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Comment by Noaidi | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who participates in this is a traitor to humanity.

An HVAC tech charged me $750 to perform one swage connection on a mini-split install I was working on. $750 for $0.10 of combustibles and 45 minutes of time. Service workers are willingly pushing their customer base into these robotic solutions and I am thrilled at the idea of a robot coming out to do some work for 1/3 of the cost

Your comment doesn't really make sense. A swage connection is done by a tool and requires no combustibles. If you needed combustibles then you need a license to handle those combustibles. And you need special tools to decide how much of those combustibles to add. You also need special tools to actually add the combustibles to the system. And before that, you need special tools to prep the system for those combustibles. And before you can do that, you need special tools to make sure your system is adequately sealed before even attempting to get the system ready to add the combustibles.

Maybe next time you should spend the few grand on all those tools, the hours it takes to learn how to use them, and can do it yourself!

Looks like a speech recognition error for consumables. That said, many refrigerants today are quite combustible.

As much as I am a skeptic of household maintenance robots, I'll admit that the robots will probably 1) actually show up, 2) show up around the time they say they would, 3) won't be drunk, 4) won't ask me to join their MLM.

Though I'm less sure about (4), considering the Worldcoin eyeball-harvesting scammers and the AI-bailout scammers are one and the same.

I can't believe I'm seeing this common low-quality "what do tradeys even do" fallacy as the top comment on an HN submission. It makes me want to cry that we are so fucked as a culture that we are scoffing at how much tradesmen charge (not that there aren't conmen in every single sector).

I do not believe that our purpose in life is to work as plumbers.

You're putting the cart roughly one lightyear before the horse.

Indeed, our purpose is to pay rent to our betters.

It just reminds me of a cartoon in my head.

First pane has a supervisor, a plumber, and a robot, with the supervisor pointing to the robot.

Next pane is the robot watching the plumber work.

Next pane is the plumber watching the robot work.

Final pane is the robot with a bloody wrench standing over the dead plumber.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/gg-dl/AAQ_wbGsz_mqtCLKLF9g...

Now do software engineers.

Yes, it's a similar situation (though with software, replacement of existing workers and augmentation of existing workers are both possible, while in the physical world, replacement is more natural, assuming robotics gets to that point). What are you implying?

Meh. Take a look at the latest few YC batches of companies. This is nothing.

The rich paying a quarter of the population to help them fuck over the other three quarters is a tale as old as time.

I want to see the robots do everything humans can do in my lifetime. This is good for everyone. When no one has a job we will figure out a way to make it work.

>When no one has a job we will figure out a way to make it work.

Mind-bogglingly casual acceptance of civil war when all you had to do was change the order to put "We will figure out a way to make it work" before "No one has a job".

That’s not mind-boggling. If you start putting out restrictions and regulations everything is going to fizzle out like 100s of other fields have done in the past. There hasn’t been any significant paradigm shifting progress in genetic engineering because everyone’s hands are tied when we could probably accomplish so much that would benefit hundreds of millions of people.

> like 100s of other fields have done in the past

Could you list, say, a dozen such fields? It should be very easy if there are, uh, hundreds of them.

> There hasn’t been any significant paradigm shifting progress in genetic engineering because everyone’s hands are tied

Or maybe there hasn't been such progress (across a wide range of polities with a wide range of regulatory environments) because it's incredibly hard?

are devs who use LLMs also traitors, in your view?

In all parts of society, there is a subjective spectrum between "making work more efficient" and "directly replacing significant numbers of workers in a period too short to adjust to avoid suffering". The closer you get to the latter, the more you are a "traitor". Use of LLMs for software development falls all over the spectrum, case-by-case.

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