I’ve been experimenting with the “all” filter (as opposed to the “subscribed” filter) lately. And I haven’t blocked any communities yet, so I get all posts. Including those from communities made for posting AI art.
I’m not saying AI art should be banned or anything, especially if it’s confined to communities specifically for AI art. And it hasn’t ruined the experience of the “all” filter enough to make me rage quit back to the subscribed filter yet. (Though I’ll probably end my “all” filter experiment and go back to “subscribed” sometime relatively soon.) But every time I see an AI generated image, it irks me. Not enough to go make nasty comments in the thread or anything. But my reaction is never “oh that’s cool.” It’s always “oh, more AI shit.” Similarly to when I run across cryptocurrentcy spam.
I don’t think anyone in that conversation is advocating against “science.” They’re advocating to (or maybe just lamenting the fact that we can’t for political reasons) do more to save real bees (and the environment in general) rather than replace bees with something robotic. And they’re commenting on how starkly this article highlights how much we’re fucking the planet.
Second, building robot bees isn’t really science. It solidly qualifies as engineering, but not science. The reason I bring this up is that while it’s arguable that there’s no science that shouldn’t be pursued (though certainly science ought to be done ethically), there’s definitely engineering that would best be not done at all. We keep engineering new and ingenious ways to extract more oil from mostly-not-oil, but that’s destroying the planet. Elon’s Hyperloop was never a good idea, and it’s fortunate it was never actually built and probably will never be built. A lot of geoengineering proposals that have been put forward are risky on the basis that we don’t understand the ecosystems involved well enough to know what the side effects might be (and that’s likely not something science will be able to solve any time soon.)
Some engineering is beneficial. But some isn’t. And you can imagine Elon or the oil industry or some reckless geoengineering startup railing against detractors calling them “anti-science” just as a PR stunt to sway public opinion in favor of their fucked-up money-making scheme.
Comparing building robot bees to measuring fly genitalia further illustrates how the poster is conflating science and engineering.
The thing about “less strain on bees” seems directly out of someone’s ass. I can’t guess their line of reasoning.
Now, being realistic, we’re so fucked that I doubt we can save the bees. And I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing to make robot bees. But it’s pretty fucked that we have to. Which is all they were saying in that conversation.
Yeah, the particular model I printed was specifically designed to be easy-ish to print. It’s printed in like 32 parts (one for each face and one connector for each vertex) and requires assembly after printing. All to avoid overhangs and such.
But yeah. Raw-dogging it with the supports would be pretty nightmarish. Lol.
My mother has a fascination with Roman Dodecahedra, so I 3D printed her one for Christmas. She hasn’t knitted any gloves with them yet. (And may never, but she still likes it and has it sitting on the mantle over the fireplace.)
But also, it’s possible OP had COVID back in 2021 or some such and just still hasn’t gotten their sense of taste back. You should look into “long covid” if you didn’t know COVID could cause symptoms (sometimes debilitating symptoms) for years after the initial infection.