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  • Xenotimexeno@snug.moe
    Oct 12, 2026, 10:37 PM

    wrt the Openai math stuff:

    I’ve also seen this argument, and it just makes me sad to hear. How good do you think our species would be at woodworking if no woodworker ever did anything except make the cheapest possible cabinet for a customer as fast as possible without thinking about anything?

    These mathematicians are almost exclusively funded by governments to do research for public good and our species’ intellectual growth. Their exploration and curiosity gave us the encryption algorithms, sampling theorems, etc that allowed you to make that tweet.

    This is the hypercapitalist idea of man as machine, where everything is in service of a customer, of doing the easiest thing possible, where creation and creativity and art just don’t make sense.

    The US National Medal of Science was recently awarded by the trump admin to zero actual scientists and a bunch of billlionaire ai / ai hardware executives.

    These people don’t act like AI belongs on some kind of throne because they think it’s neat. They built the throne a long, long time ago, and they finally have something to place on it.

    tweet by Nic Carter saying imagine if carpenters believed something like “the value of carpentry is not in me producing a nice cabinet for you, it’s actually my personal enjoyment of the process. the finished cabinet is a side effect.” turns out this is how mathematicians think. I genuinely had no idea.
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Replies

  • Yas-o-Lantern :baba_yaseen: :agenderFlag: :transgenderFlag: yassie_j@labyrinth.zone
    Oct 13, 2026, 11:27 AM

    @xeno what is really hilarious about this comparison is that being a woodworker now is a niche (in industrialised countries). If you want to be a woodworker today, it’s because you CHOSE to be one. Therefore, you actually would get enjoyment out of making a nice cabinet from someone, because you are fulfilling a niche! Most people who want a cabinet get it from a furniture shop or Ikea, where the item is produced in industrial scale, not at a personal scale

    These people clearly do not understand the point of any kind of personal design. The end result of arranging a bouquet is the floral arrangement, but that can only come by actually using your eyes, nose, and hands to work out what works, what doesn’t work, and then create new ways of doing a bouquet

    These people want to apply the principles of industrialisation and globalisation to the creative process. An Ikea cabinet is designed in Sweden, manufactured somewhere else, with the wood from another place, with each person involved in the process doing their own little bit to the extend that they’re paid to do. That is fine. I need a table and cabinet and it has to be affordable

    They want every creative project to be Disneyfied, to be gatekept by giant corporations with no sense of art except that which polls well with some nebulous median viewer

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  • Gabriele Sveltogabrielesvelto@mas.to
    Oct 13, 2026, 12:35 PM

    @xeno that's also like the dumbest, most disconnected metaphor ever. One wonders if it's him or if the bot suggested it. Who's supposed to be the customer of a mathematician or any other research endeavor for the matter? It's called *research* for a reason, otherwise it would have been called *production*.

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