There’s a thing I picked up from my dad and the fitters who worked in my grandfather’s workshop: own your tools. That way you’re not tied to your employer, you can take your tools and your skills to another job any time you please.
I was once on the position where the only laptop I had access to was owned by my employer. It made my teeth itch.
It’s just one more reason I am deeply suspicious of LLMs for coding. And all the other rented software out there, for that matter.
@pdcawley
Back in the 80s when we were a family run electrical contractor, we provided all our staff with tools and college training. The basic tool kit was theirs to keep, while we owned the bigger bits of kit and test equipment, to be booked out as needed.
Our aim, as a small company, was that our staff would eventually leave us for self-employment, or a bigger employer, taking not just their tools, but the experience that they gained.
Later in life I heard that in bankruptcy a court can take away a trades' person's belongings to pay a debt, but not their tools as it is their means of earning a living.
No sure if that is true or still applies.
@pdcawley i dig it. My first laptop was a Toshiba 3100, that one with the red gas plasma display that sucked so much power that the thing was not really a "portable." A laptop that has to stay plugged in!
I didn't see why we spent all that damn money.
@pdcawley Your implied analogy doesn't hold water for me.
Did your employer somehow prevent you from having access to any other laptops on Earth?
Also, I've NEVER been required to provide my OWN laptop for any job I've had. Would you prefer that? Because I don't believe I would.
"Your own tools" is a flabby, vague concept here that's not transporting well in this analogy. A hammer is one thing, a computer quite another.
@aud Yeah, and I can't afford MOST of the stuff at my various jobs, but that doesn't imply that I'm entitled to any of it, or that anyone should provide me with it because I'd like to have it.
Are you serious?
@pdcawley the first "rule" of the Right to Repair movement is "If you can't fix it, you don't own it" ... Back when the Maker/Hacker/Punk scene was closer together the motto was "DIY or DIE."
Our grandparents generation isn't that far off from Apprenticeships & Union Shops where they passed down & shared their knowledge instead of paywalling it and competing for promotions.
@pdcawley This is one of the core problems involved in Luddism -- one of the ways it's so relevant again to This Moment, and not in the tedious, reactionary "bwah people are Luddites" way.
The more landlords and tool renters we create… well, bleh.
I keep doing experimental work with local models. I think we'll see serious progress there. What I wonder is, how small an epsilon will there be, in X years, between them and frontier models? No idea.
@pdcawley It's why I have thought of owning a sticker printer before I even any sticker sales (💧).
Of course, the thought of owning another printer has doused my enthusiasm. I am also trying to self-host as much as I can.
@bastardsheep I once made my stepfather's 486 work laptop unbootable by messing with the config.sys. Was able to rectify the mistake by using my mother's similar (but not identical) work laptop to create a MS-DOS boot disk and revert the config.sys changes...
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