To extend that analogy a bit, the dunkfest I noted suggests that a portion of the public views STEM as perfectly okay with the orphan grinder's existence at best, and proud of having orphan blood on their hands at worst.
As for the motorised orphan grinder you mention, it looks to me like the public viewed its construction as STEM voting for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party (with predictable consequences).
Quick update: I've checked the response on Bluesky, and it seems the general response is of schadenfreude at STEM's expense. From the replies, I've found:
Humanities graduates directly mocking STEM (Fig. 1,Fig. 2, Fig. 3, Fig. 4, Fig. 5)
Mockery of the long-running "learn to code" mantra (Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3, Fig. 4 Fig. 5, Fig. 6)
Claims that STEM automated themselves out of a job by creating AI (Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3)
Plus one user mocking STEM in general as "[choosing] fascism and “billions must die”" out of greed, and another approving of others' dunks on STEM over past degree-related grievances.
You want my take on this dunkfest, this suggests STEM's been hit with a double-whammy here - not only has STEM lost the status their "high-paying" reputation gave them, but that reputation (plus a lotta built-up grievances from mockery of the humanities) has crippled STEM's ability to garner sympathy for their current predicament.
New article from the New York Times reporting on an influx of compsci graduates struggling to find jobs (ostensibly caused by AI automation). Found a real money shot about a quarter of the way through:
Among college graduates ages 22 to 27, computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates, 6.1 percent and 7.5 percent respectively, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That is more than double the unemployment rate among recent biology and art history graduates, which is just 3 percent.
You want my take, I expect this article's gonna blow a major hole in STEM's public image - being a path to a high-paying job was one of STEM's major selling points (especially compared to the "useless" art/humanities degrees), and this new article not only undermines that selling point, but argues for flipping it on its head.
Not sure myself, but the mods are probably either excluded from being banned by The Wheel™, or unbanned immediately afterwards, just to keep things running smoothly.
In more low-key news, the New Yorker's given public praise to Blood in the Machine, pulling a year-old review back into the public spotlight.
Its hardly anything new (the Luddites' cultural re-assessment has been going on since 2023), but its hardly a good sign for the tech industry at large (or AI more specifically) that a major newspaper's decided to give some positive coverage to 'em.
With that out the way, here's a sidenote:
When history looks back on the Luddites' cultural re-assessment, I expect the rise of generative AI will be pointed to as a major factor.
Beyond being a blatant repeat of what the Luddites fought against (automation being used to fuck over workers and artisans), its role in enabling bosses to kill jobs and abuse labour in practically every field imaginable (including fields that were thought safe from automation) has provided highly fertile ground for developing class solidarity.
Sam Altman is touting GPT-5 as a “Ph.D level expert.” You might expect a Ph.D could count.
So let’s try the very first question: how many R’s are the in the word strawberry? GPT-5 can do the specific word “strawberry.” Cool.
But I suspect they hard-coded that question, because it fails hard on other words: [ChatGPT]
(Seriously, this is extremely fucking basic stuff, how the fuck can you be so utterly shallow and creatively sterile to fuck this u- oh, yeah, I forgot OpenAI is full of promptfondlers and Business Idiots like Sam Altman.)
Found a good sneer recently: The LLM In The Room, about LLMs' deeply-lacking usefulness for programming
Considering the quality of your average LLM, and the quality of the promptfondlers who use them, I expect this will result in a lot of serious security vulnerabilities and broken projects.
In other news, the mainstream press has caught on to "clanker" (originally coined for use in the Star Wars franchise) getting heavy use, with Rolling Stone, Gizmondo and Axios putting out articles on it, and NPR featuring it in Word of the Week.
You want my take, I expect it will retain heavy usage going forward - as I've stated before (multiple times at least), AI is no longer viewed as a "value-neutral" tool/tech, but as an enemy of humanity, whose use expresses a contempt for humanity.
Thomasaurus has given their thoughts on using AI, in a journal entry called "I tried coding with AI, I became lazy and stupid)". Unsurprisingly, the whole thing is one long sneer, with a damning indictment of its effectiveness at the end: