Archive · August 2026
Teaching site robots to feel: touch inferred from cheap egocentric video
TouchAnything and the EgoTouch dataset infer contact and force from RGB video alone — what it means for teaching contact-rich site robots in AEC.
The engineers who stopped waiting for Swiss software: Seidler & Steiner at PAZ, 1 September
Two Pirmin Jung engineers built the Swiss structural software they couldn't buy. A PAZ-Next talk on form-finding timber loads and desk-built façade tools.
Packing Circles: Why the Densest Cloud Is the Cheapest Structure
How circle and sphere packing — from π/√12 to Kepler and Descartes — turns a generative disc cloud into a defensible, reproducible structural spec.
Seven Numbers, No Memory, 96.5%: The 14-Byte Brain That Shames Your Render Farm
MINIMIO's 14-byte neural net solves 96.5% of unseen mazes with no memory — and quietly teaches AEC teams when reactive beats heavy tooling.
Thrust Network Analysis: The 350-Year-Old Theorem That Certifies Vaults and Grows New Shells
How Thrust Network Analysis turns Hooke's 1676 hanging chain into a lower-bound proof that certifies Gothic vaults and form-finds new compression shells.
From toast to trusses: the thinking you learn before any language
Learn algorithmic thinking the way Oregon State's ENGR 112 teaches it — flowcharts, while/for loops, top-down design — built on Mermaid for AEC workflows.
The awake city: six verbs of machine intelligence, and the one it can't compute
From WeatherNext's cyclone forecasts to Sentinel-2 CNNs and OSMnx walksheds — the six verbs a city learns, and the one containment it can't compute.
Terafab: What It Would Feel Like to Be the Largest Building Ever Poured
Musk's 100M-sq-ft, $16.8B Terafab reads as the world's largest building — but at 1 TW of compute the heat load, not floor area, decides if it's even physical.
The Model Everyone Owns: What Graphisoft's Collaboration Layer Asks of a 14-Person Studio
Graphisoft's new open collaboration layer and Archicad–Forma link promise one source of truth — here's how a 14-person studio should verify the IFC round-trip first.
Asimo Retired, the G1 Shipped: What Japan's 80,000-Hour Robot Data Commons Bets On
Asimo retired unsold; the $16k Unitree G1 shipped. Inside Japan's 80,000-hour VLA data commons — and the openBIM-style bet on prototypes versus platforms.
