3D Printing

A print farm does not usually fail because nobody knows how to press “start.” It fails in smaller, duller, more expensive ways. One plate carries too few parts. Another job needs manual rearrangement. A failed object ruins the economics of a batch. The slicer accepts a layout that looks reasonable, until sequential printing reminds everyone that the print head is not a ghost and cannot pass through already printed objects. Reality, inconveniently, still has geometry. ...

Formulation is where AI enthusiasm usually goes to sober up. In a slide deck, “AI-assisted drug development” sounds clean: feed the model a drug, get back a formulation, reduce experiments, accelerate personalisation, everybody nods. In a lab, the problem is less polite. A formulation is not just a sentence with chemical names. It is a physical recipe with roles, proportions, processing constraints, and mechanical consequences. A model can sound fluent while quietly omitting the lubricant, mangling the unit, or inventing a polymer that belongs more to fantasy literature than pharmaceutics. ...