quartesixte

It's a lot harder to just spin-off and "build your own stuff" in hardware though, which is I think what keeps the "married employees" around longer. The startup costs are much higher and riskier. And you need a lot more people. Building that rocket engine from scratch probably required around 50 - 60 people to really get it all together.

Also, a rocket engine is a core feature of a rocket (literally cannot fly without it). If they started development of this engine in 2018, that's *six years* of work to get to their current state. Imagine spending 6 years on a core feature of an app that you'd consider "min-viable", and everytime you had a bug the computer you compiled the code on spontaneously combusted?

Counterpoint:

I know grammatically it isn't the most correct, but I don't see anything non-idiomatic about "amount of features".

Reason: "Just the right amount" is a set, idiomatic expression. "Just the right amount of ___" is just extending the expression. IMO extending idiomatic expressions exempts it from a lot of the formal word-pairing conventions in English.

But I'm no linguist.

If you so much as LOOK at Titanium funny you may have a really, really fun time.

Some powders have been known to burn inside the collection receptacles for excess powder while a print is running.

And once you are done, services like Xometry allow you to print out the metal by having them source a printing vendor from their network.

Aluminum is magnitudes cheaper than Inconel. And since volume is cubic, and pricing mostly on based on powder weight, you are about an order of magnitude or two off for the size of engine ABL is producing here.

Or some people are so good at their jobs that even while being completely obsessed, they still have great work-life balance.

I interact with a lot of people like the author in the article from this industry. And while yes, their worklife balance skews "work", they all have interesting hobbies and find time to hang out with friends, go on adventures, and live a pretty full life.

Unless you're on the Starship team at SpaceX. Truly, hats off to y'all at Boca Chica some intense hours you are pulling there.

Plastic to verify dimensions is a great approach.

But don't forget that the laser sintering of metal powders might result in design constraints not present in plastic printing!

Very. Very. Expensive.

Inconel powder is also Not That Great for your health and at the particle-size the printers rocket companies use, you need full PPE to safely handle the loose powder floating about.

The machines themselves are also expensive. Think in the millions of USD. EOS, SLM, and Velo3D are key players in this market. They require a fair bit of space, and training to use correctly.

You probably need a mechanical engineer who is well-versed in materials science and has a tolerance for finicky machines that constantly breakdown.

Then you have the metal powders. Which, also potential million or two.

And then you have all the associated infrastructure needed. High voltage power. Gas (Nitrogen, Helium, Argon, etc etc) in the thousands of liters per month. Waste disposal. Safety (some alloys are flammable in their powder form). Climate control (the powders are sensitive to the environment. Humidity will quickly destroy your powder supply). Tooling (the base-plates metal printers used are machined from solid blocks of steel).

And last but not least, any of the post-printing work. Heat treat. Coatings. Analysis. CNC Machining.

3D Printing metal on industrial scales is a CAPEX intensive endeavor, and not for the faint of heart.

Among all the other problems: lack of imagination.

This especially comes up in discussions with those who do not live in the dense, Tier-1 cities of the USA.

The ability to imagine and envision what a dense, urban city serviced by public transit, connected to outlying communities via regional rail, in a way that is reliable, timely, and convenient is hard to come by if all you have ever experienced is the average sized, suburban sprawl in the USA. One example: I was talking to a transplant to Los Angeles, and they objected to removing some parking in favor of more transit stations because "where would all the customers park?" To which I responded, "there will be even more customers just walking in because of the nearby transit station." To which they accused me of outlandishness.

Unfortunately they're not really a thing. Some grandfather/grandmother clocks came with moon phases, but innovation never made it further.

IMO mostly has to do with the fact that mechanical clocks didn't see much innovation over the past century. The most talented watch makers have gone on to watches and people largely stopped buying Grandfather clocks.

Not to mention, other obvious problems of weight, material costs, and the increased size requiring more power to turn all those gears.

The generous reading is this. And I don’t exactly blame whoever interpreted the regulations like that.

However, they really should have gotten a lawyer or consultant specializing in health product regulations.

How many regular mass attending, God fearing Anglicans could even recognize on the spot the minor prophet Habbakuk?

Bizarre project all around.

And with growing rumblings of people wanting to be “offline” more and more, promotions of “digital well-being/health”, and GenZ and GenAlphas’ increasing appetite with tactile, physical objects (with 90s/early 00s flair), I don’t see how “stick a screen to your face even closer and live completely digitally” is going to do well.

Not until there is an absolute killer app/use case for VR Software. Games that allow for player movement based on thought-input? Social hangouts that are seamless but also private (the groupchat cannot be spoken aloud!)?

We need better hardware too. Seamless AR/VR transition with featherweight hardware that does not induce motion sickness if put on or calibrated incorrectly all for $999.

Yeah we got a LONG way to go.

A bit of a tangent but as much as “the children” are terminally online, I get the feeling the GenX/Millennial product people have a slight misread on what that looks like.

Wait are you telling me that the only reason why we think Burke class ships are small is because 1) “Destroyer” and then 2) CVNs are just fucking massive?

That list is the CIA/State Department evaluating the average time to fluency for English natives going through one of the foreign language training programs they run.

Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Arabic sit on top of the list because they are the most isolated away from English.

Koreans find Japanese extremely easy to learn. Vice versa.

As I mentioned in another comment, make the bureaucracy a bit more prescriptive and easier to, for lack of a better word, unit test.

You don't want no-regulation in dense urban environments. But the rules are unclear, the permitting system opaque, the outcomes kind of subjective and open to too many outside interference, and the agents of the bureaucracy mostly disinterested in getting things at any sort of reasonable speed.

Like, it is probably easier for me to open a taco shop in Japan then it is in the USA, and Japan is THE land of red-tape and bureaucratic prescriptivism.

Completely off-topic, but I wonder one of the reasons why government/bureaucracy jobs in Japan tend to attract more engaged workers is the relative difficulty of bureaucracy in Japan. Imagine this: most legal documents have all the words still written in some mixture of Church Latin and French. Including giant explanatory paragraphs. Navigating this document without the aid of a trained worker (who most likely has a college degree in Church Latin and Legal French) is nigh impossible even for educated individuals and so they guide you step by step through every box and field.

"Regulations are written in blood" is, while a valid point, also something of a brain-worm.

Plenty of countries have just as good safety track records without the difficulty many US municipalities present while you are trying to start a business.

I think the problem with US regulations is (as far as I have encountered them) that they are descriptive of intended end-results, and not prescriptive of compliant implementation. This creates a lot of bureaucratic inefficiency at the implementation/inspection side as well as lots of ambiguity on end-results. The trade here is some measure of future-proofing and greater freedom on implementation.

Unfortunately, this ironically has created the strange mess we face today. Two reasons:

1. Enforcement is retroactive. You build it, and then it's inspected to code. If you fail code, you are work-stopped, penalized, and then ordered to rebuild to code. This forces an inordinate amount of caution and makes everyone involved risk-adverse to comical degrees. And creates, again, ambiguity.

2. Enforcement can happen after business commencement. That is, you start selling doughnuts, and THEN the Department of Water's sewage inspector shows up and finds that your plumbing isn't to some inane, inconsequential section of the code. Why did they show up so late? Well, as it turns out passing this part of the regulations isn't necessary to starting operations. Why didn't anyone stop you from City Hall? Because ... honestly they might know or care.

Ambiguous implementations with punitive consequences after the fact.

There are countries who do this the other way around. Incredibly prescriptive regulations that in-turn, can be easily checked and verified. Etc. Etc.

Does this stifle some amount of innovation? Yes. Is there forms of madness for this style? Absolutely. But from my point of view, the velocity and ease of business growth seems to favor one over the other. And it is NOT the USA's model.

Counterpoint: starting with assuming over-specific context is not entirely useful and there is general consensus on broad meanings of both “felon” and “felony”. We can then quickly either narrow down to specific instances of those words, or stay in broader generalizations depending on where the conversation goes.

Jump too quickly into arguing for hyper-specific contexts bringing meaninglessness to colloquial, general contexts is a surefire way to signal to counterparties you are unwilling to play the negotiation-over-contexts games necessary for smooth conversation with most people generally.

Establishment of proper contexts and applicable related terminology.

"Felon" allows everyone to know what "node" of the vocab network you just jumped into.

Yeah I live in a virtually windowless bedroom because of noise, light, and air pollution problems making me block off the windows.

Whenever I need sun I go outside. Or usually I’m at work where there are massive windows and great views of the city.

Yeah, the average user gets very used to "modern UI design" and then immediately starts noticing older designs. This flags the site as being "less safe" and when money is involved, "less safe" is a pretty big red flag.

I'm sure PMs and Data Analytics teams have actual data to back me up on this, and if the data shows to the contrary please correct me. I'm working with a small subset of friends and family who are, for the most part, your "average" user, so it's all anecdata for me.

On the flip side, stop fucking with messaging app UI.

>Then there's telegram and discord, full of all kinds of strange stuff

I was just about to say this. The new pockets of internet communities are filled with interesting and fun things again. It’s just that a lot of them are for and run by teenagers. As adults, we either feel immediately out of place or just get banned outright.

The ones run by adults are incredibly niche focusing on “non-mainstream” interests.

Discovery is a little harder, yes. And it feels more ephemeral than the static sites of yore. But they’re out there. And they thrive.

And 4chan still exists.

The kids will be alright.

When that "de minimis" limit was introduced, importing singular <$800 orders were probably a lot rarer and/or more difficult. When the average shipment being imported was an order of magnitude or more larger, it wouldn't be worth the paperwork (or the crazy inefficiency in the system from any retailers attempting it).

Technological progress has allowed massive amounts of what are essential non-existent packages to just blast through the system. We are in new territories, and it is maybe time that the rules became updated.

I am like you. I grew up without screens, and grew up spending a lot of time in car trips. I remember distinctly being keenly aware of my surroundings out the window, and playing games with my parents on how many exits I had left before we got off the highway. In amusement parks, I was charged with the map and navigating to the next ride (a six year old!).

Now, whenever I travel to a new place, I at the very least make sure to track the journey there so I can, by memory, journey back the same way. I make note of any distinct landmarks along my route, and pay attention to the logic of the local connecting roads, in case I must detour. I then compare that against any heuristics I have about city planning and my initial preview of the area on a map.

The trick is that this is all rather effortless and intuitive, if not instinctual. I wonder if my habits as a child, and my parents’ reinforcements of said habits, made it so.

But closing that loophole will have some very unpleasant knock-on effects to the course of all the other "import" activities going on at borders.

It's unfortunate but seems like this time, consumers are acting rationally and going for the lowest price possible on the commodities TEMU sells.

It doesn’t help that the knowledge in this industry is 1) held by people who statistically are less online than software engineers 2) are closely guarded “trade secrets” (job security!) 3) is in one of those “is more art than science” fields where the knowledge gained is hyperspecific

Almost none. Because Factorio handwaves a lot away.

There will be a LOT of walking around though.

Six months to understand and learn. If you’re completely new to MFR and Supply Chain, it will take you about that long to start understanding how to think and ask the proper things. This is also about how long it will take to build up rapport with the shop floor crew.

Six months should give you time to fully unwind the dependencies of everything. And learn the history and context of decisions.

You will be working with guys who have been welding metal longer than you’ve been alive. Guys who have machined parts longer than the internet has been around. This is a deep, deep field. Six months is pretty quick.

I work in the hardware space. Here’s what helped me get my feet wet the fastest:

1) Make friends with the technicians on the floor 2) Find ways to either shadow, observe, or actually learn to do what they do 3) Walk around the shop floor and watch (safely) and ask questions (safely)

MFR has a lot of nuance and you you won’t get a good grasp for the intuition behind being good at this until you encounter the problems and corner cases in person.

As for innovation: unless you have joined an “innovative” company, innovation will be hard to find. Iterating through manufacturing method is expensive, and each of the major methods (CNC Machining, Additive Printing, Metal Forming, Welding, and Automation) is an entire career’s worth of skill and knowledge on their own. Some of them are old and have been innovated already. Some face physical limitations in material science. Some have maxed out what’s possible under our laws of physics.

The leading edge right now centers around robotics and additive printing (especially metal printing). Try to get involved there.

Supply chain is almost purely an experience gain. You have to develop the muscle and intuition to navigate complex supply chain problems when they arise.

It’s a big field! Lots of unsolved problems. Good luck!

No I get what the response meant.

It’s the muscle of being able to quickly orient yourself in sudden problems and drive towards useful solutions in a focused manner.

And to be fair, if the product line hadn’t been thrown out before I started, the project would have been useful in either A) fixing the product or B) providing justification to scrap the product line (probably the more likely outcome)

And I developed a nice tool that got used somewhere else later useful.