a network of tunnels and sensors is easier to defend than a open space exposed position where drones can see you from miles away, I guess that makes tunnels better for defense
Given that we have bunker busters that will travel beyond the horizon at hypersonic speeds and bust 200 feet of reinforced concrete...
I don't think any fixed installation is particularly easy to defend?
Also, I'll grant that a drone can see you from miles away, but don't you think any one of a large and growing number of satellites can spot your massive earthworks from tens and hundreds of miles away for the months or years it takes you to construct?
When my wife was diagnosed with cancer and eventually went into remission, I didn’t really process what was happening at first. I was completely focused on getting her through it. The grief hit me later.
What helped me more than anything was going out into the garden and digging. I made sure to do it safely, since I know it can be risky, so I dug wide and with wooden supports, but there was something about just digging and digging down that let me work through all the darkness that had built up in my head. It gave those feelings somewhere to go.
This is unrelated, but I wonder if I did actually hit on something primal in myself.
> For Cray, the excavation project is more than a simple diversion. "I work when I'm at home," he recently told a visiting scientist. "I work for three hours, and then I get stumped, and I'm not making progress. So I quit, and I go and work in the tunnel. It takes me an hour or so to dig four inches and put in the 4-by-4s. Now, as you can see, I'm up in the Wisconsin woods, and there are elves in the woods. So when they see me leave, they come into my office and solve all the problems I'm having. Then I go back up and work some more."
> Rollwagen knows that Cray is only half kidding and that some of the designer's greatest inspirations come when he is digging. Says the chairman: "The real work happens when Seymour is in the tunnel."
I think the “primal urge” to dig is just really seeking the endorphins of manual labor. Digging like that is especially attractive because there’s little planning (unless you’re making a tunnel like the subject here) and no material investment but the earth beneath your feet.
One of my sisters had four boys (and no girls) and during summers they would drive her crazy with their boredom. When they were about ages 8-14 one summer she said: go in the back yard and see how big of a hole you can dig.
Wide-eyed they said: really? She said yes, dig as much as you want, but the only rule is it all gets filled in before school starts in the fall. 30 years later they say it was the best summer ever. Every day they were working on it and all of their friends would come by and help dig and plan what development would come next.
How deep did they get? Hope she kept an eye on it, unsupported holes quickly get dangerous, people underestimate how much weight is in the soil if the sides give out and just how dangerous that amount of weight moving can be.
It was more sprawling than deep. It was a series of trenches connecting "rooms". I know they also had "water features" at some points, but the water would soak into the ground pretty quickly then be a mess for a few days, so they didn't do that.
No collapses happened and everyone is still alive. :-)
Happy that all's well that ends well, but for any parents considering this, trench collapses have killed hundreds of workers in just the past decade. Anything deeper than a couple feet might be a hazard that needs to be mitigated.
You can get the same endorphins with exercise, but you don't get to see the results of your work. It's so much more satisfying when you can clearly see your progress. Playing in sandboxes or digging holes in your yard is a game, but manual labor alone is often just work.
Joking aside, I too have spent many days digging with a shovel and pickaxe on my desert property. There's something to it, even Jim Keller (of DEC, AMD, Tenstorrent...) has discussed digging trenches in some of his podcast interviews.
This article/video really rubs me the wrong way. These strawmen who are being torn down for the most part aren't building "tunnels". They're building glorified 8-10ft foundations and basements with dirt over the top instead of structures, 1970s hippie "underground homes" basically. They're calling them tunnels and bunkers for clicks and views.
To then take that naming at face value and pontificate about code and engineering is very much a two slights of hand not making a right situation. Furthermore, a civil engineer doing so is deep into "man won't understand what his salary depends on him not understanding" territory.
I know that the many HNers from the seismically active portions of the US will have no frame of reference for this but there are portions of the world where for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years basements were built with less than scant engineering. The sort of "just barely below dirt" construction most of these amateurs are engaging in is on that order of complexity. Based on my observations via Youtube, these amateurs should be more scared of their own temporary construction rigging and material handling solutions than the forces their structures must hold back.
The primary practical engineering challenge and hazard these structures face is that there's nothing stopping someone from driving a point load of undefined size over the top and that has serious implications for roof strength.
As they say, the rules are written in blood. I don't think we should be disqualifying projects because they are not Mponeng-scale or complexity.
I am not a civil engineer, but I did spend a bunch of time looking into building an underground range. Way more relaxed life safety reqs, smaller bore, etc. However, when you start reading, it is clear that much of the work is empirical, heavily localized and based on a great deal on the experience of the builder. I found very little in the way of solid theoretical modeling, but lots of measure, adjust, etc.
I think Grady does a reasonable job highlighting the dangers and risks.
Basically nobody ever died from leaky pipes or substandard weatherproofing. The code is as much about a) homogenizing the industry so big business can statistically reason about it at scale b) turning the subjective into the quantitive so that things can be done, checked, sight off on, etc, etc, without anyone using "judgement" as it is about protecting life and limb. Just about every professional has a laundry list of complaints about their area of code that boil down to it being theoretically useful but at great "not worth it" expense or a similar "not worth it" expense being incurred in lieu of very basic judgement. Arc fault breakers, and engineering requirements for small retaining walls come to mind as oft cited examples. And of course there's the myriad of wrangling that goes on wherein things get looser/stiffer requirements depending on whether their use is deemed worth incentivizing (this stuff usually lives in local addendums to the code).
I'm not saying there isn't value in there, but this habit people have of acting like it's all relevant to safety and screeching about "written in blood" is exactly what creates room for unrelated stuff to exist in the code.
>However, when you start reading, it is clear that much of the work is empirical, heavily localized and based on a great deal on the experience of the builder. I found very little in the way of solid theoretical modeling, but lots of measure, adjust, etc.
Which is a point very much in favor of the amateur.
I know you're probably intending to only remark on leaky water pipes, but:
The New London School explosion was caused by a leaky pipe. It killed 295 students and teachers, and led to the inclusion of smelly thiol in natural gas, as well as the Texas Engineering Practice Act.
A drip or stream from a leaky pipe isn't gonna do it. You need to get the bacteria into the respiratory tract to get legionaires disease. And even then a specific temperature water is necessary for it to grow.
A dehumidifier (or an HVAC system, which is where the name of the disease came from) is more likely to give you legionnaires disease than even the most substandard plumbing.
> Basically nobody ever died from leaky pipes or substandard weatherproofing
Famously, moist wet areas only grow molds that are safe for humans to live amongst, and absolutely never rotted away wooden structural components of a building.
We love engineer Kala. She decided to do a thing, while marking progress on her "technology tree" of skills gained by (very arguable) necessity. Dealing with permits and city beuaracracy seems like one of the hardest parts!
> Cray avoided publicity. There are a number of unusual tales about his life away from work, termed "Rollwagenisms", from then-CEO of Cray Research, John A. Rollwagen. Cray enjoyed skiing, windsurfing, tennis, and other sports. Another favorite pastime was digging a tunnel under his home; he attributed the secret of his success to "visits by elves" while he worked in the tunnel: "While I'm digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem."
Seymour Cray down in the tunnels, communing with the Machine Elves.
Great content for the upcoming drone wars and the inevitable tunnels that will be built for troop and matériel movements
What makes you think a tunnel would be safe? Just need to re-purpose this little guy:
https://blog.sintef.com/digital-en/inachus-project-robot-sea...
the operator of those would get hit by an aerial drone from one of the other tunnel exits
a network of tunnels and sensors is easier to defend than a open space exposed position where drones can see you from miles away, I guess that makes tunnels better for defense
Given that we have bunker busters that will travel beyond the horizon at hypersonic speeds and bust 200 feet of reinforced concrete...
I don't think any fixed installation is particularly easy to defend?
Also, I'll grant that a drone can see you from miles away, but don't you think any one of a large and growing number of satellites can spot your massive earthworks from tens and hundreds of miles away for the months or years it takes you to construct?
Makes me think the noble houses of Westeros should have dug tunnels to foil the Targaryen dragon advantage.
they did - that's why dorne was never conquered
I can’t wait till world models are good enough that you can ask robots to work autonomously to geo transform spaces.
Claude, please destroy nature.
At this point we have too much free time on our hands x_x
google ai estimates that 4.7 billion hours have been spent in minecraft. At least these are real :)
When my wife was diagnosed with cancer and eventually went into remission, I didn’t really process what was happening at first. I was completely focused on getting her through it. The grief hit me later.
What helped me more than anything was going out into the garden and digging. I made sure to do it safely, since I know it can be risky, so I dug wide and with wooden supports, but there was something about just digging and digging down that let me work through all the darkness that had built up in my head. It gave those feelings somewhere to go.
This is unrelated, but I wonder if I did actually hit on something primal in myself.
I figure if Seymore Cray thought digging was useful for mental hygiene it's probably ok:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_tunneling
https://web.archive.org/web/20080521163217/http://www.time.c...
> For Cray, the excavation project is more than a simple diversion. "I work when I'm at home," he recently told a visiting scientist. "I work for three hours, and then I get stumped, and I'm not making progress. So I quit, and I go and work in the tunnel. It takes me an hour or so to dig four inches and put in the 4-by-4s. Now, as you can see, I'm up in the Wisconsin woods, and there are elves in the woods. So when they see me leave, they come into my office and solve all the problems I'm having. Then I go back up and work some more."
> Rollwagen knows that Cray is only half kidding and that some of the designer's greatest inspirations come when he is digging. Says the chairman: "The real work happens when Seymour is in the tunnel."
Winston Churchill famously used to build brick walls to deal with the "black dog" of depression.
How much did you excavate?
I think the “primal urge” to dig is just really seeking the endorphins of manual labor. Digging like that is especially attractive because there’s little planning (unless you’re making a tunnel like the subject here) and no material investment but the earth beneath your feet.
One of my sisters had four boys (and no girls) and during summers they would drive her crazy with their boredom. When they were about ages 8-14 one summer she said: go in the back yard and see how big of a hole you can dig.
Wide-eyed they said: really? She said yes, dig as much as you want, but the only rule is it all gets filled in before school starts in the fall. 30 years later they say it was the best summer ever. Every day they were working on it and all of their friends would come by and help dig and plan what development would come next.
How deep did they get? Hope she kept an eye on it, unsupported holes quickly get dangerous, people underestimate how much weight is in the soil if the sides give out and just how dangerous that amount of weight moving can be.
It was more sprawling than deep. It was a series of trenches connecting "rooms". I know they also had "water features" at some points, but the water would soak into the ground pretty quickly then be a mess for a few days, so they didn't do that.
No collapses happened and everyone is still alive. :-)
Happy that all's well that ends well, but for any parents considering this, trench collapses have killed hundreds of workers in just the past decade. Anything deeper than a couple feet might be a hazard that needs to be mitigated.
You can get the same endorphins with exercise, but you don't get to see the results of your work. It's so much more satisfying when you can clearly see your progress. Playing in sandboxes or digging holes in your yard is a game, but manual labor alone is often just work.
You found your chew toy.
Joking aside, I too have spent many days digging with a shovel and pickaxe on my desert property. There's something to it, even Jim Keller (of DEC, AMD, Tenstorrent...) has discussed digging trenches in some of his podcast interviews.
Article really needs some sub headings or images - just anything to help situate where you are in case you navigate away from where you were reading.
The article is a transcript of the video at the top of the page.
Grady's videos are quite impressive to watch.
There are people like myself who prefer to read at our own pace, even skim the article and look at pictures. Video sucks.
Okay but that's not what this is. It's a YouTube channel. A very well known one in fact.
I could have swore there was an accompanying blog with pictures at some point.
I prefer text too but this channel is just amazing..
Obligatory shoutout to Engineer Kala
Completely offtopic, but my first reaction was this song.
Enjoy for those who would enjoy such things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34CZjsEI1yU
This article/video really rubs me the wrong way. These strawmen who are being torn down for the most part aren't building "tunnels". They're building glorified 8-10ft foundations and basements with dirt over the top instead of structures, 1970s hippie "underground homes" basically. They're calling them tunnels and bunkers for clicks and views.
To then take that naming at face value and pontificate about code and engineering is very much a two slights of hand not making a right situation. Furthermore, a civil engineer doing so is deep into "man won't understand what his salary depends on him not understanding" territory.
I know that the many HNers from the seismically active portions of the US will have no frame of reference for this but there are portions of the world where for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years basements were built with less than scant engineering. The sort of "just barely below dirt" construction most of these amateurs are engaging in is on that order of complexity. Based on my observations via Youtube, these amateurs should be more scared of their own temporary construction rigging and material handling solutions than the forces their structures must hold back.
The primary practical engineering challenge and hazard these structures face is that there's nothing stopping someone from driving a point load of undefined size over the top and that has serious implications for roof strength.
As they say, the rules are written in blood. I don't think we should be disqualifying projects because they are not Mponeng-scale or complexity.
I am not a civil engineer, but I did spend a bunch of time looking into building an underground range. Way more relaxed life safety reqs, smaller bore, etc. However, when you start reading, it is clear that much of the work is empirical, heavily localized and based on a great deal on the experience of the builder. I found very little in the way of solid theoretical modeling, but lots of measure, adjust, etc.
I think Grady does a reasonable job highlighting the dangers and risks.
>As they say, the rules are written in blood
Basically nobody ever died from leaky pipes or substandard weatherproofing. The code is as much about a) homogenizing the industry so big business can statistically reason about it at scale b) turning the subjective into the quantitive so that things can be done, checked, sight off on, etc, etc, without anyone using "judgement" as it is about protecting life and limb. Just about every professional has a laundry list of complaints about their area of code that boil down to it being theoretically useful but at great "not worth it" expense or a similar "not worth it" expense being incurred in lieu of very basic judgement. Arc fault breakers, and engineering requirements for small retaining walls come to mind as oft cited examples. And of course there's the myriad of wrangling that goes on wherein things get looser/stiffer requirements depending on whether their use is deemed worth incentivizing (this stuff usually lives in local addendums to the code).
I'm not saying there isn't value in there, but this habit people have of acting like it's all relevant to safety and screeching about "written in blood" is exactly what creates room for unrelated stuff to exist in the code.
>However, when you start reading, it is clear that much of the work is empirical, heavily localized and based on a great deal on the experience of the builder. I found very little in the way of solid theoretical modeling, but lots of measure, adjust, etc.
Which is a point very much in favor of the amateur.
> Basically nobody ever died from leaky pipes
I know you're probably intending to only remark on leaky water pipes, but:
The New London School explosion was caused by a leaky pipe. It killed 295 students and teachers, and led to the inclusion of smelly thiol in natural gas, as well as the Texas Engineering Practice Act.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_London_School_explosion
Even leaky water pipes kill people - just google Legionnaires disease.
A drip or stream from a leaky pipe isn't gonna do it. You need to get the bacteria into the respiratory tract to get legionaires disease. And even then a specific temperature water is necessary for it to grow.
A dehumidifier (or an HVAC system, which is where the name of the disease came from) is more likely to give you legionnaires disease than even the most substandard plumbing.
> Basically nobody ever died from leaky pipes or substandard weatherproofing
Famously, moist wet areas only grow molds that are safe for humans to live amongst, and absolutely never rotted away wooden structural components of a building.
Brings to mind this woman's efforts -- very impressive indeed:
https://www.youtube.com/@engineerkala/
Edit: reading is hard -- I only skimmed and did not realize she was mentioned.
We love engineer Kala. She decided to do a thing, while marking progress on her "technology tree" of skills gained by (very arguable) necessity. Dealing with permits and city beuaracracy seems like one of the hardest parts!
That was a big part of Christo's art.
He explicitly mentions her in the video.
My bad, I just skimmed. This is HN after all ;-)
Colin Furze ftw!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray
> Cray avoided publicity. There are a number of unusual tales about his life away from work, termed "Rollwagenisms", from then-CEO of Cray Research, John A. Rollwagen. Cray enjoyed skiing, windsurfing, tennis, and other sports. Another favorite pastime was digging a tunnel under his home; he attributed the secret of his success to "visits by elves" while he worked in the tunnel: "While I'm digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem."
i thought for a second this referred to building a tunnel for openclaw haha. I need to get off Twitter