Counterpoint. I have a Dell laptop from 2017 at work. I keep it around for plugging in to network equipment and that sort of thing. I've had Win 11 on it for the last few years, and it was getting unusably slow. Also, the battery, even though replaced in the last year, would only last about an hour of normal use. I had a similar belief about browsers and the web. No matter how light your OS, the browser and web experience is the bottleneck. But then a couple weeks ago, I installed Arch and IceWM with Firefox. What a difference. The thing is snappy, even in the browser. And the battery lasts all day. I was blown away.
Did the same in 2012 with hp 2510p that had windows vista pre installed on it. I could literally brew a cup of coffee and make it halfway through while this poor boy was booting up.
Bit the bullet, installed arch and dwm. I remember my initial impressions on how fast the boot went, how silent the hdd is, how the whole things works reporting just a fraction of RAM in use(right after boot).
It was the first hands-on YAGNI experience. Windows(and macos and the likes of ubuntu) loads and starts everything it has and keeps the system busy at all times in terms of cpu, disk io, network io.
Barebone linux without beefy desktop environment was like “I boot into essentials and will lazy load anything upon request”.
Like others, I love this idea. A related idea I had was a library of 3d models of parts. Like thingiverse, but specifically for repair/replace components and not limited to plastic. My thought was if it's plastic you could 3d print whatever little busted plastic part was going to send your household item to landfill. But also models of things like automotive parts that you could have made by somewhere like xometry. I thought of it as an "international component database."
I'd forgotten about those little cables. If I recall correctly, they were small round cables, with maybe four conductors and a little flat connector with a clip?
It doesn't sound to me like you've pulled much wire. I'm sure there will be a point in time when that sort of thing can be automated, but it's at least an order of magnitude more difficult a problem than driving a car.
I'd say it's at least two. Driving a car is fairly straightforward, the problems are all tractable.
Can't imagine where I'd even start with automating the work of an electrician. Even something as basic as robots grabbing regular objects is intractable right now, much less handling wire.
You'd have to have a project of massive scale that's designed specifically to aid automation and then have a fairly straightforward robot doing the work.
"Send a robot to arbitrary location X and do arbitrary electrician job Z" is fantasy land.
the datacenter demand wouldn't evaporate, it will probably change instead - i expect that the datacenters will soon be built like pre-fab homes or like the Liberty ships - the fastest ship was built in less than 5 days.
In such a module-based construction you can optimize layout and the fabrication sequence so that the labor is minimized and simplified - like for example you'd be simply laying down wire instead of running it.
Thus the modules can be fabricated where the labor is cheap and plentiful and with high degree of robots usage while only final assembly would require high cost labor at the target location.
They are going to have the necessary launch capability. The rest are bound to the surface.
Anyway, that demonstrates another way of datacenters getting modularized. The point is that the actual volume of datacenters to be produced calls for the mass production assembly line style. The one-off custom built approach becomes unsustainable.
there are many levels of automation. electricians already use a lot of "automation" already: wire pullers, electric drivers, test equipment, soldering and crimping tools, conduit benders, pipe threaders, and so on.
installation systems are currently made for humans, so one has to do some fantasizing to see a future where installs can be done completely by non-human agents or by automated orchestration of low skill human agents.
While a lot of my tools are faster I would never call them automated. You stil have to put the wire in the crimp, you still have to measure the pipe and make the cut, you still need to put the head of the driver in the screw. The 'hard' part is still 100% on the human.
The only way to really automate electrical installation is at the source (ha), when the construction materials are manufactured. I can imagine some god awful system of snap-together conduit prefilled with conductor, and junction boxes with monster dip switches to replace manual connections. It will cost 10x the price of standard materials, and it will be horribly wastful, but the labour costs will be negligible if it can be done by a robot or unskilled labourer.
Given enough motivation (cash) and temporary tools (WD-40 and tape) there is nothing stopping bigtech from doing just that to kill local trade and then 10x prices
Seems like a weird crusade. Pointing everything directly at the IP address might not seem so swell when it's time to upgrade the server or the address has to change for some reason. Sure would be nice to just update the DNS record to point to the new address.
Not a developer by trade. But incidentally, today I took my first stab at "vibe coding". I wrote a little gui program to streamline a process that I've been doing for years. The code is an absolute wreck. But the program works and does what it's meant to do. I wouldn't ever expect anyone to maintain it, but for what it is, I can't complain. The alternative would have been for the tool to have not been written at all. The level of effort was so low that a) it passed the threshold of it being worth my time, and b) if it needs to be re-vibe-coded over again, then no worries.
