One of my first jobs (~1999) was as a research assistant working on seeing whether it's possible to make reentry vehicle heat shields from oak. Sadly, it wasn't.
I used magic patterns for a couple of months and it was one of the first no brainer AI services I've paid for outside of the main LLMs and IDEs. It did such an amazing job on quite an esoteric frontend that's very much not your normal web app. Impressive. Next time I need to design and build some more frontend code I'll be subscribing again.
Edit: to add some meat to that comment what surprised me was just how much better it was than Anthropic and OpenAI tools at that time for coming up with great looking products with minimal prompting. I also fed it other designs for inspiration and it replicated them brilliantly while incorporating my requirements. Good stuff.
I've found an air fryer on dehydrate works well. The Ninja I use controls temp within a few degrees and will happily do so for hours at up to 80C (actual recorded 80C unlike my filament dryer). Also relatively cheap and compact. Worth looking into. Only downside is there's not much space inside the drawer and you have to keep turning it to get an even drying as the air circulation is restricted.
A dryer or similar kitchen appliance is in fact much better because almost all filament dryers on the market trap the moisture inside unless you manually open them.
I find it weird how even today a guide just suggests to leave the lid open when the solution is to buy a device that actually works as advertised.
This is great (in theory). During lockdown I got an ambisonic mic (Rode NF-SFW1) and used it to create Dolby Atmos experiences. The workflow - including sending it to Dolby's tool every time - was such a pain. Adding additional 3d elements was especially annoying and limiting.
Unfortunately that's no longer my hobby so can't test this for you but definitely scratches an itch for past me. Nice
Yeah, frustration with the existing solutions was one of the main reasons I started this project.
I was working in creating immersive audio, and I just found that none of the plugins allowed the level of placement that I wanted. It was all fiddly, and you couldn't easily move the listening position around, while also moving sound sources.
I came from an audio engineering background, not programming, so it took me a while to even learn how to make software! But now I made the tool I always needed.
R1 is the first model I've used that one-shotted a full JavaScript tetris with all the edge-case keyboard handling and scoring. It also one-shotted an AI snake game. With the right prompts I've found it consistently better than o1 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
The other thing is you'll need markers. At least in my experience. I think if you don't need precision photogrammetry and AI will get you the results way faster
(To be clear I love my Vega. Game changer. Just a bit heavy handed if you're not making car body parts)
100%. Lots of things work as markers, too! I ended up substituting markers for taped-on construction paper when scanning stainless steel surfaces with curves, the tape serving as feature for the scanner to pickup...worked well enough :)
I definitely recognize what you're saying and it's fantastic, but hiring managers and execs do indeed need to be active on this too.
The channels to reach out to more diverse candidate are more often than not different to those recruiters use to find your "average white guy in a hoodie". That's decreasingly the case for women (and I use that term very intentionally; I'm not talking generally "non-male" here), but social media and professional networking is quite hostile and/or intimidating to other groups. While the business benefits of putting in this extra effort in are obvious (it's a no brainer to seek out overlooked top talent, let alone the benefits of culture and diverse experiences), those benefits aren't always aligned with the hiring team who are incentivized in most companies to hit numbers. The business goals need to be driven from above by DEI initiatives or - if not - hiring manager allies who'll put their foot down.
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