casting custom metal statues self-studying formwork carpenter as a day-job
ACT Australia
Joined March 2013
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I agree with all the parts I agree with, but those parts I don't agree with? I don't agree with them at all.
I'd like to make a $10000 bet that humanoid robots will not replace construction workers within the next 5 years. Will someone take the other side?
to make an analogy between humanoid robots and self-driving cars, it seems like we are on the verge of inventing the car, not the self-driving car. Until we have training data on the scale of what Tesla have how can we expect anything like autonomy or even usefullness in genuinely manual work. Every video I have seen of humanoid robots operating are biomechanically 50 IQ. I work in the construction industry and biomechanically it's one of the most difficult jobs out there. Dozens of tools all in different working condition, knowledge of how materials behave in different conditions (wet or dry, cold and hot, old or new), the angle of attack and pressure required when applying fasteners, walking on steel rebar while reaching down and bending your arm to perform some work with two fingers at some ungodly angle, positioning a ladder correctly on an uneven surface, the logistics of executing the job when the jobsite is 20,000 square meters and no one is exactly sure where materials are. To a human it is relatively repeatable but from a humanoids perspective it's infinitely high mix.
The list of niche biomechanics and knowledge takes years to learn, how will they learn it? If humanoids are going to replace carpenters don't these companies need data from movement and photons? My prediction is that my job will be obsoleted by new building methods before a robot takes my job, the biomechanical and intelligence data trove just doesn't exist, is someone creating it?
this is true btw
being popular is an epistemic carcinogen. It's not @DoctorKarl fault, social pressures vs epistemic humility is a death match with 99 to 1 odds. If you make a living by always having a nice answer you will eventually lose your way (unless you're spergy, in which case you won't be popular).
Don't pit the deep fear of exile against your epistemology unless your friends at times find you intolerably annoying.
being popular is an epistemic carcinogen. It's not @DoctorKarl fault, social pressures vs epistemic humility is a death match with 99 to 1 odds. If you make a living by always having a nice answer you will eventually lose your way (unless you're spergy, in which case you won't be popular).
Don't pit the deep fear of exile against your epistemology unless your friends at times find you intolerably annoying.
Tom Conlan retweeted
Less than 100 miles away, about 50 tons of steel and copper are spinning at exactly 3,600 RPM. A giant rotor slews magnetic fields through copper windings and, per Faraday and Maxwell, induces a synchronized 60 Hz sine wave across an entire grid.
That electromagnetic wave propagates through grain oriented silicon steel, laminated transformer cores, kilometers of aluminum conductor steel reinforced cable, SF₆ insulated switchgear, substations switching hundreds of kilovolts, distribution transformers, oxygen free copper wiring, silicon MOSFETs, ferrites, multilayer ceramic capacitors, and the USB C cable plugged into my phone.
There, power feeds a capacitive touchscreen. A transparent matrix of indium tin oxide is deposited on glass. The controller continuously scans the grid. My finger changes the mutual capacitance by a fraction of a picofarad, perturbing the local electric field just enough for dedicated analog front ends to detect before software reconstructs the touch.
Iron ore. Bauxite. Silica sand. Copper ore. Lithium brines. Rare earths.
Refined. Alloyed. Crystallized. Doped. Implanted. Deposited. Etched. Polished.
We purified sand into nearly perfect single crystal silicon, grew boules, sliced wafers, placed dopant atoms with nanometer precision, fabricated chips containing tens of billions of transistors, synchronized them with clocks billions of times per second, and engineered them to execute matrix multiplications at a scale no human could comprehend.
Somewhere along the way, matmuls started to look like us.
That is an astonishing thought.
The towers of abstraction are staggering. No one person built this. No one person fully understands it. Yet every morning millions of people wake up tired, answer emails, argue over specifications, chase margins, fix defects, make payroll, and try to cover their mortgages. Somehow the whole machine keeps humming.
A planetary Swiss watch assembled from physics, markets, bureaucracy, ambition, error, and human necessity.
And after all of that, I touch a piece of conductive glass and step into the Roman forum of modern thought, where millions of minds test ideas against one another in real time.
Clockwork humanity.
It staggers the mind.
reposting because everyone thinks we're near useful humanoids but we're not
to make an analogy between humanoid robots and self-driving cars, it seems like we are on the verge of inventing the car, not the self-driving car. Until we have training data on the scale of what Tesla have how can we expect anything like autonomy or even usefullness in genuinely manual work. Every video I have seen of humanoid robots operating are biomechanically 50 IQ. I work in the construction industry and biomechanically it's one of the most difficult jobs out there. Dozens of tools all in different working condition, knowledge of how materials behave in different conditions (wet or dry, cold and hot, old or new), the angle of attack and pressure required when applying fasteners, walking on steel rebar while reaching down and bending your arm to perform some work with two fingers at some ungodly angle, positioning a ladder correctly on an uneven surface, the logistics of executing the job when the jobsite is 20,000 square meters and no one is exactly sure where materials are. To a human it is relatively repeatable but from a humanoids perspective it's infinitely high mix.
The list of niche biomechanics and knowledge takes years to learn, how will they learn it? If humanoids are going to replace carpenters don't these companies need data from movement and photons? My prediction is that my job will be obsoleted by new building methods before a robot takes my job, the biomechanical and intelligence data trove just doesn't exist, is someone creating it?
to make an analogy between humanoid robots and self-driving cars, it seems like we are on the verge of inventing the car, not the self-driving car. Until we have training data on the scale of what Tesla have how can we expect anything like autonomy or even usefullness in genuinely manual work. Every video I have seen of humanoid robots operating are biomechanically 50 IQ. I work in the construction industry and biomechanically it's one of the most difficult jobs out there. Dozens of tools all in different working condition, knowledge of how materials behave in different conditions (wet or dry, cold and hot, old or new), the angle of attack and pressure required when applying fasteners, walking on steel rebar while reaching down and bending your arm to perform some work with two fingers at some ungodly angle, positioning a ladder correctly on an uneven surface, the logistics of executing the job when the jobsite is 20,000 square meters and no one is exactly sure where materials are. To a human it is relatively repeatable but from a humanoids perspective it's infinitely high mix.
The list of niche biomechanics and knowledge takes years to learn, how will they learn it? If humanoids are going to replace carpenters don't these companies need data from movement and photons? My prediction is that my job will be obsoleted by new building methods before a robot takes my job, the biomechanical and intelligence data trove just doesn't exist, is someone creating it?
The Australian Public Service is a replicator that exists to transform balanced and reasonable Australians into single-issue voters, that issue being the continued replication and survival of the APS. An otherwise balanced individual is suddenly only concerned with the security of the organism, the organism is the APS.
The two primary functions are :
1. continued expansion of the APS
2. strategically deployed ineptitude and slowness towards any behaviour that does not serve function 1.
The APS employee sacrifices ambition, meritocracy, and voice, in return they receive a steady flow of ultra-secure funds, flexi-time, and officially verified herd-beliefs. The APS employee imagines that these nutrients are funnelled from the ether, they are logically guilt free. The APS employee imagines they are serving the country as their 100K salary siphons health from the nation.
The expected productivity of an APS cell is so low that software is used to track the mouse wiggles as a proxy for work. This is merely aesthetic. The only macro behaviours a cell must show are quiescence and, obviously, support for an ever growing APS.
Tom Conlan retweeted
Je veux présenter mes excuses, au nom des Français, pour avoir enfanté la French Theory (qui a enfanté la pire des merdes idéologiques : le wokisme).
Nous avons donné au monde Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. Et puis, dans les ruines intellectuelles de l'après-68, nous avons donné Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Trois hommes brillants qui ont fabriqué, dans l'élégance de notre langue, l'arme idéologique qui paralyse aujourd'hui l'Occident.
Il faut comprendre ce qu'ils ont fait. Foucault a enseigné que la vérité n'existe pas, qu'il n'y a que des rapports de pouvoir déguisés en savoir. Que la science, la raison, la justice, l'institution médicale, l'école, la prison, la sexualité, tout n'est qu'une mise en scène de la domination. Derrida a enseigné que les textes n'ont pas de sens stable, que tout signifiant glisse, que toute lecture est une trahison, que l'auteur est mort et que le lecteur règne. Deleuze a enseigné qu'il fallait préférer le rhizome à l'arbre, le nomade au sédentaire, le désir à la loi, le devenir à l'être, la différence à l'identité.
Pris isolément, ce sont des thèses discutables. Combinées, exportées, vulgarisées, elles forment un système. Et ce système est un poison.
Car voici ce qui s'est passé. Ces textes, illisibles en France, ont traversé l'Atlantique. Les départements de Yale, de Berkeley, de Columbia les ont absorbés dans les années 80. Ils y ont trouvé un terreau qui n'existait pas chez nous : le puritanisme américain, sa culpabilité raciale, son obsession identitaire. La French Theory s'est mariée à ce substrat, et l'enfant de ce mariage s'appelle le wokisme.
Judith Butler lit Foucault et invente le genre performatif. Edward Said lit Foucault et invente le post-colonialisme académique. Kimberlé Crenshaw hérite du cadre et invente l'intersectionnalité. À chaque étape, la matrice est française : il n'y a pas de vérité, il n'y a que du pouvoir, donc toute hiérarchie est suspecte, toute institution est oppressive, toute norme est violence, toute identité est construite donc négociable, toute majorité est coupable.
Voilà comment trois philosophes parisiens, qui n'ont probablement jamais imaginé leurs conséquences pratiques, ont fourni le logiciel d'exploitation à une génération entière d'activistes, de bureaucrates universitaires, de DRH, de journalistes, de législateurs. Voilà comment on a obtenu une civilisation qui ne sait plus dire si une femme est une femme, si sa propre histoire mérite d'être défendue, si le mérite existe, si la vérité se distingue de l'opinion.
C'est de la merde pour une raison simple, et il faut la dire calmement. Une civilisation se tient debout sur trois piliers : la croyance qu'il existe une vérité accessible à la raison, la croyance qu'il existe un bien distinct du mal, la croyance qu'il existe un héritage à transmettre. La French Theory a entrepris de dynamiter les trois. Pas par méchanceté. Par jeu intellectuel, par fascination du soupçon, par haine de la bourgeoisie qui les avait nourris. Mais le résultat est là. Une génération entière a appris à déconstruire et n'a jamais appris à construire. Une génération entière sait soupçonner et ne sait plus admirer. Une génération entière voit le pouvoir partout et la beauté nulle part.
Je m'excuse parce que nous, Français, avons une responsabilité particulière. C'est notre langue, nos universités, nos éditeurs, notre prestige qui ont donné à ce nihilisme son emballage chic. Sans la légitimité de la Sorbonne et de Vincennes, ces idées n'auraient jamais traversé l'océan. Nous avons exporté le doute comme d'autres exportent des armes.
Ce qui se construit maintenant, en silicon valley, dans les labos d'IA, dans les startups, dans les ateliers, dans tous les lieux où des gens fabriquent encore des choses au lieu de les déconstruire, c'est la réponse. Une civilisation se reconstruit par les bâtisseurs, pas par les commentateurs. Par ceux qui croient que la vérité existe et qu'elle vaut qu'on s'y consacre. Par ceux qui assument une hiérarchie du beau, du vrai, du bon, et qui n'ont pas honte de la transmettre.
Alors pardon. Et au travail.
