in_absentia

Your wish wash granted, the story is already off the front page, with an obvious penalty applied.

It's something that you'd pause and think about if you were trying to carefully craft a sensible argument. But the online attention economy now runs on AI op-eds. In this world of overabundance, the winning strategy is to produce outrageous takes and do it as quickly as possible.

I respect the author, but he succumbed to an... unnecessary temptation. There will be a dozen other "here's what AI means for humanity" posts on HN before the end of the week. For the human-written ones, I doubt that any of the authors will be proud of their analyses five years from now.

You're replying to a joke, and yes, that's all it's about. For all the tales of rapid self-improvement, all labs are real careful not to taint their precious training sets with anything that comes out of their systems. Website reputation modeling, fingerprints in generated text, firing contractors that rely on AI.

I've been told on HN about a year ago that the era of scraping is over and that it's all AI-training-AI now. My web server logs and stories like that disagree.

So OpenAI is not a believer in recursive self-improvement after all?

And yet, looking at the thread the day after, no one has done that before giving their take.

If that's what you want, I'll save you some tokens:

#!/bin/sh

while read question; do echo "Put it into VFIAX"; done

Probably not. Plumbing pays pretty well and it's almost never a parent's dream. It's probably below being an office assistant. We just attached a stigma to everything blue collar (= "uneducated").

Strongly disagree on that last part. Unlike software engineering, where training is nearly non-existent and we expect everyone to show to their first job interview knowing about the big-O complexity of sorting algorithms, traditional manufacturing has a robust tradition of apprenticeship and training on the job.

It also has much better and more predictable hours than, say, the ever-popular gaming industry.

You're right that low pay is an issue, but pay is crap in part because of outsourcing. Any machine shop in the US is competing with China to an extent that, oddly, we don't actually see in the software space. The West is mostly using Western-made software, and outside of that, only India is invited to the club (and even that only as a subcontractor).

But a lot of it is also just culture / parenting. Every parent wants their kid to become a software engineer, a lawyer, or a doctor. There's basically zero pride in being a machinist.

> I do not know what you are talking about.

What are you talking about? Show me one survey that shows DIY crafts as a whole becoming more popular in the past several decades. It's just not a thing. People increasingly don't have room for it, computers and cell phones have won as a way to spend the bulk of our free time, and even if you want to create, the primary outlet is the digital world.

> 3D printing at home is more popular than ever

Sure, but that's a given because the technology didn't exist until very recently. I can also say that Tesla Cybertruck is more popular than ever, but that doesn't mean much, right.

> Even families I know who don’t have a computer at home, only their phones, now have 3D printers and use them.

A vanishingly tiny proportion of families in the US or in the EU own 3D printers and use them.

First, PCBs: neither do I, I'm not sure why you're assuming that's the position I want to take. This has nothing to do with 3D printing or mail-order metal parts.

Second, I don't think there's a revolution for the general population. Your archetypal middle-aged dad / curious teenager are DIYing less than 20 years ago, which in turn was less than 40 years ago. The stats here are clear, most of "garage" occupations are on the decline. Less space, higher costs, more emphasis on safety. Some hobbies, such as backyard chemistry, are effectively gone. Shop classes in most schools are gone. Making your own bookshelf or building a radio from a kit is no longer a rite of passage.

Third, the "explosion of niche products" - maybe, but I think some of it is just visibility. Kickstarter, HN, Hack-a-Day, and so on. Before that, we had hobby journals for woodworking, electronics, etc, and they were always full of ads for niche gear. You just weren't seeing the totality of it in a doom-scroll loop. Visibility has benefits, but my point is that the qualitative change isn't as profound.

I'm not sure if it's that simple. Many space-intensive DIY hobbies are on the retreat simply because more people are moving into cities or very dense suburbs where you have no practical opportunity to, say, build a woodworking shop. Metalworking was even more severely impacted, for obvious reasons.

Also, long before mail-order offshore manufacturing, people have been lured away from most of this by the promise of 3D printing. Every other techie I know owns a 3D printer. Most have not made anything interesting with it because they soon learn that the real difficulty is materials science and 3D design. But as a nerd, it's the thing you're supposed to own. In contrast, I know maybe four people in the SF Bay Area who are into woodworking, metalsmithing, CNC, or stuff like that.

I don't see mail-order prototyping as a conspiracy... it's more of a culmination of the DIY community chasing the mirage they were sold on in the early 2010s. I still remember the HN claims: home manufacturing revolution! It's the beginning of a brand new economy, why would anyone buy anything anymore when you can just click "print"... with some amusing parallels to how some folks now talk about building your own software with AI.

The mail-order stuff isn't evil insofar that it may allow some people to make things they couldn't make before. On the flip side, it's a very inefficient way to learn, so I think it will reduce hardware literacy among those who could afford a garage workshop.

FWIW, I think the same goes for AI-assisted hardware design. On one hand, I see people who otherwise wouldn't be DIYing getting into DIY: "I asked Claude and it one-shotted this rectangular enclosure for me, it's amazing!", "Claude made this RP2350 breakout board for me, how cool is that". But I also see established DIYers getting a degree of brain rot.

It's a two-way street. When someone tells you "don't do that", they usually mean they don't want to be on the receiving end of what often amounts to LLM-powered literary diarrhea.

Yes, in theory, the quality can be the same or better than human output. In practice, the tool creates two problems: it's too easy to produce walls of text for no compelling reason, placing asymmetric burden on the recipients; and it's too tempting to click "send" without reading because you're "90% sure" the email / doc is correct, wasting everyone's time multiple times every week when it isn't.