Oh right, sorry. Should I have linked to it? It seemed pretty relevant to this discussion and most of it was quoting something so I reused a lot of it. Didn't realise that was taboo.
I wrote a post below about how AI hallucinated a whole regulation that didn’t exist which has been flagged for some reason.
I have colleagues who have had arguments with clients who have asked AI questions about planning law and been given bullshit which they then insist is true and they can’t understand why thier architects won’t submit the appeal that they’re asking for.
I think we’re in an era where any text, true or not, is so easy to generate and disseminate that the status of the written word is reduced to the standard of the gossip that used to be our main source of information before the printing press was invented. Now half the internet is AI generated bullshit as well.
I was looking for a fire standard; there's a particular fire standard, BS 5824, that I don't have that is referenced on a manufacturers website, which they claim relates to fire curtains. For context, yesterday as an experiment, I asked Deepseek to summarise BS 5839 part 6, a standard I know quite well, and it did a pretty good job. Let's ask Deepseek to summarise BS 5824...
"*BS 5824:2013* is a British Standard titled "Wall and floor tiling – Design and installation of ceramic, natural stone, and mosaic tiling in normal conditions – Code of practice". It provides guidelines for the *design, materials, installation, and testing* of tiling systems in interior and exterior applications..."
What? OK let's check the standard on the website of the actual body that publishes them: BSIgroup.com
"BS 5824:1980
Specification for low voltage switchgear and controlgear for industrial use. Mounting rails. C-profile and accessories for the mounting of equipment... Cost £149"
Oh shit the manufacturer's website is completely wrong and so is AI. They literally have no clue what they are talking about. 1. Let's not specify their fire curtains in my building. 2. Don't trust the AI.
My conclusion: If the info you need to do your job is behind a paywall or only in expensive textbooks, then AI hasn't seen it and it will make something up that's probably wrong, and probably don't get it to write your website or you will look like an idiot...
If you hire a world famous architect and then start micromanaging their design they will walk away from the project and publicly tell everyone it’s going to be shit. They don’t want to be associated with something that is not their design; it’s bad for their brand.
When I’ve looked into this before for a client in Scotland, it seems the smallest size that made sense in terms of the factors other commenters have mentioned was about £50,000 to install. Also it requires planning permission which is much harder to get for a wind turbine than for solar PV which you can often install without getting explicit permission under ‘permitted development’ rules.
Everyone is missing the point. It's not the form of the conveyor that matters it's the loading and unloading system. You need a set of standardised parcel sized containers first. Then you can design robotic handling equipment that can load and unload them easily. You can take the containers and feed them into your postal system and gradually automate more parts of the system reliably once you have standard reusable containers, bonus points if the containers are collapsible like some crates you get for fresh produce. You can imagine them clicking magnetically into totems on the street where they could be collected robotically more easily. Or in high traffic locations you might feed them hole in the wall that takes them into an underground system of some kind that transports them to a rail or truck depot. You can also imagine that parcels services might be reintroduced on local trains because you don't need an extra person to load and unload the containers at stations if this can be done robotically. There are endless possibilities for varying degrees of automation, but the key thing is that there has to be a standard interface for picking up a container of a known size. The parcel is the interface; the physical specifications of the standard containers are analogous to an API.
The technology already exists for this in airports[0][1]; when you check in a bag in a big modern airport after the gate agent sticks the sticker on the handle it won't be touched again by a human until it gets chucked into the aircraft hold. Your bag goes through the curtain and it is dropped into a standard bucket which is conveyed around under the concourse on a rollercoaster like automated rail system to screening then either to an automated vehicle for transfer between terminal buildings or to an automated storage system for people who have checked in too early or have a long transfer, finally to the stand/ramp for loading into the aircraft. Big international airports like Amsterdam Schipol, Paris Charles de Gaul, Madrid Barrajas and Heathrow all have systems like this.
Not sure I could fine a reference for that any more. I think I got it from an article or lecture by Richard Rogers years ago. He was a famously dyslexic architect and if I remember correctly was the patron of the British Dyslexia Association.
Yes but you are trading off a lot of people with a one kind of disadvantage, dyslexia, for the benefit of very very few people with a motor skills disability that affects their ability to draw or manipulate an input device which is a different disadvantage. What's the acceptable ratio? One handless person enabled for every 100,000 dyslexics sidelined? Is that fair? How do you work out an acceptable tradeoff?
It is not a given that everyone can or should be enabled to do everything possible at any cost; people in wheelchairs can't be firefighters and we don't make all old subway lines fully accessible because it is incredibly expensive.
Disadvantaging a huge number of people for the benefit of very few has a societal cost.
I think the thing that most perturbs me about AI is that it takes jobs that involve manipulating colours, light, shade and space directly and turns them into essay writing exercises. As a dyslexic I fucking hate writing essays. 40% of architects are dyslexic. I wouldn't be surprised if that was similar or higher in other creative industries such as filmmaking and illustration. Coincidentally 40% of the prison population is also dyslexic, I wonder if that's where all the spare creatives who are terrible at describing things with words will end up in 20 years time.
Offices have a lot more people per m² all of them using computer equipment continuously for 7hrs/day so in my experience they tend to have considerably higher cooling loads. I know from experience that a typical high rise office building in London, UK will have no heating requirement for most of the year; it is in cooling mode most of the time.