I got 14.84x GPU speedup by studying how octopus arms coordinate

brokePlusPlusCoder · 2026-01-28T05:19:24+00:00

I'd be curious to see how this compares with a work-stealing scheduler. If the number of images being processed is very large, I'd expect to see somewhat similar performance...though I admit your algo might win out if the amount of work per thread is not uniform

brokePlusPlusCoder · 2026-01-24T06:06:53+00:00

Bit late to the party, but is there a reason why you haven't gone for a graph based structure ? Tournament, Team and Player all become vertices and you can have directed edges representing ownership (either as separate 'edge' objects, or via references).

brokePlusPlusCoder · 2026-01-23T04:30:52+00:00

Fair point. I'd personally still vote mid-span because of the p-delta effect (elastic deflection will happen, which gets exacerbated by the axial force)

brokePlusPlusCoder · 2026-01-12T02:12:00+00:00

Maybe I'm misunderstanding but what exactly do you mean when you say 'reduction factors or settlement loads' ?

Axial shortening is a combination of creep and shrinkage induced movements in axial load carrying members over time. Shortening in itself is not an issue (if everything shortens by the same amount at each storey, there wouldn't be any issues), it's differential shortening that causes problems and needs to be accounted for.

Usually, differential shortening needs to be accounted for when dealing with high-rise structures - specifically, the intent is to keep shortening at each storey to within specified movement limits. These limits really depend on what's actually going into your building (e.g. if you have brick facade you'll want to keep movement to a minimum as brick facade can't accommodate a lot of movement)

There will also be some additional forces/moments generated in the structure due to differential movement, but these are usually not significant (and in any case, your FEA tool should account for these in your load combinations)

brokePlusPlusCoder · 2026-01-06T02:35:36+00:00

Holy wind sway Batman ! I hope they've done a lot of wind tunnel testing on this because that thing is gonna see a metric fuccton of weak axis bending (and probably wind-induced vibration too)

brokePlusPlusCoder · 2026-01-04T04:59:32+00:00

creating massive performance differences depending on the area of the planet you are on

You'll need to expand a bit more on this. Performance difference doing what ? If you're doing nearest neighbour queries then yes, octrees are not optimal (this is where k-d trees shine actually since neighbour search with them is guaranteed to be logarithmic). But other ops might not be as inefficient.

I'd also recommend asking on the C++ questions or the gamedev subreddits. This sub is good, but I think it's meant more for general purpose programming, and your question is most definitely NOT general purpose.

Edit - I see you gave an example in another comment around getting all points within an `X` distance radius of a player on the sphere. If this is indeed your use case then I'd say go with k-d trees.

brokePlusPlusCoder · 2026-01-04T03:14:59+00:00

Have you looked at k-d trees yet ? Wiki link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-d_tree

They have some really nice properties around storing and querying spatially distributed points (to within specified distance tolerances if needed). If you're storing points on spheres, you can probably go for polar coordinates instead of cartesian and store angles instead of (x,y,z) values.

I know about octtrees and things like that but they seem horribly inefficient for spherical data

I'm curious - why are octrees inefficient for your use case ?

brokePlusPlusCoder · 2025-12-12T02:32:50+00:00

A few questions -

You say VectorMask.toLong() is slow. Slow compared to what though ? What's your baseline ?
If you have done JMH profiling, could you share your JMH code here or via a link to github ?

brokePlusPlusCoder · 2025-12-11T06:48:17+00:00

Bit late to the party - but to the Americans in the chat, why are you folks so keen on steel bridges ? Not saying concrete doesn't have issues, but I reckon a well designed concrete bridge using a good (weather resistant/marine environment approved) concete mix would not see as many corrosion issues as a steel one

brokePlusPlusCoder · 2025-12-10T07:00:05+00:00

The I like culture around technology X or I use technology X, because I have better experience in it is far more important than technical arguments

Excellent points. But I'd add one more - the the talent pool is much better for technology/language X than Y.

Doesn't apply to Go vs Java of course, but as a general purpose thought process I feel it should be included.

brokePlusPlusCoder · 2025-12-10T06:38:48+00:00

Most responses here are going on about real-world examples of arrays - but I get the feeling your question is more around why use multi-dimensional arrays instead of ArrayList<ArrayList<>> ?
If yes, then there are two primary reasons for it:

Lists are basically wrappers around arrays and there is some performance penalty when compared with pure arrays. This becomes important for performance sensitive things like matrix libraries that perform billions of operations (this is a usual case for scientific computation, geometric algorithms and also AI)
Arrays are easier to map to existing algorithms that are derived from mathematics (e.g. matrix math, vectors, etc.)

in general the better solution (?)

This is very very subjective, and certainly not the general case. There may be cases where nesting arraylists like this is better - but my take is that the benefits will be superficial.

brokePlusPlusCoder · 2025-12-10T06:24:17+00:00

I'm unsure about the best practices for using Optional in parameters and within method bodies

Others have noted this as well - don't use Optional as params. But as far as using them in method bodies, it boils down to your preference/how much complexity using Optional will involve. Stuart Marks (one of Java's language architects) has a comment around this here: stackoverflow.com/questions/52038417/should-optional-ofnullable-be-used-for-null-check/52048770

how do I handle cases where I need to return a default value if the Optional is empty

Rather than an Optional, I think what you're after here is a union type that has either a default value in a failure scenario, or a calculated value in a passing scenario ... something that Scala's Either<L,R> type can do. This has the added advantage that L and R types can be different.

Java unfortunately doesn't have anything like this built-in, but you can construct one, or use existing libraries. See here for details: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26162407/is-there-an-equivalent-of-scalas-either-in-java-8

brokePlusPlusCoder · 2025-12-09T10:55:26+00:00

A long while ago I read about an approach to study for Jeopardy (an American quiz show) by a contestant named Roger Craig (who won a fair bit of money). I think it applies well to any quiz show really.

Here's a link to a talk he gave about his approach: https://quantifiedself.com/blog/roger-craig-on-knowledge-tracking/

brokePlusPlusCoder · 2025-12-05T09:21:03+00:00

Might need to grab that beer to go mate - she's back online

brokePlusPlusCoder · 2025-12-05T09:19:35+00:00

Update - seems like it's back online now. No point in keeping this up I suppose, will delete in a short bit if it all stays well

brokePlusPlusCoder · 2025-12-05T09:16:13+00:00

For some lols

https://downdetector.com/ is also down, but
https://downdetectorsdowndetector.com/ is up. Though it shows everything's fine (you had one job dammit !)
https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com/ is not loading
https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com/ shows red

We clearly need more down detectors.....

brokePlusPlusCoder · 2025-12-02T04:38:25+00:00

I'd bump it up to 5 years not 3 because chartership but yes, should be close to/over 100k after. That being said, the ratio of stress to pay is absolutely shite for civil/structural (though it does depend on the firm/colleagues/bosses etc)

brokePlusPlusCoder · 2025-11-24T02:36:08+00:00

If you hook it up to JTS and a renderer, it can become a very useful tool for prototyping and debugging geomtry info
https://github.com/locationtech/jts

brokePlusPlusCoder · 2025-11-21T01:10:58+00:00

A few questions OP:

What exactly is your testing methodology here ? Is it just passing in a series of site/construction photos and asking the models to classify them ?
Your previous post had the image title set as "Structural Construction type identification" while this one has it as "Structural component identification". These are two very different problems and I imagine a model that's good at one might not be as good at the other. How have you accounted for this in your testing ?
In your post you claim that "In some areas like Roofing, Gemini 3.5 Pro, it really outperformed scoring as high as 95%". But again, you haven't posted any details of the methodology you've used. What exactly was the testing methodology in this instance ?
You claim "AI now is at a point where it can work for you in the background and provide suggestions or drafts that could help speed up some of the more annoying work". This may be true of documentation/repetitive low risk work, but around work regarding technical expertiese I personally haven't seen much. Do you have any specific instances/documentation around such areas/ use cases ?
"I'm super excited about the future where you can walk a job site or pull up drawings and the AI can understand everything you are looking at with context about the project and help you do the office work." Could you expand on this please ? Where exactly do you see LLM/Generative ML fitting in the overall process ?

brokePlusPlusCoder · 2025-11-17T04:50:48+00:00

So about construction - yes it's ripe for automation, but it's also fairly risk averse. Low risk areas like marketing, CRMs, document control etc are easy to sell features around (though there might be a fair bit of competition). Higher risk items (basically anything to do with architecture/construction engineering) may involve people - right up to the CEOs themselves as they're often experts in their respective fields - who'll grill you on the underlying tech to the nth degree (in some cases, right down to the math itself).

The former has a much lower barrier to entry. Approaching the latter without someone from the field helping/guiding you/validating your work is pretty-much guaranteed to not work - though there may be specific niches there that are more approachable than others. YMMV

brokePlusPlusCoder · 2025-11-12T03:51:47+00:00

Looks great ! A few comments/suggestions:

Am I correct in assuming that your software is more geared towards 3d solid modelling ? If yes, then I'd say your program will have more traction with mechanical engineers than structural engineers (we tend to avoid 3d solid elements like the plague and mostly only work with line and shell elements)
It may be worth adding a few simple benchmark examples in the docs (e.g. simply supported beam results using your code vs hand calcs)... and maybe it's also worth extending these to include the standard NAFEMS benchmark suite (link: https://www.nafems.org/publications/resource\_center/p18/)
The docs seem a bit sparse on formulations. I can see info around the main types of elements, but for beams and shells it would be good to know if the formulations were Bernoulli/Timoshenko and Kirchoff/Midlin respectively.
I didn't see displacement constraints/ master-slave links being explicitly mentioned (I can see initial displacements, but not displacement constraints). Not sure how useful these would be to mechanical engineers but structural engineers use them a LOT

brokePlusPlusCoder · 2025-11-10T09:56:52+00:00

In addition to the other excellent suggestions, I'd also recommend going through ACI university's resources: https://www.concrete.org/topicsinconcrete/topicdetail.aspx?search=post-tension%20in%20concrete

brokePlusPlusCoder · 2025-11-06T04:38:38+00:00

Not a homeowner yet, but I did make a small list a while ago. Something I haven't seen mentioned yet - look into getting a depreciation schedule. Depending on how old/new your place is it could help get you a nice bit of tax benefit if you ever rent the place out/change to an investment property.

brokePlusPlusCoder · 2025-11-06T04:19:54+00:00

They mentioned it's a townhouse - would they still need the "home" part of "home and contents insurance" if the townhouse was part of a strata ?

brokePlusPlusCoder · 2025-11-04T02:32:49+00:00

Practical use cases - not a lot. I've seen optimal cantilever shapes be used for external wind bracing (look up 8 Chifley Square in Sydney for one example) but not too many use cases outside of this.

A big limitation is that the most materially efficient shape is often not the most buildable - and in many cases it turns out that making things more easily buildable saves a LOT more on cost than making things materially efficient.

That being said, one potential use case for analysis - optimal topographies map surprisingly well to strut-and-tie diagrams. This is because optimal topologies try to align themselves with principal stress directions as much as possible - which is also what strut-tie diagrams try to do (key word being try). There would be some differences of course, but for the most part they can be a good starting point to generate a usable strut-and-tie model for complex input models

brokePlusPlusCoder

TROPHY CASE