300k airplanes in five years(construction-physics.com)

339 points by juliangamble 2 years ago | 494 comments

Construction Physics essay by Brian Potter on how the US ramped up aircraft manufacturing to build about 300,000 airplanes during World War II.

How to Build a $20B Semiconductor Fab (2024)(construction-physics.com)

5 points by Bluestein 1 month ago | 0 comments

Why Levittown didn't revolutionize homebuilding(construction-physics.com)

58 points by sien 2 years ago | 125 comments

How the gas turbine conquered the electric power industry(construction-physics.com)

73 points by jseliger 2 years ago | 43 comments

Why the U.S. can't build icebreaking ships(construction-physics.com)

208 points by chmaynard 2 years ago | 252 comments

How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry(construction-physics.com)

199 points by surprisetalk 11 months ago | 429 comments

How an oil refinery works(construction-physics.com)

503 points by chmaynard 5 months ago | 175 comments

A Construction Physics article by Brian Potter explaining how oil refineries process crude oil into fuels and other products.

So you want to parse a PDF?(eliot-jones.com)

369 points by UglyToad 1 year ago | 199 comments

Blog post by Eliot Jones explaining how PDF parsing should work per the spec, covering headers, cross-reference tables, object offsets and trailers, and its real-world pitfalls.

Why it's so hard to build a jet engine(construction-physics.com)

411 points by mhb 1 year ago | 198 comments

A Construction Physics essay by Brian Potter explaining why designing and manufacturing jet engines is so difficult.

How to Train Your Robot(construction-physics.com)

124 points by crescit_eundo 11 days ago | 40 comments

Construction Physics essay by Brian Potter on how robots are trained and the role of training data and scaling in advancing robot AI capabilities.

How to hack time, with C2PA(da.vidbuchanan.co.uk)

50 points by Retr0id 23 days ago | 6 comments

Blog post by David Buchanan (retr0id) on manipulating or forging timestamps in C2PA content provenance metadata.

The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering(philschmid.de)

832 points by robotswantdata 1 year ago | 467 comments

Blog post by Philipp Schmid arguing that context engineering, supplying LLMs with the right information and tools, matters more than prompting for AI agents.