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Comment by quantummagic | Hacker News Reader

This is a very useful insight. It nicely identifies part of the reason for the stark bifurcation of opinion on AI. Unfortunately, many of the comments below it are emotional and dismissive, pointing out its explanatory limitations, rather than considering its useful, probative value.

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I find most home inspectors fall into one of two camps:

1. You treat the house as a means to an end to make a living space for a person.

2. You treat the building construction itself as your craft, with the house being a vector for your craft.

The people who typically have the most negative things to say about buildings fall into camp #2 where cheap unskilled labor is streamlining a large part of what they considered their art while enabling people in group #1 to iterate on their developments faster.

Personally, I fall into the first camp.

No one has ever made a purchasing decision based on how good the pipes inside the walls are.

The general public does not care about anything other than the square footage and color of your house. Sure, if you mess up and one of the houses collapses then that'll manifest as an outcome that impacts the home owner negatively.

With that said, I do have respect for people in the latter camp. But they're generally best fit for homes where that level of craftsmanship is actually useful (think: mansions, bridges, roads, things I use, etc).

I just feel like it's hard to talk about this stuff if we're not clear on which types of construction we're talking about.

The general public does not know how to identify or care about the pipes in the walls. They do care when they bust and cause tens of thousands of dollars of damage. Thats why they hire someone with a keen eye to it to act on their behalf.

The general public does not know how to identify or care about good code. They do care when their data gets leaked or their computer gets hacked or their phone gets ransomware. That’s why they hire software engineers, who are supposed to care about the quality of the code they ship.

Agreed. No one need care about obsessively neat and orderly code, but there becomes a point where very real world issues surface that users actually care about. Contrary to some of the opinions here. Rushing out vibeslop at rapid pace will eventually have consequences.

Brilliant

>Sure, if you mess up and one of the houses collapses then that'll manifest as an outcome that impacts the home owner negatively.

lol

"I have an opinion and everyone on the planet agrees with me, if you disagree, you don't matter" is not a useful insight, and is, in fact, far more emotional and dismissive than any of the replies to it.

That's a horribly broken misrepresentation of what was said in the original post. If that's what you took away from it, you're not reading carefully or critically.

That is, in fact, how it comes across. You’re labeling perceived opponents as “emotional” and “dismissive”.

No, that's exactly what the original post said.

> No one has ever made a purchasing decision based on how good your code is.

This has since been edited (I suspect OP later realized how ridiculous of a claim it was) but it's an objectively false statement that blindly projects OP's stance on software quality onto the entire population.

People have, in fact, stopped using software because it was too slow or buggy. I've done it, many others have done it. To give you a real example, I'm a fan of JetBrains IDEs functionality-wise, but I've been seriously considering moving away from them due to how bloated and unoptimized they've become in recent years - when your IDE feels more sluggish than one built on top of Electron, something has gone seriously wrong. I don't have to actually read the code itself to know it's bad code, I can feel it by simply using the software.

Just because you don't care doesn't mean others don't. Modern society was not built by people who didn't care about their craft, nor was it built by designing everything with the lowest common denominator in mind.

> It nicely identifies part of the reason for the stark bifurcation of opinion on AI.

It might do that, if it had any basis in reality. Why do you believe it does?

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