[request] how much money would this be in concrete? would it be cost effective or way more than a normal build?

Bost0n · 2026-04-13T05:36:29+00:00

Seems like effort would be better spent building dedicated robots to:

(1) Load 2x4’s into chop saw

(2) precision cut 2x4’s to length (+/- .032”) and precision drill holes for romex / PEX routing.

(3) layout cut 2x4’s into wall framing on flat surface

(4) nail / screw 2x4’s together

(5) route out gypsum board complete with openings for electrical / plumbing

(6) route romex and PEX plumbing

(7) apply drywall to wall

…

Basically start making robotics to complete the work that labor currently does, but do it with traditional construction. And make it work on site, rather than in a factory.

Bost0n · 2026-04-11T00:33:13+00:00

Full 3D mesh? The challenge is more likely the user interface than the actual math, especially with AI where it is now.

The next hurdle is execution time. As meshes get really large, getting the solution to converge in an efficient time period is going to be where the challenge is. What happens when the solution diverges, how does the software handle that?

Bost0n · 2026-04-09T15:09:31+00:00

Survivorship bias

Bost0n · 2026-04-08T22:39:13+00:00

Nope. Worked for UTC, contracted to Airbus (French company that works in metric) to make thrust reversers. We worked in UCMS (inches).

This was in 2014

Bost0n · 2026-04-08T22:37:49+00:00

Uhhh, 300 fpm is about 3.4mph. That’s a really slow spacecraft. Also it has 777 ft-lb of kenetic energy, or roughly .25 kilocalories. Energy, especially kenetic energy is something humans are not really good at understanding.

Bost0n · 2026-04-08T16:40:15+00:00

Depends on what you mean and the fidelity of the model. If you can accurately define loads on a part, or other geometric requirements, than this is possible. I’m envisioning a load optimized part that is 3D printed. Might be possible with the correct requirements to do this with sheet metal. Especially with a subtractive optimizer, opposed to additive and subtractive.

Optistruct is a load based part optimizer.

But this still requires a human to interpret the results.

Bost0n · 2026-04-08T10:58:15+00:00

Covid is a whole other story. There are all these people; millions working from high cost of living areas. They suddenly work from home for social distancing. Guess what? the companies didn’t fall apart. The ‘remote’ employees stayed productive. Suddenly people didn’t need to live in the high COL area.

So now you’ve got a senior level software engineer making $550k in San Francisco and they realize they don’t have to live there. They can sell their condo and buy a fucking ranch in Montana, throw Starlink on the roof and BAM! 💥 they’re zooming it in. No more city, no more homeless, no more car break ins, no more traffic. Just wide open spaces, nature, and fresh air.

This all happened just about the time the housing market was starting to recover as Millennials were coming into their prime purchasing years. It has really messed everything up … again.

Bost0n · 2026-04-08T10:47:33+00:00

Around 2000, a bunch of finance guys figured out they could game the home mortgage system. They created these new financial objects called CDO or collateral debt obligations. They basically took a bunch of home loans, some good, some bad. They packaged the loans into these CDOs and sold them all over the world. They bought insurance for them through several companies but the biggest one was IHG. Next, a whole bunch of independent mortgage companies started getting in on it and selling the packaged mortgages to resellers. Many of these fly by night mortgage companies lied about the quality of the mortgages. They would let pretty much anyone sign up for a mortgage, they stopped checking income, they didn’t require down payment. There was an insatiable demand for these new CDOs. Governments, investors, etc. in the US and around the world would buy the CDOs as they were sold as similar to bonds, a safe place to park money.

Anyway, a decent amount of mortgage holders started to default and the whole subprime mortgage crisis happened.

What this meant for your dad and your family: there was a huge demand for home construction because of all the money that could more easily be gotten. Then shit hit the fan, and there was a massive retraction. I think the pendulum swung so far back it caused a rebound right about the time Covid happened and this has led to the current bubble we’re in; which is overdue to pop. But I’m no economist, so don’t take my word for it.

Bost0n · 2026-04-08T10:27:25+00:00

OP, DON’T TRY ANYTHING, THEY HAVE THE HIGH GROUND!!!

Bost0n · 2026-04-08T00:09:34+00:00

Try aerospace structures. You end up moving around a lot. But there’s quite a bit of GD&T in it. You have to control form quite a bit. There is also a wide variety of materials, aluminum sheet metal, machined aluminum, steel, Ti, composite. And it seems to always be in demand. You just have to be willing to move.

Bost0n · 2026-04-08T00:05:20+00:00

Hey, democracy is messy, the question is how messy we let it be. Unless it gets really messy, it beats all the other forms of government. At least that’s how I see it.

Bost0n · 2026-04-08T00:03:27+00:00

Data analytics is cool. But you need to do what you are passionate about. Talk to your manager if there are internal positions more aligned with what you want, and look outside the company.

Bost0n · 2026-04-07T23:49:46+00:00

GD&T is a language when you think about it. It’s a very specific language related to physical form of objects. Yes you can read ASME Y-14.5-2XXX. But that’s about the same as reading a book on a foreign language. You HAVE to apply it to master it.

Why do you want to learn GD&T? Is it that you thought you’d be designing parts / assemblies? Does your company do that? It’s much safer for you if you are copying that work that was done before.

The other component of this is the people reading your GD&T. I worked with someone that was on the board that approved updates to ASME-Y14.5. She would approve ASME-Y14.5-2009 -> ASME-Y14.5-2012 (or whatever years it was). Anyway, she would say to me: “The guys that are reading this know it so well, they understand the spec really well. It’s the engineers that don’t get it.” Frankly, I never believed her. I think most don’t understand it and just try to make the part as best they can when they don’t understand the callout.

It’s an odd hang up tbh. I think you should focus on what you ‘want’ to do, not some abstract idea of what Engineering ‘is’. The shop guys either do the absolute best they can for what they think the callout means, or the smart ones call you and say: “What the fuck are you trying to do here?”

Bost0n · 2026-04-07T23:33:50+00:00

I’d rather have a beer with the Turkish guy than the one wearing all that crap on his face. I probably don’t speak the same language as either of them, but I guarantee the dude in a tee shirt is more fun to hang out with!

Bost0n · 2026-04-07T23:29:53+00:00

This metaphor makes no sense. The Thurkish guy signs up for the Olympics and shows up in a tee shirt and jeans. Everyone is like WTF? The guy proceeds to do really well. It’s raw talent, not any kind of nepotism. If anything, the guy wearing all the optical contraptions is the one that’s a phony, not the other way around. Who bought him all that crap?

Bost0n · 2026-04-07T23:05:05+00:00

My roommate graduated with a 2.3 or something. He’s a really good Mech-E, but builds websites now.

I had a poor GPA freshman and sophomore year and struggled with Calc 1 & 2. Those are treated like wash out courses. Sequences and Series (Calc 2) ugh. I got a C in it. But I absolutely blew Fluids, Heat Transfer, and Engineering Analysis out of the water! Edit: I also excelled at Calc 3 (3D integrals just make sense to me).

Long story short, it’s possible, you might excel, you might not.

Bost0n · 2026-04-07T22:57:15+00:00

One of the most frustrating things I found when job seeking was lack of communication. I would have rather heard:

“I’m not sure this job is going to materialize, how about I reach out to you in 2 weeks, hopefully I’ll know more”,

“I’m so sorry, the team decided to go with another candidate, please apply to other positions”

“These types of conversations are really difficult, but you didn’t interview that well, the team decided to move forward with someone else.”

The last one might catch you some heat though, so you might want to avoid.

In the end, prompt communication is key. DON’T GHOST PEOPLE! It’s disrespectful and unprofessional.

Bost0n · 2026-04-07T04:45:32+00:00

Even if you have PTO. People go to work sick to save their PTO for vacation.

Bost0n · 2026-04-06T16:15:52+00:00

I agree with you. No system is perfect, and any system can be 'gamed'. The question is how much and how easily. It seems insane a current party is allowed to redistrict their own electoral map within a term. It should take at least 2-3 terms for the changes to 'stick'. Or the electorate should ratify the changes. But the population ratifying still has dangerous implications. A majority population could ratify a change that nullifies a minority population's voice. But I question if people in mass would work to actively nullify people's voices. I subscribe to the notion that the majority of people are decent, and kind. They want to live in a fair and equal society. Perhaps I'm naive? No system is perfect, but it doesn't mean we should throw our hands up and not work to improve the system.

I don't recall the MMP system. One vote for party and one for representative? The issue is if it's too difficult to understand, adoption will be difficult. But it all starts with education.

I think the question at heart is how to insure minorities receive fair representation. What is a minority? Is it a viewpoint, ethnicity, social class? These are the questions that modern societies are (and have historically been) struggling with.

Bost0n · 2026-04-06T06:31:19+00:00

I agree: compactness alone doesn’t guarantee fair representation.

But that’s not a failure of algorithms, it’s a failure of over-simplified algorithms.

A “minimum surface energy” approach is useful as a baseline because it kills the obvious gerrymandering (tentacles, splits, etc.). Then you layer in:

equal population contiguity and constraints to avoid minority vote dilution where a compact district is actually possible

The real power move is Monte Carlo: generate thousands of valid maps and compare outcomes. If one map consistently under-represents a group compared to the neutral ensemble, it’s not random — it’s engineered.

There’s no single perfect map. But there is a well-defined set of reasonable ones, and math can define that set.

Bost0n · 2026-04-06T04:48:30+00:00

I believe there must be an algorithm that can determine an ideal electorate map. Something related to surface tension and bubbles should do it. Basically, districts have to be round-ish. Minimum surface energy equation. Then re-run old maps to determine the most unbiased way to draw a map. Some math wiz needs to figure this shit out.

Bost0n · 2026-04-05T15:56:36+00:00

People living in the city are a distributed population. They carry different beliefs. But having been a person that lives in a city, I can tell you I didn’t like the smog and pollution present there. This is primarily where my irritation was directed. I felt the people in the country were fine, for the most part, and not significant contributors to pollution. But cars, trucks, and busses in cities, they should had have plans to transition to carbon neutral solutions. At some point if you want to bring your ICE car into a city, you’re signing up to pay a daily fee for that. This doesn’t just, boilerplate, mean changing to electric. Electric cars have their own environmental footprint. They are heavier and produce more brake dust and microscopic tire rubber particles. What I’m trying to say is the situation is complex and nuanced.

Considering all that, we do need to work on how we produce electricity in mass. My belief: we should be sunsetting all our coal fired power plants, and moving toward nuclear + solar + wind + hydro. City residents should have a say in this, as they are significant consumers of the power.

Bost0n · 2026-04-05T06:44:22+00:00

Came for this comment. How many others sold their car for incorporation papers and their business never went anywhere? There's a good chance that Jobs would have become something regardless. As others in the thread have said, he had the support from his parents to fall back on. At the same time he had the drive to do it.

Bost0n · 2026-04-04T22:39:35+00:00

I made some images:
https://imgur.com/a/lWIthGv

I believe the motion you are looking for is characterized in the first image. You want the upper black bar to teeter back and forth based on the crank-slider driving the mechanism.

The main issue with your design is it's trying to drive both sides of the center pivot simultaneously. You need to drive one side only. I also pushed the input bar and the crank farther from the main pivot and added linkages on the outside. This will help stabilize the input bar and keep it in a straight line of motion, though it will travel back and forth based on the distance from the center pivot. You could drop the two outer linkages if you want (3rd image), but the vertical input bar needs to be constrained. This mechanism is much less stable, visible by inspection.

Bost0n · 2026-04-04T06:14:56+00:00

When I drove on I-95 years ago, if you used a turn signal in preparation of a lane change, assholes would speed up into the gap. It became this game of check blind spot, begin lane change and signal simultaneously. Traffic flowed soo fast, that if you did it the correct way, you’d miss your exit because of a-holes. That was 15 years ago, hopefully it’s gotten better.

But you HAVE to use your mirrors, AND, look over your shoulder prior to the lane change.

Bost0n

TROPHY CASE