A man walks into a library and asks for a book on Pavlov’s dog and Schrödinger’s cat.
The librarian says, “It rings a bell, but I’m not sure if it’s here or not.”
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hardy retweeted
Europe is one of the best places in the world to live, but one of the hardest places to build and scale a company.
After 5+ years in France, following 16+ in the US, I have a conflicted admiration for Europe.
On the one hand, Europe has great potential. When I lived in the US, I was skeptical of the European quality-of-life argument. But after getting used to Sunday morning markets, walkable cities, and 4.5 meter ceilings, I get it. There are things that you simply cannot import or experience as a tourist.
These things can make Europe very attractive for creative and intellectual work. I honestly believe some parts of Europe are the “best neighborhood” in the planet. But that’s not the full story.
I am not only a husband and a dad. I am also an entrepreneur. I founded a company in the US 12+ years ago that has offices in the US and Chile and clients throughout the world. I live in France, yet I have not opened a subsidiary here. That is telling.
We once hired someone in France through one of those remote employment platforms. The person received about 5,000 euros net per month, which is considered a very good salary here. But the total cost to the company was closer to 13,000 per month.
That makes hiring feel less like a relationship between a company and a worker, and more like renting someone from the state. At the same time, you take an enormous amount of legal and administrative responsibility. The presumption is that all companies should operate like a 1960s car manufacturer. The response is simple. Don’t set up operations in Europe.
But this is not a remote-work story. I know many small entrepreneurs in France who do not want to cross the threshold from being a one-person activity to becoming an employer. They sometimes refuse a new customer to stay small and avoid the obligations that come with hiring one person. That should worry us.
Many social protections here are described as being provided by the state, but in practice, a lot of the cost and complexity of the implementation falls on the administrative shoulders of entrepreneurs. That is reasonable for a large energy company or bank. But for a small business, it is the difference between an entrepreneur waking up on a Monday to think about product or paperwork.
Growth is not the enemy of the European social model. It is what enabled it. Much of the quality of life we enjoy here today dates back to growth incubated in the past. Growth that is increasingly hard to find. France once led frontier industries, like bicycles in the 1860s, cinema in the 1890s, and aviation and automobiles soon after. Since then, Europe built a more humane social model. But that model was built on the assumption that Europe and the US were the only two rich and industrialized places in the world.
That is no longer true. Global competition in the 21st century is not what it used to be 50 years ago, and the padding built to protect us, may have grown into the handbrake that constrains the growth of the small and flexible firms we need to compete in new frontier sectors.
We should be able to be critical about Europe in our own terms, without comparing ourselves to the US or China. Innovative parts of Europe, like Sweden or Switzerland, operate differently and provide clues. Sweden has embraced a dynamic of capitalization in its pension system for a long time in a continent where fewer people buy stocks. Switzerland, a place that shares an enormous amount of geography and culture with its neighbors, is built in part on strong internal competition among its cantons.
But neither can light a candle to a French open-air market on a Sunday morning. A market where cash is king, and for a reason.
Europe may be the best place in the world to live. But it is also one of the most challenging places to build and scale an innovative activity. The goal is not to weaken the European model. But to get to a place where we can lead again by example. The world will follow us, but only if we are ahead.
hardy retweeted
Hi, I'm Wyatt Thompson, a member of the Human Data team at OpenAI.
We recently had the chance to chat privately with Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok about the impact of AI on the future of labor. One theme stood out: economic growth matters. It drives opportunity, innovation, and human flourishing.
Here's the conversation:
hardy retweeted
I built an interactive tool to map the relationships in CAD modeling software, their underlying geometry kernels, and the companies that own them.
try it out at cadmap.io
hardy retweeted
We've discussed electropolishing & tumbling before to achieve better part surface finishes, but there's another process that yields incredible results:
Isotropic Superfinishing
Ever heard of it?
Ever used it?
Also known as Chemically Accelerated Surface Finishing, it's performed by placing your parts into a tumbler with ceramic media & a chemical additive.
The chemical compound creates a conversion film which softens the peaks / high spots on the metal surface, allowing the tumbling media to knock them down easily.
This coating continuously reforms, ensuring only the peaks get removed, and allows the final surface finish to get extremely smooth.
A surface roughness of 2–4 µin Ra (0.05–0.10 µm) is typically achievable, with even lower values possible. This is mirror finish territory. With almost no dimensional change (we're talking a few microns here).
I need to try this out for myself...
hardy retweeted
how i CAD -- engineers don't really talk about their CAD workflows much, so i thought i would spell mine out. i hope it's useful
i don't default to "parametric" (what should really be called feature based history) modeling, and i think that's ok. i think it has its place (<10% of cases imo) and i rarely think it useful in R&D or mass manufacturing. i find it's great for people who have standardized assets that follow strict rules (furniture, truss or framing companies, etc.)
i use a direct modeling approach that avoids sketching when possible. how do i do this without sketches? NX lets you generate curves without sketches. autocad and plasticity operate through this paradigm by default
i do not care about feature history length and either ignore it, or purposely use tools like remove parameters (NX) to wipe the history periodically. i never use assembly functionality or assembly constraints and all of my parts live in a single file as bodies
these files are by proxy "assemblies". i instantiate bodies within them (blocks in autocad, components in NX) when required -- i have various workflows for turning these parts into something the system can understand for drawings and PDM. those most familiar with fusion360 or NX are already aware of this paradigm
some organizations don't like this. for example, one forced feature history based models ("parametric") or models would be rejected in the ECR process
in other orgs, they've mimicked almost 100% my direct modeling workflow and it was actually frowned upon to have a feature based modeling histories. what i've learned is that for really complex assemblies, you need to not parametrically link variables that define geometry and reduce feature history as much as possible. i understand this is indirectly calling some startups out (like flow engineering), but i have not yet seen this to be untrue
why?
1. dependencies break. think of each dependency (parameter, feature, etc.) as an attack vector. native CAD files are not source code. each CAD company has created their own "source code" (features) and they do not necessarily all compile to the same result. in the software paradigm, you should actually think of BREPs (.stp exports) as the source code, and everything before that as an abstraction that could cause issues. almost every employer i've had disagrees with me on this, so if your blood is boiling, it's OK, you're not alone
2. it's fast. it doesn't matter what i started with, i don't have to think about the history of the part. if i don't like a part, i can push/pull faces and slice geometry to get what i want. the ability to totally disconnect the future state of a geometry from its previous state is, and i don't think this is an exaggeration, almost 10x faster than having to grok what you were thinking months or years ago
3. to further the point in 2 -- you can comment code. that's a reason source code can live for decades and its intent can still be understood later. you can't comment feature histories
4. if you go with the direct modeling approach, the CAD cartel loses. if you can easily export your step file, and rely on direct modeling approaches, then you're never locked into a CAD system. period. feels pretty good. by the way, this is what enables open source hardware
hardy retweeted
Aerospace parts are not 100x overpriced because of paperwork or crazy high standards or any of the reasons folks often think they are.
This is a part that would be $50 if it was an aftermarket dingus for your car’s oil pan, if made to the same tolerances/QC and with the same material. In fact, most OE car parts are held to exceptionally tight dimensional tolerances and quality standards.
Aerospace shops - with all the QC gear and ISO certs and paperwork automation - typically have an hourly rate 1.75x - 2.0x comparable non-aerospace shops. No, QC and documentation do not 100x a part’s cost to make.
What makes aerospace parts expensive are 3 main drivers:
1. Volume. Boeing builds 458 copies of the 737 every year. If you get the contract for the inconel de-icing bleed air manifold (2x per hull), that is fantastic! You are also making only 1000 parts per year. Not huge scale to get automotive industry efficiency (which is usually 7 figures annually).
2. Design For Manufacturability. Aerospace engineers are perhaps (as a group) the worst in the world at designing their parts with any consideration to manufacturing. While one understands for this for power plants and some critical sub-systems, my gut feeling is that 90% of the parts on an aircraft could have a 50% coat reduction with a single round of DfM. I’ve seen some totally stupid things out of Boeing and Airbus on parts- either could save $1B annually if they just had CATIA/NX disable the fillet command.
3. Distribution. Aero has a pile of Persian rug salesman in the parts business. Nobody wants to do the work, so everything has layers of useless “service” middlemen who each mark up 300%. For example- none of my Boeing customers ever work with Boeing, they work with a contractor, who is working for a supplier, who sells to Boeing. Boeing is “saving money” by paying 3x for every nut and washer and valve… Airbus is apparently worse. (my customers making SpaceX parts deal directly with SpaceX, often with access to the engineers for a tight DfM feedback loop).
TL;DR- Aero parts are expensive because of low volume and a sclerotic industry filled with lazy MBA parasites who drag value, not because they are exceptionally hard to make or “the paperwork.”
hardy retweeted
1. The Santa Barbara school of evolutionary psychology holds that a universal set of complex psychological adaptations evolved in Pleistocene Africa. In no particular order, here are few folks on here doing research in this tradition, highlighting one paper/thread each:🧵
hardy retweeted
The largest series of fossil modern human remains dating to the Pleistocene are about to be destroyed please help stop this madness and sign the attached
change.org/p/supporting-the-…
hardy retweeted
The second half of this short video, on how people sometimes answer quantitative questions qualitatively, blinding them to obvious opportunities, is something which I would like to triple underline for e.g. startup founders.
Try a little bit of rigor! See where it gets you.
How Boom Supersonic's @bscholl recruited a world class team
"If you can wave a magic wand and get anybody on the planet to come work with you on this, who would your top five people be?
Forget whether they're available.
Forget whether they're interested.
And it turns out, you don't need too many levels of recursion before I was actually talking to the best people on the planet."
Source: @ycombinator @snowmaker
hardy retweeted
How Boom Supersonic's @bscholl recruited a world class team
"If you can wave a magic wand and get anybody on the planet to come work with you on this, who would your top five people be?
Forget whether they're available.
Forget whether they're interested.
And it turns out, you don't need too many levels of recursion before I was actually talking to the best people on the planet."
Source: @ycombinator @snowmaker
hardy retweeted
This is, not true.
The machines in Apple's model studio are very different from the production machines used by Catcher and Foxconn for mass-scale production.
Fun Story: The iPhone 6 bending debacle forced Apple to quickly re-evaluate using a 7000 series of aluminum in place of their standard 6061. They had (of course) experimented with this long ago, but cost and finishing concerns - 7075 is harder to anodize, and finishing is the *hardest* thing Apple dos - drove them to use a slightly tweaked version of industry standard 6061.
Catcher and Foxconn both thought this would be a nice opportunity to milk some more margin, so they told Apple they could do 7075, but the cycle time was almost 2x, so the price would go up substantially.
One of the machinists thought this sounded like bullshit, so Apple called the US distributor for the machines that Catcher and Foxconn use, pulled the identical tools they were running in prototype (in new BT30 holders), and ran back to back tests to prove out the cycle time and tool life on the same machines their vendors were using. Until this point, they did all their own prototyping and process development, but it was up to the vendors to use the competitive fight for more orders to figure out how to get the cycle down; Apple never got very specific as to the process - just the quality and price.
Well, lo and behold - 7075 had the same cycle time as 6061. The vendors were bullshitting them to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Apple showed them the results of their testing and told them to pound sand with the price increase. Ever since, Apple has run a full-scale production lab (separate from Ive's model shop) to validate production methods and guide Apple's design and procurement decisions.
Apple's prototype shops run very high-end, hyper-accurate multi-axis machines that are ideal for rapidly turning concept sketches into machined parts. If you know CNC stuff - they are a big on Hermle and Willemin-Macodel shop, but they have whatever gear they want. Other machine shops at Apple support engineering efforts running similar equipment. The production validation lab however, uses the same gear that is used in Asia, and evaluates precisely what Apple can expect their suppliers to be doing when they move to full-scale production. These are similar, but very different machines than the model/engineering shops run - lower cost, faster, more fussy to set up, but designed to absolutely bang-out lots of parts very very rapidly.
hardy retweeted
Happy to publish Lecture 1 of my course, Advanced Machining, here on @X. This lecture is an introduction to the course and also dives into the history of machining.
I hope you enjoy it! Please let me know what you think in the comments :)
hardy retweeted
Gang rape was a traditional practice in parts of Australia (and possibly still is). One example is the initiation rite of introcision, where pubescent girls had their vaginas cut and were then forced to have sex with multiple men. 1/
(Image by Nicolas-Martin Petit, c. 1800)
hardy retweeted
Google’s NotebookLM is crazy good.
My mind is blown by the accuracy of the summary, the human voices, the banter, and the conversation. 🤯🤯
I gave it an 1,814 page CFPB Examination and Supervision Manual - one of the most boring topics for most.
It consumed those 1,800+ pages (imagine the context window size) and spit out a great conversation in a few mins.
I can’t distinguish it from a real podcast, it actually is than the ones out there.
I can’t imagine what the next 12 months will bring us.
hardy retweeted
I read this recent 'microplastics in the brain' article and I have a lot of questions. 🧵
My first story for @guardian / @thenewledenews:
Microplastics are turning up in more & more human organs — including the brain.
(Thread...)
theguardian.com/environment/…
