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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • I know lots of euro bros are showing how long their country is, but I think the point is that Texas is a state, not country. When you compare those things it’s quite impressive, however still not even the largest state in the world. Here are some others. A nice drive from Anchorage to Prudhoe Bay will cost you 17 hours, or in Amazonas, Brazil, Manaus to Cruzeiro do Sul is 33 hours.

    To the guy who annexed Arizona into California in order to beat Texas, shame.






  • Interesting. I saw the Qidi X-Plus 3 advertises 600mm/s vs Bambu P1S 500mm/s. And the P1S doesn’t offer a heated chamber. Have you noticed a difference in quality from the heated chamber?

    I haven’t yet been convinced of the bambu cool-aid mainly because of closed software. Klipper support is a big value prop. Who knows how long bambu will support OS versions and what happens if they start charging for cloud. It’s a young company, so not a lot of confidence yet.






  • I appreciate your opinion. I know that the qualification I made is a controversial one as everyone wants to be an ‘engineer’, but I’m still confident it holds. Applying physics is not purely at the atomic level. In web development, one of the physical challenges can be bandwidth, however, while most people claim to concerned about bandwidth, in reality they don’t do anything about it. Minifying code is cool, but that’s not doing any engineering by itself. Calculating the throughput your datacenter can dish out for your 1million users as you write a function that optimizes load vs lag of streaming video, that’s engineering.

    Thinking about user interaction and experience is more psychological than it is physical in most cases. Designing the user experience of a medical device or cockpit switch are both not automatically qualified for engineering: unless, you are designing the medical interface to overcome spasms that someone with Parkinson’s has, or, the cockpit switch is designed with a plastic mix to survive the temperature, vibration or weight requirement, it’s going to be more of an art-than-science. I’m not saying one is worse, but we need to make the distinction between designers, developers, scientists and engineers.

    I understand that everyone wants to be an engineer, whether for pride or just to feel more important (hell I want the engineer title too). Unfortunately, the tech industry (with arguably one of the most conflated egos) liberally tossed around software engineering to every role to attract talent and I don’t see that changing. It’s a profession, so whatever you are being paid to do will determine if you are engineering


  • I typically tell people that engineering is applying physics. If you aren’t directly interacting with the physical world, you are most likely a developer.

    Working on an app, no matter how complex (or unessarily convoluted) generally makes you a developer. If you aren’t thinking about impact of clock cycles, actuation/hardware interfaces or sensing, there is a high chance that the work you do has little to no risk or a chance of failure that is governed by the physical world. As said in other comments, engineers design and sign off on things. There is an implication that there is an unknown constraint, unlike a fully observable software environment.








  • Any launch from the moon would require launch back from earth to retrieve the rocket so it can be put to use again.

    Space elevator and orbit launch is an interesting thought. I think it’s a tough sell. In that case we would be launching uncontrolled asteroid-like dumps towards the earth. Sounds like a nightmare waiting to happen. Every city would need a missile defense system 🤣. The resource dumps would have to be big enough to warrant the investment in the space elevator and not burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, or, we would need a space elevator on earth too (which would be the biggest engineering and political feat humans have ever done).

    Mass driver. That’s another cool idea. From some research it looks like most metals have a temperature which they stop being magnetic and getting into Earth’s atmosphere would put most metals past that. Having a mass driver on top of a space elevator, or just a giant mass driver, also sounds like a head scratcher if most resources we would want can’t be ‘slowed down’

    The problem with all these cool engineering ideas is that they seem to require a united human race. The universal earthling concept is probably lifetimes away or until we face some (un)natural disaster that causes countries to unify. With the way the world is right now, I am having a hard time imagining uniting for ‘progress’.