washing by hand is more effective.

Dishwashers are better than hand in literally every sense.

More water efficient, chemical efficient, cleaner since the water gets MUCH hotter.

I agree, with a good modern dishwasher. My parents have a wonderful Bosch dishwasher that is quiet, efficient, and most importantly, can handle anything you throw at it. Conversely, the dishwasher at my apartment is junk; I have to rinse and scrub dishes before putting them in the dishwasher or they won't come out clean.

But you do use a car, instead of walking everywhere.

This is a bit beside the point. They also use dishes instead of leaves, presumable a modern axe instead of a piece of stone, etc.

To me it’s about finding the sweet spot between staying connected to the thing that you’re doing for the purpose of keeping life interesting/fulfilling and utilizing your time wisely.

Driving stick is like shooting manual photos. Not necessary in 2023, but can be a lot more fun than the alternative, and enables levels of control that cannot be found with automated solutions.

Choosing to walk is like choosing to forego fire altogether.

My point is that AI is just a tool for programming and that I see it as more comparable to the difference between walking and driving than the difference between driving stick and automatic.

Eh, I can’t really agree, but I suppose this is relative to each person’s interests.

To me, the analogy to walking would be like foregoing the computer entirely and using an abacus, or sticks in the sand.

The end result of writing code manually or automatically is still a program made from code that must be maintained. Some people like more control over the code.

The end result of using an automatic or manual transmission is still driving. Some people like more control over the operation of the transmission because of the finer grained control over the output of the car that it enables.

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