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zamadatixtoday at 6:59 AM1 replyview on HN

Yeah, definitely. On one hand it's obvious such companies will want this data precisely to make their systems work. On the other hand... once they have the data, we all know it also ends up wherever someone is willing to pay for it. Even if they say it's not the goal today... 10 years from now how do you know the owner of the data at that point will feel the same way? Doubly so since they don't seem to be making any privacy guarantees around the pricing, just attempts at anonymizing the high level things.

I find it interesting how many people get worked up about the "skilled/unskilled" terminology though. Just walking to arbitrary waypoints is an extraordinary feet in itself - if you dropped me in the past and told me to build something which walks (or even just traverses) as such I would likely not achieve it in my lifetime, despite having great insight into how we've already accomplished this goal. At the same time, people know listing "mastered the ability to walk as a child, proficient in running" in the skills section of their resume does not make sense. It seems easy enough to understand the difference in meaning between the two contexts (skills an average human is expected to have over, say, a rock vs skills which differentiate one as able to start a job without waiting for several years of additional development) rather than seek to pick the least relevant interpretation.

OTOH, there are definitely jobs which get conflated as having a low barrier to entry (for the average person) but actually take many years of training to be able to get a typical job in (and not just for the "high end" version of the job). That's definitely a misclassification, but not for something like cleaning homes where the average person is expected to be able to do it themselves.


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ndsipa_pomutoday at 11:03 AM

> OTOH, there are definitely jobs which get conflated as having a low barrier to entry (for the average person) but actually take many years of training to be able to get a typical job in

Isn't the barrier to entry due to the jobs not allowing for mistakes? Cleaning has a high tolerance for mistakes (e.g. missing bits, leaving streaks on windows etc) and so it's fine for an inexperienced cleaner to learn from their mistakes whilst doing the job. However, people would not be happy for a lawyer or surgeon to be learning from their mistakes whilst working - they are expected to already be competent and mistakes are generally very damaging.

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