Looking at the level of detail, and the thoroughness, I wouldn't have expected it to even be possible to complete it in 20 years. How much time does this guy spend driving truck? Amazing accomplishment and display of dedication and creativity.

20 * 365.25 = 7305 days. Assuming their "near a million buildings" number tracks to somewhere around 950,000, he would have had to build 130 "structures" a day on average.

This is all round and not precise numbers, considering he had to have days where he couldn't build, I'm guessing on the number of structures, and he started in 2004 (22 years ago), accuracy is not possible. But still, even if we fudged it down to 100 structures a day: This is BONKERS.

The man has a prodigious skill at building simple models and painting them. I am incredibly impressed. And I am curious if he did it all alone or if he ever had help from friends/family, even just simple cutting of the balsa wood into simple templated shapes for him to later construct. (To be clear, even if he had help it takes nothing away from how impressive this is)

Maybe after a few thousand buildings, he built specialized tools to quickly build the templates in bulk. Still incredible.

Like what though? Every building is a little different and the fastest way I can think of is laser cutting or CNC which is still pretty slow. Unless he was whole hog CNCing entire city blocks that is. Though the article mentions “balsa wood cut with an X-Acto knife”. If that part is true, this is utterly incredible and I have no idea how he pulled off more than 100 buildings a day.

Looking at the pictures in the article, the level of detail is not particularly great in some parts. It seems like many building have very simple shape and color. With some modeling skill, I can imagine carving and painting 100s of these in a day. Although I can't imagine doing it for 20 years.

I would however like to know what his research was like. Was he just following Google Maps/Earth? They were released in 2005 and 2001 respectively and NY has had coverage from the get go.

You don't need CNC for speed if the job is fixed and simple. You can make simple jigs and holding fixtures which firmly hold the object with features to help guide tooling. A number of these can be made to speed up all sorts of operations.

"A model-maker spent 20 years driving trucks!"

"We overestimate what we can achieve in a day, and underestimate what we can achieve in a year."

Your sibling post estimated it pretty well :)

There are places that has already begun.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/9/bangladesh-shuts-uni...

Impossible. Iran's army was already demolished weeks ago, and there's "nothing left". What did they take it down with, bb guns?

Same as what happened to that Ford aircraft carrier, some fire incident in the kitchen that was. I doubt aircrafts have a kitchen yet, but toilets could catch fire, right ?

Since their military capacity is certainly completely demolished, they probably took it down by throwing rocks

The whole thing is impressively disorganised going back to not having a clear objective or plan for the war.

They took a page from the US administration playbook and manifested a victory into existence.

Understaffing is no excuse at an airport that size with that kind of airspace. Somebody high up in the food chain with integrity and authority should be closing the runway if staffing is so low that it becomes unsafe. And I'm no expert, but having enough staff for separate air and ground control seems like a minimum safety requirement unless it's a tiny airport.

Pilot Unions should go on strike until ATC is properly staffed at every level, since Regan made it illegal for ATC themselves to go on strike.

Something like that just might happen

Not having distraction devices in a classroom is such a basic concept. I'm surprised it required government intervention. Every half decent school principal should've banned them in their school, and if the principal didn't, the individual teachers should have banned them from their classrooms. The first time a kid had to have a question repeated to them because they were looking at their phone should've been the last time phones were permitted in that class.

Part of the problem is with each step down the ladder there's less authority and support and more chances for blowback from angry parents going higher up the chain. Teachers fear not getting support from principals if they're DIYing a device ban, principals fear blowback from complaints to the board or superintendent etc.

There's also the normalization problem at the teacher level where kids are used to using them in other classes so it's a bigger lift to get different behavior in one specific class.

I haven't used a mouse in ages, but I haven't used a trackpad - ever. I've never found one that matches the accuracy, speed, and overall joy of using TrackPoint to move the mouse cursor.

Yeah it’s really a shame that the track point wasn’t adopted globally (I’m assuming for patent reasons, but surely any patents must be expired by now).

For years I used a Trackpoint external keyboard plus a mouse. The track point is great for small movements when you’re primarily typing, and the mouse is great for when you are primarily moving the cursor.

I love trackpoint for navigation and UI control. But it's not that great for drawing / painting (even though I did use it for that, successfully).

Love GIMP. Always capable of doing anything I need done with raster images or even PDFs. Lately I've been opening PDFs and lightening the pages so that they can be printed without wasting a bunch of toner on backgrounds that are meant to be white but were scanned in as a light grey.

I assume you don’t do this manually and you’re doing some kind of scripting, can you describe your process?

Sorry, I don't have to do it in sufficient quantity of frequency to encourage scripting. And while doing it manually, I notice that the required tweaking of levels changes depending on the content of the page and how poor the scan is. I'm not sure an automated solution would provide satisfactory results consistently.

> Anyone is allowed to call you a moron and claim to be doing you a favor. (Which, in point of fact, they would be. One of the big problems with this culture is that everyone's afraid to tell you you're wrong

Absurd. You can point out how and why someone is wrong without insulting them by calling them a moron. Telling someone they're a moron is only stating your personal opinion in an offensive way, without any useful proof.

> profiting for having done it.

Isn't that permitted by some of the more popular licences? If you care about others profiting from your work you'd choose an appropriate licence. And then you'd temper your expectations and hope for the best because you know there will be less than perfect compliance. It's like lending money to family or friends. You can hope they pay you back, but better to consider it a gift because there's a good chance they won't.

Is it worse because it's AI for some reason? I'm having trouble pinning down exactly what the gripe is. Is it license compliance? Is it AI specific? Is it some notion about uncool behavior in what some people see as a community?

My personal interpretation of the rule is that if it's human-originated but passed through a layer of cleanup, it's human-originated. For the same reason I'm not refraining from running the spellchecker or using speech-to-text to generate this sentence. "If I could be having my English-speaking nephew type this on my behalf while I told him my thoughts in Japanese, it passes the smell test for human-sourced" feels about the right place to set the bar.

Yes but the guideline states that AI-edited comments should not be posted. It doesn't say it's okay as long as it's "human sourced" or "human-originated".

So if your layer of cleanup is AI assisted, then it's in violation.

Part of the problem I was getting at is that the requirement of "Don't post AI edited ..." is stricter than necessary to ensure the outcome that "HN is for conversation between humans" because an AI edited post is still a human post.

Anyway, I suspect a lot of people are going to ignore that guideline and will feel free to use their "layer of cleanup" whether it's a basic spellchecker or an LLM, or whatever else they choose, and most people aren't going to be able to tell anyway. The guideline is unnecessarily strict in my opinion, but it doesn't matter in the end.

My layer of cleanup is AI assisted. It's the spellchecker integrated into my web browser. That was definitely "AI" technology when it originally came out.

But I think you and I are on the same page: we both know this isn't a rule that's there to be hard-and-fast enforced because that's completely infeasible. The definition of "AI" is a moving target, as is "generated."

It's a rule that's there to have a rule so when the real problem is "Hey, your content is too low-quality but you dump volumes of it and it's clearly following a procedural template" the mods can call that "AI" and justify limiting or banning the account on prior-stated rules. Which is fine, but I'm glad to call it what it is.

(One unfortunate oversight: we haven't added "posts sounding like they are AI-generaed" to the "Please don't complain about" set. So expect that to become a common refrain now since the incentives to make the complaint against disliked comments are obvious... At least until that becomes annoying enough to justify a rule).

Yep, the complaints are already far more disruptive than the AI miasma.

I'm more interested in the last layer than the first. People should feel fully accountable for what they post, like they could have done it exactly and completely by themselves if they'd simply taken more time.