I'm probably not the only person who thought this was about ssh and possibly handrolling something
that said, I've been latently fascinated by this kind of project. I've seen a couple of how-things-work/maker/dare-me-to-do-it type shows from UK and US where folks single handedly do stuff like this, though they're all hairy dudes unlike Kala, whose channel looks pretty cool
This is a very cool frontier for a homeowner, to not just have dominion over your terranean space by growing edible veg and habitat for animals but also use your below ground asset for who knows -- domicile extension or DIY geothermal or ...?
Gemini tells me in the US, land ownership theoretically extends to the Earth's core
There's a lady on Instagram that goes by the handle 'engineerkala', who's been building a tunnel/mine below her home and learning the process along the way. I'm pretty sure one day the account will go dark when she's entombed herself a hundred metres below her living room, but until that comes it's a fascinating and extremely entertaining page to watch.
She is clearly autistic. And she is relatively intelligent. But she's not as smart as she seems to think she is. Some of the things she shows in her videos, complaining about code enforcement cracking down on her... yeah, no, she's going to be the object lesson on why the code exists.
On the other hand the code enforcement forced her to take a year to demonstrate her tunnel was safe, so she may be the illustration of the reasons the code exists in that she survives and finds another seam of rock to build her castle with. Who knows. I think it's wonderful that weirdos like her exist, whatever neurology they have.
She certainly managed to pass and allowed her to continue, so I'd agree here. Having spent some time underground with work I just have the fear of these kinds of projects, but she definitely has the knack for it.
But now you've forced your adversary to deploy and use "this little guy" on top of everything else they're doing. If you raise the costs high enough that they can't pay, you win. Yay!
a network of tunnels and sensors is easier to defend than a open space exposed position where drones can see you from miles away, I guess that makes tunnels better for defense
Given that we have bunker busters that will travel beyond the horizon at hypersonic speeds and bust 200 feet of reinforced concrete...
I don't think any fixed installation is particularly easy to defend?
Also, I'll grant that a drone can see you from miles away, but don't you think any one of a large and growing number of satellites can spot your massive earthworks from tens and hundreds of miles away for the months or years it takes you to construct?
Does no one remember how the resistance in Gaza held out to this day via their highly sophisticated tunnel system that the IDF was so terrified to enter they tried bombing it in a raster pattern with 2000 lb bombs to virtually no effect except on the aboveground civilians the bombs ran through?
When my wife was diagnosed with cancer and eventually went into remission, I didn’t really process what was happening at first. I was completely focused on getting her through it. The grief hit me later.
What helped me more than anything was going out into the garden and digging. I made sure to do it safely, since I know it can be risky, so I dug wide and with wooden supports, but there was something about just digging and digging down that let me work through all the darkness that had built up in my head. It gave those feelings somewhere to go.
This is unrelated, but I wonder if I did actually hit on something primal in myself.
> For Cray, the excavation project is more than a simple diversion. "I work when I'm at home," he recently told a visiting scientist. "I work for three hours, and then I get stumped, and I'm not making progress. So I quit, and I go and work in the tunnel. It takes me an hour or so to dig four inches and put in the 4-by-4s. Now, as you can see, I'm up in the Wisconsin woods, and there are elves in the woods. So when they see me leave, they come into my office and solve all the problems I'm having. Then I go back up and work some more."
> Rollwagen knows that Cray is only half kidding and that some of the designer's greatest inspirations come when he is digging. Says the chairman: "The real work happens when Seymour is in the tunnel."
I think the “primal urge” to dig is just really seeking the endorphins of manual labor. Digging like that is especially attractive because there’s little planning (unless you’re making a tunnel like the subject here) and no material investment but the earth beneath your feet.
One of my sisters had four boys (and no girls) and during summers they would drive her crazy with their boredom. When they were about ages 8-14 one summer she said: go in the back yard and see how big of a hole you can dig.
Wide-eyed they said: really? She said yes, dig as much as you want, but the only rule is it all gets filled in before school starts in the fall. 30 years later they say it was the best summer ever. Every day they were working on it and all of their friends would come by and help dig and plan what development would come next.
How deep did they get? Hope she kept an eye on it, unsupported holes quickly get dangerous, people underestimate how much weight is in the soil if the sides give out and just how dangerous that amount of weight moving can be.
It was more sprawling than deep. It was a series of trenches connecting "rooms". I know they also had "water features" at some points, but the water would soak into the ground pretty quickly then be a mess for a few days, so they didn't do that.
No collapses happened and everyone is still alive. :-)
Happy that all's well that ends well, but for any parents considering this, trench collapses have killed hundreds of workers in just the past decade. Anything deeper than a couple feet might be a hazard that needs to be mitigated.
Also depends on the local geology and how tenacious the kids are. I couldn't dig to dangerous depths as a kid even if I wanted to because the soil got way too rocky to dig through before 3 feet down.
You can get the same endorphins with exercise, but you don't get to see the results of your work. It's so much more satisfying when you can clearly see your progress. Playing in sandboxes or digging holes in your yard is a game, but manual labor alone is often just work.
I haven’t been to a gym since leaving college (I rowed in a championship 8, and twice daily workouts were a thing). Instead I do manual labor and love it. I’ve built dry stack basalt walls, mowed, edged, pruned, chopped and sawn, poured and broken cement, etc and never missed the (for me) pointless repetition of “exercise”. I respect folks that can do it, but I can’t understand how.
Best digging I ever did was in a torrential downpour for 4 hours. Mud and grass was flying everywhere, my shoes were squeaking as they drove down the shovel. I was soaked to the bone and my heavy, cotton clothes slapped freely against my skin with each shovel full I tossed to the side. That was some of my favorite digging ever.
I dug a hole that was about 3 meters deep and around 9 meters wide at the surface (I had to keep a gentle slope and cut wide terraces so the walls wouldn't cave in).
Joking aside, I too have spent many days digging with a shovel and pickaxe on my desert property. There's something to it, even Jim Keller (of DEC, AMD, Tenstorrent...) has discussed digging trenches in some of his podcast interviews.
My thoughts exactly. I’ve been using them for exposing local services to the public internet from my home network. Super convenient for initial proof of concept work…
You more or less can if you can afford the robots. Technically you need a dozen people or so to run the machines, but if you can afford the machine and costs to run it the costs of the people isn't going to phase you.
Now if the robots were affordable to someone on a minimum wage income that would be a big deal.
A Chinese 2 ton mini excavator is like $8k, and electronic solenoid valves could be added for like $2k. I've got to re-convince myself I don't need to take on this project like every other month.
Claude, please acquire the seedlings and reforest these 100 acres with the right native plants. Follow up for 3 years to ensure atleast an 80% survival rate. Ensure 20% are commercially viable hardwoods to pay for your operational costs.
I get it, I really hate when I go looking for instructions and all I can find are long videos. (Just try to Google instructions for learning CAD. All it comes up with are videos.)
Grady's video are not instructions, they are entertainment. He is a much better producer of videos than a writer. I'm quite thankful that he makes transcripts of his videos, but they are always better watched instead of read.
I mean that's hardly that bad.In the 17 years since release, ~7 billion humans will have had 1,042,440,000,000,000 hours of free time meaning society has spent 0.000451% of it's time on minecraft in the last 17 years.
Which is rounded well out beyond significant figures (as we've only got the one in 7 billion people). Rounded, we've spent effectively no time on minecraft.
This article/video really rubs me the wrong way. These strawmen who are being torn down for the most part aren't building "tunnels". They're building glorified 8-10ft foundations and basements with dirt over the top instead of structures, 1970s hippie "underground homes" basically. They're calling them tunnels and bunkers for clicks and views.
To then take that naming at face value and pontificate about code and engineering is very much a two slights of hand not making a right situation. Furthermore, a civil engineer doing so is deep into "man won't understand what his salary depends on him not understanding" territory.
I know that the many HNers from the seismically active portions of the US will have no frame of reference for this but there are portions of the world where for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years basements were built with less than scant engineering. The sort of "just barely below dirt" construction most of these amateurs are engaging in is on that order of complexity. Based on my observations via Youtube, these amateurs should be more scared of their own temporary construction rigging and material handling solutions than the forces their structures must hold back.
The primary practical engineering challenge and hazard these structures face is that there's nothing stopping someone from driving a point load of undefined size over the top and that has serious implications for roof strength.
As they say, the rules are written in blood. I don't think we should be disqualifying projects because they are not Mponeng-scale or complexity.
I am not a civil engineer, but I did spend a bunch of time looking into building an underground range. Way more relaxed life safety reqs, smaller bore, etc. However, when you start reading, it is clear that much of the work is empirical, heavily localized and based on a great deal on the experience of the builder. I found very little in the way of solid theoretical modeling, but lots of measure, adjust, etc.
I think Grady does a reasonable job highlighting the dangers and risks.
The only time theoretical modelling happens in most civil engineers careers is at university. Especially so with geotech/soil mechanics - it is the most inexact and variable/unpredictable area especially when water gets involved.
Structural steel would be the most predictable. Concrete and timber are in the middle somewhere.
Basically nobody ever died from leaky pipes or substandard weatherproofing. The code is as much about a) homogenizing the industry so big business can statistically reason about it at scale b) turning the subjective into the quantitive so that things can be done, checked, sight off on, etc, etc, without anyone using "judgement" as it is about protecting life and limb. Just about every professional has a laundry list of complaints about their area of code that boil down to it being theoretically useful but at great "not worth it" expense or a similar "not worth it" expense being incurred in lieu of very basic judgement. Arc fault breakers, and engineering requirements for small retaining walls come to mind as oft cited examples. And of course there's the myriad of wrangling that goes on wherein things get looser/stiffer requirements depending on whether their use is deemed worth incentivizing (this stuff usually lives in local addendums to the code).
I'm not saying there isn't value in there, but this habit people have of acting like it's all relevant to safety and screeching about "written in blood" is exactly what creates room for unrelated stuff to exist in the code.
>However, when you start reading, it is clear that much of the work is empirical, heavily localized and based on a great deal on the experience of the builder. I found very little in the way of solid theoretical modeling, but lots of measure, adjust, etc.
Which is a point very much in favor of the amateur.
I know you're probably intending to only remark on leaky water pipes, but:
The New London School explosion was caused by a leaky pipe. It killed 295 students and teachers, and led to the inclusion of smelly thiol in natural gas, as well as the Texas Engineering Practice Act.
A drip or stream from a leaky pipe isn't gonna do it. You need to get the bacteria into the respiratory tract to get legionaires disease. And even then a specific temperature water is necessary for it to grow.
A dehumidifier (or an HVAC system, which is where the name of the disease came from) is more likely to give you legionnaires disease than even the most substandard plumbing.
> Basically nobody ever died from leaky pipes or substandard weatherproofing
Famously, moist wet areas only grow molds that are safe for humans to live amongst, and absolutely never rotted away wooden structural components of a building.
A lot of regulations are also for consumer or user protection - not just for the first owner, but later owners too. Substandard waterproofing may not be dangerous, but it does bankrupt people and ruin lives.
We love engineer Kala. She decided to do a thing, while marking progress on her "technology tree" of skills gained by (very arguable) necessity. Dealing with permits and city beuaracracy seems like one of the hardest parts!
> Cray avoided publicity. There are a number of unusual tales about his life away from work, termed "Rollwagenisms", from then-CEO of Cray Research, John A. Rollwagen. Cray enjoyed skiing, windsurfing, tennis, and other sports. Another favorite pastime was digging a tunnel under his home; he attributed the secret of his success to "visits by elves" while he worked in the tunnel: "While I'm digging in the tunnel, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem."