I think at that point the phrase "engineered soil" loses all utility. We've been engineering soil with domesticated herd animals since prehistory, bringing fertilizer from pasture to arable land at the very least. If we look further at the most recent archaeological research on cultivation, there's growing evidence that soil engineering is how societies move from cultivation-assisted hunter gatherers to fully sedentary agriculture (and the strongest evidence, i.e. from extant isolated tribes in jungles, is that even the so called hunter gatherers participate in extensive soil engineering to support cultivation).
That's my fault, I should have prefaced that I'm just talking about the US. I have no idea what the situation is like in Europe (for some reason I assumed biofuels weren't big there). Due to US density and geography, most marginal land here wouldn't be returned to little more than pasture. It depends on the state but most of that land was never forest to begin with.
> Most crops in the modern world run an engineered soil anyway.
What do you mean by engineered? The most fertile places in the US (i.e. the southwest) run on multi-million year old alluvial plains where micronutrients are deposited from mountain runoff. NPK and some micronutrients are supplemented but the most fertile regions tend to be the least "engineered". The engineering goes into the massive irrigation projects, not the soil, precisely because engineering the latter is so much harder.
The vast majority is grown on marginal land, just above pasture. They can't grow better crops without massive works of engineering and tons more fertilizer and energy use. The alternative is to just use slightly less of that land, because the animals are going to have to replace that feed from somewhere. Distillers grains are valuable because the fat and protein are used for finishing cattle for human consumption in feedlots so the sugars are either going to the cows or the biofuels.
The "limited value" isn't so limited when we're talking about an additive to gasoline. The first thing we tried polluted the entire world with a background level of lead!
> So it's wasteful, not at all "Green", and inefficient, but do we have a replacement octane booster that wont poison people?
I'm not sure it's all that wasteful. The waste product from biofuel production is distillers grains [1] which are just fed back to animals afterward for the protein, fiber, and fat content.
Homer recorded the contemporary oral tradition, which had lots of local knowledge and historical details embedded, even if it's mixed in with fantasy and mythology.
We see this play out across many cultures. Most recently Inuit oral tradition helped locate the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus from Franklin's lost expedition after 150 years of failed attempts to find it. Turns out the tribes on the ice knew where they sank all along and passed it down through stories.
> DD6 is a second-generation nickel-based single-crystal superalloy developed by the institute with fully independent intellectual property. Its chief engineer, Li Jiarong, said the alloy’s performance matches or exceeds that of comparable second-generation superalloys used in Europe and the United States, at a lower production cost.
US manufacturers have already developed sixth-generation SC superalloys and most Western airlines are on engines with third- and fourth-generation materials.
The technology behind single crystal superalloys is relatively well understood, the problem is getting the process reliable enough to be economical in an industry that requires tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars to develop through trial and error. The TFA's point is that unlike EVs or semiconductors, the turbofan industry is between a rock and a hard place that China's other successful industries weren't.
That's a very vague prediction that took decades to bear fruit. The concrete predictions behind the investments into companies like Pets.com and Webvan failed. It took the survivors like Ebay/Paypal and Amazon to build the digital payment and shipping infrastructure over decades until cultural acceptance hit critical mass.
I only use it to help hold together some complex assemblies when putting them together so I can't speak to it's strengths, but:
> Do you need a conductive substrate on both sides to apply the release voltage?
Yes, you attach VCC to the substrate you want to remain bonded and GND to the substrate you want to detach.
> How available is it for purchase if you aren't Apple or Samsung?
You can just call up your usual 3M distributor and request it. It's over $2,000 for a 100 meter roll so it's not something you'll usually find in stock at your local Grainger but it's not some super-secret material only available to the biggest manufacturers.
The vast majority of the time, you don't hear about it at all. Leveraged buyouts and the monopolistic strategies like buying out all the private doctors or veterinarians in a region get all the negative press but they're a tiny fraction of private equity.
The big money is in really boring industries like mining/oil/resource extraction, power plants, infrastructure, construction, and other industries that are predictable and in high demand everywhere. PE firms often get the best deals because they thrive on those kinds of connections and can offer up large amounts of capital on favorable terms in exchange for first dibs. The "rich get richer" is their primary strategy and it works without minmaxing exploitation because that's a bottom feeder strategy, not one that can guarantee steady returns on tens of billions of dollars.
CPU cache space for code is much smaller than GPU memory for models (and the former is more important for performance since many CPU operations like pipeline parallelism are latency bound, not compute bound).
The real power with these kinds of tools isn’t prompting one shotted models but giving agents the ability to do the full workflow. You give them a description of the part and how it’s supposed to mate with parts from McMaster, Misumi, existing parts libraries, etc and the agent downloads the models, asks any clarifying questions to clear up ambiguities (using available part configurations to provide options when applicable), uses measurement tools to validate the design, provide material details for FEA, read and use PDF drawings/datasheets, and so on.
At least, that’s the theory. The problem is that none of the existing CAD tools (almost all exclusively built on Parasolid) are set up to support agentic workflows. None have proper text based representations, with the possible exception of OnShape’s feature script which is too undocumented and proprietary to be of much use. Even if it was supported, Parasolid isn’t set up to provide the kind of detailed error reporting needed to provide agent feedback.
I’ve been experimenting with this in ECAD by giving agents the ability to edit Altium files directly and it’s been working very well (even with footprint drawings!), but my attempts to do it with MCAD have fallen flat on their face because it’d require developing a geometric kernel from scratch with this workflow in mind.
> Curious to hear if people have use cases where they find 1M works much better!
Reverse engineering [1]. When decompiling a bunch of code and tracing functionality, it's really easy to fill up the context window with irrelevant noise and compaction generally causes it to lose the plot entirely and have to start almost from scratch.
(Side note, are there any OpenAI programs to get free tokens/Max to test this kind of stuff?)
They can oneshot relatively simple parsers/encoders/decoders with a proper spec, but it’s a completely different ballgame when you’re trying to parse a very domain knowledge heavy file format (like the format electronics CAD) with decades of backwards compatible cruft spread among hundreds of megabytes of decompiled Delphi and C# dlls (millions of lines).
The low level parts (OLE container, streams and blocks) are easy but the domain specific stuff like deserializing to typed structs is much harder.
Totally agreed. I’ve been reverse engineering Altium’s file format to enable agents to vibe-engineer electronics and though I’m on my third from scratch rewrite in as many weeks, each iteration improves significantly in quality as the previous version helps me to explore the problem space and instruct the agent on how to do red/green development [1]. Each iteration is tens of thousands of lines of code which would have been impossible to write so fast before so it’s been quite a change in perspective, treating so much code as throw away experimentation.
I’m using a combination of 100s of megabytes of Ghidra decompiled delphi DLLs and millions of lines of decompiled C# code to do this reverse engineering. I can’t imagine even trying such a large project for LLMs so while a good implementation is still taking a lot of time, it’s definitely a lot cheaper than before.
[1] I saw your red/green TDD article/book chapter and I don’t think you go far enough. Since we have agents, you can generalize red/green development to a lot of things that would be impractical to implement in tests. For example I have agents analyze binary diffs of the file format to figure out where my implementation is incorrect without being bogged down by irrelevant details like the order or encoding of parameters. This guides the agent loop instead of tests.
When I was developing my ghidra-cli tool for LLMs to use, I was using crackmes as tests and it had no problem getting through obfuscation as long as it was prompted about it. In practice when reverse engineering real software it can sometimes spin in circles for a while until it finally notices that it's dealing with obfuscated code, but as long as you update your CLAUDE.md/whatever with its findings, it generally moves smoothly from then on.
https://github.com/akiselev
Projects:
* ghidra-cli - cli to run ghidra headless for agents to reverse engineer stuff
* altium-cli - build and edit Altium PCB files with agents
* pcb-toolkit - PCB design library and CLI for calculating impedance, current capacity, via properties, etc
* debugger-cli - debugger CLI tool for agents to run and debug binaries
* datasheet-cli - search for components via Digikey/Mouser, download datasheets, and use Gemini to extract (semi-)structured data