sgnelson

There's a lot of argument about whether or not the bomb should have been dropped, and that debate will go on forever.

And while the following is not as important as the decision to drop the bomb, I think the decisions to publish "Hiroshima" and how it was published (especially in 1946) is very much worth understanding. This was not a story the US Government did not want to get out.

The US military/government tried to hide many of the facts about what happened at Hiroshima/Nagasaki for various reasons (military secrecy was one, but I think hiding the true impacts of the horrors of the bomb from the American (and world) public was the big one.)

You can read about the coverup of the nuclear weapons impact on Hiroshima in the book "Fallout" by Lesley Blune: https://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/books/fallou...

And here's a short article that I quickly googled that discusses the story behind the story using "Fallout" as a reference: https://insidestory.org.au/the-making-of-john-herseys-hirosh...

FabAcademy which is the course taught by the same professor, but not part of MIT, includes a "wildcard" week where you can choose what to do. Many students will do embroidery using a embroidery machine. A number of final projects will also include sewing/textiles.

A friend of mine final project: https://fabacademy.org/2022/labs/charlotte/students/nidhie-d...

Also, as someone already mentioned, see fabricacademy.

Edit:

What about making a cast iron skillet from scratch? https://fabacademy.org/2024/labs/dilijan/students/shushanik-...

See https://fabacademy.org/ for the version of the MIT HTMAA class open to all. It's run by Neil Gershenfeld.

Also, the class documentation itself is not where the "cool" stuff is, it's in all the student documentation. Here is a list of all the students in this past years FabAcademy: https://fabacademy.org/2025/people.html

And here are some highlights for this years final projects: https://fabacademy.org/2025/highlights.html

And what I always really liked where the weekly highlights as well (I don't have a link handy at the moment, I'd often make notes for myself of different projects.)

woke = "something I don't like."

incompetence =/= corruption.

This is such a bad idea, I can't even...

That sounds interesting, I can't imagine such a thing being allowed. Can you tell us more about the program and what it involved?

One thing I've noticed over the past 20 years. At least in the United States, we need less "ditch diggers." This means that those who are less intellectually capable find it harder to get employment in a suitable position. I think this is an issue that needs to be addressed. But you know, I live here and now, so that ain't happening.

I personally think a balanced take is: It's a private school, and it's not the job of the Federal Government (especially personally directed by the President) to go after an educational institution for arbitrary and capricious reasons; just because he doesn't like a few of its policies and how a few of the students and professors behave.

I believe that is a balanced take. It's not about what Harvard is and is not doing. Harvard is a private school, they can do whatever they want. But when the Federal government goes after them for their internal policies, almost completely because the President personally doesn't like them, that is government overreach at it's worst.

It blows my mind that people are arguing over what Harvard's internal policies are instead of the fact that we're watching the Federal Government run roughshod all over the right to free speech.

But yeah, people will continue to say "Harvard sucks." I don't care if Harvard sucks. Harvard has the right to suck. It's not the Federal Governments job to ensure they don't suck. But it's somehow Harvard's fault for deserving this. "Small Government" My Ass. We are watching America become fasicist in real time. But let's continue to argue about a relatively small schools internal policies.

This is Fascism. With a Capital F.

Because this is not about tech, this is just politics. /s

One thing I've learned since last year; a lot of the tech bros seem to really love fascism. Many others go along to get along. And some hide behind a veneer of "impartiality" to continue to stay in their bubbles. Looking at you ycombinator/hackernews.

Things have changed, but some of these people love it; more money and power for themselves. Some are afraid of rocking the boat, and some choose to maintain willfull ignorance.

I feel like I'm living in a black mirror/silicon valley hybrid tv episode.

I'm still reading through the article, but as a teacher, I'm highly skeptical of the results of this meta study. My own observations do not support that ChatGPT et al improve learning performance and especially thinking.

As you can imagine, discussing AI in education is a huge topic. But seeing a study like this that just says "Yep, it's all good." I'm stupidly skeptical of this sort of meta-study. I very much believe the jury is out, and especially in terms of long term performance. I don't care if my students are able to use ChatGPT to "do better" in my classes if the results are short-lived.

A short review of my experiences; my bias, I am very much skeptical of the generative LLM's on the whole. I do fear it will become a crutch rather than a teaching tool. But I also use them, and I think it's amazing technology. I see it as a tool that will be used. And as it's a tool, like all tools, it can be used for good or bad.

For every amazing anecdote I have of a student using ChatGPT to do something amazing or using it as a personal tutor (and I have seen this and it's awesome.), I also have anecdotes about students relying on nothing but ChatGPT output, taking it as gospel, and imo, losing their research problem solving capabilities. I've taken to calling it the "Death of Research." "Why bother reading or looking for anything, ChatGPT will just give it to me."

I will say that I deal with STEM education, work mostly at a Community College in a trade, and as such, I'm exposed to a very different cohort of students that tend to be less computer literate, and are different in many ways than your traditional students. But I also work with high school students, who are very computer literate, and ironically, these are the students I see the problems with.

I'm not trying to say "AI Bad." But I sure don't buy the argument "AI Good."

There's something incredibly ironic to me about Uber staff fighting a return to office mandate, given that the actual laborers for uber don't have a work from home option what so ever. (also, do uber workers who have gotten used to working from home then take uber to their office?)

Serious question, after the past few months, how can anyone deny that America is heading in a totalitarian direction? Those of you who believe that all of the many actions that have happened in the past few weeks are "okay", please explain your perspective without resorting to "whataboutism" or cherry picking only one or two of the things that have occurred lately. Because from what I'm sitting, this is not behavior of a government based on democratic ideals.

SVG PCB is a similiar concept. The nice thing is that it allows both code and gui manipulation of the design.

https://leomcelroy.com/svg-pcb-website/#/home

I think it's telling that the WSJ felt that Thursday afternoon before a Holiday was a good time to release this article.

Is Elon head of Doge or not? This is one of the many tactics they use. "Oh, he's not the head of it" He just makes all the decisions...

I really wish someone would take this and combine it with true photogrammetry to supplement the photogrammetry rather than just try to replace traditional photogrammetry.

This type of thing would be the killer app for phone based 3d scanners. You don't have to have a perfect scan because this will fill in the holes for you.

There's no way that Panama is not preparing on sabotaging the canal. Yes, it can be repaired, but it'll probably take a year. And I'm sure that having the Panama Canal down for a year won't affect the American economy (nevermind the rest of the world's.)

Also, this article is clearly a "Diplomacy Through Media" article, with the intent of letting Panama know of the "options" they have, a) more US troops in Panama asserting some control over the canal, b) US Troops in Panama with complete control over the canal or c) US troops in Panama overthrowing the government and taking over the canal. What options!

But again, this seems like an intentional leak from the White House to put pressure on the Panamanian government. And like all things trump white house, it's heavy handed, unsubtle, and poorly done.

But now the Trump sycophants will come out and tell us how this is 4D Chess. At the same time screaming: Break up NATO! Stop supporting Ukraine! No more world police! No more foreign wars!

Yay America, well done in electing this a-hole.

( Except Panama, Greenland and Canada!)

aerospace in the US is very much NOT low workforce. It's quite the opposite. One of the highest employers of "traditional" manufacturing in some ways. I think you also underestimate how many employees are required for medical equipment manufacturing as well.

That's a real shame.

I haven't paid that much attention, but in my utopia, they would have received some funding from the CHIPS act just to act as a gateway for educating people on how to design and make chips. But we live here.

And now here we all are with the russian agents firmly entrenched in the GOP.

[citation needed]

I take it you've never heard of the Nine Dash line?

My answer is why not both? Is the end goal energy efficiency or making a product that works?

Mitutoyo isn't a monopoly, not even close. Just because a company offers a product that is arguably just slightly better in one aspect than others does not make it a monopoly. (I say this with a 10 year old pair of harbor freight calipers on my desk that easily have a 2 year battery life with regular usage. Also, Dial Calipers.)

But to answer your question, must they? No. Do they tend to be bad? Yes. Does their behavior get worse over time? Typically.

Citation Needed.

FYI, from 2017.

Also, Matt Keeter has some serious skills.

I always thought his Antimony CAD program[1] was neat, and sad that it seems to have died. I've yet to figure out how to get it to run on newer versions of linux (The last time I tried was about 3 years ago, and I was just using a raspberry pi.)

[1] https://www.mattkeeter.com/projects/antimony/3/

At first I was skeptical, but that's an impressive demo for such a small machine.

The documentation on your github is a tad lacking however. :)

But good luck on your machine, I like your CPAP fan idea.

While you may not take this as proof it affected this exact decision, it's hard to ignore it as a possible reason.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/10/amazon-wants-to-depose-presi...