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by fjdhcjjenxncnd 3547 days ago
And this is precisely why I'm a mechanical engineer instead of a web developer, despite being very very good at the latter.
1 comments

What are you engineering right now?
My work is a bit meta at the moment. I'm making software that can take part designs and optimize their physical shape for better performance.

So the end result is more fuel efficient cars, faster planes, etc.

Oh, so you're optimizing and not innovating.
Actually no. I'm making the software that did not previously exist. Others down the road can then use it to produce better performing products.

Passive aggressive word games aside, you really can't compare "reducing the global need for oil" to "snapchat for cats".

> Passive aggressive word games aside, you really can't compare "reducing the global need for oil" to "snapchat for cats".

Actually. By reducing the consumption of oil, it becomes cheaper to travel and people will travel more... increasing the consumption of oil.

Game word in point: You might be having the opposing effect of what you think :D

It's known that we can't dig up and burning all profitably extractable hydrocarbons, if we want to avoid the worst case scenarios of global warming. See eg. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/27/fracki...
That would be Jevon's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Like, what special sauce do you bring to the table that ANSYS or Solidworks or whatever FEA package people use for optimization studies doesn't already do--and probably do well enough?

You dismiss twitter, snapchat clones, whatever when they do deliver actual value to people just because they don't meet some arbitrary feelgood measure of "innovative". A measure that coincidentally happens to somehow make your cute little tool worldchanging! Industry, especially in mech and AEC, is hilariously slow to change workflows once they have something that works. Your product is probably going to get lost in the noise, all with you puttering around going "but but but I was innovating! Why don't people support innovation?!".

You're coming off as a holier-than-thou "srs bsns" engineer when you should have some humility. Maybe post under your real account.

It's still very much a research implementation, but I'm making global black box combinatoric methods which can be used where analytic optimization methods are not available, e.g. multi-objective optimization.

>Maybe post under your real account.

I have no real account. I always make a new one every few posts partly for privacy reasons, and partly because I enjoy reading posts like your own. :^)