jf___
(From THE NEW YORKER) Cambridge, Mass., Feb. Z5-The Air Force announced today that it has a machine that can receive instructions in English, figure out how to make whatever is wanted, and teach other machines how to make it. An Air Force general said it will enable the United States to "build a war machine that nobody would want to tackle. " Today it made an ashtray [2]. -- San Francisco Chronicle, March 28, 1959
That ashtray was teh 1st CNC'd object. Noble [3] speaks about the political angle that was an underpinning motivation
[1] http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=960118.808374
[2] https://mitmuseum.mit.edu/collections/object/2007.037.001
[3] forces of production - a social history of industrial automation (Noble, mit press)
A context window is a fixed-size memory region. It is allocated once, at conversation start, and cannot grow. Every token consumed — prompt, response, digression — advances a pointer through this region. There is no garbage collector. There is no virtual memory. When the space is exhausted, the system does not degrade gracefully: it faults.
This is not metaphor by loose resemblance. The structural constraints are isomorphic:
No dynamic allocation. In a hard realtime system, malloc() at runtime is forbidden — it fragments the heap and destroys predictability. In a conversation, raising an orthogonal topic mid-task is dynamic allocation. It fragments the semantic space. The transformer's attention mechanism must now maintain coherence across non-contiguous blocks of meaning, precisely analogous to cache misses over scattered memory.
No recursion. Recursion risks stack overflow and makes WCET analysis intractable. In a conversation, recursion is re-derivation: returning to re-explain, re-justify, or re-negotiate decisions already made. Each re-entry consumes tokens to reconstruct state that was already resolved. In realtime systems, loops are unrolled at compile time. In LLM work, dependencies should be resolved before the main execution phase.
Linear allocation only. The correct strategy in both domains is the bump allocator: advance monotonically through the available region. Never backtrack. Never interleave. The "brainstorm" pattern — a focused, single-pass traversal of a problem space — works precisely because it is a linear allocation discipline imposed on a conversation.
The "cheap, uniform, and free of defects" story is partly a story about coal. The drywall industry scaled on the back of an abundant, nearly free waste stream from the energy sector. It's a classic example of industrial symbiosis — one industry's pollution abatement becomes another's feedstock.
And it cuts the other way now: as coal plants shut down across Europe and North America, synthetic gypsum supply is shrinking. The drywall industry is facing a real raw material squeeze, with manufacturers having to shift back toward mined gypsum or find alternative sources. There's ongoing work on using phosphogypsum (from fertilizer production) but that comes with its own radioactivity concerns.
For someone in your position this is particularly relevant — the "wonder" of drywall is entangled with the fossil fuel economy in a way that makes earth-based construction methods look increasingly attractive as that supply chain unwinds.
no going back once you experience realtime rendering of your document, and support in VS Code is stellar IMO.
[1] http://typst.app
As Robert Kennedy explained in 1964, "President Kennedy's favorite quote was really from Dante:
'The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of moral crisis preserve their neutrality"
[1] https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/life-of-john-f-ke...
These diamond wires are also used for quarrying the stone.
The BRG Group at ETH Zürich has delivered some stunning project exploring a modern take on stereotomic / stone construction, both in terms of fabrication and engineering
Stone actually can work well with the proper detailing (dealing with cold bridging, styrofoam is a good way to break the cold bridging ):
Heat Storage: Stone, being a dense and heavy material, has a high thermal mass capacity. It can absorb and store a significant amount of heat during the day when exposed to sunlight or internal heat sources like heating systems. This stored heat is gradually released back into the indoor space during cooler periods, such as evenings or nights, helping to stabilize indoor temperatures and reduce heating or cooling requirements.
Temperature Regulation: The thermal mass of stone can act as a natural temperature regulator, slowing down temperature fluctuations within a building. During hot summer days, stone absorbs excess heat, keeping indoor spaces cooler. In colder weather, it releases stored heat, helping to maintain a more comfortable and consistent temperature.
Energy Efficiency: By using stone as a thermal mass material, buildings can reduce their reliance on mechanical heating and cooling systems. This, in turn, can lead to significant energy savings and lower utility bills, as the building naturally regulates its temperature with less energy input.
Passive Solar Design: Stone can be strategically placed in a building's design to maximize its exposure to sunlight during the day. This allows for efficient passive solar heating, where the stone absorbs solar energy and releases it slowly, reducing the need for active heating systems.
[1] https://github.com/tpaviot/pythonocc-core [2] odico.dk/ [3] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=pyth... [4] https://www.cgal.org/
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330914101_SCALING_A... [2] https://vimeo.com/94076571
https://github.com/donalffons/opencascade.js
have it run in your browser
https://donalffons.github.io/opencascade.js-examples/demos/b...
[1] https://discourse.joplinapp.org/t/quick-links-plugin/14214
[2] https://discourse.joplinapp.org/t/automatic-backlinks-with-m...
Joan Robinson
[1] https://discourse.joplinapp.org/t/quick-links-plugin/14214
[2] https://discourse.joplinapp.org/t/automatic-backlinks-with-m...
Note many followed in Roger's wake, take for instance yet another recent landmark ruling by the the German constitutional court declared the current climate protection measures insufficient [3]
The organization that took on Shell is Milieudefensie [4] ( hey, why not pay tribute and chip in )
[1] https://www.revolutionjustified.org/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4M-8bYFJsiA
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/06/germany-to-bri...
The shell case builds on a landmark ruling [1] which has gone through Courts of Appeal and the Supreme Court. In my opinion, the odds of this ruling being revoked is highly unlikely, since the argumentation of the ruling follows [1] hence there is jurisprudence in place.
[1] https://leidenlawblog.nl/articles/the-urgenda-decision-the-l...
Definitely this played a massive factor, the documentary of Ken Burns is fascinating and insightful
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/ken-b...