Have the government only sell these in times of crisis. They're not competitors, but vendors of last resort. For general maintenance replacement, the gov should tell prospective buyers to take a hike.
I had to force myself to forget about rhino after they deprecated the only version I had a license to, and I moved off Windows, because I would have been destroyed if I realized what I had lost.
TLDR: Michael Gibson is the brain child for Rhino3D's UI.
Yup. I know some of this story.
It's been a minute, so I forget some details...
Ages ago, Robert McNeel & Assoc had been working on the geometry kernel for years. They had high value customers who needed very correct results, not available (from other kernels) at the time. By that time, being a VAR, McNeel had experience with most commercial offerings.
Not having their own front end, they had to import/export to other CADD systems. One of their motivations for reverse engineering AutoCAD's DWG format.
McNeel stumbled onto Sculptura. A mesh modeler written by a solo dev. As I remember it, Sculptura's UI was innovative, amazing, and norm breaking. Exactly what McNeel was looking for. They bought it asap. (Gods, I wish I could quickly remember that guy's name.)
McNeel's intent was to synthesize Sculptura's UI and their state of art kernel.
McNeel had the dual luxury of time and no installed base (legacy). Their initiative motivation was a correct kernel. Like correctly joining 3 curving surfaces. (Their canonical example at the time was to accurately model a styrofoam egg carton.) Which took years of R&D.
So they had time to really nail Rhino3D's UI.
Aha. I just found the official history. My memory wasn't too far off.
Michael Gibson! Yay! I now recall him grinding away on Rhino. Whenever I visited McNeel, he loved giving demos, talking about ideas, etc. Great guy. (We were both young, surrounded by olds, so had that connection.)
I grew up in Seattle and attended West Seattle High School. The technology teacher (whose name I forget, but I can remember his face and voice!) decided to teach us Rhino3d. That went on to me talking about Rhino on Slashdot one day and a digital book publishing startup noticed my comment, and eventually offered me a job of writing a book about Rhino.
I actually haven't used Rhino for much of anything for decades now, I think the last time I used it was to build a scale model of my old town home. I cannot really justify spending $1000 on a program that I would only boot up once every few months for fun. But I have kept love for it all these years, every time I have started it up (downloaded a trial to get some particular task done) I was able to continue right where I left off making things.
There are other substances that can be used for reactor coolant. Molten salt reactors are actually substantially more efficient than water-cooled reactors because they have a higher operating temperature. You can also use liquid metal as coolant, such as lead or bismuth.
> Being able to fly non-stop B-52 and B-2 sorties from home air bases with single-digit-hour flight times is a different thing entirely.
I agree with you in principle, but I worry that the United States hasn't been stockpiling enough ordinance to keep that up for very long at all. We don't keep many munitions factories on a hot standby either.
The history of technology is filled with examples where between two competing analogous products, the inferior always wins. It does not matter if it is only slightly inferior or extraordinarily inferior, both win out. It's often difficult to come up with counter-examples. Why is this? Economic pressure. "Inferior" costs less. Sometimes the savings are passed on to the customer... they choose the inferior. Other times the greedy corporate types keep all of it (and win simply because they outmarket the competitor). It does not matter.
If there are people who, on principle, demand the superior product then those people simply aren't numerous enough to matter in the long run. I might be one of those people myself, I think.
A few years from now, do you think, will anyone notice that all the customers who used to be able to afford the product have starved to death and sales are plummeting? Will they be sad or confused by this mystery?
Focus on making products/services for people that actually do have money to spend then.
A dimension people hate looking at is credit is far too easy in the US, which means too many companies are heavily optimized for extracting that money from people that didn’t really earn it in the first place. This means a lot of the smartest workers are preoccupied on the wrong things instead of helping advance society.
Careful there. You are not wrong, but you are not really correct either. Credit is a tool. Many people are using credit wrong and getting away with it because it is too easy. However that doesn't mean credit is a bad tool, just that it isn't used correctly.
Credit is a great tool if you get the value of the thing while you are paying for it. Paying for a car on credit (including insurance, taxes, fuel, maintenance...) is a great idea if you get the car payment worth of value (including what it does for your ego - if you are honest that is why you have it) from having a car every month , paying for a car on credit that you don't get the payments worth of value from is a waste. Similar for a house - I plan to live in this house for the next 10+ years, so I shouldn't pay for it all up front.
Most things though don't give value over time worth their payment. I don't get a payments worth of value from having gone on vacation a few months ago, so I should have paid for that up front (which I did but many do not). I like musical instruments, but I can't be sure to get $100/month of value out of my fumbling playing (or having them for my ego) so I won't buy them on credit.
You can't take it with you, so no sense in dieing with a mattress full of cash (unless that really is worth it to you). You should have some rainy day savings. Most things in life get value today only and should be paid for today.
If I could buy this to run it locally, what's that hardware even look like? What model would I even run on the hardware? What framework would I need to have it do the things Claude Code can do?
Age 12-14, pick a number in between that works for your group's culture and stick with it. Everything else is pseudo-scientific horseshit, and artificially raising the number past this range causes more harm than good.
The biggest impediment to tracking law via git is that you can't commit anything with a timestamp before the unix epoch. And law almost certainly requires the historical antecedents in the repo too, if it's going to be useful.
It's sort of funny to think about how you'd format Thomas Jefferson's email address so that he could be credited as the author of this article or that amendment. I bet someone's already figured out how to do that though.
If these LLMs were trained on internet forum posts, think about how those work.
If the posts talked about third party interactions (movie characters), they try to see everything from all the points of view. If nothing else, because it can be interesting to talk about. If instead the posts talk about personal interactions, then people go into advice mode. Your girlfriend's bad for you and cheating on you, dump her before she dumps you. Your neighbors are assholes, get a restraining order. Your boss is sabotaging you, stand up for yourself so you can get a promotion. When people talk about interactions you have had yourself, they always see the other person as the villain, unless you come across as so unlikable that they hate you and see the other person as the victim.
reply