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connoronthejobon Being ambitious and being a dad

Like 95% kids.

I had a week where the kids were with Grandma and Grandpa. I got more done on a Wednesday after work than I did in the previous few weeks including weekends.

I don't think everyone needs kids and I don't subscribe to the 'moral high ground' of having kids, BUT I have zero sympathy for childless peers that think their life is too busy.

connoronthejobon Being ambitious and being a dad

100%. I wonder how many of us have the exact same day.

connoronthejobon Show HN: I built 184 free browser tools – PDF, image, dev, AI tasks, no upload

Also not working for me. Along with the text extraction. :(

connoronthejobon Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

I didn't know there were so many nuclear engineers on HN.

connoronthejobon Online age verification is the hill to die on

Since when did being an influencer become 'one of the few remaining methods' to make a decent income?

connoronthejobon I did no work for a year and no one noticed

I've worked with these people. I noticed.

connoronthejobon NASA announces overhaul of Artemis program amid safety concerns, delays

Neither craft have achieved their missions so it's a bit early to make that call.

connoronthejobon I converted 2D conventional flight tracking into 3D

Agreed. Seeing a 737 airplane flying at 1000ft over my office made me a little concerned for a second. FlightRadar24 uses a few standard type aircraft icons.

The altitude seems a little off - is it supposed to be to scale? Some aircraft flying around 1,000-3,000 ft looked closer to FL20 from my experience as a passenger and pilot.

connoronthejobon We rendered and embedded one million CAD files

Neat.

As a mechanical engineer, I feel the part of my job is safe from AI for the time being. I don't think quality training data for good mechanical design exists.

3D CAD is only part of good design. To a tinker-er that is 3D printing simple parts, an STL is fine. But most parts that matter require far more design consideration and detail than simply the geometry data that an STL (or other 3D file) provides.

The majority of parts are accompanied with a drawing, and that is where the real design actually is found: Tolerances, GD&T, materials, processing notes...

Even then, most of the calculations and considerations to build the model and drawing are not explicit in the design documents: Nothing about a drawing of a stainless steel part tells you WHY it must be a stainless steel part. I don't think there is a large set of well documented designs out there to act as training data for an AI system to design an assembly beyond basic 3D parts.

The authors identify this gap, but it's a fundamental problem with the wholesale move to AI in mechanical design.