[Gordonjcp]

> There's a long list of construction startups who thought the industry was low-tech simply because everyone in it was dumb, and that they would be the smartest guys in the room who'd revolutionize everything.

And therein lies the problem.

The guys that work in construction aren't "dumb". They're most likely way way *waaaay* smarter than you, particularly about construction, but maybe not so much about the computer industry.

Guess what? Construction is absolutely nothing like the computer industry, and nothing the techbros know about it remotely maps onto construction.

[RowanH]

I jointly ran a window and door software company (I was responsible for product/dev). You wouldn’t believe the amount of staff that joined “how hard can windows be?” Consistently and without fail 3 months later “what the _____! I never knew!”

And that’s just one component of a building.

Buildings are not simple things…

[eternityforest]

Nothing about computers maps to anything else. Computers are unique for many reasons, like the undo button, the fact that manual dexterity is not a factor, the lack of any concept of wear, strength, or durability, and the ability to copy something perfectly an unlimited number of times with no raw material input.

Building a bookshelf is SO much harder than software, and that's WITH clamp on guides, power tools, and pocket screws, giving myself every possible advantage. Things like painting, skateboarding, or guitar are an order of magnitude beyond even that, I can't even imagine what it would be like to be able to do those.

Software can easily become kind of a useless toy or hyper niche thing, unless the whole field can be changed to make it work like software does(Like how money and shopping is done, where every process has been changed to work with the software).

Once you change the whole field, stuff gets easy, otherwise, you're just spending all your time translating between paper notes and digital files, which are useless because there's no management system to do anything with the files, so they just sit there till someone has to run to the computer to check them.....

[naijaboiler]

You can say that about just every industry tech bros intrude on with hubris.

[marcosdumay]

Well, the software startup mentality didn't succeed in revolutionizing any industry except for software.

And it is looking quite shortsighted and unsustainable for software too.

[Gordonjcp]

Yeah exactly, like the car industry. Christ, can you imagine if one of those cloud-cuckoolander morons decided they wanted to start a car company? You'd have kinda cool-looking cars that were surprisingly affordable but all the switches would be replaced by a big touchscreen that's too bright to look at when you're driving at night, and all the important safety systems would be written in node.js or some damn thing.

[Qwertious]

Do Teslas actually have important safety systems written in node.js?

[Gordonjcp]

Portions of the "Autopilot" and FSD systems are written in Node.

You reckon self-driving cars are going to be safer? I have a 1998 Range Rover that barely has *any* software on board, never mind things that will shit a brick because of the next Leftpad Incident.

[eternityforest]

There are plenty of 1998 vehicles with drivers ready to shit a brick at a moments notice though.

[Gordonjcp]

So, much the same as Tesla Autopilot, which is currently far less safe than driving manually?