Archive · August 2026
IFC in Notepad: reading a building with three lines of IfcOpenShell-python
IFC is a plain-text STEP graph you can open in Notepad. Read and edit a real building in three lines of IfcOpenShell-python — no licence, no vendor lock-in.
Tesla built Optimus's factory before it showed the robot — and that inversion is the story
Tesla is converting a Fremont car line to build Optimus before revealing it — why the humanoid bottleneck moved from the demo to actuator supply and line rate.
Held up by a service: what the Hielotron teaches the smart building
Prada Poole's 1976 Seville ice rink stood on air and vanished in one night — the honest ancestor of every smart building held up by a running BMS and a licence server.
One sparse factor, three passes: DiffPhD rewires the soft-body solver stack
DiffPhD, a GPU differentiable solver, stays stable at 100x stiffness contrast and runs 10x faster — bringing gradient-based form-finding to the AEC desk.
Kimi K3 Hits the Studio: a 2.8-Trillion Open Model That Reads Your Screenshots
Moonshot's Kimi K3 is the first open-weights 3-trillion-class model, with 1M-token context and native vision that names CAD. A PAZ hands-on for BIM desks.
Visual Programming, from zero: the dataflow graph is the real language
Grasshopper, Dynamo, n8n and ComfyUI share one idea: a directed acyclic graph. Learn the dataflow model that survives when the plugin goes dark.
The Control Layer Dies First: SBB's CHF 280m Bet on Keeping Iltis Alive
SBB pays Siemens up to CHF 280m to keep 30-year-old Iltis alive to 2045 — a lesson in single-vendor lock-in and the certification chain buildings ignore.
Review of the Week — W31: The Week Every Story Was a Dependency Graph
PAZ Kaffi W31 recap: Chandigarh, Akira, the Gotthard twin and Git — the week every strong story turned out to be a dependency graph hiding a single point of failure.
Earth Intelligence Is a Projection Choice: What Copernicus's 24-Hour Delay Means for Your Site Datum
The EU's 24-hour delay on Copernicus Sentinel data exposes a datum problem — why every site workflow needs an explicit CRS, epoch and projection before you measure.
Nine Archicad add-ons in one morning: PAZ-BOX and the office that runs like a program
PAZ-Next opens PAZ-BOX: nine Archicad add-ons — Raumstempelfix, Volumenstudie, PAZGPT — run against a live project. Turn your most repetitive task into a parameter.
