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Check out Technology Connections. This is way, way, way more in depth than anything one can find on TV.

Thinking about it I have to revise my statement somewhat. I have seen The Great War, Technology Connections etc and my Youtube algo is after 15 years very tuned to me.

The issue is somewhat that this stuff needs to be pushed more into peoples feeds and not pregnant spiderman videos.


If anybody wants some more encouragement to check out Technology Connections ... the vibe is hour+ long Andy Rooney pieces.

Damning with faint praise. He was never a first-rate reporter, AFAIK. More like Paul Harvey.


I’m not saying that you’re wrong.

But it’s worth noting that any good technology starts off being called a toy and with most people not being able to imagine its usefulness.


Yeah, like blockchain.

(Sorry for the snark, I'm hangry)


And metaverse.

There are also a lot of bad technologies that start off being called a toy and then just die. Many more, I'd wager.

I hope that we will soon have ways to change the tone of AI writing, I hate that all news articles now have that same AI voice.

> that teaches you how to manipulate people

Well, it's called "... and influence people", so I see where you were coming from in your assumption.


> do your hobby with other people, frequently

I think this advice can be refined.

The goal is to meet people with shared interests, regularly.

You may like to work out, but unless you enjoy talking and thinking about working out, the gym isn't the right place!

You may like to hike, but you may not enjoy talking and thinking about hiking. You may still find friends in the hiking group, because as you spend time together you discover shared interests. But you may also discover that you have very little in common with the people who like hiking.

That's why it's so easy to make friends in University: You spend a lot of time together AND you have a shared interest: The major you all chose!

On the other hand, if you're into ... trains... you need to find places where people go that like to talk and think about trains! That's not always easy!


Yes I agree! The shared interest really helps with developing the connection

Friends in south Sweden and they got a hole drilled in the front yard like it’s the most normal thing. Is it there?

The challenge is for people who live in apartment buildings in urban environment where you have no front yard you can drill into at your leisure.

The solution is of course to get a communal system. As a bonus, drilling one giant loop is significantly cheaper than drilling hundreds of smaller ones.

>The solution is of course to get a communal system.

If it's that simple why is Austria not doing this in the cities? I don't know any voter who opposes cleaner air and cheaper heating.


If you have district heating I think there might be conflict of interest / regulatory capture.

No, it's individual apartment building based heating with the oil burners in the cellar for each building.

It doesn't work this way. Dense cities just don't have enough space for geothermal heating. It really works for single-family homes only, or maybe just a slightly more dense areas.

Not to mention that city infrastructure is WAY too expensive to build, anywhere. You'll spend more money on planning than on doing the actual construction.


> geothermal heating

Ground source heat pumps != geothermal heating.

The technologies are completely different.


https://mncifa.mn.gov/heights-geothermal-district

Granted, this system is being installed on the grounds of a former 112 acre country club that is being redeveloped, so it’s more of a greenfield project than slapping a geothermal loop in a central business district, but it’s a geothermal district heating and cooling system in a city.


Their resulting density (~450 square meters per housing unit) is only a bit more than a dense SFH zone. And they also are able to tap into an aquifer, significantly improving their capacity.

In general, you absolutely can do district-level heating. The former USSR countries are known for doing this on the scale of entire cities. But I don't think it's feasible with geothermal (unless we're talking about Iceland).


>The former USSR countries are known for doing this on the scale of entire cities.

Not today anymore. In my warsaw-pact country, my parents and most of the city residents cut themselves off from district hating since the 2000 and installed natural gas heaters/boilers in their apartments, which is what most people in my city use to this day.

It's because the former commie district heating was incredibly wasteful and inefficient in the post commie era, making it cheaper and more convenient to have you own apartment heating.

Probably the same thing would happen with heat pumps in apartments now, if air-to-air heat pumps could produce enough heat in cold winters.


District heating worked really well with coal/gas power plants because the waste heat was essentially free. But the infrastructure for heat transmission was costly and required constant maintenance. I did calculations for district/distributed heating costs professionally in mid 2000s, and back then they were about even.

The engineering culture in the USSR was also quite poor, so it was easier to build one steam/heat plant rather than hundreds of individual water heaters.


What isn't cheap, though, is maintaining the plumbing of the communal system, especially outside cities.

I built an optimisation for charging my car. It’s very smart, looks multiple days ahead in weather and prices and predicts my driving habits.

I tried to make it a product, but I didn’t find much interest. Maybe I’m just bad at marketing.

With the help of Claude, it cost me years of experience and few weekends to build. So even if nobody other than me ever profits from it, it was still worth it!


Is the internal data model of fusion structured enough to be understood with a text-based LLM? Or do you need to basically screenshot the render to understand what is happening?

Would a more CAD-as-code based approach to CAD design be more suitable?

Just like, LLMs have an easier time to build a presentation with latex than with powerpoint...


We are using a CAD as code approach! Like I said in the post we heavily leverage FeatureScript to drive Onshape and Python to drive Fusion


Okay, I will read it and then probably need to google most of these :D


https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2050264512230719980?s=20

Here you can see how code drives the modeling


I’m a soft developer by trade and CAD is just something I do in order to be able to make the hardware I want to make. I’m not good at it and it takes me forever.

This is very exciting.

Next step, I need the same for PCB design, with good understanding of EMI issues.


These standalone batteries are typically privately financed.


Private finance normally lined with some low cost public money, especially at this size.

If it is straight up privately financed even more of a big bet.


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