nickparker

Incredibly well executed Youtube project IMO. The DIY many-poled rotary encoders are particularly gorgeous cost engineering in a hobby project like this.

It works if you just plainly describe what you're looking for, I write a new prompt for different images just like "re-render this as a matte untextured 3d model, remove all details except geometric form"

I've had surprising success with meshy.ai as part of a workflow to go from images my friends want to good 3D models. The workflow is

1. Have gpt5 or really any image model, midjourney retexture is also good, convert the original image to something closer to a matte rendered mesh, IE remove extraneous detail and any transparency / other confusing volumetric effects

2. Throw it in meshy.ai image to 3D mode, select the best one or maybe return to 1 with a different simplified image style if I don't like the results

3. Pull it into blender and make whatever mods I want in mesh editing mode, eg specific fits and sizing to assemble with other stuff, add some asymmetry to an almost-symmetric thing because the model has strong symmetry priors and turning them off in the UI doesn't realllyyy turn them off, or model on top of the AI'd mesh to get a cleaner one for further processing.

The meshes are fairly OK structure wise, clearly some sort of marching cubes or perhaps dual contouring approach on top of a NeRF-ish generator.

I'm an extremely fast mechanical CAD user and a mediocre blender artist, so getting an AI starting point is quite handy to block out the overall shape and let me just do edits. EG a friend wants to recreate a particular statue of a human, tweaking some T-posed generic human model into the right pose and proportions would have taken me "more hours than I'm willing to give him for this" ie I wouldn't have done it, but with this workflow it was 5 minutes of AI and then an hour of fussing in Blender to go from the solid model to the curvilinear wireframe style of the original statue.

Bad popularizing article, doesn't cover the actual conclusion:

The main points emerging from the combined simulation and experimental study on atmospheric entry of the paper plane are: • Orbit: The paper space plane de-orbits from LEO extremely quickly due to its very low ballistic coefficient. Atmospheric entry from a 400 km circular orbit occurs within a few days. • Attitude: In the free-molecular portion of atmospheric entry, above ∼120 km altitude, the paper space plane maintains a stable flow-pointing attitude. Small-amplitude oscillations occur in pitch and yaw. Although the coupled simulator is not designed for application at lower altitudes, the results suggest the onset of uncontrollable tumbling at ∼120 km altitude. • Heating: Based on the hypersonic wind tunnel test results and simulation, surface forces acting on the space plane during atmospheric entry are not expected to cause significant deformation. However, the paper space plane experiences severe aerodynamic heating in the order of 105 W/m2 (or 10 W/cm2 ) for several minutes. Accordingly, combustion or pyrolysis is expected during atmospheric entry

I found myself reading this more for the excellent notetaking than for the content.

I suspect the discussion was about as charged, meandering, and nitpicky as we all expect a PL debate among deeply opinionated geeks to be, and Jake Edge (who wrote this summary) is exceptionally good at removing all that and writing down substance.

> RO desal splits the incoming ~3% salinity stream into two halves, one fresh and one ~6% salinity. This concentrated brine is fed to adjacent brine processing facilities (ideally in both countries) that exploit the region’s abundant solar and geothermal energy to extract potentially millions of tonnes of lithium, sodium, magnesium, chloride, and other metals found in sea water. The resulting depleted brine is piped back to the ocean where it is thoroughly mixed with sea water and discharged.

Casey's proposing we mine the brine for useful minerals. You're right he's glossing over details, but a citation addressing the economics of brine disposal with his proposed processing would add more to the discussion.

Please also be careful about selling to incumbents without a strong guarantee (ie contractual penalties) your product will stay in market for many years.

I know smoke detectors and a couple other crappy home goods have been fixed by scrappy upstarts, sold to the losers for <100M, and then shuttered to avoid pivoting the existing business. Heartbreaking lost progress every time it happens.

Almost nobody in tech is interested in the degrowth solution to climate change, we’re all in on increased affluence with tech mitigations for the environmental harms.

Somebody’s gotta book all the electric / / synfuel powered flights ;)

Active vacuum insulation isn’t a thing because you need high vacuum to reduce thermal conductivity at all, because mean free path and therefore specific conductivity grows at the same rate density decreases until mean free path exceeds the characteristic length of your application.

Also, modern VIPs have decades of life if installed properly.