How'd that work out for SawStop? A tech that makes table saws basically safe by stopping the blade immediately on contact with water (simplified description). The inventory tried to license the tech, then tried to get regulatory agencies interested. He never had any luck. I imagine his licensing terms were too much; he ended up making his own line of saws which are substantially more expensive than the unsafe competition.
I'm sure there are tons of other examples. Outside of highly regulated areas, improving safety usually plays second fiddle to lowering price.
There was new development in the SawStop story in 2024, their release of a key patent to the public for use by other manufacturers in preventing amputations:
Article is very interesting and focuses on the historic faces of DARPA, not really getting too much into the modern state of the agency. Over the past 10+ years DARPA have embraced the OTA - other transaction authority - as a contract vehicle to allow DARPA PMs additional flexibility and speed in letting contracts. This has allowed, perhaps, a return to more of the ideas of the old days in which a performer and PM might seek that "meeting of the minds" mentioned in the article, and issue funding to start work.
A real limitation perhaps that DARPA has is the 3-5 year PM timeline. PMs start with a project and vision for their work, often a multiphase effort. We often joke that the challenges DARPA offers are not all that difficult, only the schedule is. A few years ago I worked on what would have been a wonderful project on a 2 year timeline which was compressed to half that, with the usual shifting sands of requirements consuming the majority of the allocated time.
I can't say that giving PMs a longer timeframe would be a good thing - that 3-5 year PM clock keeps everything moving apace. Perhaps the longer-term programs ought to be given by the office directors to PMs, but then you have the disadvantage (mentioned in the article) of PMs having to execute a project they don't believe in. That hasn't worked well; disengaged PMs, focused on their passion projects, don't give the needed attention to inherited assignments.
The future of the agency is concerning. Given increasing time and funding limitations, coupled with the Heilmeier focus, there's been a tremendous push towards immediate results. Which means simpler targets that don't provide the amazing leaps ahead that DARPA was once known for. Look to their current SBIR topics, which include one on the use of language models for suicide prevention, and another on processing data to generate facility clearances. These are not leaps ahead, but instead incremental, focused improvements. We once lost a DARPA proposal because our plan was too certain to work, they wanted more risk. Quite a change.
DARPA still hires visionary PMs, and they have the tools again to realize these visions. I hope to see a return to the DARPA referenced in the early article. It will be fun to pitch ideas to those guys. I'm tired of talking to the ones who are too focused on today to think about tomorrow.
The few DARPA tasks I've worked on or had steerage over usually involved getting results quickly and iterating. The initial kickoff call with the stakeholders were about shared vision, but then there was a quick feedback loop until a final report was derived from the call notes and slides.
In that respect, it's a very decent way to do R&D - you have access to a highly motivated stakeholder with a clear vision of how your work fits in the larger scheme, and are allowed to iterate your way to a product both are proud of.
As a pilot, I love the idea. But as soon as I saw the cockpit I knew the price would be out of my league. I'm still in the single digit gallons per hour world, and this bad boy is running at 50-60 gallons per hour. Nice engine. Would be great to be able to buy JetA.
I was amused that they elected to pay the weight penalty of a stove, until I saw they're carrying around an outboard motor. Love the idea, wish I were rich enough to really consider one of these for myself.
Also - thrusters in the floats? I haven't seen that before. I never did get a seaplane endorsement, which you'd need for one of these. That's a neat idea, even if it isn't theirs. I wonder how much they're needed, and if the added control on the water is worth the weight. I have to imagine they'd be great if they offer enough degrees of freedom (and are easy enough to understand how to use).
edit, I guess you need that turbine to lug all the extra weight from the furnishings and floats around with enough Vx to get out of short mountain lakes with a little density altitude.
Holy Toledo. The Winnebago Heli Home is the most 1970s thing I have seen since the CRT thread. How much more energy can we consume in doing a typical recreational activity.
For me (and I imagine a lot of people) it is his Fallingwater house (https://fallingwater.org/) which is a tremendous example of architecture which builds on its environment. I don't think that's a particularly great place to live in - seems to be a museum now anyhow - but it's a wonderful idea. In a lot of ways architecture is about setting high expectations, and that does it. A lot of his other work - the Usonian designs - look to me to be like what became 80's style American architecture. But I'm no student of the field; I just admired Fallingwater.
I don't get the worship, either. Fallingwater has required a lot of intervention to stay up. The much praised Johnson Wax complex has a tower that can't be occupied. The administration building has workers on the ground floor ("Great Workroom") where management can look down upon them from the second floor. He dictated how people who commissioned him were to live in their homes down to what they could and could not have in them. Many of those houses have required work as well. The guy was arrogant and constantly over budget. HN doesn't consider these good traits in other engineering fields.
Context is a big part of it. He died in 1959 at 91, so everything he worked on is old at this point much of it well over 100. People have copied and improved on many of his ideas, but it’s a mistake to judge historic buildings based on modern practices.
Natural light is wonderful in a world with AC and modern windows, but the first residential AC was installed in 1931. Structures that could keep you cool where still a big deal when most of his buildings where constructed. Which fed into the idea of building a building for the location, prevailing wind and weather patterns mattered more.
I dunno, it sounds like Wright had the concrete done in 1935 and it was 60 years later that "forensic evaluations revealed fatal developing conditions in the late 1990s.". Like after 60 years you can only detect a problem when you bring out tooling (but not an actual failure!)?
I might be no architect but I always hear the comment that "anybody can design a building that stands but it takes an engineer to design a building that just barely stands". It really sounds like Wright correctly designed a building that just barely stands and the rest of the people are too worried about his success.
The engineers of his day and his client both raised concerns. This is the first I've heard that engineers build to barely last. Maybe that's true in software. I hope to hell that it is not true for homes, cars, roads, bridges, aircraft, and spacecraft.
Durability isn’t free. No reason to build for 30,000 years when needs change over time.
Public infrastructure like bridges are designed to predictably decay over time so they can be maintained or replaced if they are still useful. Just look at the NYC subway system there’s tons of old tunnels that just aren’t useful today, they didn’t collapse but they still became obsolete and that’s inside a major city which kept it’s subway system.
It's called "beauty." If you don't have an eye for it, well, that's your taste. You aren't going to convince anyone with utilitarian arguments, any more than "those shoes are uncomfortable!" will convince anyone to wear sneakers instead of high heels or wingtips.
I've been to both Fallingwater and the Johnson Wax building. They're both beautiful.
> Many of those houses have required work as well
and the owners were quite happy to do that work. I don't think anyone hired FLW expecting to get a regular old tract house.
> Many of those houses have required work as well.
He was constantly pushing the boundaries in materials and technique, so it's not terribly surprising that 100 years later there is a lot of repair needed.
But if you think you don't like his work, then I have something for you to check out. Next time you are in Chicago, walk into the lobby/atrium of the Rookery Building (in the Loop at the corner of LaSalle and Adams). He was hired to do the renovation, and it is magnificent.
I hate the arrogance as well… but, I’ve watched shows of homes built by renowned architects and some their clients have a special ability to accommodate the architects’s eccentricities. They’ll point out some odd and queer things with pride —and how they keep the oddities despite how impractical or inconvenient they prove. It’s like the clients get off on that themselves. It’s really weird.
The only profession more full of arrogance than architecture is orthopedic surgery.
Unlike the failed artists and engineers who build little dioramas out of cardboard and model railroad scenery, surgeons merit the arrogance.
To reach your maximum safe annual dose of arrogance-by-proxy, just watch a single documentary covering what all of the architects who decided to become "urban planners" did to the fabric of society in the 50s and 60s because they thought that poured concrete hellscapes were beneficial to mankind and that they knew better than the sum total of all of humanity.
This is a pattern with the early modern architects, especially as the materials and construction process were still mildly experimental.
LeCorbusier also made a house (Villa Savoye) that was supposed to be functional and easy to live in. It looks super clear and luminous and could be mistaken for a modern house at a glance, but was a hell to maintain (leaked like a seave) and not great to live in in general.
The other answer about magnetostriction is technically correct (the best kind) but Misses the actual cause, which is subharmonic oscillation. This occurs when you have not stabilized your control loop properly and is often the result of inadequate phase margin. A simple fix may be to allow the control bandwidth by increasing capacitance at the work amplifier output. But this may also make the response too slow.
For most people designing DCDC converters, this is the most difficult part to understand and correctly tune. If you get the parts selection right and carefully lay out the circuit, this is the one that they can't get right. It takes some understanding of control theory or careful testing and tweaking. And it's what drives a lot of folk to the expensive and relatively inflexible power modules.
Looks like it uses yahoo_finance_api in rust. In theory that supports options, but no idea whether this tool handles that data properly, I didn't feel like searching that hard.
It's gonna take a lot to pry me away from my spreadsheets. They are simple and just work. Ages and ages ago I used MS Money but once they shut down I never migrated to the 'sunset edition,' just switched to excel. I keep trying things, but without local, automatic sync to my accounts, nothing is as simple and effective as a simple spreadsheet, for me.
Website was not pleasant to use on mobile, I couldn't really see much, and the demo was definitely not mobile friendly. At least on a pixel 6.
I like the idea. I take it as an all in one lab notebook for electronics. You might consider adding in timing diagram tools, and an easy way to copy/paste scope shots or similar, but this seems useful.
Being clear about ownership of information posted to the site is pretty important. I'd hate to see my design data shared without permission or used to train your algorithm.
I've been wishing for years for a way to draw circuits as easily as I do on a whiteboard. Schematic capture doesn't have to be as miserable as experience as it is, but I don't have the time to make that till. Maybe you do.
I'll try to remember this for next time I'm at a computer, the Idea is pretty cool.
First, I pretty sorry that VisCircuit is unfriendly on mobile now. I currently focus on desktop web development and didn't spend too much time on mobile.
For other feedbacks:
1. Timing diagram: It is a great advice! Thanks. Timing diagram is important for digital design. I wrote it down and plan to do in the future.
2. Data privacy: I totally agree, so I take data privacy at the first priority issue to make sure users data will be protected correctly.
3. I agree with you that the world needs a tool to draw circuits as easily as on a whiteboard. During my work, I always use PowerPoint to draw circuits, but it is not good enough. I will work hard to make VisCircuit an easy-to-use circuit diagram editor.
Thanks for your feedback! Welcome to try it at a computer.
Interesting that all but two of the listed startups were software companies (FedEx, Tesla). I imagine the costs of fixed investments required to scale a company not based on software can reduce the potential max returns quite substantially. Can a non-software company achieve the kind of returns a software company can?
I would say mostly no, which is exactly why software gets so much investment and has seen so much growth, especially 15-10 years ago when it suddenly became possible to address the entire world with very few regulations.
The runner up darling child (outside of questionable financial products) seems to be biotech, whose heavy regulation and complex supply chain issues are offset by almost everyone in the world's desire to not die.
This is pretty typical aboard ship for smaller vessels on long voyages. Not so hard as it sounds: get wet, turn off; lather up, rinse off, turn off. You can do with 20-30 seconds of water and be quite clean, with some practice.
It's not satisfying though. And I can't imagine how those numbers scale if you have long hair, or use conditioner.
I lived for 3 years in a motorhome roaming around the US, taking a navy shower about every other day -- usually after an exhausting hike, run or maintenance work. It was a delight, every single time.
Yes, this bothered me too. It's impressive how much energy is required to just melt water much less bring it to temperature. It's 330 kJ/kg, which is 1250 kJ/gallon: 350 Wh. So it costs more energy to defrost one gallon of water than it does to do the rest of the 110F temperature change.
The physics term for this is the "latent heat of fusion," or the energy required to change states from liquid to solid, or vice versa.
A few years ago I saw someone calculate the energy required to melt the ice in front of a locomotive (I think) at speed; IIRC it required a (not small!) nuclear reactor's worth of energy. Not practical!
> A few years ago I saw someone calculate the energy required to melt the ice in front of a locomotive (I think) at speed; IIRC it required a (not small!) nuclear reactor's worth of energy.
I'm sure there are tons of other examples. Outside of highly regulated areas, improving safety usually plays second fiddle to lowering price.