Archive · August 2026
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.
Git for Architects: The Version Habit That Outlives Every Vendor
Why every Swiss Büro should run git init on its live project today: free, offline, vendor-proof version history for IFC, SVG and Grasshopper files.
Cache-augmented generation: the cheapest token is the one you never re-read
How CAG caches a frozen corpus to cut RAG cost — the O(n²) attention bottleneck, Redis TTL traps, and where a Swiss BIM studio should actually reach for it.
Akira's 160,000-cel pipeline and what it teaches your office about single points of failure
Akira's 160,000-cel, ¥1.1 billion production is a systems diagram: how pre-scoring and the seven-studio committee teach your office to delete single points of failure.
