Correct, yes.

Prior to this technology there was some “higher” or more complex skill that could be learned that encorporated the new tool. The human brain stays relevant only in a new and more expansive space.

This tool does not do that. There is nothing more advanced the human brain can do beyond problem solving.

There is an entire field of research dedicated to this; RBV. Things like a lathe or a calculator are “complementary tools” under RBV, humans can utilize them without loss of the skill that enables them. LLM’s are “substitutive” tools under RBV, they replace human skills without enhancement.

Here, there’s a whole paper about it.

https://sms.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/smj.3387

I was homeless when I joined.

So was half my division.

You don’t seem like a “I want to win” kind of person. Popular revolutions survive on the backs of people who are good at killing. Are you good at killing?

None of those tools could do the decision making part.

I see this comparison so often and it’s incredibly disingenuous. An LLM can iterate over a problem and resolve it over time. It can debug, fact check, create and test hypotheses.

That is distinctly different from arithmetic but faster or writing but faster.

Hear hear.

Sweet lord I hate these things. They get rid of all the best parts of being human and leave only the shitty parts.

The correct and moral thing to do would be the absolute eradication of the technology and enacting a global non-proliferation treaty. Unfortunately I’m not likely to see that in my lifetime so I’m likely forced to live with the slow collapse of humanity into comfort and leisure.

You may have me mistaken with someone else haha. That being said maybe I should start one lol

Pour yourself a cup of coffee.

IN GENERAL: You will encounter much more friction in dealing with certain day to day tasks (until you configure everything) but unlike Linux you will find that the system is much easier to understand and therefore the fixes “stick” in your head a bit easier.

Overall, Linux is like going on a pleasant hike that has occasional 120° cliff faces you need to climb. OpenBSD is like hiking a mountain where you are at a consistent 45° angle. You’ll face challenges but the resolutions are understandable and internally consistent with each other, and you will find you’re own understanding of the system improves much more consistently through use.

USER EXPERIENCE: Desktop: You will be using X11 for the forseable future, particularly OpenBSD’s security oriented fork of Xorg. For the most part any knowledge of setting up an Xorg desktop will transfer with little issue and the applications one would expect to see in such a desktop are present. OpenBSD comes with a few built in window managers which all ere on the “classic” side of the house. Most notably is cwm (Calm Window Manager) which is somewhat inspired by plan9’s Rio.

Wayland is still experimental but there has been a good deal of progress here, DWL is at a point where it “mostly works” though it is far off from being the default. It is important to note that “being the default” actually means something in this space. The OpenBSD developers pride themselves on having and extremely secure and well maintained “base system” so the OS and it’s surrounding ecosystem encourages users to not deviate from defaults as much as possible. That being said Wayland will likely, eventually, become the default.

Applications: The ports tree is less comprehensive than FreeBSD and certainly less than Linux but there is a surprising amount of less commonly used software in there. Case in point, Librewolf is in the ports tree as of 8.0 current. For the most part you will find the tools you need with little issue though; Krita, Kicad, Emacs, etc. There is generally a tool to match your need, though you may need to adapt your workflow to the OS from time to time.

System Administration: This is where she really shines. OpenBSD is understandable; it presents a clean and comprehensible computing experience that invites you to fully grasp how your operating system works. Unlike Linux, which has to cater to a wide variety of use cases, OpenBSD’s tooling is simple and focused on a few specific tasks. In general OpenBSD leans heavily on being a UNIX-like and as a result understanding of Unix is directly transferrable to understanding of OpenBSD.

That being said, OpenBSD also suffers somewhat from being tied closely to its Unix roots so certain aspects of the base system can seem a bit “dated”. A few notable examples being limits on shared memory and concurrent processes being low by default and the default partitioning scheme not fully utilizing very large SSDs. Important to note here; all of these can be easily configured so it’s not that much of a headache.

Another area where OpenBSD is a bit behind, though it has not negatively impacted me, is its file system. FFS is serviceable but it is not a featureful or performant as the “cool kids” of FreeBSD and Linux (ZFS, btrfs). This is being remediated though (see below).

SECURITY: OpenBSD doesn’t have namespace or chroot based process isolation the way Linux or FreeBSD does. Instead it uses a novel approach in the form of two simple syscalls, pledge and unveil.

Pledge is used to limit the specific syscalls a process is allowed to make and when, unveil limits the portions of the file system that are accessible to the process.

Despite seeming less powerful than things like a Linux container these two primitives have proven to be remarkably capable of isolating and securing software used in OpenBSD.

That being said they do take some getting used to and can create certain headaches if you are not familiar. In general, whenever you download a package there will be a message about a new file in /use/local/doc/pkg-readme/; read it.

THE FUTURE: OpenBSD’s development is best described as communal. Users are somewhat tacitly expected to contribute in some way (bug reports, write ups, etc). Personally I like this as it creates a more tight knit and supportive community.

As a direct result of this, and the simplicity/understandability of the system there is a lot of “low hanging fruit” being attacked right now. As mentioned above Wayland is close to being stable and one of the developers for 9front (Ori Bernstein) is working on porting GEFS (the Good Enough File System) to OpenBSD which should bring OpenBSD much closer in performance to its peers in terms of file system. Vmm (the native hypervisor) just got multi-vcpu support in 8.0 and there are a slew of other minor improvements that are accruing.

THE COMMUNITY: The most concise way I can describe the OpenBSD community is “they respect your intelligence.” It is expected that you have read the man-pages and readmes for the software you are using, it’s expected you have an understanding of the guts of the system. This can seem gatekeepy or a bit conceited but allow me to present a counter argument. They don’t think you’re an idiot by default.

The community, as a result of its proximity to other areas in the “indie” computing scene, tends to carry a certain set of cultural markers. There is a lot of cross pollination from the 9front and Suckless communities and as a result you’ll interact more with that computing philosophy. In general the community appreciates simplicity, comprehensibility, and hackability.

CONCLUSION: It is fun, satisfying, comfy and, most importantly, AI free. Learning how the system works feels good partly because the barrier to learning the system and contributing to it is actually much lower than in other systems. I have come to love it, principally, because it has a certain degree of “humanity” that makes it a joy to use.

Businesses tend to bank on demand for products being functionally infinite over the long term. Because of this it tends to be a safe bet that you’ll make more money the quicker, and cheaper, you can get products on shelves.

This has held pretty true thus far, though personally I have to wonder if there’s an upper limit. Human’s have to have a upper tolerance for buying junk right?

Throughput primarily, the bottleneck is still shipping. These systems do allow for picking/packing faster as well but from a logistics standpoint if you want more output you just need more trucks.

I rather like being busy, I rather like working. I rather like having a practical utility to my community.

I rather hate having free time.

AI removes the things I like and keeps, or enhances, the stuff I don’t.

Unfortunately we don’t have standardized roles in this industry.

Jobs like these tend to touch one of a couple spaces.

1. Controls engineering: PLC programming and traditional robotics
2. Fleetops, application engineer, or operations engineer: I’ve seen these show up at places like Boston dynamics
3. Technical support: look for ones that mention wanting like a EE and knowing stuff about control systems.
4. SCADA engineer: Especially at tech startups.

In general you’re looking for jobs that reference a mixture of networking, control systems, SCADA, DCS, PLC, IT infra, and of course robotics.

My entire team is 30+, hard to find people with a diverse background that are also 22.

My hope is that the rate of improvement is not consistent across all domains.

Like you said code and math were easy due to there being a wealth of training data and the feedback loop being fast and low stakes.

The loss of tech as an industry writ large will hurt and those of us whose identity is largely tied up in being technically savvy will have some hard years ahead, but we may see the light of day.

If it turns out there are no brakes on this train we’re talking about a civilizational catastrophe.

EDIT: To highlight the extent to which this can fuck us. Even in mankind’s most fantastical sci-fi, humans are still relevant and proactive. We have no cultural model for education and technical skill being completely irrelevant.

As for me, I’m going back to school for my EE

Expensive isn’t really an issue though is it?

If I can guarantee you quadruple your revenue by doubling your expense, you’d take the deal no? That’s basically what these things do.

Yep it works. When it’s running one of these things can push, not joking, millions of cases through a single warehouse a day.

They don’t need to. No more than a conveyor needs to think critically.

I think people are envisioning the robots moving through a warehouse that was built for humans. That is not the case.

Special purpose warehouses are built with the robots in mind. The bots don’t need to navigate an uncontrolled environment as the environment was meant for them.

It’s basically a really big, really performant conveyor belt.

I’ve seen the same. My current take is basically “nothing about how we did warehouses transfers to this new way, and attempting to make them dovetail gives you the worst of two worlds”.

The cool thing is there’s so many neat new industries this can create. The downside is that, as usual, there’s a big disconnect between P&L decision makers and technical professionals.

This is actually a good time to get into the space. There’s not a ton of companies competing over a now growing market and the work is weird enough that AI hasn’t fully eaten it.

Downside, see my other posts, the field wants to pull people who have a pretty diverse skill set. I would be prepared to discuss RAFT consensus in the same conversation as PID tuning and control theory.

Checkout companies like Symbotic, Boston Dynamics, or robotics integrators like ABB

The company this post is referring to doesn’t have bots moving around a warehouse designed for humans. They built a whole building with shelves and space designed for the robots.

I promise you, the throughout is tremendously higher than humans alone. The bots can get up to roughly 45mph in a few seconds and break to a full stop in the same amount of time. I know this because I work in this space, the system is fast

What’s interesting is that this specific company isn’t doing that.

They don’t build robots to move around a human warehouse, they build a giant warehouse (sort of) designed for their robots.

Unfortunately the robots are substantially faster and more effective than humans. Can you run at ~45 mph?

The issue is complexity and that’s something that’s getting better over time.

The industry is still in its infancy, not just warehouse automation but robotics and fleetops in general.

There’s a lot of growing pains as we figure out the best ways to manipulate autonomous robot swarms that can number in the thousands.

One of the big issues is just training personnel for all this. It’s quite rare to find people with a background in both hardware and software and who can speak both fluently.