my cemetery has tons of historical correspondence by employees going back almost 200 years and i like to read it and make myself insane thinking about how much more shit i am expected to do in a day than these people and how i am not even actually making that much more money than them
I am an engineer and have this same thought about the speed of work when drawings were done by hand and not on the computer and that was way less than 200 years ago.
I’ve had the same thought about insurance underwriting, which was done by hand until spreadsheets became common. How did you do six revisions on a “firm” quote when everything was pen, paper, and lookup books? Answer: you didn’t, and sales or account management didn’t like it they could suck eggs
Architecture is the same way. Thanks to CAD and Revit, and the ability to re-use but adjust plans for things mass market housing, clients can easily expect multiple new lots and sets of plans every single week.
Small enough firm we just said no to new Revit work. We've lost some work but not enough to hurt us. A few clients who insist(ed) on Revit have caved and extract ACAD files for us to work with.
I am used to revit at this point and while there are headaches it is also easier and more streamlined to work in. I learned both programs at the same time when starting out. Seems like the future is more revit and less cad in my experience.
Old enough that I started out drafting by hand and my boss is older than I am. I can get around with Revit but only if things are set up. I realize this will leave me behind eventually.
And print. You want a hundred books, 80 pages each? That'll be July 20th earliest regular delivery, expedited pricing will get it to you in three weeks.
Now - email comes in at 3pm. You need the books tomorrow 10am? You gottit.
I'm not even convinced CAD saves time, the time's just spent on creating more and more detailed unnecessary information that the builders won't even look at. Hand drawn walls would be two lines noted '215mm blockwork' instead of infinitely zoomed in detail and it was fine
And it's funny, because you would think it would make getting plans out simpler. But the easy of copy, paste, and editing seems like it has led to homebuilders offering a HUGE amount of options, from diff. rooms to mirrored lots, and it makes plans/templates overly complicated to actually work with.
Law’s the same way. You have to exchange documents relevant to the trial. Used to be that was a contract and like eight letters, and you’d ask witnesses about what they said in person and on the phone. Now most of our job is reviewing millions of tangentially relevant internal and external emails.
This, to me, is the main argument for a 4 day work week. Just having CAD, email, and excel means we’re doing in a week what must have taken an engineer 2-3 months in the 80s.
There was more thought and care that went into design, more humanity, if you will, when drawings were done by hand, calculations were done on paper, and revisions required thoughtful consideration.
Forget where I read it but the nationalization & then internationalization of finance played big part. When the banker knew you AND would walk past your business everyday he was willing to loan you the extra money to make new building aesthetically pleasing. Now an algorithm determines loan amt.
People remember the Lettera 22 typewriter and the Mallard train engine and forget all the mediocre designs that were their contemporaries. I have my mom's turn-crank nut chopper and it is not a miracle of design. Neither was our ice pick.
But the point is that everyday design is often ugly. William Morris was complaining about it in the mid-1800s. “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” Notice that he makes an exception for useful things.
yeah it kinda sucks, i've been in civil engineering for over 20 years and timelines have gotten progressively more annoying due to cad/c3d. turnaround is very annoying, i still remember a client demanding a road widening that would take time to do w/ utility changes saying 'its just lines on paper'
For us in TV, this is a nightmare for post. Due to HDR and extremely high resolution, networks want us to have 4K HDR rough cuts which is so much work and server space compared to even just a few years ago. It’s also a nightmare on production to shoot with such a quick turnaround
and on the flip side now that everything is streaming and home video releases are going away, the end product that viewers can actually watch looks worse than a bluray from 2008 because the bitrate got crushed to hell.
See, this is complicated. Because in theory, Netflix and Prime use Microsoft silverlight which can do true 4K at high bit rates which is why we have to deliver for them in native 4K HDR. But they’re doing some bs with the bandwidth to make it look like shit. You should see what we deliver
It’s so frustrating because our footage looks so good once it goes through online. I’m headed to a literal paradise next week to shoot a new show and I’m going to lose it when I watch it in the bay, knowing it won’t look this good ever again 😭
My favorite "surely you can run 10 variations on this building in 30 minutes, It's just typing a few numbers into the computer"
You are asking for something with more steel in it than a WW2 destroyer, that takes time dipshit.
If the people making decisions were required to know anything about the work that's being done, management would end at the director level. Maybe even a step below that. I'm a med dev engineer and nobody above my boss knows anything about the day to day.
People seem to think with this comment that I’m pro-machine learning to replace artists. Maybe that’s on me.
I actually feel the opposite. And I purposely use the name machine learning, because the other, two-letter term is marketing bullshit.
I’m not sure what you think I’m selling. I don’t want machine learning to replace artists. Just the opposite. I believe machines can’t make art, only simulate it.
I intended to identify that capitalism uses resources to further its goals at the exclusion of everything else.
And that is exactly why these technologies will fail in this role: they can produce a draft product instantly, but revision work has highly unpredictable turnaround time and quality. It’s hard to get real work done around such a schedule.
That draft product might be heavily laced with serious factual & logical errors, which takes more time for humans to fix than to have a human write from scratch… but they don’t care about any of this because executives are divorced from reality.
I agree.
Great artists are great editors. This is the main reason why machine learning can’t produce art. Machine learning models are terrible editors.
It’s not the turnaround time. It’s the increase in profit they expect to see by eliminating humans and pumping out “content” faster… even though people can’t consume all the content anymore, nor is it even digestible. It’s just feeding more click bait to increase prices on advertising slots.
in order to consume all the content you need to purchase tokens to use the ai article summarizer. this stimulates the economy and increases productivity, somehow.
it feels like the goal is to turn all media into radio static and sell an oracle that will divine signals in the noise.
There's a bunch of job postings on Indeed and LinkedIn asking for people to review AI-generated articles before publishing, and they ask for something like 10 articles a DAY. Machine learning will raise expectations even higher.
How about we don’t replace artists and illustrators? Let’s just not do that. You realize we can just not destroy an entire artist industry that’s a net good for humanity so a few tech CEOs can make all of our lives worse while they get extremely rich
