In my mind, 'tinkering for fun and knowledge' was never meant to be profitable - if you're tinkering with the express aim of making a profit i'm not sure you're really 'tinkering' so much as you're trying to create a product/service/output for someone else to pay for?

There's absolutely nothing wrong with doing that - I'm just not sure the 'ethos' of tinkering has anything to do with trying to make money and is usually reserved for describing someone playing about with something for their own enjoyment/fun with no desire to make money.

Now, of course some people did find that their tinkerings were able to make them money, but I think at its base it's a term I'd tend to say implies doing something for fun/for themselves, rather than doing it for profit?

In my experience there's still plenty of people out there tinkering just for their own personal satisfaction, but of course there's almost certain a whole load more people out there 'tinkering' to try make a profit.

"warm nostalgia" "reformatting C drives due to malware"

Processing error.

The real problem is the philosophy that arose in the 1970s that "maximizing shareholder value" is the point of business. As a society, we've become obsessed with optimizing this one variable at the expense of all others and "growth" has become a religion. At it's core, the most important thing we should be optimizing for is "does this business improve the world while turning a robust and sustainable revenue stream" not "how much money can we make for investors". The latter will always optimize for incredible wealth disparity, enshittification, and mostly useless people like Elon Musk becoming stupidly wealthy because it's basically impossible for them to lose money no matter how bad their ideas are (once you're a certain level of rich, your passive income is just immense). I'm not saying shareholders/investors shouldn't be considered, but it can't be the only or the most important metric. We've completely lost the plot on the social and market purpose of a corporation.

the difference is that an automatic transmission doesn't make the car work worse. The modern UX landscape would rather board up a room because the door has a sharp handle than figure out how to make the handle less sharp

ETA: Or, to put it in car terms, we were all forced to take cabs (except for the people who were interested in driving, who became cab drivers) because car crashes happen or my sand eating neighbour couldn't tell which pedal was the brakes

I think there's a fallacy where someone points out one instance of a larger trend which will, when taken to its logical progression, lead to an undesired effect; and then someone attempts to rebut the claim by pointing out that the trend has existed before and the undesired effect hasn't happened yet, so any concern is nugatory. I'd call it the grippery slope fallacy, complement to the slippery one: we haven't fallen down the slope yet, so we can't fall down it. What if an individual instance of ignorance is acceptable because people still need to have understanding in other areas, but if all understanding everywhere is eliminated then we all suffer?

Absolutely - you used to have to control the richness of the fuel mixture manually. You used to have to crank it to start it, manually interact with a clutch to shift gears, etc.

I appreciate the tactile joy of interacting with simple systems like those, but most times I just want to get where I'm going. Freeing my attention from those tasks allows me to pay more attention to the (inattentive) drivers around me, and try my best to not die.

Eventually a computer will handle driving for most of us, and we can lament about all the things we've lost there too. If you zoom out, most of us don't have an in-depth understanding of how an entire city works (power, garbage, sewage, maintenance, public services, politics, etc), and couldn't coordinate the various activities to keep it running if we had to. We live in towers of abstraction.

This time is different though (which has also been said every single time). But I'm worried this time it's true (also said every time). Doesn't help with the unease though.

You mean as a distraction from the point being made?

No. No economy ever had essentially every single major company spending a significant fraction of its budget on hiring auto mechanics. Which is to say, for all the changes the automobile wrought, the role of the computer in industrialized society eclipses it tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold. For an individual in many modern societies, being denied access to a car is already effectively crippling, and the idea of being denied access to computation threatens to be somehow even worse.

A person dies every 26 seconds in a road traffic incident somewhere in the world. A big part of that is people using machines they do not understand.