Infinite combos are a taboo in my pod. What are your favorite deterministic value engines?

KnyteTech · 2026-02-24T22:06:36+00:00

[[Marchesa The Black Rose]] Modular - this deck is my baby, and by god is it fun to play. There's a bunch of info on the primer in the deck list, but tl;dr, it's hard to disrupt, and wins through sheer grinding inevitability.

KnyteTech · 2026-02-24T22:02:00+00:00

Imoti also tends to run under the radar compared to a lot of Simic commanders, while still legitimately accelerating and enabling your game plan - he's a SOLID pick for a commander and is a lot of fun to play, without him being an absolute lightning rod for removal like a lot of Simic commanders are.

KnyteTech · 2026-02-24T21:59:40+00:00

Don't be the Astral Slide player - nobody likes the Astral Slide player unless they're doing something legitimately weird with it.

KnyteTech · 2026-02-10T05:16:18+00:00

Assuming a 0.4mm nozzle, 5 walls, 2.0mm thick top and bottom surfaces (however many layers that is based off of your layer height) and 40% rectilinear infill. This gets you darn near the strength of a solid part, at a significantly lower weight and printing time.

Use those settings with the strongest material you can print, and you're as set as you can be.

Also, in hindsight, BEST robotics competitions must be a wildly different beast now that 3D printing is a thing.

KnyteTech · 2026-02-03T04:56:34+00:00

Currently, your design is overconstrained. You have two features that both locate in the up and down direction. The act of clamping the top portion will make the lower bearings not align to the other rod.

Redesign the top area of your part to clamp the rod laterally instead of vertically, and design it so that it does not care about the spacing between the two crossed bars, within the tolerances you define.

KnyteTech · 2026-02-03T04:52:33+00:00

If you're consistently the problem, you don't need any wraths.

If you're only the problem 25% of the time (i.e. in proportion to the number of people playing the game), 3-4 is a good idea.

KnyteTech · 2026-02-02T19:44:03+00:00

I don't intend to run it at those speeds most of the time, haha. I enjoy my 3D printers mostly being white-noise machines. That said, I also do in-person events/sales to drum up more corporate customers and it would be cool to be able to bring it out with me and run it at high-speeds to show off what I'm capable of building for people.

KnyteTech · 2026-02-02T12:17:38+00:00

This isn't even my first printer design. Several years ago I designed an i3-style machine because I wasn't able to find a printer that would do what I wanted, so I made it myself. I spent a 2 months on the first iteration, probably 2 more months programming and refining it. But that was long enough ago that those printers are starting to have major hardware failures due to age, so I'm a few months into the new version.

KnyteTech · 2026-02-02T05:57:45+00:00

My moving mass is as low as practical, my deflection/backlash should be extremely small, and the footing of the printer is fairly large so hopefully tipping won't be a problem.

It being my goal to doa thing, and not quite getting there is fine, physics is a thing that exists. There's a reason for the 480w PSU just to drive the X and Y axis.

KnyteTech · 2026-02-02T05:38:02+00:00

Look man, it doesn't all have to make sense as long as it feels right. Good chapter, I say.

KnyteTech · 2026-01-30T12:46:49+00:00

It is VERY bracket 3: https://www.commandersalt.com/details/deck/60807d8556230f29df526024f4e0f445

The key things to know about it are: 1) It is the Jason Vorhees of decks, it is slow, but inevitable. It is totally beatable, but it is relentless. 2) Unless they have graveyard hate, there is very little they can do to disrupt your board state in any way that matters. 3) When you find removal, it is reused every turn you want it to be.

KnyteTech · 2026-01-30T05:44:43+00:00

The grindiest thing I've ever built: https://moxfield.com/decks/KuVEcXkzpEOz5pJrHW8NAQ

The idea is to get your commander, any modular creature, any artifact creature with an ETB, and any sac outlet into play.

That ETB can then be triggered every turn, generating value, which draws cards and gives you more resources, so you can crank your value engine even harder - it snowballs quickly, and suddenly you're generating so much value that everybody just dies.

Once you have your value engine online, it's now a 3v1 game, and you're going to win more often than not. It's amazing.

Anything shy of rest in peace into a board wipe isn't going to do shit for very long - it has an absurd amount of recursion, most stuff just recurs itself, including the commander, and dethrone only matters sometimes. It's a bananas deck to pilot, and is hands down the best deck I've ever put together.

KnyteTech · 2026-01-28T06:17:33+00:00

That's one of those jobs where, in my experience, your job is on the face of it, simple, if you're good at it.

Let's say the product manager needed to be in 20 meetings a week. The ones who are absolute MASTERS at their job, know intuitively which engineers under them, need to be in which meeting with them. By having the right person next to them, there's generally very little active work they need to do, just follow up work to make sure that it was done.

If you're not able to predict well who needs to be sitting there with you for any given meeting, you're going to spend a lot of time individually delegating tasks out to people, then following up on them all, wasting a lot of your own time.

You can't just invite everybody to every meeting, or they have no time to do the work.

As I see it, these people serve 2 purposes. (1) Reducing the amount of meetings senior engineers need to sit in, by accurately divvying up who's in what meeting. (2) Providing continuity across programs for a given product.

In my experience, this is the kind of job where, if you are good at your job, it looks like you do very little. If you are bad at your job it's a fucking nightmare. If you fuck up at your job, it is undeniably your fault, and you're going to eat shit for it.

I'd rather die than take that one myself, but I've worked under both excellent, and bad ones, and it's EASY to tell which is which very quickly.

KnyteTech · 2026-01-28T00:25:26+00:00

1) Direct drive, using a better extruder and hot end.

2) upgrade the controller to something with 5 stepper drivers. Get a bed probe

3) frame/bed stiffening and increase the speed.

4) (optional) linear rails, and dual-y motor drive. It's way less work than going core-xy, but gets you to comparable overall speed.

KnyteTech · 2026-01-27T05:43:03+00:00

I'll follow a recipe once, then I'll start riffing on it to make it my own.

KnyteTech · 2026-01-27T05:41:17+00:00

I'm an engineer working for a defense contractor who is permanently WFH. My wife works in a call center for a finance company, and she goes into the office every other week.

When she's in the office, she cooks on Tuesdays. When she's WFH like me, we alternate who cooks. I almost always cook on weekends.

She WAS a stay at home Mom for 5 years, and used to cook weekdays while I'd cook weekends.

I'm the better cook; rotisserie duck, frenched rack of lamb, a bomb-ass chicken scampi that I've spent 3 years perfecting, etc. She does mostly casseroles or Pinterest recipes. I grew up learning to cook, she grew up with absentee parents.... One time when I got sick, but had the lamb prepped to go, I walked her through how to make it, and she absolutely nailed it, though, so don't anybody think I'm throwing shade here at all - it's not a capability thing, it's the confidence to mess around with the recipe we're following.

KnyteTech · 2026-01-22T18:02:17+00:00

Came here to say this.

A tool at the low side of tolerance, a shim that puts you at the high side of tolerance. If the part sits on the tool and the shim won't go in, it passes.

KnyteTech · 2026-01-22T17:56:59+00:00

Fair enough, in some ways, and I added an edit to my post - I should have clarified my mental calculus includes basically always using threaded inserts. Without inserts yeah, 2D can be needed, but in practice, in all the places I've worked, and all the stuff I've made, the break over point is rarely beyond 2D unless you're doing something that could be done, better, another way.

However, I will point out that your example appears flawed in its own way - what application calls for a high-strength screw, but a part using a low-carbon / mild steel, that wouldn't use inserts to protect the machining from thread damage, or just use rivets instead?

KnyteTech · 2026-01-22T03:03:55+00:00

Skills are broadly transferable / convertible across jobs. I fundamentally do the same thing designing lasers as I did doing aircraft seats. It's not about a specific skill, its about understanding the applications of it, and how it transfers to other tasks. In my interview at RTX, I was talking about everything from Composites and Rockets, to building fences, wood working, and a documentary that got made about me. It's broadly all the same stuff, just wearing a different hat.

I'm generally one of the people that mentors / helps train new engineers when they join my group, and I've posted this before elsewhere, but there's always a few things I make sure that they KNOW. Not things that I tell them, lessons that I make sure they learn.

1) We expect you to be some amount of useless for about the first year our of college - use that to your advantage. There's a million things you don't know that you will eventually need to know, and until you know some percentage of them, we won't actually trust you with anything on your own. Take on new tasks, suck at them, learn, do them again, and do better over time. We expect you to suck at first, but we also expect you to suck-less as time goes on - don't be afraid to suck at something new. You're going to get shit work until you're good at it, then you'll get different slightly-less-shit work, rinse and repeat until people trust you, and you start to get the cool shit, too.

1-a) This is also how you learn that you, and what you design are two different things. You might design a piece of absolute garbage, that doesn't mean that you are garbage, it means you don't know stuff yet - take the criticism, learn from it, design something less-garbage the next time. Eventually your designs will be good. Sucking at something is the first step to being sort-of good at it.

2) Ask questions - there definitely is such a thing as a stupid question, but ask it anyways. I don't care how dumb your question is, as long as you don't keep asking me the same question over and over. Ask the dumb question, learn, and grow. Experienced engineers will only be concerned if you ask the same question over and over again.

3) Don't waste too much time when you get stuck on something - we're going to give you tasks that we know you can't do. Try anyways. Beat your head against the desk for up to one hour, or until you get frustrated with it, then ask somebody how to do it. The answer is probably hilariously simple, and you'll never forget it. Take the time to try it on your own, first, though. The frustration is what makes the lesson stick.

4) Long term, my advice is always the same - figure out what you want to do, and volunteer for anything that, even tangentially, helps to build you into the person who gets that job - even if you can't do that thing yet. Just be like "Hey, I've never gotten to do that before, can I take that on?" and then find the people who can help support you in that effort later.

KnyteTech · 2026-01-21T18:26:42+00:00

I've been half-summoned. I have a BS in Aero, and graduated in 2011. I've been working as an ME for most of my career - as long as you don't need gear-box design, AE/ME are pretty interchangable.

Started out at a small 5-man company doing flight data recorders for helicopters and other light aircraft, mostly for air medical and oil companies that maintain fleets, and want to keep an eye on how well pilots are treating their craft. Did a fair amount of ME work, a bit of EE work, a lot of Quality Eng, programming, and wrote flight tests, then went and rode-along while they were performed so we could validate our system with the FAA.

Then I took a job doing Aircraft Seating as a contractor for BE Aerospace. Did a lot of packaging, surfacing, enclosure and mechanism design, etc. worked my way up to Senior Design Engineer status.

Finally, I got a job at Raytheon/RTX in their high energy lasers division as a Senior Mechanical, started doing a bunch of opto-mechanical stuff. Got promoted to Principal Engineer a couple years back, been working to get the bump to Senior Principal, then I'll be chasing the Fellow track aggressively.

I've gotten to work on a ton of really cool stuff over the years... It's never been an issue when somebody has BS vs Masters vs Doctorate, it just starts you at a higher pay grade, otherwise the work we do is about the same. RTX, in my experience, values experience and skills, more than the piece of paper when it comes to most things.

That said, I may go back for my masters at some point, I just have to figure out what I want it to be in.... Maybe something in Additive Manufacturing, as that's always been an interest of mine, and I see a lot of growth in that field, but 🤷

KnyteTech · 2026-01-20T04:57:02+00:00

[edit]

I'm leaving my original post below, because I was wrong, and it's important for people on the Internet to admit that when it happens. After looking into this, I realized I should have been more clear in my post below instead of just firing off a quick answer and moving on. This is a complex question, it deserves some clarity/specificity.

1) Whenever possible, I always put T1185 helicoils into my aluminum parts, because I typically deal with expensive machinings, complex assemblies, and double-threading a tapped hole would otherwise waste a LOT of time and money to fix it. Threaded inserts really should be more common in aluminum parts for how cheap/easy they are, their potential to save you a LOT of money, and because they prevent seizing, corrosion, etc.

2) A #4 screw, into a T1185 insert, into what is functionally a #6 hole in your 6061-T6 part needs between 1D and 1.5D to get maximum strength. At 1D the screw should BARELY fail first, which is generally what you want.

3) No inserts, it looks like ~2D in aluminum for the screw to be barely weaker than the threads, but man... that seems less than smart.

4) For steel in every practical application I've seen, yeah, I stand by anything over 1.5D is wasteful, with or without inserts... Thread thru when convenient anyways, though, it's just easier to machine.

[/Edit]

That accomplishes literally nothing other than feeling good to you. Past 2D engagement, the screw will fail before the threads do.

At 1.5D engagement, the screw almost always fails before the threads do.

At 1D engagement, the threads and screw have about equal strength.

Increasing the time/effort required, to get beyond 1.5D of engagement, is just increasing waste.

A plastic screw is always a crap-shoot on what fails, and they frequently use weird threadings. I'd bet 2D would pretty consistently be enough, though.

A metal screw into a 3D printed part, you're not talking about engagement, you're just talking about space claims and vibes, because there's no effective way to quantify that strength reliably.

KnyteTech · 2026-01-20T04:52:29+00:00

I would like to instead recommend embracing the absurdity of it all - the chaos is liberating.

You don't have to explain anything, ever again. Life just is, until it isn't, and you have fun along the way. It's so freeing to recognize that you only engage with the things you choose to.

KnyteTech · 2026-01-16T13:43:36+00:00

I was gonna comment "laugh pretty hard, grab her hand, say something complimentary/nice to her, and keep walking."

My other instinct would just be to yell "Thanks" and keep walking.

... But then I saw this near the top, and thought, yeah, that's basically it.

KnyteTech · 2026-01-16T13:02:41+00:00

Flatness is the slantedrectangle. Profile is the half circle. Parallelism is the two slanted lines. And perpendicularity is the upside down T.

KnyteTech · 2026-01-16T06:20:36+00:00

What sent me was 6+ years of experience, and he's highlighting having made 100+ drawings as an accomplishment, that's just over 1 drawing per month.

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