Huh? A lathe is absolutely a tool by Hickey's definition and any sane person's. You can chuck multiple tools in a lathe (drills in the tailstock, boring bars, turning, facing, and threading cutters in the toolpost). But that doesn't change the fact that a lathe itself is also a tool.
The thing that makes a lathe a tool is that it behaves like a tool. Not an appliance. Its utility scales with the skill of its operator. Just like a hammer, or a saw, or a wrench. A skilled machinist uses his tools to achieve precise results. An amateur uses the same tools to achieve poor results.
AI appliances puke out randomly generated slop. You could argue there's some kind of skill involved in attempting to read the tea leaves in this slop, but in reality it's just not so. You don't get any depth of experience with these "tools", you just get an accept/reject decision point. Repeat enough and you might come up with something useful. Or you might not. Like accepting random outputs from some kind of vending machine.
This is very, very different from what you get from a skilled craftsman. "A good workman does not blame his tools" is not applicable around LLMs. They're always saying "this model is better than that one" and the like. A good machinist can get good results out of a worn out lathe. Why can't the AI pilots get good results reliably?
The thing that makes a lathe a tool is that it behaves like a tool. Not an appliance. Its utility scales with the skill of its operator. Just like a hammer, or a saw, or a wrench. A skilled machinist uses his tools to achieve precise results. An amateur uses the same tools to achieve poor results.
AI appliances puke out randomly generated slop. You could argue there's some kind of skill involved in attempting to read the tea leaves in this slop, but in reality it's just not so. You don't get any depth of experience with these "tools", you just get an accept/reject decision point. Repeat enough and you might come up with something useful. Or you might not. Like accepting random outputs from some kind of vending machine.
This is very, very different from what you get from a skilled craftsman. "A good workman does not blame his tools" is not applicable around LLMs. They're always saying "this model is better than that one" and the like. A good machinist can get good results out of a worn out lathe. Why can't the AI pilots get good results reliably?