i genuinely believe engineering software has made us worse engineers. here’s how:

PSA: if you are using a startup’s product, founders genuinely love if you reach out to them to give feedback. i would be 10x happier if i had 10x the feedback

New base completed, yes we are pressing bearings into sheet

i have no idea where the future of standards is going to go. i am deeply thankful for organizations like the ASME, but the future feels incompatible with the business model of locking standards behind a membership or $200 PDF standards and tools like python are free for software developers, yet engineers are expected to pay thousands of dollars a year to engage in their practice. i understand why: failure testing and analysis and research and x and y and z are all costly. i don’t disagree with that but i also think this information should be freely available. agents are inherently advantaged here, weirdly: their proprietors presumably are paying some sort of licensing fee to these organizations to gobble up and use their data, and if not, that’s a really bad deal for the people who build these standards

i spend much more time thinking rather than doing because of AI. many people are going to struggle with this transition

oh you’re a software “engineer”? explain anything in this photo

spacex mentioned in their latest earnings call that they’re investigating modular inference clusters. the mechanical engineering behind warehousing compute is already hard, so why would they go through the effort of making the challenge more difficult by making their compute modular (portable and sized for transportation)? 1. electricity cost: as an example, electricity prices can vary by 10x within texas alone. being able to pick up your compute and move it allows you to take advantage of the electricity market. ai inference is a rare commodity where supply is geographically disconnected from demand. you can take advantage of dirt-cheap electricity and still serve compute to high-cost-of-living markets like nyc with negligible performance impact (latency) 2. labor: one of the factors going into the placement decision is whether or not you can staff the facility. logistics companies like ups, fedex, and walmart fight with this constantly. it's a large factor in deciding where a new facility will be located 3. upgradability: a huge part of designing these facilities is planning for future expansion or upgrades. modularity lets you define standard interfaces, which makes ripping out and replacing "units" of the warehouse easier than treating it like a brownfield project to upgrade. it's extra work on the front end to define and standardize these interfaces, but doing so pays off in the future 4. cost and scale: it's cheaper and faster to scale from 1x to 1,000,000x with a modular design by just connecting units together rather than designing for your target scale through greenfield or brownfield development. you also get economies of scale (wright's law) with this method. remember: there will be factories producing these "units". need more compute? stamp out more units. no need to customize. interestingly, this also reduces risk by pushing capex commitments further down the line when more information is available. if ai is what we think it is, just make more units. if it isn't, just make fewer 5. performance: the primary limiting mode of heat transfer in these systems, regardless of whether they are open-loop or closed-loop, is convection, not conduction or radiation: qDot = hA(T_out-T_in) qDot is your heat transfer rate (roughly, how much power it takes to cool the system) h will always be the same (with fluctuations depending on external factors like humidity that you can't really control) A (area) you can't change -- it's effectively your "fin," which is set and T_out is effectively the surface temperature of the chips you're trying to cool this leaves T_in -- which, for closed-loop systems, is roughly geographically independent. but for open-loop systems... anyways, all of this comes together to make sense. interestingly, tinycorp is doing this too with their exabox. tiny has a lot of engineering challenges with their thermals and have real challenges with 4 and 5, but spacex will be able to

you aren’t the problem, solidworks is the problem

Okay it’s happening: - Added 160k square feet in Reno for our automated high volume lines and parts up to 5’x10’. Operational now. - Added 170k square feet in Pittston PA for 1-day shipping (or faster) to the Northeast US. Landing machines and growing the team now. - Southeast US is next (flying out next week to negotiate a lease). 3 more leases in 3 more states to sign after that. Expect massive lead time reductions across our factory network. - Finalizing our first acquisition and working on the second and third. These are services you’ve been asking for. More coming. We’ll be able to say yes to more of your BOM. - Welding is ramping nicely. More assembly support soon. - More materials and capabilities for CNC machining in development now, including much smarter pricing. Increased capacity will also help us cut lead time drastically. - Added 450 people so far this year. Hopefully double that in 2027. - Candy and merch budgets have been tripled. …And we’re just getting started. That’s a big part of why we raised again: to build more, ship faster, and make manufacturing easier and more accessible. I’m doing my best for ya. I love you guys. Big thanks to @willreed at @sparkcapital , @caitlinbolnick1 at @CRV, @marksugarman at MHS, @andrew__reed at @sequoia and @matthuang at @paradigm for supporting our Series B (and the extra rocket fuel) LFG!!!!! 🇺🇸

onshape must feel like crack if you never used a real cad software before

everyone recreating their favorite CAD package with AI is about to find out where that license money that didn’t go to improving the product went (lawyers)

if you're an engineer, i highly recommend learning how to write software. it's very rewarding, and as it turns out, very useful for mechanical at least, i don't feel like i'm losing my engineering ability despite getting into software. it seems to be like riding a bike

“you have autodesk products installed locally, do you not?”

holy hell. i had no idea autodesk could do this: if you use fusion they can force you to install arbitrary software of their choosing to snoop on your computer and you’re legally required to comply within 15 days this is insane