5 ms·

ChatGPT isn't going to destroy Jeff's job.

by 1970-01-01 4y ago

CoastalCoder 4y ago
How about ChatGPT producing a suitable CNC program? (I have no idea how feasible that is, I'm just curious.)
- Blackthorn 4y ago
  And you thought chatgpt was bad with subtle bugs in generated Python code. Now just imagine it scrapping a thirteen hour part or crashing a $300,000 machine.
  - CoastalCoder 4y ago
    I've never worked with a CNC. Wouldn't they typically have safeguards against machine-damaging instructions?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - jaipilot747 4y ago
      Usually not. Especially not in machines where you manually set the bits and the machine has no idea of the bit and it's properties, nor of the piece you are machining.
    - Blackthorn 4y ago
      What the machine knows: (1) Where the head is. (2) If you program it right, where the end of the tool is. (3) If you program it right, what the width of the cutting edge of the tool is. That's it. You could maybe prevent it from diving the tool into the table. But you won't prevent it from trying to take a 2" cut into D2 steel. Or going down into a pocket and crashing the tool holder into a section of the workpiece. Or going down into a pocket and rapid moving left, slamming the tool into the workpiece (which if you're lucky will just break the tool).
      - mauvehaus 4y ago
        ... And depending on whether it uses steppers or servos, it may only know where the head is relative to where it was last told its origin was. ... And, if it's using steppers, it only knows that much if it hasn't slipped/missed/lost a step.
    - davemp 4y ago
      From my at a glance knowledge of the space, complex CNC setups can have NP path routing problems to go from a model to the actual job. So I wouldn’t be surprised if the tools are underdeveloped. You’re only selling a couple of these machines to very sophisticated operators after all. There isn’t the scale/market to justify much polish.
    - jdboyd 4y ago
      They might try, but it is hard to know which instructions will damage something. The machine might not not what the shape of the work piece inside of it is supposed to be, and if it doesn't know that, it might not know when one operation fails in a way that would now cause a later operation to incorrectly collide part of the machine with the work piece. On stupider machines that are only 10s of thousands of dollars/euros/etc, you also have to be certain that what the machine expects for tool geometry matches reality (meaning that the correct tool was in the correct tool location, that the tool is mounted in the holder at just the right length, that the tool itself hasn't deformed, etc. That said, I wouldn't bet against AI stuff potentially being good at generating tool paths in the future. Sometimes I think that existing CNC stuff might be too dumb. Where is the lathe equivalent of auto-probing a 3d printer bed or using machine vision to monitor the print? Where is the mill equivalent of visual examining each part like a pick and place machine does? Why can't I put a piece of metal in a vise and just tell the mill to square of the ends? It could be that what I'm picturing is only stuff that casual users would be interested in, and thus there isn't sufficient money to develop it.
      - di4na 4y ago
        Re auto probing: it exists but usually not at your level because you rarely need that precision for the work you do. On top of this, it gets far more expensive because the levelling mechanism end up having a precision cost too. Also let say that the use case are a bit different. a 3d printer is a far far far more controlled environment
        Kirby64 4y ago
        The difference is simple, a 3d printer starts with nothing on the 'table' or platform and adds. It has 100% of the information of what is added, so in theory it's possible to know where any potential collisions are (this is not done in practice, and also doesn't account for adhesion print failures, etc, but it's possible). A CNC starts with an unknown block on the table, held by an unknown workholding fixture, made of an unknown material. There just is not enough information to not crash into something unless programmed around it. Or just run way too fast and destroy tools. In theory you could design sets of rules, but now you're having to add so much specificity to a design it's a big time waste. There's not really any meaningful entry level CNC machines, so if you can pay for the big machine... you kind of can pay for the expertise to not destroy the machine.
    - auxym 4y ago
      Nope, not in my experience. They will happily ram themselves at full speed into your solid-block-of-steel workpiece if you tell them you (thereby probably causing tens of thousands of dollars in damage).
    - at_a_remove 4y ago
      Terrifying amounts of no, not even a little.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      To some degree. But if you purposefully program in a toolstrike and ignore the warnings you'll get a toolstrike and depending on how beefy the tool/machine is the damage may well be considerable. Hold down clamps are a particularly good source of toolstrikes.
- edrxty 4y ago
  I'm sure you could train it on a bunch of g code and get g code out but it wouldn't have any context for the specifically targeted CNC machine and would probably just gouge random holes in the bed with random tools
- abakker 4y ago
  SO BAD. It is NOT aware of G and M codes on a per machine basis and will create amazing crashes will full conviction that it will work. Edit to add: E.g. it fully recommended that I use a G38 instead of g31 in a macro, which would on my machine would probably destroy my probe.
  - knodi123 4y ago
    > crashes will full conviction that it will work That 'full conviction' part is the kicker. I don't mind if an AI says "gee, this might work", or "maybe this?" But the confident idiocy is going to kill someone. I asked one what the best breed of dog was for a family with a child who had allergy problems and was sensitive to dander. It said a golden retriever was best, since they are hypoallergenic and don't ever shed, plus they're friendly and eager to please.
    - abakker 4y ago
      "confident idiocy" is exactly what is wrong with CGPT and other AIs. (and plenty of people)
Blackthorn 4y ago
Robotic welding processes have caused quite a bit of grief in the workforce before the advent of ChatGPT, unfortunately.
- buildsjets 4y ago
  Any weld that can be economically automated should be. Several years ago I worked a project to help a supplier implement automated orbital tube welding for an aerospace product. There were two of these welds per part, and 8 parts per airplane, for an airplane that was being produced at around 50 per month. So they needed to make about 800 welds per month, about 37 per day. Including setup, each manual weld took around 15 minute, so over 9 hours of welding the exact same setup over and over, while being exposed to hot surfaces, UV light, and welding gasses. That's no job for a human.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  There is good money made by people fixing up after the robots.
- WheatMillington 4y ago
  On a production line, sure. But not in the kind of work in the link, and not in almost any kind of repair work, bespoke work or built to order manufacturing.
- nimbius 4y ago
  having worked in shops alongside automatic welders its a toss-up at best. See vendors like Fanuc and Motoman will say just about anything to get the bid for a process automation contract. 50k cycles per hour? sure. maintenance period every 25 years? why not. seamless switching between pulsemig, pulseGMAW and cupped tig? you know it. Vision system? it can see through time buddy, this robot does eeeverything. the problems start when your shop retools without a cycle time analysis, makes small tweaks to existing metal profiles without updating the bots, or finds out robots aren't magic money saving golems. for me its been the last one because every shop Ive been in will literally run an autowelder until the teeth in the gears sound like an empty bag of cheetos and the tool path leaves about an inch of over-weld and spatter. the overweld and quality issues get the grinder treatment from a line worker whos pulled out to do lots and lots of reworks so your cycle time is now bob's cycle time. now eventually the setup to pulsemig wont make sense anymore or nobody can remember how to switch it to GMAW or a customer needs a mig joint so more tweaks happen until your $250k bot is now just a pneumatic arm that shoots metal boogers at a joint and sends it to rework. no shop wants to spend money on a programmer or mechanical maintenance unless the machines literally swinging around in a fiery puddle of its own hydraulic.
m463 4y ago
maybe wait for gcodeGPT?
wyclif 4y ago
How does a person become an apprentice silversmith?
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  Maybe obvious, but, find a silversmith and ask. Finding them is the hard part though, I think you're better off finding something broader, e.g. a jewelery shop that makes their own or does repairs, there may be relevant courses and education paths for it. The trouble is, I think, that it's a dying art; for years a lot of these craftsmen have been superseded by cheap mass-produced fashion jewelry on the one hand, and cheaper or more practical every day use items. There's less pieces in people's homes that are worth handing down to younger generations. But this can be reversed, it just means people need to make investments into items that may not be immediately useful or won't be used daily, things like grandfather clocks, jewelry, display pieces, art, etc. One example I can think of is that my parents have an "analog" weather station on their wall, it's got things like a quicksilver thermometer / barometer, a weather glass, and a blurb of text, etc. They bought it because quicksilver was being banned for use in thermometers etc, so they figured it would be the last chance. But the other factor, and we're zooming out a bit now, is that people have less permanence in their lives nowadays. Home ownership is decreasing fast, and people seem less interested in "being set for life", e.g. buying a house with the intent of living there forever and/or raising a family. But that's very tangential, lol.

ChatGPT isn't going to destroy Jeff's job.

CoastalCoder 4y ago

How about ChatGPT producing a suitable CNC program? (I have no idea how feasible that is, I'm just curious.)

Blackthorn 4y ago
And you thought chatgpt was bad with subtle bugs in generated Python code. Now just imagine it scrapping a thirteen hour part or crashing a $300,000 machine.
- CoastalCoder 4y ago
  I've never worked with a CNC. Wouldn't they typically have safeguards against machine-damaging instructions?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - jaipilot747 4y ago
    Usually not. Especially not in machines where you manually set the bits and the machine has no idea of the bit and it's properties, nor of the piece you are machining.
  - Blackthorn 4y ago
    What the machine knows: (1) Where the head is. (2) If you program it right, where the end of the tool is. (3) If you program it right, what the width of the cutting edge of the tool is. That's it. You could maybe prevent it from diving the tool into the table. But you won't prevent it from trying to take a 2" cut into D2 steel. Or going down into a pocket and crashing the tool holder into a section of the workpiece. Or going down into a pocket and rapid moving left, slamming the tool into the workpiece (which if you're lucky will just break the tool).
    - mauvehaus 4y ago
      ... And depending on whether it uses steppers or servos, it may only know where the head is relative to where it was last told its origin was. ... And, if it's using steppers, it only knows that much if it hasn't slipped/missed/lost a step.
  - davemp 4y ago
    From my at a glance knowledge of the space, complex CNC setups can have NP path routing problems to go from a model to the actual job. So I wouldn’t be surprised if the tools are underdeveloped. You’re only selling a couple of these machines to very sophisticated operators after all. There isn’t the scale/market to justify much polish.
  - jdboyd 4y ago
    They might try, but it is hard to know which instructions will damage something. The machine might not not what the shape of the work piece inside of it is supposed to be, and if it doesn't know that, it might not know when one operation fails in a way that would now cause a later operation to incorrectly collide part of the machine with the work piece. On stupider machines that are only 10s of thousands of dollars/euros/etc, you also have to be certain that what the machine expects for tool geometry matches reality (meaning that the correct tool was in the correct tool location, that the tool is mounted in the holder at just the right length, that the tool itself hasn't deformed, etc. That said, I wouldn't bet against AI stuff potentially being good at generating tool paths in the future. Sometimes I think that existing CNC stuff might be too dumb. Where is the lathe equivalent of auto-probing a 3d printer bed or using machine vision to monitor the print? Where is the mill equivalent of visual examining each part like a pick and place machine does? Why can't I put a piece of metal in a vise and just tell the mill to square of the ends? It could be that what I'm picturing is only stuff that casual users would be interested in, and thus there isn't sufficient money to develop it.
    - di4na 4y ago
      Re auto probing: it exists but usually not at your level because you rarely need that precision for the work you do. On top of this, it gets far more expensive because the levelling mechanism end up having a precision cost too. Also let say that the use case are a bit different. a 3d printer is a far far far more controlled environment
      - Kirby64 4y ago
        The difference is simple, a 3d printer starts with nothing on the 'table' or platform and adds. It has 100% of the information of what is added, so in theory it's possible to know where any potential collisions are (this is not done in practice, and also doesn't account for adhesion print failures, etc, but it's possible). A CNC starts with an unknown block on the table, held by an unknown workholding fixture, made of an unknown material. There just is not enough information to not crash into something unless programmed around it. Or just run way too fast and destroy tools. In theory you could design sets of rules, but now you're having to add so much specificity to a design it's a big time waste. There's not really any meaningful entry level CNC machines, so if you can pay for the big machine... you kind of can pay for the expertise to not destroy the machine.
  - auxym 4y ago
    Nope, not in my experience. They will happily ram themselves at full speed into your solid-block-of-steel workpiece if you tell them you (thereby probably causing tens of thousands of dollars in damage).
  - at_a_remove 4y ago
    Terrifying amounts of no, not even a little.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    To some degree. But if you purposefully program in a toolstrike and ignore the warnings you'll get a toolstrike and depending on how beefy the tool/machine is the damage may well be considerable. Hold down clamps are a particularly good source of toolstrikes.
edrxty 4y ago
I'm sure you could train it on a bunch of g code and get g code out but it wouldn't have any context for the specifically targeted CNC machine and would probably just gouge random holes in the bed with random tools
abakker 4y ago
SO BAD. It is NOT aware of G and M codes on a per machine basis and will create amazing crashes will full conviction that it will work. Edit to add: E.g. it fully recommended that I use a G38 instead of g31 in a macro, which would on my machine would probably destroy my probe.
- knodi123 4y ago
  > crashes will full conviction that it will work That 'full conviction' part is the kicker. I don't mind if an AI says "gee, this might work", or "maybe this?" But the confident idiocy is going to kill someone. I asked one what the best breed of dog was for a family with a child who had allergy problems and was sensitive to dander. It said a golden retriever was best, since they are hypoallergenic and don't ever shed, plus they're friendly and eager to please.
  - abakker 4y ago
    "confident idiocy" is exactly what is wrong with CGPT and other AIs. (and plenty of people)

Blackthorn 4y ago

Robotic welding processes have caused quite a bit of grief in the workforce before the advent of ChatGPT, unfortunately.

buildsjets 4y ago
Any weld that can be economically automated should be. Several years ago I worked a project to help a supplier implement automated orbital tube welding for an aerospace product. There were two of these welds per part, and 8 parts per airplane, for an airplane that was being produced at around 50 per month. So they needed to make about 800 welds per month, about 37 per day. Including setup, each manual weld took around 15 minute, so over 9 hours of welding the exact same setup over and over, while being exposed to hot surfaces, UV light, and welding gasses. That's no job for a human.
jacquesm 4y ago
There is good money made by people fixing up after the robots.
WheatMillington 4y ago
On a production line, sure. But not in the kind of work in the link, and not in almost any kind of repair work, bespoke work or built to order manufacturing.
nimbius 4y ago
having worked in shops alongside automatic welders its a toss-up at best. See vendors like Fanuc and Motoman will say just about anything to get the bid for a process automation contract. 50k cycles per hour? sure. maintenance period every 25 years? why not. seamless switching between pulsemig, pulseGMAW and cupped tig? you know it. Vision system? it can see through time buddy, this robot does eeeverything. the problems start when your shop retools without a cycle time analysis, makes small tweaks to existing metal profiles without updating the bots, or finds out robots aren't magic money saving golems. for me its been the last one because every shop Ive been in will literally run an autowelder until the teeth in the gears sound like an empty bag of cheetos and the tool path leaves about an inch of over-weld and spatter. the overweld and quality issues get the grinder treatment from a line worker whos pulled out to do lots and lots of reworks so your cycle time is now bob's cycle time. now eventually the setup to pulsemig wont make sense anymore or nobody can remember how to switch it to GMAW or a customer needs a mig joint so more tweaks happen until your $250k bot is now just a pneumatic arm that shoots metal boogers at a joint and sends it to rework. no shop wants to spend money on a programmer or mechanical maintenance unless the machines literally swinging around in a fiery puddle of its own hydraulic.

m463 4y ago

maybe wait for gcodeGPT?

wyclif 4y ago

How does a person become an apprentice silversmith?

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
Maybe obvious, but, find a silversmith and ask. Finding them is the hard part though, I think you're better off finding something broader, e.g. a jewelery shop that makes their own or does repairs, there may be relevant courses and education paths for it. The trouble is, I think, that it's a dying art; for years a lot of these craftsmen have been superseded by cheap mass-produced fashion jewelry on the one hand, and cheaper or more practical every day use items. There's less pieces in people's homes that are worth handing down to younger generations. But this can be reversed, it just means people need to make investments into items that may not be immediately useful or won't be used daily, things like grandfather clocks, jewelry, display pieces, art, etc. One example I can think of is that my parents have an "analog" weather station on their wall, it's got things like a quicksilver thermometer / barometer, a weather glass, and a blurb of text, etc. They bought it because quicksilver was being banned for use in thermometers etc, so they figured it would be the last chance. But the other factor, and we're zooming out a bit now, is that people have less permanence in their lives nowadays. Home ownership is decreasing fast, and people seem less interested in "being set for life", e.g. buying a house with the intent of living there forever and/or raising a family. But that's very tangential, lol.