So, having found my way back to the wars after a long hiatus that has seen the fragmentation of my lance, the death of our war master and the birth of my children who wish to fight the clan scum along side Dad I have found myself in a somewhat unique'ish situation.
In the intervening decades I went and got myself trained as a 2d/3d draftsman and somehow acquired the skills and tools necessary to create sprawling environments.
The rub comes that we, my lance and I, were never into tabletop or miniatures, it was all hex graphing notebooks, tokens and "your imagination". And so, I am somewhat lacking in how do hexmaps "do".
So with a hex being 30m flat to flat, that yeilds ~780m² (technically 779.4229 but I'm willing to chalk it up to metrology error) per hex; the physics of a battlemech sharing a hex with infantry and mechanized infantry, armor and artillery etc makes sense: they are where the legs aren't but how many fit in a hex? Not like a breaching stack but how do we handle two friendly mechs transiting a hex, say the mouth of a canyon.
Next up, unlike our bubble verse timeline where we developed rectilinear architectural and grid based Cartesian mapping systems, I have to only assume that in the BT bubble, they developed a hexalinear system because why else would there be hexagonal natural features (unless of course the whole hexagonal water thing IS true?!?) and hexagonal building systems etc. I cannot see a system where 30m wide roads are the norm so do you all just develop a "square" urban/suburban/industrial space and lay a hex grid over it?
To tie this all together I have the capacity to do civil drafting in Autocad in 2d from a plan view, add elevation isolines and do some elevation extrusion to create actual terrain and/or create a simplified land form with a corresponding elevation profile, say a long run of valley flanked by hills and plains. Additionally, an urban system is simple enough to do on a NY grid, DC radian grid or even an old world grape bunch plan. Biome can likewise be shown via hatch patterns & colors and the whole thing could be displayed simply with iso lines for elevations on an E sheet.
Many jumps in the past I found that a number of coworkers were involved with the SCA and we did some work together which culminated in the preparation of a D&D hex map in plywood scaled to their miniatures and using model railroad trees etc. it was a mountain with valleys and some plains with forests all fitted to a folding ping-pong table. I'd love to do something like that again but I don't have free access to a cnc router and a growing pile of off fall anymore, I can schedule and pay for it but baby steps, gotta see how deep the lads wish to go first.

Hi, I'm very much a stumbling newbie to Blender (3.6 LTS so far), and the last 3D stuff I did was some mostly forgotten AutoCAD and 3D Studio Viz way back in the 90s. I'm looking for pointers on what functionality to search the docs for in relation to what I'm trying to do.
Project: superimposing some proposed architecture onto a photo to assess the impact of the project on the neighbours view.
I'm looking for a way to create some invisible objects/shapes to "mask" the geometry in renders such that the background photo shows through in that position instead. This is to have the "foreground" parts of the "background" appear in front - eg things like trees and fences etc. I think the 3D Studio functionality for this used the term "mask". I'm hoping I can avoid doing most of the work in an image editor afterwards.
Would you approach this using material rendering settings, or is this a compositing solution? Or something else entirely?
Thanks

Context, warnings, disclaimers:
Previous MD
Joint income is roughly $115k. My partner is freelance and his income is variable. As in my last diary, I will refer to my partner by his pet name, Smol. We are not married and maintain separate finances except one joint account for paying our mortgage and settling up on bills. We have been together 10 years.
We only were able to purchase our home due to assistance from parents ($35k from mine, $20k from Smol’s). I know some people prefer to see that up front so they can skip the read and I totally understand.
We recently adopted a Valentine’s Day kitty, so we have four animals now.
Section One: Assets and Debt
Retirement Balance (and how you got there) –
TSP - $58,668. I’m only contributing 5% plus match.
Old job 401K - $8274. Still need to roll this over. Oops.
Equity - $71,000. Principle balance: $460,252 for 3 bed 1 bath purchased with Smol in 2021.
Savings account balance – $10,865.39
Checking account balance – $2,020.51
Joint Checking - $221.91
Credit card debt - $0
Student loan debt (for what degree) - $49.5k for Masters degree.
Undergraduate covered by state education trust. Parents paid in 7k when I was a baby. This covered 125 credits at an in-state university.
Section Two: Income
Income Progression –
2015: $28,000
2016: $30,000
2017: GS-9 Step 1 $56,229
2018: GS-11 Step 1 $66,253
Present: GS-11 Step 5: $90,912
Biweekly Take Home – $2,178.59
Deductions:
Mandatory Pension Contribution - $153.33
TSP - $174.24 (5%. Agency matches first 3% and then 50 cents on the dollar for the next 2%)
Social Security - $208.18
Federal Taxes - $422.94
State Taxes - $156.86
Life Insurance in the amount of my salary - $14.88
Medicare Tax - $48.69
Health Insurance - $95.74
Dental - $25.70
Vision - $5.65
Side Gig Monthly Take Home – I’ve cut back on dog sitting. I sit once or twice every 2-3 months, usually making around $500 per job.
Section Three: Expenses
Mortgage Principal, Interest, Taxes, and Insurance - $2,677. I pay $1,606 (60%).
Savings contribution - $100-300 when possible, but something always seems to come up with the house, the animals, or the car.
Investment contribution - $0
Debt payments - $354.15 I am pursuing PSLF and will be eligible in August 2027.
Donations (please specify if monthly or annual) – Roughly $300-400 annually to various causes.
Electric - $75 split 50/50 with Smol. Usually less than $50 in summer.
Gas – $175 in winter split 50/50 with Smol. Less than $50 in summer.
WateSewer – $112, I pay.
Trash - $132.51 every 3 months, I pay.
Internet - $80/mo, split 50/50 with Smol.
Cellphone - $55 my contribution to family plan with parents and brother.
Subscriptions - HBO $14.99, Spotify $9.99 and Apple TV $9.99. I pay all of these. $6 to Patreon.
Gym membership - $75 for climbing gym.
Pet expenses - $350 for two dogs and AssCat. Smol covers expenses for NiceCat.
Car insurance - $522 twice a year, I pay. I purchased and paid off the car. We share one vehicle.
Professional License Exams - I'll probably pay roughly $1200 this year.
Paid hobbies - $180/mo for weekly guitar lessons, $30 1-2 times per month for voice lessons. Ad hoc expenses come up related to climbing/camping/skiing. Lots of gas for the car.
Doctor - $50. I put this in a sinking fund for copays and tests as they come up.
Other – Approx. $300/mo goes into various sinking funds
DAY 1
7:45: Startled awake by Smol gently coaxing me into life. It’s the weekend and we are going to the resort to cross-country ski today, so I should have been up earlier. I spent half the night awake because AssCat slept on my legs and he’s a mighty, pint-sized furnace (he was, after all, born and delivered to us straight from hell) that bakes my entire body. I pour myself downstairs. Coffee is ready and Smol is slicing thick pieces of the bread I made last night while frying up some eggs. He serves my plate with a forehead kiss.
8:30: Take both dogs for a walk. Only one dog is coming to skijor, as our youngest doesn’t take kindly to being charged by unruly, off-leash dogs while pulling. An inevitability at the resort. We did a family skijor adventure yesterday, but I still feel like a bad mom leaving him home.
10:00: Make it to the cross-country lodge. We have free passes thanks to a friend that works there, but I need to buy a dog pass ($5). Dog gets all the compliments for being the most beautiful member of the family. We head out to the trails and go our separate ways, Smol on his classic skis and me on skate skis with the dog. It’s fucken wimdy, but the dog loves it and I love dog. He is very adorable in his blue racerback harness with his dog pass flapping in the wind.
1:45: All three of us are beat, but happy.
2:30: Make it home and the power goes out. I get cleaned up and comfy, make some tea, putz on my guitar, and read a graphic novel with NiceCat on my lap.
5:00: After a family dog walk, we make a frozen pizza topped with Field Roast veggie sausage. Then it’s off to the movies for a rare date night. It’s a bit of a drive and I’m afraid I’ll fall asleep on the way.
7:15: Smol buys the tickets and I purchase the snacks and drinks ($29). Smol tells me he doesn’t want popcorn, but I know he’s lying so I buy a medium. He starts eating it 3 previews in.
11:00: Take some Tylenol and fall into bed. I didn’t drink enough water while skiing and my head is pounding. Tomorrow will be better.
DAY 2
6:30: Tomorrow is not better! I wake up to two alarms, mine and Smol’s. I’m immediately confused and ask him why he’s getting up at 5:30. He tells me it’s 6:30. I’m an idiot. I didn’t move my clock forward. My carpool arrives at 6:30. I launch out of bed, get dressed, brush my teeth, and splash cold water on my face in 5 minutes. Fortunately, my carpool shows 5 minutes late. Unfortunately, I did not have time to make coffee, breakfast, or lunch.
7:45: Stop at the donut shop by the office for a large coffee and a donut. My coworker pays (he forgot his breakfast and wallet a few weeks back and I covered him). We get to the office and realize we forgot our key fobs. Coworker taps on our Staff Officer’s window for building access.
8:30: Standing staff group meeting. Travel budget is nonexistent this year. Guess I won’t be attending the big agency conference for my job series this summer. Rats.
12:00: The Employee Association snack cabinet recently returned after a four-year hiatus. It’s saving me today. I put cash in the jar for a handful of snacks that will serve as my lunch and emotional support ($3). I’m having a stressful day and I sense I’m on the verge of either making it everyone’s problem or crying. Maybe both.
2:00: Smol is picking meals and grocery shopping and asks if I have any requests. I add Greek yogurt, tofu, kale, bell pepper, avocado, and apples to his list. This gets added to the ledger of items we will split at the end of the month. He spends about $120 total.
6:00: Greeted at home by two happy huskies, two indifferent cats, and a package. It’s my new two-dog tug rope for skijoring. It’s pretty! Smol is already cooking spiced lentils for dinner, and he insists I bear witness to the many deals he secured on groceries (bounty of berries, a fridge full of sparkling water, raisins that he wants me to pack in my lunches). I take the dogs on their long evening walk and decompress.
8:00: After dinner with Smol I head to the gym to climb and lift. It’s snowing and windy.
10:15: Home again. I have my nightcap ice cream and turn in. Smol left a sticky note on my clock reminding me to spring it forward, so I finally get that updated.
DAY 3
7:45: Logging on later than I planned. Like my car clock I shall remain on Standard Time. It’s a work from home day and I absolutely need to get my project signature ready. It’s snowing a bit again.
9:00: I’m hungry for breakfast. I waggle the veggie sausage links at Smol and ask if he wants some in the scramble (yes). I make us both eggs and load up my plate with them and some berries and toast.
10:30: AutoCAD crashes. I will never know peace. I take a deep breath and remind myself in a few months time it will be field season, I will be in the woods and my biggest concerns will be armed, drunk people breaking into my project sites and running through the trees naked.
12:30: Smol slips me a piece of paper with the sum of money I need to add to our joint checking account for the back tax bills on our house (title company screwed up our paperwork, assessor couldn’t move forward until corrected, we didn’t know about any of this until we were CC’d on the FINAL NOTICE to the title company, we owe two years of back taxes as a result). I move my contribution of $1,823.95 over from my savings account. This is our second installment. We have one more (thankfully much smaller) payment in July.
1:00: I’ve been so locked into work I didn’t even take the dogs for their morning exercise. We all take a break to go skijoring on some trails off the neighborhood. Since we didn’t get out early the snow is soft and the pups are getting a workout. We move slowly but at least they will be tired.
2:00: Make a sandwich and get right back to the grind. NiceCat snuggles in my lap and purrs. Guitar teacher texts me that he’s sick and can’t make our lesson tonight. Shoot. We will plan a make-up session.
4:15: Tea and snack time. I mix up some Greek yogurt with maple syrup, berries, and some cereal for crunch. Offer the cats drugs.
4:30: There is a sudden flurry of avalanche blasting and my older dog panics. I dose him with Sileo gel. Poor guy, I thought we were done with that for a while.
5:45: Log off and curl up on the couch to read a book and decompress.
6:15: The dogs haven’t been able to hang out in the backyard since the snow reached fence height and I feel bad about it. Now that it’s getting soft, we go out with them and dig a perimeter along the fence so they can hang untethered in their snowy domain.
7:15: Smol heats up leftovers and to my great delight drenches several pieces of sourdough toast in butter as a side. We snuggle up on the couch to watch the last episode of House of Ninjas. If this show doesn’t get renewed for a second season I will perish.
8:45: At the gym to lift. Before leaving home Smol says that he prepared a protein dense meal and he “expects mass!!!”
10:15: Get the coffee pot ready and prep my breakfast/lunch/snacks to-go for my office day tomorrow. Read in bed until I’m tired enough to sleep.
DAY 4
5:30: It is Wednesday, my dudes.
7:45: At my office digging into work and my breakfast (Greek yogurt, honey, berries, and cereal). My 3-year-old nephew texts me “Rustshjttchtyygghjbkjjkk. Drystone. Yet the u the Hugh.” Big if true.
9:30: Large staff group meeting with folks from our District offices. Spring is right around the corner and with it comes our busy season. Topics range far and wide, from big picture budget to toilet pumping, hazard trees, and campground host cleanliness (or lack thereof). There are snacks.
12:15: Meeting continues into the afternoon with topics that don’t involve me. I escape to eat my veggie sandwich and apple, then scuttle around collecting signatures on my project package.
3:00: One of my climbing partners wants to rope up tonight. It’s Smol’s weekly game night, so I say yes.
4:50: Log off. There’s usually a big after work happy hour on days that the District staff come into the Supervisor’s office for meetings, but the carpool is collectively too tired to attend. We do, however, stop for a snack at the gas station. I get chips and a vitamin water ($6.29).
6:00: Same old stuff. Walk the dogs, eat leftovers and ice cream.
8:00: Meet my friend at the gym to climb.
10:30: I think I’m asleep before my head even hits the pillow.
DAY 5
9:20: Nothing much to report so far today. It’s been a quiet work from home morning while I wait for signed documents and play catch up on minor tasks.
9:45: Eat scrambled eggs and toast saturated in butter while I work. I do not fear death.
11:30: I’ve been mentoring an interpretive ranger on signage design and he’s having issues preparing his file for print. He packages the InDesign file and sends it to me for troubleshooting. I fix it immediately. I wish I could say it’s because I’m a genius, but I really have no idea why it worked for me and not for him.
1:00: Smol asks if I want cheese Pizza Rolls. Yes.
2:00: We take a long, relaxing family walk. I aspired to skijor in a lovely meadow up the pass today, but my legs are sore.
3:45: I discover I missed an email about a partner agency meeting from 9-12 this morning. I need to talk to them about a water tank they owe us at one of our campgrounds. Dammit.
4:30: Run out to drop off a package at the post office ($4.08), grab a few items from CVS ($36.29), and the grocery store ($25). We have friends visiting from overseas starting tomorrow and I want the house stocked and comfy.
5:45: I sure was hoping to get my package back with the Forest Supervisor’s signature before calling it quits today. Really counting on it for tomorrow’s submission.
7:30: The evening is a flurry of activity: cleaning the house, doing laundry, and moving cat stuff around to prepare for our incoming guests. I fix up the dogs’ dinner while Smol manages ours: bbq tofu sliders and french fries, which we weirdly had last time I wrote an MD.
8:45: Lift. Catch up on my favorite Webtoons between sets.
10:30: Bed.
DAY 6
5:55: I typically schedule my office days to avoid Fridays, but not this week. I’ll be driving straight from the office to the city to pick my pals up from the train station today! I’m driving solo so I sleep in a bit. I hate getting up early.
8:15: Make it to the office. Still no signed docs. My best friend texts me about a dream date our spirits took to the movies last night.
9:00: Greek yogurt with maple, berry, and granola for breakfast. I stare at my project wall. I have a chart of sticky notes with project titles organized under headers titled “In the Woods,” “Decked,” and “In the Chipper.” After weeks of being singularly focused on today’s deadline, it’s time to move some new sticky notes into The Chipper, including a big project due one month from today. But I don’t wanna. I’m so burned out from weeks of stress and it’s Friday. I choose to be irresponsible and pick a small, fun task with zero urgency: illustrations I was asked to make for the Employee Association.
10:30: Smol sends the morning photo dump of all my honeys. He knows I miss them on office days.
12:00: Lunch is leftover bbq tofu sliders. I will be eating with my friends in the city for dinner. We hardly ever eat out (due to cost and a dearth of quality options), so I’m eager to enjoy some town tasties later!
1:15: I have been on this unit nearly 5 years and I just learned we have an office gym??!
2:00: Decide to start some shit with the water tank issue.
5:15: Logging off and heading to the city! It’s about a 50-minute drive to the train station.
6:15: United with my pals and extremely excited about it! We drive around the city while I point out sights before stopping for dinner. My friends insist on paying. We eat slowly and catch up for almost two hours before heading back up the mountain.
9:30ish: Back home with Smol and the critters. My friends settle in, and we stay up a bit late chatting.
DAY 7
8:30: Apparently I was zonked. I’m the last one up and to the coffee pot. My friends are busy doing a little bit of work, but we enjoy a slow morning together chatting and snacking while they manage their business. I start marinating tofu for dinner and walk the dogs with Smol.
11:00: We all head out to enjoy some nature and see the sights.
12:00: Arrive at one of the local breweries for drinks and pizza. Smol orders our pizza while I buy everyone a round ($39.42).
1:30: More nature time. Our friends don’t have the best footwear for snow, but we make the best of it.
3:00: Swing by the grocery store to buy a few items for dinner. I battle my companions at the card reader, but they win.
5:00: We all go to a nearby paved (and plowed) trail system to walk the dogs. The pups frolic through the snow while we talk and enjoy the mountain views.
6:00: I cook one of my favorite tofu bowl recipes. Dinner is a long and leisurely affair, followed by denning down in the living room to watch a movie.
9:45: We all turn in a bit early to rest up. Tomorrow will be a full day at the cross-country ski lodge!
TOTAL SPENT: $1,972.03
Entertainment $34
Snacks/Groceries $34.29 (+ 120 spent by Smol to be divided at end of month)
Miscellaneous $40.37
Drinks/restaurants $39.42
Taxes $1,823.95
Reflection:
This week was such a treat! The visit with our friends continued beyond this diary and I picked up a few more meal and drink tabs. I typically only set aside $50-60 for eating out a month, and we only go to the movies maybe once or twice a year. This isn’t virtuous; we just can’t afford to go out. I kept thinking how nice it felt to loosen up, and I hope someday going out can be a more regular part of our budget.

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I'm currently configuring a custom Copilot bot for use in my company in the MEP industry. Vision was to have it draw from some existing company resources and answer specific questions about AutoCAD and Revit software in addition to answering questions on the handbook and our project schedule.
So far I've only been getting message errors using the generative tab. When I was getting responses, they were incredibly generalized (basically gpt 3.5). Does anyone have a known node tree workflow w/ settings that would simply be User's prompt > search knowledge files > output response? I'm basing this off an existing GPT demo I made in the ChatGPT UI but so far Copilot hasn't yielded similar results.

Why doesn’t civil 3D move toward revit/BIM with intelligent objects for site design?

1. I should be able to assign various pavement sections to site areas and materials. Corridors have this to an extent, but could be more generalized to incorporate sites not created with corridors. Like why can’t I assign an area so that Cad knows that it’s asphalt parking and link it to a pavement section that’s dynamic when I change pavement thickness? If you grade in parking curbs with feature lines, god forbid you need to widen the lot by 3’ and update all those offset feature lines. Can I just assign a curb subassembly to a centerline and have that knows that there is a 6” drop?
   
2. Pipe networks should allow you to incorporate the bedding cross sections.
   
3. Similar to revit, we should be able to place vertical features like handrails, guardrails, trees, fences, stairs, equipment pads. These items should have properties like adjustable fence heights, bottom rail, top rail, etc. hand rail properties..
   
4. Using items 1 - 3 think of the possibilities of determining quantity takeoffs. You could get a report knowing exactly how much asphalt, concrete, aggregate, piping, fencing, etc if you set up your areas correctly. Also, get good earthwork quantities that automatically factor in various pavement quantities.
   
5. With assigning material properties, you could easily create renders since cad knows what is asphalt, concrete, sidewalks, fencing, railing, grass, etc. assign grading to these as well.
   
6. Once and for all, please create real useable integration b/w revit and C3D or better yet, integrate the functionality into Revit. I want to be able to link a live building model into my drawing, and I want them to be able to link a live site model into theirs. Integrating with point 5, you could really design sites as they are actually built and easily see how visually comes together. Not a bunch of arbitrary lines.
   
7. Give us Revit functionality when it comes the ability to manage title blocks, drawing links, section cuts, etc. I know some of this can be done in CAD but it’s more tedious effort and less intuitive than Revit.
   

I’m not an Autocad/C3D hater by any stretch. Overall it’s the most user friendly software available for site design. I just think it could be so much better if it integrated functionality that Autodesk already has in other programs.

Why doesn’t civil 3D move toward revit/BIM with intelligent objects for site design?

1. I should be able to assign various pavement sections to site areas and materials. Corridors have this to an extent, but could be more generalized to incorporate sites not created with corridors. Like why can’t I assign an area so that Cad knows that it’s asphalt parking and link it to a pavement section that’s dynamic when I change pavement thickness? If you grade in parking curbs with feature lines, god forbid you need to widen the lot by 3’ and update all those offset feature lines. Can I just assign a curb subassembly to a centerline and have that knows that there is a 6” drop?
   
2. Pipe networks should allow you to incorporate the bedding cross sections.
   
3. Similar to revit, we should be able to place vertical features like handrails, guardrails, trees, fences, stairs, equipment pads. These items should have properties like adjustable fence heights, bottom rail, top rail, etc. hand rail properties..
   
4. Using items 1 - 3 think of the possibilities of determining quantity takeoffs. You could get a report knowing exactly how much asphalt, concrete, aggregate, piping, fencing, etc if you set up your areas correctly. Also, get good earthwork quantities that automatically factor in various pavement quantities.
   
5. With assigning material properties, you could easily create renders since cad knows what is asphalt, concrete, sidewalks, fencing, railing, grass, etc. assign grading to these as well.
   
6. Once and for all, please create real useable integration b/w revit and C3D or better yet, integrate the functionality into Revit. I want to be able to link a live building model into my drawing, and I want them to be able to link a live site model into theirs. Integrating with point 5, you could really design sites as they are actually built and easily see how visually comes together. Not a bunch of arbitrary lines.
   
7. Give us Revit functionality when it comes the ability to manage title blocks, drawing links, section cuts, etc. I know some of this can be done in CAD but it’s more tedious effort and less intuitive than Revit.
   

I’m not an Autocad/C3D hater by any stretch. Overall it’s the most user friendly software available for site design. I just think it could be so much better if it integrated functionality that Autodesk already has in other programs.

I'm looking on recommendations for drawing a family tree.
I did a version decades ago using AutoCAD & that's the sort of functionality that I'm looking for (without buying a full AutoCAD package). I'm perfectly happy drawing lines, moving groups around and not looking for something that generates trees automatically from a GEDCOM file.
I'm thinking of tools like Viso or similar that people have used successfully

TL;DR don't want to architect any more because reasons? Set a new year's resolution to break out of architecture. Maybe my tale will inspire you.

Wall of text incoming.

Hello architecture. I joined this sub a long time ago when I was still working in architecture. Mainly to see if I could find others who felt the same way that I felt then - which is to say, trapped.
Recently I’ve seen an influx of posts and comments from folks who are unsure about their future in architecture and are considering a change. As someone who carved my own path to success and happiness out of architecture - this is my plea to you:
Do it.
Take a chance and try something new in 2024. It doesn’t matter how young or old you are, we all have the capacity to change. Architects are invariably some of the most passionate, smart, and well-rounded people that I know. You can achieve whatever you set your mind to. I did it and I believe you can, too.
My biggest regret was taking so long to mobilize. Here’s my own anecdote:

Part 1: Feeling stressed and burned out

My partner constantly quipped about how tired or stressed I seemed to be, when I wasn’t even working. “Babe, you married an architect. What do you expect?”
I was too far lost in the sunk cost fallacy to see the forest for the trees. “It will get better. Just grit your teeth and push through. Don’t let all those all-nighters be for naught.” Sadly, my 45k a year starting salary couldn’t even pay for all the caffeine that I needed to sustain myself in NYC.
Frankly, with a gun to my head I couldn’t tell you the worst of a laundry list of things that stressed me out. The unpaid internships, the long hours, the low salary, the mis-managed projects, the repetitive and uninspired designs, the unrealistic deadlines, the endless meetings, the clients with zero taste or sense, the egos…? Oh my god the egos.
Retrospectively, I don't think I was cut out to be a designer. At least not in architecture. I loathed the iterative design process, and how long everything took. I felt trapped in the bullshit hierarchy of approvals that I needed for every single little change. I wasn't just designing for the client any more, I was designing for the PM, then the PA, then the Principal, then the guy whose name was on the door himself, and THEN the client. All this hullabaloo just to stroke some egos (for now 70k a year after I threatened to leave).
After a particularly bad design review where the guy-whose-name-was-on-the-door literally screamed at the Principal like he was a toddler, I got so stressed out that I ended up in the ER for unexplainable light sensitivity and head pain. Apparently my body had contorted itself in response to stress, causing acute tension headaches that hurt so much I couldn't open my eyes. "Doctor, I'm 28 years old, are you shitting me?" Hours later when I could see again, the look on my partner's face in the waiting room told me something had to change.

Part 2: A realization

So, I couldn't be a designer any more - at least not without therapy that I couldn't even afford. I didn't want to do project management either. Shoutout the the PMs out there who genuinely like being in meetings 8 hours a day. When I went to discuss next steps with the principal I worked for, I even tried picturing myself in his shoes, some 10+ years in the future. Yeah, he made good money. Had 3 kids and a big ole house in the NJ suburbs. But still nowhere near what a doctor or lawyer of equivalent experience would be making at his age. He was likely to work until his 70s or 80s like all the other Principals - not just for the money, but because they were all truly passionate about this career. I had zero passion at this point.
At least I was good at Revit. So I carved a little niche for myself doing BIM management and other “techy” stuff including VR, which was nice. It insulated me from the bullshit. But it was both a dead end career and not one that anyone seemed to take very seriously. 6 months after the headache incident, I left my firm without looking back when I got offered the big bucks at a Revit consultancy. Six figures, baby!
I consulted at a handful of some of the biggest firms in the country - Gensler, SOM, HOK, etc - and surprise, surprise, the quality of Revit projects that I saw was absolute dogshit. Why even build a Revit model if you’re going to just draft all your details in AutoCAD and then import them? Or download a 10mb task chair family from the internet and place it 1000 times in an office model and ask me why your Revit file is 8 fucking gigabytes? Cringe.
The one blessing was that I was very good at what I did, and this earned me a certain amount of trust with leadership. I could pursue anything that I wanted to, technologically speaking, within reason.
I used the opportunity to teach myself how to code and automate the shit out of everything I could. I got so good at this that I went from creating Dynamo scripts to custom Revit plugins, to full blown desktop applications over the span of 3 years. I was also getting paid decently well so I took some of that and invested in myself by doing a part time coding bootcamp, which ultimately led me to becoming a software engineer.

Part 3 - The road to recovery

Look, I'm gonna be honest here. I'm not exactly super passionate about coding either. I considered several career paths including Business Management, Product Management, UX Design, and some other trendy words I've forgotten about. So why did I pick software engineering? Because I was a) good at it and b) it pays a fuckton of money. Go look on levels.fyi to see how much software engineers make.
I got incredibly lucky - when I graduated my bootcamp, it was the peak of the tech hiring frenzy at the start of the COVID pandemic. I sent out 20 applications and ended up with 8 offers, and I took the highest offer which was around 150k. The bootcamp paid for itself (12k).
Before you go dropping over a grand on a bootcamp - a warning: 2023 was an absolute bloodbath in tech. 100s of thousands of tech workers got laid off, and the layoffs are continuing to happen albeit at a much slower rate. My firm is starting to hire again, so my fingers are crossed that 2024 will be a year of hiring once again.
Today, I work fully remote for about 4-5 hours a day, have 2 meetings a week at max, and get paid around 250k a year. Zero stress, zero headaches. I’m not even at my peak earning capability yet (~500k a big tech firm. Again, check levels.fyi if you need inspiration). I own a house and a car in the NJ suburbs (yeah, just like my former Principal), and both my wife and I are on track to retire in our 40s. She also works in tech, by the way. So yeah, I'm very happy. And you can be too.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask here. I get a ton of DMs so I'm probably not going to respond if you DM me. Sorry.

Recently, many folks have been claiming that their Large Language Model (LLM) is the best at coding. Their claims are typically based off self-reported evaluations on the HumanEval benchmark. But when you look into that benchmark, you realize that it only consists of 164 Python programming problems.
This led me down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out how helpful LLMs actually are with different programming, scripting, and markup languages. I am estimating this for each language by reviewing LLM code benchmark results, public LLM dataset compositions, available GitHub and Stack Overflow data, and anecdotes from developers on Reddit. Below you will find what I have figured out about Lisp so far.
Do you have any feedback or perhaps some anecdotes about using LLMs with Lisp to share?
---
Lisp is the #34 most popular language according to the 2023 Stack Overflow Developer Survey.

Benchmarks

❌ Lisp is not one of the 19 languages in the MultiPL-E benchmark
❌ Lisp is not one of the 16 languages in the BabelCode / TP3 benchmark
❌ Lisp is not one of the 13 languages in the MBXP / Multilingual HumanEval benchmark
❌ Lisp is not one of the 5 languages in the HumanEval-X benchmark

Datasets

✅ Lisp is included in The Stack dataset
❌ Lisp is not included in the CodeParrot dataset
❌ Lisp is not included in the AlphaCode dataset
❌ Lisp is not included in the CodeGen dataset
❌ Lisp is not included in the PolyCoder dataset

Stack Overflow & GitHub presence

Lisp has 6,945 tagged questions on Stack Overflow
Lisp projects have had 8,431 PRs on GitHub since 2014
Lisp projects have had 12,870 issues on GitHub since 2014
Lisp projects have had 73,903 pushes on GitHub since 2014
Lisp projects have had 47,157 stars on GitHub since 2014

Anecdotes from developers

u/KaranasToll

Chat gpt is known to lie and be confident in its incorrectness. Also, try telling it to convert a program from lisp to python that uses advanced features like the condition system.

u/friedrichRiemann

How do you think the advent of ChatGPT and Copilot would affect the adoption and popularity of Common Lisp, Clojure and Schemes? On one hand, Large Language Models did not have access to these "niche" languages for training as much as the more popular alternatives like Python and Typescript so the quality of their output would be worse in comparison. On the other hand, the "interactive" aspect of LISP in that you code stuff, test in REPL and code again would not be so unique since the developer can just use the chat system to refine his solution. The other upside that LISPs had over the likes of Rust and C++ is the lack of syntax clutter and cleanness of s-expressions. In this front too, they would hurt from the likes of ChatGPT since the syntactic complexity is handled by the LLM not the developer.

Fine_Impression_3171

I'm an engineer working in the construction field, and I'm currently trying to create a Lisp routine for a project I'm working on. I've been trying to use GPT to generate the code, but I'm having some trouble getting it to work properly. I was wondering if anyone knows of a pre-trained GPT that has been specifically trained on Lisp code. I've been searching online, but I haven't had any luck so far. If anyone knows of a pre-trained GPT with Lisp, or has any tips for training my own GPT on Lisp code, I would really appreciate the help.

---
Original source: https://github.com/continuedev/continue/tree/main/docs/docs/languages/lisp.md
Data for all languages I've looked into so far: https://github.com/continuedev/continue/tree/main/docs/docs/languages/languages.csv

It's been a while since I used Trimble kit and if I remember correctly you cant do onsite/controller offsets? For example you want to pick up a tree centre, you lean your pod on the tree, measure the radius and measure the distance from prism to centre of tree? I use to remark all this information and have to do edits in AutoCAD to get the tree in the right location.
I've been using Leica for the past 4 years and there is a simple menu for doing this onsite/controller where you punch in the measurements on a offset in/out and offset right/left ribbon.
Does Trimble really not have anything like this on there controllers? I'd be using a TSC3?