He seems to be doing everything by "feel". I would imagine that if the stone were 3D scanned it wouldn't be difficult to use some software to determine the optimal orientation to achieve the largest cut stone, for a given cut style.
He's making decisions based on a lifetime of experience. I wouldn't be so quick to assume that can be replaced by a simple optimizer. Additionally, maximizing size is just one goal among many.
The hubris of any software dev is that code can do anything better. For a large majority of things, I would agree. After all, that's why we made computers in the first place. It's also my tenet of workflow automation. I'm not trying to eliminate a person's job. I'm just trying to make the tedious error prone parts of the job less tedious and error prone so that the person is free to spend more time on the things that they are good at and would be difficult to automate.
Automated gem cutting exists, but is only used for lower value stones. If it were such an obvious slam dunk the industry would be using it for stones like this too.
I like to use Toyota as an example, because they famously reject total automation as a desirable goal. The believe having humans in the loop creates a learning loop that gets the best overall result, so they optimize for a sweet spot between automation and human.
To use an analogy from art, automation doesn't replace the artist, it replaces more limited paint brushes. As amazing as recent large model advances are, there's also a clear difference in how effective humans are at using them to get the desired result.
If you're just playing around then a simple prompt to finished image pipeline is convenient and shockingly good. If you're being more specific about the end goal then you need the model to expose more fine grained ways for the user to express what they want and modify the intermediate results. This why you see Adobe et all focusing on that kind of "smarter tool used in detail" approach.
>>If it were such an obvious slam dunk the industry would be using it for stones like this too.
I don't think so, or at least I think it misses where this industry drives value from. I don't know if my comment will seem too cynical for the Hacker News add value to discussion threshold, but - the entire industry is by definition built, completely, around sub-optimization and artificial complexity, scarcity, and meaning. If you want optimal and efficient and automated, you can get it for fraction of the price. The hand made sub-optimal facet is a strong part of the perceived / advertised value.
Yes, because simultaneously it's somehow true that it's a slam dunk to use automation to replace this skill, but yet industry faces some sort of irrational barriers to implement that.
Or maybe, just possibly, armchair opinions from programmers who have never done this and have no idea what the reality is beyond a youtube video have superficial understanding?
A cheap quartz movement (watch mechanism) will be more accurate than most high-end mechanical watches, and yet they keep being made.
I think the main reasons (beside "vanity") are:
a) huge profit margins, limiting the incentive to optimize
b) high start up costs combined with relatively little volume
A system would have to accurately measure imperfections/inclusions, then pick the best design, then it'd either have to cut it themselves or communicate the instructions to the person (who'd have to be willing to use such a system).
The current approach with a human designing and cutting the stone is simply good enough, so there is no reason to change. And something like re-cutting the Koh-i-noor happens rarely enough that I suspect nobody wants to invest in developing the software for it when you can get a close enough result by throwing more one-off manual work at the problem.
Synthetic stones (which I assume are a much simpler problem because they're even cheaper and have fewer inclusions to optimize around) are already being cut by robots (or so I've been told, at least). I think the whole "real natural stone" and "hand-cut" parts are definitely part of the appeal/selling point.
If you care about a "slam dunk", you'll buy robot-cut Cubic Zirconia or Moissanite and call it a day.
I have absolutely not posited the barriers as "irrational". Artificial market segmentation, and increasing value of product through human artistry are increasingly common and not necessarily "irrational". There are any number of products on the market that machine can make better, but we value more highly when it's made by human... in fact, that's true of a very large proportion of products, marketed as "handcrafted" or, since it's 2024, "artisanal and rustic" et cetera :-)
(the line of where "handcrafted" goes from "friendly and community and positive and encouraging neighbourhood entrepreneurs" to "evil and scheming and big-corpo-deceptive" is subjective evaluation, but none of them necessitate "irrational" let alone, as is implied, "stupid")
Anytime something takes a long time to create, there's an expected add to the price. Look at your 18 year old (and older) Scotch/Whiskey prices. Even lab grown gems takes months to "grow". Yes, there is a cartel influence on an artificial scarcity, but even still, it's something that isn't just common everyday discoveries for the vast majority of people. Even without the cartel influence, there would still be value in them vs much more common things like quartz/granite/etc.
'computers' can now rival the greatest painted masterpieces from all of human history with a mere text-based prompt (or less). would you consider those generated works to be masterpieces? or is there something about a work created by human hand and derived from a human mind that can only make them so?
The thing with masterpieces is that they don’t hold that status because they can’t be replicated, they hold it because they were novel, innovative, and unrivaled at the time of their creation.
> The training of painters in past centuries regularly involved copying old master drawings and paintings. To that end, most museums happily allowed students into their buildings for that purpose (some still do). But the practice was not limited to students. Even fully trained old masters copied older masters.
> The practice of copying and recreating paintings by the Old Masters at the Louvre goes back to when the museum first opened in 1793, when any artist could turn up and use a freely available easel to copy a masterpiece.
> ...
> Not all artists copied works to improve their skills. Some took up the practice professionally, since the demand for copies of masterpieces in the Louvre was high throughout the nineteenth century.
> ...
> These days only 250 copyists are permitted to install themselves in front of the museum’s art works, and a two-year waiting list shows that there are plenty of hopefuls waiting in the wings to take up a palette and brush.
> Those granted access have up to three months to work on their copy.
That this exists as a pedagogical exercise does not disprove the original point in any way.
Source: I spent a lot of time in the library copying sketches of the renaissance masters as a kid.
AI is the pencil, not the artist. As cool and capable as large models are they are not even remotely close to replacing self directed human intent. If you do not understand this you do not understand art.
I don't believe there's some magical quality to human intelligence, just that the things we are making today with AI are still orders of magnitude short of the real thing, and that there are still very difficult open questions in that gap.
There are certain jobs that we consider artists, but are very close to someone entering a text to a prompt. Consider a director for theater/film. They are prompting their "tools" (to be reductive) to produce the art they want, and have to sometimes accept when they just can't get the results they want from their tool.
I've kept considering the term hand crafted when reading this thread about what is considered valued art or not as that's what applies to this gemstone TFA directly. Then it went to the painters with brush strokes, and that too keeps the hand crafted idea. That's when I jumped to directors. To step further away from art, and switch it to sportsball. While current managers might have once been a player, now, they are essentially entering text into prompts to get their "tools" to provide the result they are looking for with varying degrees of success. The managers/coaches can't kick/throw the ball themselves to get the results. They just have to get their "tool" to perform better by constantly tweaking the text entered into the prompt. Hell, now I'm thinking parents are constantly tweaking their prompts to get their kids to do something.
Okay, at this point, I'm convinced we're all just part of the matrix.
> Consider a director for theater/film. They are prompting their "tools" (to be reductive) to produce the art they want, and have to sometimes accept when they just can't get the results they want from their tool.
Bluntly, it's clear you have no personal understanding of such productions and did not understand the most important point of my comment and how different it is from piloting a generative model.
Bluntly? You clearly have no idea who I am or what my work experience is like. I have no idea what your response has to do with anything, but I hope you feel better for getting it off your chest.
Humans working on a creative team are not automatons given commands, and this is a pretty basic understanding even if you are super impressed by what large models can do.
I am not super impressed by what LLMs can do, and think the current hype wave is ridiculous. I find them slightly more useful than NFTs.
But if you can't see how a director trying to use phrases like "I see what you're doing, and it's interesting. But let's try saying the actual lines a few more times, and then we'll let you play with it some more", or "okay, that was great. let's do it one more time", or "this time with more energy/angrier/etc", or "that was great everyone! this time, we're going to do the same thing but with..." or any other variations of director speak isn't like a user tweaking their prompt while looking for something entirely different or keeping parts of it while looking to change a different part.
If you can't see how that kind of feedback loop is similar to using a GPT, then you're really being obtuse as it's as blatant as the nose on your face
Almost every time I see an AI generated art piece, I know it's AI generated, and it looks cheap. Sometimes an actual experienced artist uses AI and manages to tweak it to look decent, either by prompt engineering or further manipulation. There's nothing that yet replaces the human taste for what looks good nor what resonates for contemporary audiences. At best, it could be said that AI has further reduced the value of derivative art and photography.
A lot of the AI "art" I've seen looks like a psychotic serial killer made it. There's just something wrong with it, especially when it depicts humans - the eyes are insane, the facial expressions look like the subject wants to cannibalize me. If it were a human artist, I would suggest they seek mental help. It's honestly kind of scary that this is what computers are creating, it's no wonder some people worry about AI destroying humanity.
One time I only input the style of the image basically leaving the description empty. I was wondering what it would come up with by it self. It served a human head on a table. I didn't need a second image.
Hardly. They cannot mimic the brush strokes, the material choices, expressiveness, composition and more. It is absolutely abhorrent to say that any AI is even in the same field, let alone close to art masterpieces.
i appreciate your frank reply. by posing my question in such a way so as to illicit discourse, my position was lost and does read ambiguous.
i would like to not agree with you that plenty of people believe machine-generated work is even in the same universe as human art (including that which is not painted). but i'm afraid you may be right.
my downvoted-to-purgatory comment you've quoted. glad to see that the phrasing of that specific question stuck out to at least someone in the manner i intended.
This is done for some diamonds. About 1:20 in this video you can see them mention how they use computers to aid in deciding how to cut the diamond https://youtu.be/8lk8p0re8Eg
great point... but in thinking about your comment, it occurs to me that then it could no longer be considered "hand cut."
i found it very interesting that he shared he was hoping for 300+ cts., but had resolved to be satisfied with at least 250. so he did alright after all.
A lot of “academic” ebooks are expensive. I’ve discovered though, that if I put them in a list and monitor it, sometimes they will suddenly drop in price. Sometimes permanently, sometimes they just go on sale. I’ve gotten books that were $30 for $2. Call me cheap, but I hate to buy a $30 unless I know I’m going to love it
And another 51 bits of info for whether the picture of the puppy on the back of the card is right-side-up or upside-down! (Or, absent puppies, any other asymmetrical pattern or image that you chose for the message deck).
Because your recipient has to be able to determine the reference orientation of the deck, you get 51 bits of extra information from puppy orientation, and another 50 bits of extra information from face-up/face-down orientation.
To place the deck in correct orientation, in preparation for decoding, ensure that the top and bottom card are face up, and that the puppy on the back of the top card isn't upside-down.
In an asymmetrical design, the orientation of face carries no extra information, since orientation information is already carried by the orientation of the design on the back.
For decks with a symmetrical back design, the following cards have asymmetrical faces:
- The seven of diamonds.
- The ace, three, five, seven and nine of hearts, clubs and spades.
In my deck (a standard design), none of the face cards are asymmetrical.
So there are sixteen cards that carry orientation information, one of which must be used to define the reference orientation of the deck, yielding 15 additional bits of information.
