A Civil 3D plugin (Genabler) that will include all the network catalogs and collate the Civil 3D styles for civil engineers to use. There are some out-of-the-box catalogs and styles shipped with the default installation, but they are quite limited and fairly well hidden—which is not surprising, given that Civil 3D is a huge beast. As a result, they are not commonly used.
When people think about Civil 3D, they often assume it requires BIM modelers (in a sense, just glorified drafters) to create all the necessary catalogs and styles, and to assist with their use.
My Civil 3D plugin will:
1. Make standard, market-compliant catalogs and polished styles available to engineers at large. Think of it as the WordPress theme provider equivalent.
2. Make the entire process easy and painless through the plugin, with prominent buttons for quick access.
If the plugin is done well, there will be less need for BIM modelers, since for a fee, engineers could simply purchase catalogs and styles that are so easy to use they require no technical training.
As a side benefit, I also get to explore how LLMs can help me write code. It has been a while since I last updated my AI usage policy [0], and I look forward to revisiting it.
I think the fact that DeepSeek trains on competitor queries (i.e., distillation) — along with using banned Nvidia chips — helps explain how it can achieve such low training costs (USD 6 million vs. billions) while delivering only slightly worse performance than its American counterparts. It also undermines the narrative that DeepSeek or China is posing a serious challenge to the U.S. lead in AI. The gap may be closing, but the initial reactions now seem knee-jerk.
That the discussion has being hijacked and shifted to moral superiority is really unfortunate, because that was never the point in the first place.
These models never cost billions to train and I doubt the final training run for models like GPT-4 cost more than 8 figures. 6 million is definitely cheaper and I would attribute that to distillation.
A lot of people attack US for banning the chip sale to China, but the reality is that the ban is two way. Not only US bans advanced chips, China also severely limits US chips in the hopes that it can spur the homegrown ones. In fact, the first sentence says it much
Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek has relied on Nvidia Corp. chips that are banned in the country
I have two niche blogs( civilwhiz.com and mes100.com). Those bot traffics increase my visitor count in Google analytics by more than 100%. It's super annoying when the analytics are distorted by bots traffic.
One thing I’m curious about is this: Ilya Sutskever wants to build Safe Superintelligence, but he keeps his company and research very secretive.
Given that building Safe Superintelligence is extraordinarily difficult — and no single person’s ideas or talents could ever be enough — how does secrecy serve that goal?
If he (or his employees) are actually exploring genuinely new, promising approaches to AGI, keeping them secret helps avoid a breakneck arms race like the one LLM vendors are currently engaged in.
Situations like that do not increase all participants' level of caution.
Doesn't sound like you listened to the interview. He addresses this and says he may make releases that would be otherwise held back because he believes it's important for developments to be seen by the public.
No reasonable person would do that! That is, if you had the key to AI, you wouldn't share it and you would do everything possible to prevent it's dissemination. Meanwhile you would use it to conquer the world! Bwahahahaaaah!
Case 1:
You're a high performer, one year into the role. A colleague, who's been around longer but struggled, gets promoted not necessarily on merit, but on their ability to manage up. Your early contributions are quietly absorbed into their promotion case. Once they step into a managerial role, the dynamics shift. Unless you stay quiet and compliant, you’re suddenly less welcome in the team.
Case 2: High Performers:
Some managers (even partners) feel threatened when team members build credibility with clients. I’ve seen situations where a client repeatedly requesting a specific consultant backfired on that consultant. At year-end reviews, client recognition turned into a liability, not an asset.
Credit Allocation:In some Big 4 setups, CRM credit allocation is less about contribution and more about visibility and tagging. Accounts are assigned to partners who may not actively engage, yet receive full credit. Technical sales teams, who drive actual deals but don't "own" accounts, often find their impact diluted. In some cases, partners even tag themselves as "owners" of said accounts mid-pursuit to claim credit post-close. At the year end, the actual deal closers are usually running around begging partners for credit. You might end up getting 30% of what you actually closed. This works well for partners as incentives outflow is reduced leaving money on the table.
Event Marketing Shell Game:
Large-format partner-led events in places like Goa or Dubai are positioned as knowledge exchange and brainstorming events. Behind the scene Sales teams are pushed hard to invite prospects where the engagement has been going on for months. When those deals close weeks/months later, the event organizers often claim the outcome; regardless of who did the heavy lifting.
>>You're a high performer, one year into the role. A colleague, who's been around longer but struggled, gets promoted not necessarily on merit, but on their ability to manage up.
Its honestly mostly like a queue, you can't see why people who came before should get a early exit. But those people had people before them too, and thought the same. Now that you arrived, you think your specific case be prioritised above them for merits you think count above theirs and not necessarily their place in the queue.
As much as we all think we are special, we mostly aren't, time and queue position plays a huge role in most things in the society.
Its pointless to fight the queue system, most events in life happen in an order, and its pointless to fight cause-effect sequences. Some exceptions to this absolutely exist, but this is the general rule.
>>At year-end reviews, client recognition turned into a liability, not an asset.
Do not outshine the master - 48 laws of power
Remember the system is a part of the game, if you threaten someone you will take their job, its in their interest now to see through the end of you.
More like Dave has been pushing up sacks of really valuable things up a hill, for years.
Jack who just arrived and pushed ONE sack up slightly faster than Dave, in the first week, thinks he must be promoted above Dave right then and there. Or its oppression.
To start with accept this thing first. Its human fallacy to confuse making rapid changes to a process as making fast progress. In reality sticking to one thing for long is what brings the big progress.
You might want to talk to martial arts people, stock investors/traders, musicians, surgeons, or anyone for that matter.
Someone who shows up on the 10001th morning, is not the same as some one who showed up on the 100th morning, even if the latter is some performing better creating a his own personal local maxima.
Very good retort. I will insist both things happen and our views on it probably come down to life experience and current position.
I've too often seen Dave praised for carrying sacks day in day out instead of placing them on the goddamn conveyor belt. Some have come to doubt the conveyor belts utility when we could all just be carrying the sacks. In fact if we got rid of the conveyor belt we could hire our cousin and brother-in-law to be cool like Dave.
I want to be proven wrong, but I feel that demographic collapse is the single biggest crisis facing the developed world today. In this regard, the US is actually doing better than East Asian countries and Europe, but the trend is unmistakable — modern, affluent states are committing voluntary suicide because their citizens are simply not willing to have children.
Generally, populations with higher birth rates come from poorer countries or communities with lower living standards. Israel is the only major exception, but once you analyze the social strata it becomes clear why: higher-income groups still have lower fertility than the religious ones (especially the ultra-Orthodox and Arab Muslims) by a wide margin, even though the higher-income groups still have higher birth rates than other OECD countries. This creates long-term strains on society.
Another interesting fact is that groups with higher socioeconomic status (SES) tend to have lower birth rates. If SES correlates with IQ, then there’s an uncomfortable but politically incorrect implication: the smarter groups are having fewer children, while the less advantaged groups are having more. A few generations later, it’s not hard to see where this leads — human intelligence may trend downward. That is simply evolution at work.
Climate change, wars, pandemics, and natural disasters won’t wipe out humanity; we’ve survived all of those and recovered. But demographic collapse driven by high living standards is new territory, and I am genuinely, deeply worried.
You can have a spiral of bad economic decisionmaking through demographic biases in natalism, but that's likely to be a product of cultural transmission, not of any biological property of intelligence, which is mean-reverting and only dubiously and marginally correlated with genetic variation.
Which is to say, you can make the point you're making without going out on a politically (and probably scientifically) incorrect limb.
Yes thank you. The concept of Natural Selection has a lot more dependencies and complications than typically attributed. Especially for a complex outcome like “intelligence” or economic success.
Demographic collapse paired with high fertility for scientifically illiterate religious groups (Like the amish, who have a fertility rate of over 6) might still pair terribly with climate change driven by positive feedback loops (like methane leaking from thawing permafrost). We'll lose the technological and state capacity needed to mitigate & adapt while the global climate slowly trends towards an uninhabitable equilibrium.
China is now encouraging higher birth rates after many years of the one-child policy. But the general consensus is that it hasn’t been very successful, even with the CCP’s authoritarian power. The causes are multi-dimensional and difficult to solve: high living costs, changing social values, and younger generations who no longer want to marry young—or marry at all.
Even North Korea has to encourage women to give birth[0]; the Kim dynasty can’t simply issue an order and shoot anyone who disobeys. It simply doesn’t work that way.
The CCP has not really exercised its authoritarian power to raise birth rates yet because it's not a big enough problem and might never become one.
The birth rate fell in North Korea because people are genuinely starving, whereas in other places it's mostly because of birth control. These are not comparable situations.
A Civil 3D plugin (Genabler) that will include all the network catalogs and collate the Civil 3D styles for civil engineers to use.
There are some out-of-the-box catalogs and styles shipped with the default installation, but they are quite limited and fairly well hidden—which is not surprising, given that Civil 3D is a huge beast. As a result, they are not commonly used.
When people think about Civil 3D, they often assume it requires BIM modelers (in a sense, just glorified drafters) to create all the necessary catalogs and styles, and to assist with their use.
My Civil 3D plugin will:
1. Make standard, market-compliant catalogs and polished styles available to engineers at large. Think of it as the WordPress theme provider equivalent.
2. Make the entire process easy and painless through the plugin, with prominent buttons for quick access.
If the plugin is done well, there will be less need for BIM modelers, since for a fee, engineers could simply purchase catalogs and styles that are so easy to use they require no technical training.
As a side benefit, I also get to explore how LLMs can help me write code. It has been a while since I last updated my AI usage policy [0], and I look forward to revisiting it.
It's a shame that the top comments are focusing more on Elon Musk, his personality and politics rather than the quality of the model per se.
Speaking about Elon, regardless of what you think of him, he really does get things done, despite naysayers -- SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink and even get Trump elected ( despite subsequent fallout) etc. Even Twitter is finding a second life by becoming a haven for the free speech advocates and alternative views, much to the chagrin of MSMs because they now no longer have the monopoly on the "truth", and censoring "fake news" becomes hard.
People like Elon are almost by definition contrarian ( you don't change the world by being a conformist), that should align well with the predilection of the intended audience here. So it's a surprise to me that HNs are almost uniformly, vehemently anti-Musk. It's almost as if the ultimate embodiment of the hacker spirit -- Musk -- is being rejected by his own kind, the very kind that he is supposed to inspire.
> Even Twitter is finding a second life by becoming a haven for the free speech advocates and alternative views, much to the chagrin of MSMs because they now no longer have the monopoly on the "truth"
Of all the silly things to say about Musk and Twitter, the idea that “MSM” are upset about Twitter is among the silliest.
In my understanding of the hacker ethos, hackers appear to be genuinely nice people who mean to do good for society and regular people. Elon does not align with those values according to some people so they reject him and his activities.
Accusing a cave diver who made Elon look stupid to be a pedophile just because Elon can’t stand people not thinking he is the smartest? Can give more examples.
Besides the obvious right wing interference in politics, star link weaponization in some countries - how can anybody stomach the saving-humanity-agenda while running a major social media unresponsiveliy without caring of moderation, its consequences for real people?
I think the lack of moderation is a feature not a bug. People actually get to express themselves freely, very unlike the sterile feeling you get from mainstream social media, with content engineered for maximum engagement and political correctness for maximum ad revenue.
Because someone's moderation is censorship to someone else. Begging Musk for free speech is another issue in itself though so you better don't bet on X allowing you to speak forever.
Free speech is one of these things that is always used as a trojan for doing ultimate good.
Let us empower anybody to say anything they want AND enforce everybody to have to listen to it.
Anonymous free speech is not free speech. There is no accountability. It should not should not be a human right. Its destroying our societies. The evidence should be clear by now.
Say what you will about Stalin, but he really did win World War II and liberate his people from the yoke of fascism. Say what you will about the Kim family, but they really stood up to the world’s greatest superpower and held their own. Say what you will about Pol Pot, but he gave everyone an appreciation for rural life.
People, if you’re going to start a sentence hero worshipping an asshole with “say what you will”, you have to realise that anyone can be lionised, no matter how they are. No one with any sense thinks Elon Musk is a good person and you’re not convincing anyone with your “say what you will”.
But Tesla != Musk. He wasn't actually a founder, he bought his way in, and demanded that everyone agree he was a "founder".
Not to mention the huge numbers of real scientists working over the decades to improve battery tech to the point where it was obvious that electric cars were going to be viable.
We shouldn't praise Musk for taking credit for other people's work.
Really? Most of the stuff he promised never materialized. Elon's genius is that he learned where the money comes from. Both Tesla and Space X where financed by gov. money. That's why he supported Trump and that's why he keeps pumping the stock. He goes directly to the source.
My Civil 3D plugin will:
1. Make standard, market-compliant catalogs and polished styles available to engineers at large. Think of it as the WordPress theme provider equivalent.
2. Make the entire process easy and painless through the plugin, with prominent buttons for quick access.
If the plugin is done well, there will be less need for BIM modelers, since for a fee, engineers could simply purchase catalogs and styles that are so easy to use they require no technical training.
As a side benefit, I also get to explore how LLMs can help me write code. It has been a while since I last updated my AI usage policy [0], and I look forward to revisiting it.
[0]: https://civilwhiz.com/my-ai-usage-policy/
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