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But is it carbon neutral?

How much energy in terms of calories does one get per acre?

What is the equivalent energy input in terms of diesel and so forth?


Why would you use diesel as input when you are making fuel? Just use part of the fuel you are making as input for the next crop.

We will have to see if Deere's new tractor which runs on E98 actually makes it to market.

The blunt question is:

>How many calories of energy to grow 1 calorie of corn (using modern industrial farming practices)


Another commenter said this ratio is 1.3 in favor of output.

Interesting --- does that also include considerations such as oil for lubrication and fertilizer sourcing?

Not sure. But not everyone uses fertilizer. No till is being more widely appreciated, getting nitrogen in the soil using cover crops that fix it from the atmosphere. Probably everything uses oil for lube including any alternative energy. Teslas still need greasing after all. They still have bearings and other moving parts.

Some crops can require as much as 10 calories of petrochemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy when one takes such things into account --- corn (well, maize) is quite calorie dense/efficient in terms of land and other usages --- I'd be curious to see a full, comprehensive crunching of the values involved.

Well we are talking about ethanol production not corn for food. That is where the 1.3 ratio comes from. fuel input to fuel output.

Until it builds a stairway which leads to an attic in such a way that the access is under the shallowest part of the roof and unusable.

I've tried using the 3D generation stuff a bit, but it never worked out.

Still amazed that folks such as:

https://www.reddit.com/r/openscad/comments/1adcw41/i_am_comp...

manage to get anything usable in 3D at all, but making an STL is a big difference from making a useful architectural structure.


For a summer program, I, along with some other kids and a teacher were supposed to build a robot --- since none of us know how to solder, we instead used the money to purchase a computer, modify a nice Rubbermaid trash can and a lazy susan and some drawer slides to hold it along w/ a few accessories (notably a Cognivox voice recognition unit), calling it CTC-1 (Computerized Trash Can mark 1) --- an Apple ][ was selected over the other options (a TRS-80 Model III and an Atari 800 were the other possibilities).

Bought a copy of _Apple Machine Language_ by Don and Kurt Inman, and did BASIC programming (having previously started w/ whatever BASIC was on the HP 3000 at the local college where a gifted and talented summer program allowed access.

Then, there were rumours in _Byte Magazine_ that Apple was making a new computer, and one day, in the copy of _Newsweek_ in the high school library there was a _16-page_ advertisement (which I pulled out and kept w/ my _MacWorld_ magazines --- had a full run of the first couple of years, but I'm getting ahead of myself....)

Graduated, enlisted, began training, then on leave at home that Christmas took out a huge loan and bought basically one of every Mac related thing in the store, including the bag to carry everything in (excepting the ImageWriter printer) --- used it for years, eventually getting HyperCard, playing _The Manhole_ (Where Alice would have gone if Alice had had HyperCard, a precursor to the game _Myst_) as well as buying a copy of _Through the Looking Glass_, the only game Apple ever made. Got out and went to college studying graphic design, using a variety of Windows computers (drove all the way to the state capitol to buy a copy of Adobe Type Manager for Windows 3.0), and then was gifted a NeXT Cube by my brother-in-law. Also bought a Newton MessagePad 110 and used it w/ the NeXT using a serial link to transfer data. And, I bought an NCR-3125 running Go Corp.'s PenPoint, which had a Wacom EMR stylus which paired well w/ the Wacom ArtZ tablet connected to the Cube.

A copy of OPENSTEP 4.2 for the Cube was the last thing I bought from Apple until I bought a copy of Mac OS X Public Beta.

A thing which I hoped for, for a while was that they would use the NeXTBus and make a motherboard for the NeXT Cube which would run contemporary software....

A great way to vicariously experience all this is to read:

https://folklore.org/0-index.html

there's even a story on the game:

https://folklore.org/Alice.html


Ages ago, I worked at a flexographic print manufacturer, once, when a new hire had made a large plot on Kraft paper (which was moderately expensive/difficult to source and a nuisance to switch to/from), it turned out a circle was on a non-printing layer (why Adobe Illustrator allows that is a separate discussion --- Freehand's printing everything which is visible and not printing anything invisible or on the background is correct) and came to me asking help in re-loading the Kraft paper and in explaining to the folks who were concerned about money and so forth.

Instead, I troubled the lead stripper for a compass and ruling pen and got a bottle of fountain pen ink (fortunately, the circle was black, and that was a colour I had in my ink rotation) and showed the trainee how to use a compass w/ a ruling pen to create a circle with a desired stroke thickness in ink --- their low-budget graphic design program had totally skipped over any sort of physical media, going straight to computer usage....


Great that you knew that - but that doesn't mean it was worth it for the kid to learn.

There is more interesting/useful things in life to learn than you will live. Just becoming a brain surgeon, heart surgeon, anesthesiologist, and other somewhat related medical specialties will take you to retirement age without ever leaving school. That is despite the overlap, we haven't even start to make you any form of engineer, musician, or any other the other interest fields there are out there.

We as a society have to look at things like manually drawing as hobbies you can learn if you want that should be put in a book just in case someone wants - but otherwise not taught. There is nothing wrong with what you knew how to do, but there are more important things to teach kids and we need them to move on to the real world not learning everything.



Yeah, I've been wondering what this might look like for a 3D printer slicer --- heck, I'd be glad to just have a series of sliders:

- aesthetic print quality

- dimensional accuracy

- strength

- ease of removing supports

- reliability of printing

which resolve to two values which estimate:

- print time

- volume of material used/consumed in supports


Yeah but not everyone has the same priorities within those sliders. For example strength is something that has many different types. Tensile strength, compression strength, shearing etc.

You use different infills to optimise for each type. This differs per model. An AI can surely help optimise it but it won't always know which one to prioritize, it requires knowing exactly what the printed model will be used for.

The same with aesthetics, usually you care about one specific side. And for ease of remove, are you willing to use support interface material? That makes a lot of difference.


I think this comment actually makes the case for highly custom LLM modifications to software. If you have priorities, you express them to the model and let it figure out how to maximize the UI for your needs.

Yes indeed but not as sliders IMO, that was my point

Yeah, and then ran away to Switzerland rather than work to preserve the democracy which made his fortune possible.

By the way this creation of his, from July 1990: https://www.fourmilab.ch/evilempire/ is very relevant here, but we are getting off-topic :-)

SpeakFreely was his as well - a very early encrypted, VoIP app.

And this: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ ... As I said - an interesting person :-)


That is more of an indictment of the US than it is of Mr Walker. Maybe I should run away to Switzerland, too.

Is this critique or praise of his character? ;-)

Statement of fact with my interpretation --- folks should verify the fact and read what he has written and come to their own conclusions.

While I'm grateful Autodesk stepped in and kept TinkerCAD afloat, I'm relieved Sketchbook escaped their clutches, and am glad I never got involved in Fusion 360 so as to suffer from their on-going "rug pulls" --- which of these are a result of his influence, I've not found a need to discern.


Vibe coding only seems to work, insofar as it does when the training data includes multiple exemplars of solutions to a given problem.

As noted elsethread, there's only one geometric kernel which is decently far along and opensource and it's over 1 million LOC --- I doubt it's being included in any training data, and I doubt that an LLM could regurgitate such a large project which would then compile w/o errors and then work as expected --- the number of tokens required to get such a project to an initial state is a marked hurdle as well.


The Plasticity guy seems to be threading that needle.

That might seem to be the case, right up until he gets taken to court over it.

Never presume that a thing is legal (or will not later be punished) on the basis that someone is already doing it.


You can't stop it. This is just progress.

All software that isn't delivered over client/server to thin clients is now subject to being trivially cloned.


That was never in question, even before AI. It just took more monkeys at typewriters.


The new 1.1 update seems markedly easier to use.

There's also a soft-fork which some folks are funding:

https://www.astocad.com/


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