Re:AMD Announces 307% Increase in Q3 Earnings
by ksec on Wednesday October 25, 2017 @03:59AM
(#15548286)
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-...
After reading this, it is clear how much can still be done. Holland has in the past 3 - 4 years consistently been innovating and producing much better yield in all sort of agriculture products. The first two years most US companies has been saying those prices aren't sustainable, and they will come down soon, it is now clear those better then expected yields are not mere coincidence.
Re:AMD Announces 307% Increase in Q3 Earnings
by smcl on Wednesday October 25, 2017 @05:18AM
(#15548619)
While I can't speak for the physical part of construction, I know that the Structural Engineering part was until semi-recently (2007-ish) pretty manual. My flatmate graduated at the same time as me and worked in a local engineering firm in Edinburgh and I was always curious what his work involved. It turns out there were a LOT of extremely manual calculations performed with pen and paper, with datasheets containing commonly used calculations for how structures should behave under different loads and the properties of various materials you could plug into these calcs.
Re:AMD Announces 307% Increase in Q3 Earnings
by friendzis on Wednesday October 25, 2017 @06:51AM
(#15549001)
One of my teachers used to say "what is cheaper: Robert or robot?". There already are constraint based systems for structural engineering that e.g. calculate supports given structure and loads, select materials, etc. I am not too familiar with UK market, but in my country people in civil engineering tell me that significant portion of engineering project costs come not from actual engineering, but rather various permits, coordination and other bureaucracies that do not benefit from single party automating.
This makes returns on investment into new software, trainings and lost temporary productivity diminishing. Without government changing standards on engineering output, the market for flexible projects is not that large (which is a bit of a chicken and an egg problem).
Re:AMD Announces 307% Increase in Q3 Earnings
by smcl on Wednesday October 25, 2017 @07:30AM
(#15549192)
That might explain why my friend wasn't enthusiastic about trying to automate some of them for him. Tbh this was before I realised startups were a thing you could do so I wasn't thinking about this as a business, just as a way to make him less stressed out so he could leave work at 5pm and come for beers with me
Re:AMD Announces 307% Increase in Q3 Earnings
by danpalmer on Wednesday October 25, 2017 @07:07AM
(#15549078)
I’m not that familiar either, but there’s loads of building work going on near me in London that looks pretty modern. There’s a hotel nearby that has been built out of prefabricated rooms that came in on lorries, and there are two blocks of flats being built with a platform that rises up a floor at a time, producing seemingly fully completed floors out of the bottom (difficult to describe). Both of these seem relatively modern to me, and are certainly seeming to produce building more quickly than normal.
I would argue construction is probably the least digitised. The Economist had an article recently that construction is the only sector in manufacturing in the UK that declined in productivity over the past two decades. I'm not really in the topic but the construction I see in the city (London) looks not like they adapted any processes developed over the past 1-2 decades. Maybe that's where the next revolution happens.