YHK - yet another hacker news clone

AI firm HUMXN offers free plumbing and HVAC service in Minnesota to train robots

29 points brunomarsjams 1 hour ago 41 comments

Noaidi 46 minutes ago | parent

Anyone who participates in this is a traitor to humanity.

whartung 41 minutes ago | parent

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.

praxulus 40 minutes ago | parent

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

vkou 39 minutes ago | parent

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

happytoexplain 18 minutes ago | parent

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

vkou 40 minutes ago | parent

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

anon7725 40 minutes ago | parent

Now do software engineers.

happytoexplain 6 minutes ago | parent

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?

dyauspitr 39 minutes ago | parent

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.

happytoexplain 15 minutes ago | parent

>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".

theoreticalmal 37 minutes ago | parent

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

gusmally 36 minutes ago | parent

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

happytoexplain 13 minutes ago | parent

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.

FLeXMurphy 34 minutes ago | parent

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

black6 44 minutes ago | parent

At what point do these services become free, in the Star Trek post-scarcity sense? How is the promise that automation will ultimately provides freedom from struggling for survival upheld? The piper has to be paid, unless the owner class all of a sudden does a one-eighty and decides they can stop raking in money.

nekusar 33 minutes ago | parent

The only way that will happen is when we convert from a capitalist to a socialist democratic economic structure. It'll likely need a whole host of bloody wars for that.

Probably should do that before policing/military humanoid robots are cheap enough. If we don't, we're looking at our future as indentured servitude for capitalists for the rest of the lifetime this earth can support life.

FLeXMurphy 30 minutes ago | parent

>It'll likely need a whole host of bloody wars for that.

Out of curiosity who are we killing or getting killed by? What amount of brainwashing will it take to get all these rubes to kill eachother to make the 1% richer?

nekusar 23 minutes ago | parent

For example:

Pro-capitalist governments (cycle of corruption choosing the winners, revolving door between politics and business)

Human and robotic military conscripted to fight

Capitalists

Capitalists' workers paid enough to not be "worker class"

The other side:

Union supporters

Workers rights advocates

Socialists/communists

People who lost jobs/poverty class

Workers abused more than "average"

We have seen these types of wars before, and in the USA. Our own worker rights and union history was horrendously bloody. Even had the US military killing strikers and union folks. It's also where the private military, The Pinkertons, came from.

And prior to 1940s with FDR, there was a strong Socialist and Communist groups pushing for their respective changes. FDR appeased some of the demands with his reforms. And those reforms were credited to the success of the late 50's and 60's.

black6 17 minutes ago | parent

"Oh you don't have to fight them, you just have to convince the pitchfork people that the torch people want to take away their pitchforks."

debo_ 25 minutes ago | parent

According to the Star Trek timeline, we first need to experience the Bell Riots, the Eugenics Wars, and World War III before your proposal can be enacted.

maitland 40 minutes ago | parent

the gen ai image on this page has a "shut off" label for the base of the human plumber's neck. To say nothing of the amusing drainage schematics (water flows up?)...

psychoslave 34 minutes ago | parent

That’s hilarious really, genAI at it’s finest neglecting use case!

momojo 39 minutes ago | parent

How is this on the front page? Its not a YC company. They have no internet presence besides a Claude website. 0 followers on X/twitter. No public mentions of funding or votes-of-trust. No names to vouch for them.

Can OP or founders comment?

pizza234 32 minutes ago | parent

I personally find it very interesting as example of AI moving into the physical world.

momojo 29 minutes ago | parent

They don't even do the robotics, they just do the data gathering.

thomas_unise 21 minutes ago | parent

Hi

I’m the owner of this company

What would you like to know?

Just because I’m not in YC does mean anything

I have deep home service connections and have been doing internal ai app development for the past couple years

I’ve trained my own deepseek derivative so I’m familiar with structuring the data

I think it’s lame you try and downplay a company because they aren’t SF based and in a YC cohort

I made the calls and got the contracts with these home service company who will document all their jobs for me and my team

nemomarx 12 minutes ago | parent

How is your process for selling the results? do you have a buyer lined up who is loaning the robots for this in some kinda sponsorship deal, do you intend to sell it as a service later on?

thomas_unise 6 minutes ago | parent

I have home service techs wearing meta glasses while they do their job.

We are data only. So we have no robots. We capture the entire job and structure the data for training

Our model is to capture hard to get training data for robotics

short_sells_poo 10 minutes ago | parent

Well, the parent poster has a point. They are asking: why are you notable? Neither your company, nor you seem to have any track record, references, an indication that you know what you are doing or some prior art that'd be indicative of future performance.

That is not to say that your idea or company are bad, but there's very little substance that would indicate that I should care.

I don't care that you trained your own deepseek derivative or that you got contracts. What you are proposing to do is interesting, but a mission to Mars is also interesting. If it's some random person proposing a mission to Mars, I don't care because they have no chance to actually achieve anything meaningful. If it's a person who has credible support and a plan, sure, now I'm listening.

Why should I care about you doing it? How are you proposing to solve the hard problems, which are in the robotics space?

thomas_unise 4 minutes ago | parent

Fair critique

But I am doing what everyone does on here and sharing what I’m up to.

I’m not trying to say I’m special or anything like that.

This just happen to resonate

jawns 38 minutes ago | parent

There's obviously a strong incentive for homeowners to participate: they don't have to pay for a service that is often valued at hundreds of dollars.

But what is the incentive for contractors to participate, and how does it overcome the enormous disincentive of "You are training your replacement"?

My guess is that truly skilled contractors in these trades are not hurting for work. So I doubt they're going to be swayed by just a few more extra jobs added to their docket.

Less skilled contractors who are desperate for work might be taken in, but then the quality of their output is likely to be worse, and the value of that training data is likely to be low.

My guess is that people in skilled trades who are used to working with their hands are going to be even more skeptical than white-collar folks about an AI revolution, and more guarded against change in that direction.

FLeXMurphy 17 minutes ago | parent

> But what is the incentive for contractors to participate, and how does it overcome the enormous disincentive of "You are training your replacement"?

They don't need an army of contractors to do this. They just need a few, much like the AI labs that have a handful of SME staff for each particular subject to guide the corpus of data. See mathematics example.

It is not about knowing if someone can be bought. It's knowing just how much is just enough to buy them.

And then you have individuals whose pride is more than enough. See Terence Tao for a great example of a Useful Idiot.

colesantiago 30 minutes ago | parent

It is known that the AI labs are going for all economically useful work.

Creatives and all white collar jobs are the easiest to target first, with AI labs basically pitching individuals and businesses:

"AI will free you up with more time to do 'other meaningful things'"

If you find yourself laid off or work has run dry from a previous gig because AI can do it better than you, you'll naturally consider a role which AI hasn't touched...yet

Then you see AI and robotics labs going after the margins of blue collar jobs, which then they will also say again to the blue collar workers:

"AI will free you up with more time to do 'other meaningful things'"

I can't imagine what the world will look like if you repeat this N times, or even in 10 years.

Because you need to pay your rent, and bills right?

Unless rent, bills and all the rest of it doesn't mean anything anymore in this 'AI abundance' age.

FLeXMurphy 27 minutes ago | parent

I'm seeing a lot of surprised people on this thread. Have a look at the more recent YC batches of startups. Count all the non-AI ones, and subtract from total. And don't pretend to not know what the end game of something like YC is here. And YC is not the only one.

One company doesn't need to do everything. But 100-1000 smaller companies, each taking on a piece of every-day work that people are paid to do and replacing it with AI, is definitely doable and can pay very well if deployed at scale. It doesn't have to be perfect all the time either - just cheap, fast, and good enough. As it always has been.

You didn't really think they are training vision models so they can just drive your car around, or that they are training robots to perform physical tasks so they can just use them in factories, did you?

happytoexplain 19 minutes ago | parent

As always: Outrage != surprise.

reticulates 4 minutes ago | parent

You’re almost right but missing an entire category of startup: “egocentric” data. A lot of the most high revenue startups right now are, essentially, recruitment agencies for frontier labs to get video of skilled workers. OpenAI and others are spending billions per year with the various startups. We aren’t witnessing specialized startups training for specific sectors, we are witnessing training startups trying to hoover as much video as possible.

Personally, I’m not convinced these startups have much life in them. They’re popular right now because they are low effort as there is a huge demand from the frontier labs, but a year from now, there’ll be more than enough data.

happytoexplain 19 minutes ago | parent

Hideous.