411–420 of 564 posts
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Prefab houses are a thing and they aren't exactly rare. People escaping apartments usually complain about neighbors or lack of a garden, not about the floor plan.
They are pretty rare, at least here in the US, and widely seen as undesirable or 2nd-3rd tier at best.
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I’d add to the list of why partial automation isn’t worth it: it’s more satisfying to build a brick wall than babysit a bricklaying machine. Doing the physical labor is difficult. My father was a bricklayer from ten to fifty, when he finally had to stop working. But he loved showing me the buildings he built. He helped build city government buildings, schools, libraries. The pride he felt, that he’d built something w…
My dad was a stair builder his whole career until finally becoming a freelance carpenter after getting laid off. Stairs, like bricks, are probably another implement that us techies use daily with absolutely no appreciation for complexity and skill involved. Spiral staircases are an incredible work of craftsmanship, or at least they were. I used to go to the shop with my dad when I was a kid. They would rig up these b…
Sorry it's really hard to get a sense of the difference you're describing and I'm really interested to see what it looks like.
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> RSI from typing Most office jobs don't involve that much typing. You can also buy keyboards with softer switches. (RSI was more common in the days of mechanical typewriters.) Low physical acitivity can be made up for going to the gym after work. It sounds to me you never did a day of manual labor in your life.
Well not to discredit your point but a day in the life off wouldn't really bring to life any of the points we're discussing when it comes to physical injuries. Without you picking at each of my points in detail, RSI is still an injury people STILL DO get nonetheless. In the same way that the introduction of the hard hat hasn't completely stopped people having their head caved in. My point, was that both physical/labo…
While your point is true that every profession has an injury risk, it's the type of comment that misses the point: there is a significant difference in those stats, and by trying to equate them, you are purposely watering down the significance of one where injuries are more prevalent (or at least harder).
It's a response similar in style to deflecting from attempts to solve one crisis by introducing another crisis.
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My dad was a stair builder his whole career until finally becoming a freelance carpenter after getting laid off. Stairs, like bricks, are probably another implement that us techies use daily with absolutely no appreciation for complexity and skill involved. Spiral staircases are an incredible work of craftsmanship, or at least they were. I used to go to the shop with my dad when I was a kid. They would rig up these b…
Could you link to some screenshots? Sorry it's really hard to get a sense of the difference you're describing and I'm really interested to see what it looks like.
Edit: sorry that was unreasonably snarky. I know you're looking for pictures. The CNC-milled kind that I am talking about are easy to find. Google image search 'curved handrail cnc.' I'm actually having a hard time finding pictures of classic steam-bent curved handrails amongst tons of content marketing from bendywood and contractors. If you happen to tour an antique house with curved, wooden handrails, study the way they look. it's usually one long beam, maybe with carved, ornamental caps at the end. I don't really know when the change took place, but if you look at any house built at least since the nineties, the handrail (if not painted) will look like a bunch of disjoint blocks stuck together.
The value of work is not in the work done; it's in the decisions being made. It's the ability to handle edge cases, to work your way through ambiguity, to "unstuck" a stuck situation, and to resolve tricky unforeseen issues. If you build a robot that only handles the main workflow and can't handle any of the exceptions, you're not automating anything; you're building a convenience tool. Basically, you're removing som…
> This is both economically unviable and largely unpopular. And yet, you can make billions of dollars on it. This is literally the modus operandi of modern tech companies like Google and Amazon. Automate the main workflow, silently ignore exceptions, and if anyone complains about problems (or your non-existent customer support), just wave your hands in the air and mumble something about "scale being hard".
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https://www.fbr.com.au/view/hadrian-x Brick laying robots already exist. This isn't a problem that can't be solved, it's a question of making it economically viable. But the future is pretty obviously going to be skilled machinery operators overseeing the automation. Even more interesting its once you automate like this the constraints start changing: i.e. it's easier to have a robot lay bricks with epoxy then cement…
Yes, that system is discussed in the article, and it looks like it doesn't work very well. I doubt it can keep up with human labor. I agree. It will happen eventually, but the bigger point here that is more related to to discussions on HN is that despite a lot of enthusiasm, machine learning and AI are still in the amino acid phase of evolution, and everything still sucks.
It works poorly, therefore bricklaying has been automated. The programmers won. The bricklayers won too. It's only Grakel with his weird bet that lost.
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Not quite. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plattenbau
The article mentions those. There's a reason they are not used much outside of parking garages.
it doesn't look the same as a Soviet era building project, but the technology and system is roughly the same.
For my new house, laying the bricks (aerated concrete blocks actually) took 2 days. The rest of the house took more than one year to finish. Not really necessary to optimize this step in many cases.
As mentioned in the article. There are brick laying machines for roads that are really interesting. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cGhzzcgfHNc
but that still has a human loading it and arranging the bricks, which i presume is amongst the largest time sink, sometimes 2. It is probably a vast improvment in terms of human-power required though
The value of work is not in the work done; it's in the decisions being made. It's the ability to handle edge cases, to work your way through ambiguity, to "unstuck" a stuck situation, and to resolve tricky unforeseen issues. If you build a robot that only handles the main workflow and can't handle any of the exceptions, you're not automating anything; you're building a convenience tool. Basically, you're removing som…
I'm planning to build a house, and it has surprised me that standardised house plans are not readily available online - particularly for European weather conditions - the emphasis is instead on custom floorplans. Creating new designs millions of times over seems like an obvious inefficiency.
However, plots and legal requirements differ significantly that in urban environments, it's hard to make the most of the plot without going custom (requirement to be that far away from the neighbour and the street, whether you can have windows facing that side or not, what kind of foundation is required by the terrain, etc).