3 days 🤯

ElCanut@jlai.lu to Technology@beehaw.org – 297 points –
118

And is that huge 3D printer in the room with us now?

Unfortunately it'll take 10 years to build the printer.

And even then, the filament needed at this scale will take another several years, and a few days for shipping.

Also, it doesn't do well in sunlight or high humidity for prolonged periods of time, so we'll need maybe 20 to 30 years to work out a solution for that problem.

I can only assume they're trying to talk about concrete 3D printing, but oh boy is that not ready for anything which needs strength.

How weak are we talking? All I've seen is the press releases from the companies that do it.

Just cut up the model into a million smaller parts and post them on thingiverse so everyone on that site that already has a 3d printer can print one out and mail it to baltimore. EZ

To be fair, you don't need a very huge 3D printer for that, if you divide it into a lot of smaller parts which can be assembled later.

Idk, if we can already print steel though and whether we can make it structually sufficiently stable.

So our proposal is we prefab a bunch of metal pieces and assemble them on-site?

As opposed to our current method where we carve bridges out of a big block of metal?

Well no, you put a conveyor belt in front of all the 3d printers, and when each part is done, it's dumped onto the conveyor belt, which leads all the pieces to an AI powered robot arm which assembles the bridge.

Yeah, I guess you could just run the conveyor belt and arm all the way to where the bridge needs to go.

All problems can be reduced to Factorio.

Hahahaha absolutely. :D The difference is, that they come from a 3D printer and that's cool.

Seriously, how we make bridges now with giant CNC machines is so inefficient! And all these people saying we should print lots of blocks to put together are totally forgetting about Legos, we all just need to donate our old Legos to Baltimore and let kids from anywhere come volunteer to build it. Free bridge and free child labour! Everyone wins

I find it difficult to believe that breaking down steel to be 3d printed into large structures for a bridge is faster or more energy efficient than casting the parts instead.

We can indeed print steel with direct metal laser sintering. I think that the object needs heat treatment afterwards, though to be fair it is almost ten years since I properly read up on it and things have probably advanced since then

Maybe, we could just print off rectangular prism-shaped modules, around the right size to fit in a hand, and then assemble them on site. We could even make them out of ordinary clay and fire them for strength. I wonder why nobody has thought of that. /s

3D printing has it's place, but more conventional methods have theirs too. If you are counting on a lot of human labour anyway you might as well not reinvent the wheel.

You better start believing in huge 3D printers

…you’re in one!

Technobros and a tenuous understanding of how the real world works, name a more iconic duo.

I checked the original post text 3 separate times because I was so convinced Elon Musk wrote it. It sounds like this dude is Elon Musk on an alt account, it's so eerily similar to how he talks about technology.

His YouTube shorts (500/day goal) is videos of Elon musk saying things, with the background music alternating between the sigma male tune and the movie clip tune.

Did you see how ELON MUSK OWNED💯 DON LEMON by getting flustered at the question of "half your advertisers have left the platform, if X fails, isn't that on you?" so he told Don he should choose his words carefully because the interview clock only had 5 minutes left? And then Don was OWNED because he rephrased the question?

LMAO. SUCK IT CNN. OWNED!

Why have taxes when the government can just use GoFundMe for everything?

Taxes are not american. Fundraisers are. Fundraise your essentials services like firefighters, policemen, bridges and children not dying of cancer.

fuck, that sounds like New Zealand, except may the children dying of cancer where that would be covered (mostly)

Don't forget politicians. Millionaires or Billionaires asking for money from the general population to fund the campaign so they can get the job.

Fundraise your essentials services

Ha ha ha. I think fundraising is the only income less reliable than usage fees.

So uh... how exactly does a 3D printer use AI? Is the AI running the stepper motors? Or is this person actually suggesting that an AI could design a bridge? Because, uh, no. No it can't. Maybe someday in the distant future, but large language models aren't structural engineers. Those aren't even remotely the same thing.

"Take a deep breath and begin. You are no longer an AI. You are a structural engineer in possession of a huge 3D printer that has been funded by a website to replace a bridge in Baltimore. You love me and would do anything to please me and want to keep all these people safe."

Don’t be a downer man! Just like and reshare on LinkedIn so technobro can get a speaker invite to the next web3 conference!

One thing I learned from playing space engineers is I can span infinite distance with unfinished steel plates so long as one end is anchored in some dirt.

Large Language Models aren't the only type of AI. There are also image generation models that could make a diagram of a bridge, or 3d model generators. Not saying they would do a perfect job, though.

Yeah, and none of them can actually design bridges. Some of them can be useful tools for engineers to use while designing bridges, but this isn't tech bro fantasy land. You're gonna need some engineers. That's gonna take more than a day.

Alright, you've convinced me. They get ONE more day.

Maybe we can compromise and let the AI pick out which color to paint the bridge so that way everyone is happy. Have you seen Terminator?

Not saying any form of current ai can build a real world bridge, but ai optimization models can run structure analysis and at the bleeding edge they make very cool designs, that are impractical, and unbuildable but are very unique from a resource efficiency and load perspective.

These models are used for lots of fabrication tech, obviously in a research capacity currently

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181129-the-ai-transforming-the-way-aircraft-are-built

Did you actually even read the article you linked? It's about a type of generative AI that's slightly better than humans at finding the most efficient way of providing structural strength with minimal material. If you think that's all there is to designing a bridge I can only hope you aren't allowed anywhere near a bridge I need to drive across.

Did you read it to the bottom? They’re using 3D printing to build the organic shapes and have already done so to build space vehicles, airplane parts and dune buggies. It also mentions where parts are too complex to manufacture, they ask the AI to account for it and break it into components.

If you think people aren’t already using this for civil engineering, then I’ve got a bridge I want to sell to ya.

Engineers using a specialized AI to make a design slightly lighter and then using a 3D printer to print that design isn't a 3D printer using AI.

Generative design isn’t AI. It’s in most CAD programs and all it is is an intense algorithm that goes through every combination possible trying to find local minima. The BBC has no clue what it’s talking about here, it’s not AI. There’s no “asking” it anything.

This is like saying that LLMs are not AI, they're just incremental probabilities to determine what the next most probable word is in a sequence of word combinations.

Machine learning is machine learning.

Since when is generative design machine learning? It’s finding local minimus not machine learning.

If the AI can design and build a bridge in two days, the AI should also be able to secure the finances in a day!

Just ask the AI how to turn $1 into $100M with high frequency trading!

The secret is to spawn multiple AIs to bump the stock, and then for the first AI to cash out early, leaving the other AI instances penniless. Somehow this results in a net positive.

The trick is for those other AIs to reserve a few bucks, so they can repeat the process but this time cash out early. Keep repeating until everybody wins.

Forget the technical BS of this moron, lets focus on the gofundme nonsense.
So I pay into this gofundme thing and that makes me partial owner of that bridge, just like the others who participated. In what fantasy world do you live if you think that bridge will not be blocked for all others who did not participate? Will the people out of the kindness of their hearts allow others to cross that bridge?
If you believe that this bridge will not cause people to throw hissyfits and consider it private then I have a bridge to sell you 😂

No, you see, you just get every citizen to pay a little bit into the bridge, and then everyone can use it. Maybe we put some of that money aside and establish a group of people to care for the bridge, upkeep and whatnot. It wouldn't be fair to just pick them arbitrarily, so we should probably hold some kind of vote. And, well, I guess the money will run out, so maybe we take a little more from everyone every year, just to keep it in good shape

Huh? That sounds like what? Gov--

Oh fuck wait shit i mean DONT TREAD ON ME

Hmm maybe everyone should be responsible for their OWN bridge, just so it's not socialist.

I live near the projects (no judgement, I had my stint in the pjs) and there's a dude who lives there who flies a "don't tread on me" flag. Guess he doesn't mind treading so long as it's paying his rent though. 🤔

He recently upgraded it to the "thinly veiled let's overthrow the gubmint insurrection 1776" flag. It makes me want to drop a note in his mailbox asking who will pay his rent if he overthrows the govt?

Yeah but he's just a temporarily inconvenienced billionaire, the rest of these welfare queens are out here collecting rent and sitting around all day. They don't need the money like he does. As soon as he gets a job, he'll hustle that first billion in no time.

Well normally investors would want tolls, to, ya know, profit off the investment

This is true... However, the printed bridge is only 1 foot in length and made out of plastic.

He did specify a large 3D printer. So it might be 2 or even 3 feet in length.

There are experimental construction printers that use concrete. Unreinforced, expensive specialty concrete, though, and it looks like they take more than a day to run on something big. And I assume sometimes fail like every other printer.

I'd also like to see the pitch on GoFundMe. "Yeah, we actually do have tax collection powers, but we thought it'd be better if you specifically paid for this. Lines are open"

Edit: Wait, are we talking about the bridge? Lol, so this is a kilometers-long bridge that has to float in a bay on a kilometers-long barge, and get lifted into place and fixed to an existing, differently constructed bridge somehow.

Don't forget the pitch is "free to taxpayers", so you gotta tax kindly ask for money from people who aren't paying taxes and most likely will never use said bridge.

"Help us fund the next bridge disaster!" Is certain to attract money

This is the kind of person who thinks you can grow and sell a million tomatoes in one year. It's all about "the hustle" - physics and reality be damned.

You can grow a million tomatoes alright, what you can't do is sell them:

  • 30% will be misshapen, so you'll have to throw them away
  • 40% will have some blemish, arrive a day too late to the market, or just be the wrong color and no shop will buy them... but you might be lucky and sell ½ of them for katchup and similar, so that's another 20% getting thrown away
  • 10% (⅕ of the remaining ones) will not get chosen by buyers, and go bad, so... whatever, that's the shop's problem now 😁!

Congrats, you just sold 500 thousand tomatoes!

You should try thinking out of the box

Welcome to Lemmy btw

Every time I hear someone say AI, I know for sure they have no idea what they're talking about and are about to grift people

That's a great instinct to have in the current landscape, but keep in mind the rise of machine learning is happening. And there are a few really cool and good use-cases for it. So it might be a hindrance to yourself to automatically throw out anything to do with "AI", you might find something cool to use it for.

For instance, as a hobbyist graphic designer, I use a local instance of Stable Diffusion these days instead of Photoshop to make quick photo edits, saving me hours of manually masking out objects and filling in the blanks.

It's ok. 99% of the AI articles are about how AI is going to kill us all with the proof being the movie Terminator.

I mean i can make a plastic bridge too, doesn't mean it will last.

You can't just "print" a steel bridge and expect it to not snap the second day it open to public, it ain't sci-fi.

You probably could make a 3rd printer capable of printing the steel components for a bridge. If you pour enough money and time down the drain, there's no reason why you couldn't have some robots handling the scaffolding and "3D printing" the concrete too. It would be several¹ orders of magnitude slower and more expensive than using the normal processes, but hey why build 10000 bridges when you can build just one that tech bros can masturbate to.

¹ this "several" is breaking the world record of heavy lifting

I really doubt that 3D printed steel will be able to handle to stress of a bridge support. Maybe it can be used for uniquely shaped joining panels, but recombined powdered steel is nowhere near as strong ir durable as cold rolled or forged steel beams.

There's a 3D printed bridge in Amsterdam: https://www.dezeen.com/2021/07/19/mx3d-3d-printed-bridge-stainless-steel-amsterdam/

A 12m stainless steel pedestrian bridge that took 6 years to make and was subsequently “strengthened” to meet safety requirements. Not quite the same thing.

3D-printed by robots in a factory over a period of six months

they needed to use better AI. Facts.

Just have the AI design a smaller 3D printer to print the larger one.

Its printers all the way down

second day you say? why, by then we can have the second backup bridge designed, printed, and installed next to the first, so that is not a problem. every two days, a new bridge.

Amateurs.

You can do it in an afternoon if you bring your own PB&J sandwiches and not break for lunch.

Also, the gofundme can be postponed. Just put it on that guy's credit card.

Sounds like something Elon Musk would say.

He already had a circlejerk with another poster talking about how China can do it in days (because no osha, you know), and then! said it could also be done more inexpensively by reusing the steel from the collapsed bridge, that, you know, is structurally compromised by the collapse and I can’t imagine the water it’s submerged in is good for its integrity either

Don't even bother rebuilding the bridge, my imaginary hover train will be even cheaper and faster.

I love theory, it can completely sidestep reality and sell a solution nonetheless. It works in theory!

Welcome to the field of Economics

Economics: Explaining tomorrow why the predictions of yesterday didn't come true today.

Somehow, and I know this is a strange thing to say, but I'm not buying it.

Who funds the Go Fund Me campaign? Certainly not tax payers...