Building blast resistant is a common practices for Refinery control rooms. The same methodologies can be employed for data centers as well.
1 blast can be expensively guarded againt. However designing anything above ground for sustained barges is practically/commercially prohibitive. Underground is only option.
PS: Civil Engineer. Designed few of those Gas explosion resistant control rooms.
Anther perspective, AI is fast turning [0.1x to 0.5x] low cost X-world Sofwate Engineers into >1x engineers.
Contrary to pre AI era, one of my close relative he has become very good "understand / write the requirement" guy. HN may be dominated by >1x engineers, another revolution is happening at lower /bulk end of spectrum as well.
AI makes it possible for someone who has never written code to generate a program that does what they want. One of my friends wanted to simulate a 7,9 against a dealer 10 upcard in the card game blackjack. GPT was able to write the simulation for him in javascript/html. So it took a 0.001x coder and turned him into a 0.2x coder.
One more thing I try is give same prompt once in a while to ChatGPT/Gemini/Grok. Than take the 2 out of 3 ideas forward.
All leading AI seems to have some blind spot. Like some kind of intricsic character. 1 will completely overlook some particular bug while finding other excellent bugs and edge cases.
Getting the code through all 3 before commiting has shown excellent results to me.
You are an inspiration. I will remember this when I grow older. Just wanted to say this, I am 1/2 your age, and I am sure there are 1/3 or even 1/4 people here. ;)
I can imagine, where this becomes a mainstream PCIe extension card. Like back in days we had separate graphics card, audio card etc. Now AI card. So to upgrade the PC to latest model, we could buy a new card, load up the drivers and boom, intelligence upgrade of the PC. This would be so cool.
This is exactly what's going to happen. Assuming no civilization-crippling or Great Filter events, anyway. At this point I fail to see how it could go any other way. The path has already been traveled, and governments (along with many other large organizations) will demand this functionality for themselves, which will eventually have a consumer market as well.
Another commenter mentioned how we keep cycling between local and server-based compute/storage as the dominant approach, and the cycle itself seems to be almost a law of nature. Nonetheless, regardless of where we're currently at in the cycle, there will always be both large and small players who want everything on-prem as much as possible.
I will try the newer version again. Last I tried 2 years or so back, it was crashing for me.
Personal Context: I am a civil enginer, and our requirement from CAD softwares are a lot simpler than Mechanical Engineering. Here on HN, whenever I see people discussing CAD, its the mechanical version of parts and 3d printing.
Shameless Plug:
I have decided to try building my own! Over a long enough timeline, it is doable, including the UI/UX part.
If you've ever done UI/UX research and worked with volunteer developers who only care about technical problems? It is the hard part. Good UI/UX is hard to begin with, its even harder when no one is interested in front-end development.
Is there a reason you don't just use FreeCAD, SolveSpace, Dune3D etc instead of attempting to develop all of this from scratch given that all of this software is open source in any case?
As I said, all these are optimized for Mechanical engineering, to the best of my knowledge. In civil, there are lots of standardization in 3D part and a lot more focus on 2D side. Major part of building design is using standard steel section. Mechanical side, apart from nut bolts, everything seems to be custom. Software interfaces prioritize these use cases.
Think of I beams, all major countries have national standards of shapes and sizes. There are many "devil in detail" nuances.
So, giving it a go myself. If not for others, at least for my own itch. This is one aspect of open source.
At least for me personal open source project[1], it has been >5x boost. In speed, motivation. Operating knowledge level etc. At some places, I even put inline comment, "this generated function is not understood completely" ! Or may be a question on specific syntex (c++20).
> this generated function is not understood completely
I think this kind of stuff is OK for the most part. I think it's a thrilling part of computer science: building systems so complex they're just on the brink of what can be fully understood by a single person. It's what sets software engineering apart from other engineering fields where it's unacceptable not to fully understand the engineering, say, for factories, buildings, bridges, ships and infrastructure and such.
SpaceX makes 16B in revenue per year, with 7B in ebitda (which doesn't account for the cost of rockets)... so assume what, 3B in free cash flow per year? And that's being generous.
That's about what Google creates in free cash every 2 weeks.
1. They've been in Growth mode, where it's common for companies to prioritize capturing the market over being profitable.
2. They've had no problems with money since proving their effectiveness. They can raise capital at favorable valuations (and hold secondary sales) whenever they want. It has been one of the hottest private stocks that people clamor to own.
3. As a private company whose dominant shareholder is the CEO, nobody can pressure them to raise prices. This typically changes after an IPO.
4. Previous government administrations would likely have resisted paying them much more than they charge the private sector or other governments. The new administration has proven they will do favors for companies that are friendly to them.
5. For awhile it seemed they might soon have viable competition for manned space flight (e.g. Starliner) but only in 2024 did we see how bad those are.
6. The low cost is a point of pride for Musk who liked to prove how much more efficiently he could do spaceflight than NASA.
1 blast can be expensively guarded againt. However designing anything above ground for sustained barges is practically/commercially prohibitive. Underground is only option.
PS: Civil Engineer. Designed few of those Gas explosion resistant control rooms.
reply