Leipzig is a bit more progressive/alternative, so I can see such a initiative to work out in the right place, but I doubt that today this is still a big thing? Lots of construction and modernisation going on in the city.
And where do you get in the woods all the other mass produced parts needed for a drone, like chips, sensors, engine, battery, ..?
Unfortunately 3d printers ain't replicators yet.
So yeah, if you have special needs, modifying a special ops drone, or simple part printing, they are great.
> Its printers are now used across Ukraine, with frontline print farms producing vital equipment and components where they are needed most.
This is your typical "ackchyually" meme, people facing adversity in real life don't care about your theoretical pros and cons, they just do their things
3D printing will remain constrained by fragile centralized supply chains for feedstock until someone develops an effective practical decomposer/recomposer that can break down common plastics into their constituent monomers, oligomers, or other reusable chemical building blocks and then reform them into high-quality filament or resin on demand.
And then, the next step for deco/reco will be the metal frontier.
Unless you think you're only going to need a couple spools to get the job done before never using the thing again.
> But for mass producing a solid design, 3D printing is the worst solution, because it is slow. Injection molding would be the fast (and cheap) way.
~10 years ago I was really into designing my own "drones" (but the kind that don't kill people) and I primarily used a CNC machine (Shapeoko 3).
Multirotor vehicles are a good match for designs that are a series of mostly flat plates connected via simple standoffs and you can knock those out really quick with a CNC machine.
Injection molding is certainly much better than 3D printing for scale, but CNC is a nice middle ground that allows for quick manufacture while still having a lot of the same flexibility for iterative design that you get with 3D printing.
CNC is a terrible choice if you’re making flat plates or can modify your design to use flat plates + basic bends and stand offs. Laser or water jet are significantly faster and cheaper.
> CNC is a terrible choice if you’re making flat plates or can modify your design to use flat plates + basic bends and stand offs. Laser or water jet are significantly faster and cheaper.
Laser cutters and waterjets are CNC machines.
And yeah they are generally faster than using a drill, but cheaper is situation specific (can be, depending upon the scale).
3d printers are also CNC. My impression is that people often use the term to mean CNC mill. Much like "drone" implies "quadcopter" despite the existence of other very different types of "drone".
"Maybe we need yet another word for this kind of development."
I am fine with vibe coding by now. It captures the spirit quite well, if the vibe of the direction is good, you have a rush with one shotting amazing features - if the vibe is gone, it became a slob hell with the model going in circles. But this is not random for me, but depends how much I follow the architectural decisions (and not "great, go on"). So I would rather introduce "slob coding", for mindless prompting without control of what is happening.
I want this to be a distinction too, vibe coding with benchmarks and evals and making good architectural decisions for the LLM coder based on them takes a lot of mental energy and engineering insight. I've been making a voice agent and Claude's initial attempts were all based on best practices from two years ago. I had to do a lot of paper reading and research consolidation to get any kind of consistent, useable quality results.
"Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically."
"Pretty sure it's also an excuse to keep the bomb squad and evacuation procedures in practice."
Definitely not in this eastern part of germany where I live. Every major construction needs to check for bombs, but it also happens randomly that a excavator finds a bomb.
There were just a looot of bombs dropped. (And they don't always move it, often it is too rusty also to defuse and then controlled explosion if the surroundings allow it (they use lots of water bags on top, witnessed it once))
>Definitely not in this eastern part of Germany where I live.
A farmer or construction worker (or at least one outside of Germany or any other culture famed for incessant rule following) only needs to watch the bomb squad guy rip a shell out of the ground with a shovel and no specific care given once before they realize it's best if they just do that damn job themselves and avoid the hassle.
Hm, but they maybe know when it is safe to do so, because they immediately recognize the device and know there is no mechanical fuze that can go off by handling it rough.
Because that can happen. And if they know, it still can go wrong.
From TFA:
"In June 2010, three bomb-disposal experts in Göttingen, Germany, were killed by a 500kg American bomb found beneath the site of a new sports arena. "
> only needs to watch the bomb squad guy rip a shell out of the ground with a shovel and no specific care given once before they realize it's best if they just do that damn job themselves
Do you apply this logic to surgery, engineering, etc.?
"The expert makes it look easy, therefore it must be easy."
I know it's really easy to make this out to be big and scary and complex from your ivory tower but the person doing this has already seated a tractor tire with starting fluid, used a forklift as a work platform, welded up the leak on the air compressor and half a dozen other things that you said would kill them that day and it's not even noon. Using the leaf blower and a broom to dig an artillery shell that didn't go off 5min ago when you hit it with a piece of machinery isn't that much of a stretch. These people live in a different (better) world than you.
Please make sure they put your HN username in the obit so I can read it from the “don’t touch the unstable WWII bomb without knowing how to manage it” ivory tower.
None of what you listed implies familiarity with bombs. They did not said that farmers are dumb, they said they are not experts on safe bomb destruction.
I never said they were familiar. I said that the realities of their daily lives mean they don't really care about what the same people who fill the internet comments with sneering takes about how all sorts of mundane things these people do is wrong or unsafe. They simply don't care what you or I or anyone else here thinks.
Regardless, farmers across the EU pull thousands of tons of shells out of the ground every spring. They, as a demographic, have infinitely (because anything is infinitely more than zero) more experience than some out of touch office workers who read the official recommendations the local bomb squad writes up and screech about the fact that nobody follows them.
Reality of the farmers life mean they do not care about potential WWII bomb exploding while they are right there? There is difference between a shell (a projectile) and a bomb. And reality across EU is that farmers and construction workers do care about not blowing themselves up.
Frankly, the only out of touch person here is you - likely office worker who imagine that all farmers are irrational macho men. And someone who genuinely thinks that if some safety rules are skipped for comfort, then surely most will try to hit the bomb with random equipment to see whether it blows.
"A junior engineer who has only ever used LLMs to write code and create architectures does not just not have that experience but also won't acquire it."
My ego tends to agree, that how can they be ever competent, if they have not endured the same hardships as I had crunching trough problems and getting allmost lost in the details.
But I rather suspect, they will turn out fine. I know LLMs are great for me to learn and I think the young generation will learn what they need to learn to get the job done.
Because keeping all the easy things coordinated and understanding the big picture is still a hard task yet unsolved by LLM's?
But yeah, who knows what happens once that change. I assume even after the singularity, it still makes sense, that we train some people to know what is going on ..
"what actually helped was writing down what I wanted"
Hehe, I would say you started with becoming a developer
"and batching small fixes together."
And this works even better, if the fixes are related. Agentic coding is all about context. If you fill it with too much unrelated stuff, only garbage comes out. And then it goes in circles until it randomly achieves something and moves on.
ha, maybe I did by accident. and yes, "related" is the key word. my worst evenings were the ones where I threw three unrelated things at it at once and got all three half done.
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