I do agree. SQL is simply an access API for so many systems, and nice as it's a declarative language rather than a normal programming language. LLMs are super powerful to express questions to data that can then be translated into SQL.
I work as a journalist covering the lab space. Lab informatics and automation in particular.
A few factors off the top of my head (there are more):
- Proprietary communication protocols between equipment from different OEMs. It's possible to automate to a greater extent if every asset speaks the same language. They often don't. Instruments exist in the OEM's walled gardens.
- Robots do save money in the long run, but they are expensive upfront. This is a deterrent, especially labs on a small budget that just don't have the CapEx for robots. This is the case for many academic labs, in particular.
That said, there is progress being made toward automating wet labs to a greater extent. There are projects to standardize protocols so you can have communication between assets from different OEMs. One of my sources from the NIH also told me last week that there are advancements being made in mobile robots that can cart samples from instrument to instrument autonomously.
Okay, this is helpful and definitely aligns with what I've heard. The proprietary protocols problem keeps coming up.
Is there any chance we can connect for me to ask a few more questions or read some of your reporting? My email is in my profile.
I am currently doing a masters in robotics and my capstone is aiming to do some lab automation. I don't have background in the area, so I am trying to learn everything I can. Thanks!
I'm a magazine journalist who's usually working on multiple stories at once. I collect a lot of tabs.
So the other day I used Claude to make a browser extension that saves all in an active window to the specified "Writing Project" so I can easily open/close them all as needed.
>No business would choose no-growth + reduced cost over growth + same cost.
If that were the case, why are so many companies bent on eliminating some employees and equipping the rest with AI to make up the difference? Wouldn't it be in their best interest to retain ALL those employees and equip them all with AI?
Forums worked (and still do) because they're small niches, like the budding Internet. As soon as they become big, they lose their sense of community, and become profitable to spam.
So, maybe we have to choose between isolated human islands vs. an ad-and-SEO-infested world?
They worked and they often worked quite well. Unfortunately, many of those “working” forums I frequented are now inactive. It’s tough to visit some and see it’s been many years since the last post on some - and those are just the ones that are still online.
> Going back to forums locked behind accounts would be a good first step.
How do you ensure the accounts aren't AI bots or people who scrap and serve it all back to the AI soup pot? The identity seems to be quite a problem online.
The entry fee let them be a lot more chaotic too - people who go too far and piss someone off would get kicked out and forced to pay money to rejoin again. But it put a price tag on trolling, unlike platforms like Instagram. So people could do it and somehow get better at it until it turns into comedy.
Invite-only, the way private torrent trackers still do it. Which has its own problems, but if you limit the number of invitees a given user can bring in and other such restrictions, it makes it practically impossible to for bots to make up a good chunk of the userbase.
Invite-only sounds like a good idea. Especially if you need multiple people to approve invites. However, one or a few people might get greedy and add bots.
The bots can avoid this by staying low impact. Farming data for AI training is rather simple. Vote brigading is also hard to track.
In the same way advertising is money spent hoping for revenue, shaping the visibility of posts by your actually human coworkers and customers work similarly.
Bot presence isn't the problem, the issues caused to the community by a high volume of scraping and spam is. Bots staying low impact and not being annoying enough to get banned is almost as good as eliminating them entirely, unless you're a perfectionist.
hahaha god Reddit is fucking full of people who are clearly using AI to write or edit their posts, I get so many people trying to glaze me like ChatGPT does now and it's so fucking creepy.
Sounds about right. Prove you're a real human through some sort of identification verification process. Probably would lead to better conversations, especially if each person could have only one account.
I am quite skeptical it would help. The majority of users on forums already aren't AI, and from my personal experience in the last couple decades on many different forums, there's already an abundance of egotistical, dogmatic god complexes around to make the experience insufferable enough already.
> an abundance of egotistical, dogmatic god complexes around to make the experience insufferable enough already.
And you can find a curated list of these people on r/LinkedInLunatics, though I'm not sure the curation is necessary as it seems like pretty much the _entirety_ of LinkedIn posts are the kind that make you question whether the poster is human.
There's marketing and building a personal brand, and then there's whatever the heck LinkedIn in 2025 is...
Please help translate the memes today for my gray hairs. I wound down my LI account around 2016 because it was 2-3 degrees to everyone with zero human-to-human I knew messaging. What has MS turned it into, a substack for business consultants and e-book merchants or something else?
They turned it into Facebook for self congratulating executives and wanna be temporarily embarrassed millionaire “thought leaders”. It’s insufferable and fuels capitalist cynicism like nothing else.
