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this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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@V0ldek @cstross I couldn't even read the whole list after seeing "CNC Programmers" on it. That may not be the most absurd, but the idea of "here's a robot with a sharp blade spinning at high RPM that we're using to make a physical object with extreme precision, so we fired the human who knows how it works and gave their job to the hallucination box" makes Willy's Chocolate Experience seem like a warmup. I just hope there's video. Lots of video. Ideally from behind safety glass.
@geeksam @V0ldek @cstross
Safety glass Hell: I'd insist on remote cameras and several feet of reinforced concrete.
Meanwhile, I'm lookin at the list and amazed by the number of "jobs" I have apparently had (which never paid me in the first place). Certainly, any time I was invited to deejay on the radio, it was never paid. Moreover, even in the 1990s I knew a fellow radio DJ who was more or less replaced by a CD jukebox with song choices dictated from on high and he was basically the voice in between tunes and ads to make it seem as if it wasn't evil overlords. Maybe, he got paid? I have my doubts.
CC: @V0ldek@awful.systems @cstross@wandering.shop
@geeksam
@V0ldek @cstross Don't worry, any video not shot from behind safety glass will suffer from rapid existence failure
@geeksam
Can confirm. Inbetween me being a self-taught coder in my youth to getting a degree in Software Engineering I also took a detour and got a degree as a Mechanical Engineer.
That involved CAD/CAM and running the output on CNC machines. Which involved hitting the metal piece with the head too far down and metal being flung around at ludicrous speed.
@V0ldek @cstross
@geeksam
*Leaded* glass, I hope! It's only a matter of time before someone in the Hegseth DoD decides this will be excellent for machining plutonium pits.
@V0ldek @cstross
@geeksam @V0ldek @cstross
Production CNC machines are beyond safety glass and sheet metal already.
Sometimes even in work cell cages!
Programming CNC has been done by opening up the print or CAD model and telling the CAM package to generate the tool paths for many years already.
Sometimes programmers edit the generated code a little bit to adapt it, but there's little zero risk in trying machine models on this. The worst that can happen is a crash that scraps a $50k spindle.
@geeksam @V0ldek @cstross The original poster of this story can't read. Somebody in the Bluesky thread found the original paper. The research looked at people in these professions using LLM assistance in their workflow.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07935
"Can't read" is the kind of insult we don't need in this context.
@blakestacey Redundant?
Pointlessly insulting, cruel, assumes total incompetence at life rather than a momentary mistake in managing the information overflow, juvenile in the bad sense of the word.