literallymechanical

[literallymechanical]

[literallymechanical]

When are they going to invent the hormones that turn you into a gyrotron

[literallymechanical]

[literallymechanical]

I fear not the man who has read 10000 posts, but I fear the man who has read one post 10000 times.

[literallymechanical]

Look, I know that Masons claim that they're actually all about law-and-order subservience to absolute monarchy but I'm pretty sure that's mostly a kink thing if you peel back like a single layer.

What is your Hogwarts house?

I've been thinking about this. It was so easy when we were kids and didn't have critical thinking skills and twitter didn't exist – four color-coded choices with fun names and plenty of knockoff merch. Does gen alpha have a substitute these days? Is there a popular middle grade book series out there where you and your friends can debate who is Protagonist, Nice, Nerdy, or Edgy? The children yearn for a classification system!

This is a legit question that I am asking! I'm out of touch with middle grade/young adult lit, and my nephews are still on picture books. Maybe I'll ask my cousin's 15 year old at the next family holiday.

[literallymechanical]

No Graylaw or Whitelaw Hiveless options. If you're going to choose not to participate, you have to commit so hard to non-participation that you think a duel to the death is a reasonable way to solve property disputes.

What is your Hogwarts house?

I've been thinking about this. It was so easy when we were kids and didn't have critical thinking skills and twitter didn't exist – four color-coded choices with fun names and plenty of knockoff merch. Does gen alpha have a substitute these days? Is there a popular middle grade book series out there where you and your friends can debate who is Protagonist, Nice, Nerdy, or Edgy? The children yearn for a classification system!

This is a legit question that I am asking! I'm out of touch with middle grade/young adult lit, and my nephews are still on picture books. Maybe I'll ask my cousin's 15 year old at the next family holiday.

[literallymechanical]

We should make kids read Ada Palmer's Too Like The Lightning and decide if they are an:

Individualist athlete/artist/politician convinced that they are the next Great Man of History

Good samaritan nurturer with a patronizing moral superiority complex

Conlanger deeply committed to elaborately ritualized social systems that border on LARP

Natural capitalist with personal, economic, and political value tied to land ownership

Smug evo-psych INTJ ivory-tower academic

Futurist technological-utopian starry-eyed workaholic scientist

Hardcore paranoiac prepper natural-law-pilled anarchist

European

These are your only options.

What is your Hogwarts house?

I've been thinking about this. It was so easy when we were kids and didn't have critical thinking skills and twitter didn't exist – four color-coded choices with fun names and plenty of knockoff merch. Does gen alpha have a substitute these days? Is there a popular middle grade book series out there where you and your friends can debate who is Protagonist, Nice, Nerdy, or Edgy? The children yearn for a classification system!

This is a legit question that I am asking! I'm out of touch with middle grade/young adult lit, and my nephews are still on picture books. Maybe I'll ask my cousin's 15 year old at the next family holiday.

[literallymechanical]

What is your Hogwarts house?

I've been thinking about this. It was so easy when we were kids and didn't have critical thinking skills and twitter didn't exist – four color-coded choices with fun names and plenty of knockoff merch. Does gen alpha have a substitute these days? Is there a popular middle grade book series out there where you and your friends can debate who is Protagonist, Nice, Nerdy, or Edgy? The children yearn for a classification system!

This is a legit question that I am asking! I'm out of touch with middle grade/young adult lit, and my nephews are still on picture books. Maybe I'll ask my cousin's 15 year old at the next family holiday.

[literallymechanical]

I'm not speaking for anybody but myself here, but yeah, in my personal opinion, I'm at 99% Believe on SPARC (the test tokamak, not for electricity generation) surpassing breakeven in 2026. For the pilot plant in the 2030's discussed in this article, I'm also personally leaning closer to Believe than Disbelieve.

i want to believe

[literallymechanical]

shout out to the giant worm in the center of the earth. thank you for never surfacing 🙏 we appreciate you. have fun in the lower crusts

[literallymechanical]

[literallymechanical]

We switched from SolidWorks to NX just before I joined (NX is better at dealing with building-sized assemblies, afaik) so I got to see the team collectively have a conniption about the learning curve lmao.

Rumor has it that Apple sculpts all their blobjects in NX via direct modeling. Which I suppose makes sense – I feel like being able to squoosh some cubes into shape would be pretty great for product design, but less so for, like, an engine.

Are there any primitives or operations you wished parametric CAD software had?

This is tricky, because parametric CAD is what I learned to design on so its feature set feels "natural".

I don't really think so! Most of the obvious innovations are already covered, SolidWorks can take a model back and forth between parametric and primitives modelling in its own weird way, Inventor has really great design for manufacture features, from what I've seen SolidEdge has done some clever stuff with the solver to help you design parts that are customizable as you go down the chain. Who knows what's going on in NX these days, not me. There's definitely some holes in the sense of individual packages lacking features, but almost anything you can ask has been implemented somewhere, by someone.

Good quality design for manufacture tools really do help, I remember doing sheet metal stuff in Inventor back before they cut off free Inventor access and being able to see your generated sheet and bend allowances so clearly was great, and now even OnShape has pretty solid design helpers.

A thing small shops and hobbyists would probably like is better handling of point clouds and photogrammetry for matching parts, since you're much more likely to be working with parts and projects where you didn't do all the design, I've spent many hours trying to accurately model a mating feature, but even that's like. Pretty good these days, importing 3D scans into an editor is pretty standard and the good CAD packages will even let you pick up holes and clean up point clouds directly from the scan.

I'm not that much of a mech eng, and never really was, my CAD is mostly self taught for simple tasks, real mechanical designers no doubt have better opinions on this, @literallymechanical probably has thoughts on T-splines.

[literallymechanical]

I'm in the same boat re: parametric vs. direct modeling. I did a bit of blender as a teenager, but in college and career I've only ever really done parametric modeling. So like, what operations do I feel are missing from parametric CAD? Idk, I've been meaning to give zbrush a try for some art projects, give me a few months to tool around with it and I'll get back to you.

That being said, I'm a mechanical engineer. I know math and DFM and materials science and FEA and thermo and all that good stuff, but I don't have the same level of deep CAD expertise as a mechanical designer – just like how I can't compete with a professional machinist when it comes time to actually fabricate something. Like, I can use a bridgeport without losing a finger, but there's a reason that machinists don't let engineers use their tools lol.

(We use NX at my current workplace, and I don't love it compared to SolidWorks or Inventor. The interface is a bit too loosey-goosey for my tastes, it keeps trying to second-guess you. The learning curve is rough. And yes I know that Apple allegedly uses NX for direct modeling, but that's scary ._. )

Are there any primitives or operations you wished parametric CAD software had?

This is tricky, because parametric CAD is what I learned to design on so its feature set feels "natural".

I don't really think so! Most of the obvious innovations are already covered, SolidWorks can take a model back and forth between parametric and primitives modelling in its own weird way, Inventor has really great design for manufacture features, from what I've seen SolidEdge has done some clever stuff with the solver to help you design parts that are customizable as you go down the chain. Who knows what's going on in NX these days, not me. There's definitely some holes in the sense of individual packages lacking features, but almost anything you can ask has been implemented somewhere, by someone.

Good quality design for manufacture tools really do help, I remember doing sheet metal stuff in Inventor back before they cut off free Inventor access and being able to see your generated sheet and bend allowances so clearly was great, and now even OnShape has pretty solid design helpers.

A thing small shops and hobbyists would probably like is better handling of point clouds and photogrammetry for matching parts, since you're much more likely to be working with parts and projects where you didn't do all the design, I've spent many hours trying to accurately model a mating feature, but even that's like. Pretty good these days, importing 3D scans into an editor is pretty standard and the good CAD packages will even let you pick up holes and clean up point clouds directly from the scan.

I'm not that much of a mech eng, and never really was, my CAD is mostly self taught for simple tasks, real mechanical designers no doubt have better opinions on this, @literallymechanical probably has thoughts on T-splines.

[literallymechanical]

tomorrow i will ride an elephant sized isopod into a crowded public area and we will all find out what happens next together

[literallymechanical]

oh nooo

guys do not type 32 x 25 into a calculator its so fucking scary

[literallymechanical]

Okay so a guy in my solid state physics class was telling us about this muon scanning startup he worked at, GScan, and I'm going insane. I don't work there and I have no stake in the company, financial or otherwise, I just need to tell you about it.

Muons are short-lived subatomic particles, same charge as an electron but ~200 times more massive. On Earth, they're produced by cosmic rays colliding with the upper atmosphere, and they hit the ground at a rate of about ten thousand per minute per square meter.

They're moving extremely fast at ground level, like 0.99 c. So they careen right through matter, deflecting only very slightly around heavy atomic nuclei – they'll penetrate like a hundred meters into solid rock.

What do you do with this continuous shower of deep-penetrating charged particles, constantly blanketing every square inch of the Earth's surface?

(source)

The classic thing is use them to image the inside of massive structures, like we use x-rays to look inside living tissue – except instead of generating them yourself, you just use atmospheric muons. Muon archeology is a whole thing, they've used it to find hidden chambers in pyramids and stuff. Neat!

But this one Estonian company is doing some crazy bullshit and I love it.

Sandwich anything between a pair of portable muon detectors and get full 3D imaging of the interior, with sub-millimeter accuracy, by tracking the minute deflection of muons between them. Samples that are WAY too thick for x-rays, made of literally anything. Just put some muon detectors on some two by fours in a warehouse and call it a day.

You can just. Image anything??? Anything you want?? Completely passively!! Just detectors! No particle source! Put them anywhere. The detectors themselves are a mature technology, the company's tech is in the algorithms they use to get this level of spatial and elemental resolution.

You can detect failures inside cable-reinforced concrete bridges without cutting open the bridges.

Decommissioned Soviet nuclear submarine filled with concrete, with no drawings or documentation, that may or may not have spent fuel canisters in it? And you need to cut it up for storage? Just look at the muons.

One of the wackiest ideas is to put one detector under your bed and one on the ceiling, so you get a full 3D scan of your body every night, passively. I want one.

[literallymechanical]

I want him to go on Shark Tank in 2028 with the stupidest app you've ever seen.

I just think it would be very, very funny if the only charge that actually had enough evidence for a conviction was like, concealed carry without a permit, he does 18 months in jail, and then starts an off-putting crypto investment podcast or something. Or maybe a band. John Hinckley Jr speedrun.