For a deeper look at this philosophy of craft you won't do much better than The Beauty of Everyday Things, by Soetsu Yanagi: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-beauty-of-everyday-thing...

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.

This appears, to me, like an LLM-agent descendent of these earlier multi-agent systems.

I lost track of the research after I left academia -- perhaps someone here can fill in the (considerable) blanks from my overview?

I can walk through my local woods and listen very carefully but I don't think I could read a recipe book and pay attention to an audiobook!

So for me and I guess for most people it depends on the intensity of the activity and on the nature of the book. I have gradually found where the balance is for me and I've learned to hit the pause button or rewind 30 seconds.

I also pick different types of books to read and to listen to. I _love_ having an engrossing story as an audiobook. And popular science is a great listen, e.g. I loved the audiobook of Stolen Focus. But with physical books I tend to choose more involved or complex novels (e.g. Deep Wheel Orcadia), poetry, and for non-fiction books that are more specific to my interests (psychotherapy, ceramics).

Can I stay focused if I'm just sitting and listening instead of reading? Absolutely not.

There's no 'vs' here. They occupy different spaces. All hail text, whatever form it takes.

I'd much prefer firing with wood. But I'm too suburban and firing with wood takes much more effort in prep and during firing, but it's a pleasant and exciting experience! Which gas firing is not.

Early peoples would have used wax or fats to seal pots like these, to make them functional. People do that with modern pit-fired pots too, or use other sealants.

I designed and built my own high-fire kiln, but it uses industrially made light-weight insulating and refractory brick, and gas burners, and I use Orton cones to know when I've hit the right amount of heat-work, and a pyrometer to take temperature readings. But some brave souls make their own bricks, and look at the colour inside the kiln to know when they're at temperature.

It's a force-multiplier for contentment. No other life change comes close. I'm grateful every week and like you I'm never going back.

I've been using tmux for five or six years. In that time I've used Linux and MacOS and several different terminals. But how I navigate around a terminal has stayed the same thanks to tmux.

Another reason: put complex tmuxinator configs in source control and start up a bunch of stuff for your project with a single command.

[1] https://github.com/jamescoleuk/lk

[1] https://github.com/jamescoleuk/lk

[2] https://github.com/jamescoleuk/run_lib