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You can't talk about hobby tunnels without mentioning the Moleman of Hackney :-)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lyttle

- The house was later brought back to life in an amazing way https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifestyle/article/sue-webst...

I haven't seen the Public Image Ltd logo in a very long time.

That is fascinating!

But I feel he was an amateur compared to Joseph Williamson :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williamson_Tunnels

Brilliant. This indeed wins :-)

My wife and I have an excavator on our property that we use for making trails, trenching, digging up stumps, etc. All of it is exhilarating. But, nothing beats simply digging. Something about breaking through the top layer and getting a big scoop of earth that just feels real good.

Seymour Cray down in the tunnels, communing with the Machine Elves.

I thought you were just riffing around but wow:

https://www.reddit.com/r/HighStrangeness/comments/v15u0t/sey...

First person I thought about when I read the title.

If you haven't already, I would highly recommend this book[1] on Seymour Cray. An amazing read.

1. https://www.amazon.com/Supermen-Seymour-Technical-Wizards-Su...

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

How far down does a person own, on their property? I mean, keeping things (relatively) simple-- and residential-- and assuming you respect the water table, utilities, etc?

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's mentioned in the second sentence of the post

Fair

I don’t know how Colin Furze hasn’t come up in this thread yet. He has built a sprawling series of tunnels and rooms under his home and not in some cursory, lip service way like Kala.

Read the article and find out!

I got about halfway through and didn’t see him mentioned.

Edit: lol he’s in the first paragraph.

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.

Great content for the upcoming drone wars and the inevitable tunnels that will be built for troop and matériel movements

What makes you think a tunnel would be safe? Just need to re-purpose this little guy:

https://blog.sintef.com/digital-en/inachus-project-robot-sea...

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!

the operator of those would get hit by an aerial drone from one of the other tunnel exits

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?

Given that we have nuclear weapons why bother making anything?

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been going the other way around entirely.

It's attackers that can't defend against anything.

Makes me think the noble houses of Westeros should have dug tunnels to foil the Targaryen dragon advantage.

they did - that's why dorne was never conquered

Little known fact, dragonglass is an excellent semiconductor

Israel and the US have shown in Iran you need to dig extremely deep, otherwise you stand no chance against modern bombs.

But carrying bunker busters via drones is a lot more expensive than hand grenades.

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?

https://www.972mag.com/tunnels-hamas-lethal-gas-bombs-gaza/

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.

I figure if Seymore Cray thought digging was useful for mental hygiene it's probably ok:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_tunneling

https://web.archive.org/web/20080521163217/http://www.time.c...

> 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."

Winston Churchill famously used to build brick walls to deal with the "black dog" of depression.

The International Churchill Society has an pretty fun read about his bricklaying "career".

https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finest...

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 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.

Why not lean into it instead of becoming a wet blanket? Just look at the trench every few hours or so, and if it gets too deep, tell them about and help them with setting up some shoring.

That's what it means to mitigate the hazard, right?

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.

Perfect Venn diagram of man's urge to dig holes and the endless possibility and adventure of childhood Summer

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.

Yeah, that's part of why those gameified exercise apps are such a big hit - you can see "results" before you see the results!

How much did you excavate?

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).

You found your chew toy.

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.

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Was hoping this was about network tunnels…

Was hoping this was about earthen tunnels and was pleasantly SURPRISED considering the website we are on :)

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…

I use them as cheap-man's VPN. A ssh server on a public IP but a non-obvious port brings you into the network, and port forwarding allows you to connect to relevant endpoints in your remote network via localhost:12345.

house gotta have sipapu

Article really needs some sub headings or images - just anything to help situate where you are in case you navigate away from where you were reading.

The article is a transcript of the video at the top of the page.

Grady's videos are quite impressive to watch.

There are people like myself who prefer to read at our own pace, even skim the article and look at pictures. Video sucks.

Okay but that's not what this is. It's a YouTube channel. A very well known one in fact.

I could have swore there was an accompanying blog with pictures at some point.

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 prefer text too but this channel is just amazing..

I can’t wait till world models are good enough that you can ask robots to work autonomously to geo transform spaces.

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.

That is the easy part.

However you just made a robot that will happily kill anyone who happens to wonder into the dig zone - we know from experience that people like to watch excavators work and they have no clue where the safe zone is. As such I have to discourage you from trying it - not that you couldn't make it dig the holes you want in a short time, but because you need someone trained watching for people walking in the unsafe zone and so you gained nothing. Waymo/Tesla have put a lot of effort into this type of detection, if you don't have similar backing you have no chance of doing it - if you do have that, there is likely a lot of money to be made.

Not all projects have to be taken on with the goal of commercialization. The beachhead functionality would be manual remote control - operate two machines from one seat. Then maybe some cameras to be able to work in the dark/cold/hot/etc from the comfort of inside. Even that is getting into the safety issue (any control system can go sideways), but seems straightforward to solve (some kind of redundant remote-control e-stop).

Any type of automation would be a huge pile of unknown unknowns, safety being one of them, how to even define goals for it to solve being another. Which is what keeps this idea in the realm of a dog chasing a car - if you gave me an excavator I could remote-control from my computer today, I'd not have the first clue what to actually do with it (beyond manually-controlled digging from my chair).

I do get that in the era of "AI" and vibe-coding why I may have set off your engineering sensibilities wtfometer though.

(Automating a lawnmower though...)

This all makes for fine hand wringing but is pretty much irrelevant at hobbyist project scales. The workplace standards that everyone tries to apply in bad faith to personal use are mostly designed to solve problems that aren't there. You're not gonna have distracted drywallers or rebar guys trying to take a shortcut and schlep materials through the excavator's range of motion in a personal use setting. You're not gonna have a boss yelling at someone who doesn't know better hop in an unstable trench or unstable latter and git'r'done when you're your own boss.

> You're not gonna have a boss yelling at someone who doesn't know better hop in an unstable trench or unstable latter and git'r'done when you're your own boss

eh, kind of. The motivation to take unsafe shortcuts manifests differently, but it is still there. It requires some vigilance to exercise self-responsibility and sometimes make yourself stop and take a step back and figure out a better way to proceed, while accepting that something is going to take longer than you'd planned.

The important thing is there are no people in the loop so it’s truly scalable.

Claude, please destroy nature.

Claude, please remove all invasives

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.

At this point we have too much free time on our hands x_x

google ai estimates that 4.7 billion hours have been spent in minecraft. At least these are real :)

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.

Sounds about right?

eta: that's 4.51 of every million seconds

Completely offtopic, but my first reaction was this song.

Enjoy for those who would enjoy such things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34CZjsEI1yU

I don’t like these posts because they’re just transcripts of a video. It’s a form of slop which predates AI.

There's a lot of value in transcripts of videos being provided next to the original content. It improves accessibility for a lot of people and helps out those of us who might be searching content or not in a place where they can watch a video but can read. Why would it be considered slop?

Obligatory shoutout to Engineer Kala

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.

>As they say, the rules are written in blood

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.

> Basically nobody ever died from leaky pipes

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_London_School_explosion

Even leaky water pipes kill people - just google Legionnaires disease.

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.

Sounds like a tacit admission that those bits are written in rotten wood rather than blood.

The part I take issue with isn't the building code in principal or that non lethal things can be regulated. It's that the people being to lie though their teeth and pretend it's all written in blood when a whole bunch of it isn't are essentially stealing credibility from those parts that are. A few bad apples (handouts to industry) spoils the bunch (very clearly important stuff, like floor and roof loading).

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.

> 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.

meh, I understand the point, but it is about your risk tolerance being different than whoever writes the code. I have a long list of complaints about the NEC, (including AFCI requirements), but IMO, these kinds of requirements do save some amount of lives -- the issues comes down to how much do you value your own life, and/or the lives of others. The tradeoff, as always, is cost -- inspections, permits, impact studies etc push up the cost of new and remodel jobs substantially.

Where I really take issue with different code is when we hammer down on a specific issue of small significance while neglecting a more significant problem. For example, I have never in my life seen an inspector check the torque of a main lugs, polaris connectors, etc. Might just be my inspectors, but I have seen way more failures due to loose or over tightened connections than anything else.

I am all for gradually raising the bar for safety, but it has to rise faster than the increased cost, along with a level raising of the bar across all facets.

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Brings to mind this woman's efforts -- very impressive indeed:

https://www.youtube.com/@engineerkala/

Edit: reading is hard -- I only skimmed and did not realize she was mentioned.

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!

That was a big part of Christo's art.

He explicitly mentions her in the video.

My bad, I just skimmed. This is HN after all ;-)

Colin Furze ftw!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray

> 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."

i thought for a second this referred to building a tunnel for openclaw haha. I need to get off Twitter