>who was just fooling around
In my own professional life, I've found this to be a very divisive statement. For some, it is a sign of wasting time and effort. For others, they use this to describe themselves when they want to do exploration for the goal of finding improvements, without any clear goal because they have a few ideas but none worth putting forward. I've been told to spend time learning AI and have found that saying "Yeah, I'm playing around with it." was the wrong thing to say because it was seen as not doing anything worthwhile. It doesn't matter that I would also say the majority of my tech skills were developed when I was "playing around".
I wonder if this is purely a linguistics breakdown, or if this is tied to some deeper difference in a person's relationship to tech?
Agree it's divisive, and I would argue it speaks more to a person's perception of work vs play more than a relationship to tech. If (the general) you think that play is for children and work is serious biz, then yeah I could see how you wouldn't take someone seriously when they say they're "playing around with it". It's usually not obvious which attitude a person has though without getting to know them a little bit.
Yes, I think it can be a sign of a very deep difference. When they say "spend time learning AI," they mean work through some teaching materials to learn how to replicate what others are doing. This often doesn't result in a deep understanding, but it can be enough to allow them to do their job.
Ironically, people with this mindset will sometimes ask people who they recognize as having strong skills to share their magic secret, which is assumed to be some books they read, videos they watched, courses they attended, etc. If you tell them that experimenting, playing around, etc. is a key element, they may assume you're just selfishly hoarding your fount of knowledge.