I sell 12-24V fridges with adjustable temperatures on them
More than a handful of times I’ve had customer returns because the fridge is “broken” and when I inquire further they refuse to use a fridge which deviates from the set temperature for any amount of time (even by one or two degrees)
By giving users the affordance of knowing the exact temperature - they’re appalled to realise it’s not a magic black box, and that the compressor kicks in to bring it back to temperature, and kicks out when it reaches it
They no doubt have no issue with their domestic fridge, which does not afford them the ability to see the exact temperature, despite functioning the same under the hood
Digital scales are notorious for this. Rather than show natural weight fluctuations, plenty will just lie and say you weigh the same every day until it's a couple pounds different.
It's something that makes more sense hands-on. I took a basic letterpress printing workshop[1] at the SF Center for the Book (SFCB[2], a non-profit in SF), so I had an immediate idea of not just what brass rules were and even how they felt in my hands. Making a portrait with them would be a pretty involved, very tactile experience.
There's so much tacit knowledge involved with physical skills and practices that the only way to preserve the knowledge is to keep using and teaching the techniques. For letterpress printing this is going to be the domain of specialized artists and non-profit organizations like SFCB. I really hope that we do manage to keep practices like through the generations; they're unique and beautiful as both a matter of history and a matter of craft.
This is a good reminder to myself that I meant to take the extended "core" letterpress workshop series at the SFCB, but did not have the time or energy for it over the last couple of years. Hopefully I'll do it this fall or something...
Brass rule appears to be... exactly what it sounds like, a straight line made notionally of brass. This isn't exactly an unknown term; compare the <hr> tag.
It might be somewhat more ethical redacting this, some things are just better left alluded to
I myself have taken apart CRTs and microwaves, but learning these things should be done by reading media with all attention paid to safety (a specific tutorial on testing and discharging caps), not a quick aside in an unrelated blog post
You didn’t say anything wrong, but it might be wise to lessen the word count while also protecting (the potentially vulnerable) people that may read your post
Quite a lot of people with intellectual disabilities and/or on the spectrum do teardowns/e-waste (there are even charities here in Brisbane Australia), it’s similar to the old journalist code of ethics on carefully omitting information related to suicides, sometimes it’s wiser to not say anything at all, than it is to say the technically correct thing
Interesting thing about the evolution of Hyraxes is that it is likely to be an example of a Hard Polytomy - as in Hyraxes, Elephants and Manatees split off simultaneously
I knew that Hyraxes were related to elephants, And I've seen rock hyraxes in the wild many times, but TIL the term "Hard Polytomy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytomy
That’s the biggest thing I took away from the whole Boeing corporate disaster
You need to maintain at least a minimum amount of internal competency in almost all areas
If you completely give away a capability to other countries (in this case, fishing knowledge and labour) it is much harder to bring back than just coughing up the money
Those sectors you let die might not matter right now, but they might matter later. And you might have to scale up fast.
We buy local brands of shoes that are in inr 300-2000 range and that solves like 70% of the shoes market in India. From shoes to skippers to formal shoes to ladies heels and such.
Then you gave INr 3000-8000 that are considered really really expensive.
Convert that to usd and you will see how much premium is being charged.
Perhaps. But does a subsidized industry retain competence, or retain incompetence? After all, if you're making a profit no matter what, what incentive is there to do well?
Many of the EU farming and fishing subsidies are to NOT produce anything.
That often depends on the structure of the subsidy.
"We will pay you 5 euros per kg of fish sold in supermarkets to consumers" is different from "We will pay you 500,000 euros a year to keep fishing".
There is a very reasonable argument in fisheries starting at least a century ago (and locally long before that), that we're looking at a partially renewable good - that it would be easy to cause an unsustainable population collapse with unrestricted harvesting, and so you should try and intervene in the market to sustain fish populations and stabilize harvests. Subsidies intended to do this are distinct from subsidies intended to keep fishermen employed fishing.
See also How Tech Loses Out over at Companies, Countries and Continents https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/, where the author asks, "In any organization, in any company, in any group, any country and even any continent, what level of technical capability, do we need to retain?"
Once you've outsourced everything except the management work, the organization forgets how to do the thing they're supposed to be managing.
> If you completely give away a capability to other countries (in this case, fishing knowledge and labour) it is much harder to bring back than just coughing up the money
I feel like money is overwhelmingly how we denominate value, effort, and agency in our society. Almost every time somebody says "You can't just throw money at the problem", they are arguing that we shouldn't even try that, contrary to all established reasoning about how society works.
There are diminishing returns to funding, but the people who use this expression are typically at a tiny fraction of where we would expect to hit them.
If you want to have a fishing industry because fish are your idealized heritage, then choose to subsidize it heavily either to continue to exist, and/or to expand it into waters and economies of scale where you can still fish profitably. Like the Japanese and the Chinese do, respectively.
You need to pay money to people who will put in effort and agency. You can't just throw money at random people and expect something useful to happen. Sometimes, the people who will make things happen if you throw money to them don't exist. Sometimes, you have to turn people into those people (which also costs money).
Money is something you give people so they can eat and stay warm while they do the thing you want. They still have to be doing the thing you want. Sometimes there's enough reputation and legal threats on the line that you can assume the person will do the thing just based on the fact they're taking money from you and not freaking out. Companies do things this way a lot - individuals not as much.
The abstraction is not the territory, and the idea that money denominates value is an abstraction... often we define "value" as "that for which money is exchanged", making the abstraction tautological, at no gain. This is often done by people who want to think the thing they're spending a lot of money on is very valuable, or want to make you think the thing you're spending a lot of money on is very valuable.
Oh yeah, Triple J's Like A Version is incredible. I don't know what they've got in the water there but so many artists put out their best ever work with those covers. Here are some I like:
- Someday (Julia Jacklin cover of The Strokes)
- Love (CHVRCHES cover of Kendrick Lamar)
- Feels Like We Only Go Backwards (Arctic Monkeys cover of Tame Impala)
- Do I Wanna Know (CHVRCHES cover of Arctic Monkeys)
- Believe (DMA's cover of Cher)
And speaking of Australian childrens TV and Like A Version covers, the Wiggles covered Tame Impala's Elephant (bet you didn't expect that one!)
Agree, I'm not sure why you'd think that's the only use case for 3D, unless I misunderstand your argument here.
How would you handle visual effects with point-clouds for example? There are so many use cases for proper 3D, and all I can think of as use-case for point clouds are environments with static lightning, which seems like a really small part of what people generally consider "3D scenes".
Maybe I missed the mark on “gamedev”, but 3D is larger than just “aesthetically pleasing 3D VFX” for its own sake
Often I’m trying to use something as a reference for a design where a 3D model isn’t the actual end goal, or I’m performing analytics on a 3D object (say in my case for a lot of GIS and simulation work)
The whole “mesh is the be all and end all of 3D modelling” irks me as while yes it’s a really important way of representing an object (especially with real time constraints), it doesn’t do justice to the full landscape of techniques and uses for 3D
It would be like 2D sprite artists from the gamedev world saying “what’s the point of all this vector art you illustrators are doing” or “what’s the point of all these wireframe designs you graphic designers are doing” - “these aren’t raster images!”
I suppose my snipe was trying to communicate the idea that 3D is larger than just a vehicle for entertainment production. It intersects many industries that may eschew polygons because real time rendering is irrelevant
3D tooling has uses beyond producing 3D scenes, just as Photoshop is used for more than touching up photographs
Edit: for anyone stuck in a rut with meshes come join the dark side with nurbs - it makes you think about modelling in a radically different way (unfortunate side effect is it makes working with meshes feel so so “dirty”)
The whole “mesh is the be all and end all of 3D modelling”
No one said this, it seems like you are making up fake questions and not dealing with the actual questions that the person you replied to asked.
You can view point clouds and you can warp them around, but working with them and tracing rays becomes a different story.
Once you need something as a jumping off point to start working with, point clouds are not going to work out anymore. People use polygons for a reason. They have flexible UVs, they can be traced easily, they can be worked with easily, their data is direct, standard and minimal.
Games are the least of it, the vast majority of scientific applications to do with physics use meshes rather than point clouds.
This is because a point cloud does not represent a surface or a volume until the points are connected to form, well, a surface or a volume.
And physical problems are most often defined over surfaces or volumes. For instance, waves don't propagate over sparse sets of points, but within continuous domains.
However, for applications where geometric accuracy is needed, I think you wouldn't want to use a method based on a minimal number of photographs anyways. For instance, the Lascaux cavern was mapped in 3D a decade ago based on "good old" algorithms (not machine learning) and instruments (more sophisticated than a phone camera). So these critiques are missing the point, in my opinion. These Gaussian Splatting methods are very impressive for the constraints they operate under!
What I think Mathematicians should remind themselves is a lot of prestigious mathematicians, the likes of Cantor or Erdos, often only employed a handful of “tricks”/heuristics for their proofs over their career. They repeatedly and successfully applied these strategies into unsolved problems
I argue would not take a tremendous jump in performance for an AI to begin their own journey similar in kind to the greats, the only thing standing in their way (as with all contemporary mathematicians) is the extreme specialisation required to reach the boundary of unsolved problems
AI need not be Euler to be an important tool and figure within mathematics
What I think Mathematicians should remind themselves is a lot of prestigious mathematicians, the likes of Cantor or Erdos, often only employed a handful of “tricks”/heuristics for their proofs over their career.
I know this claim is often made but it seems obvious that in this discussion, trick means something far wider and more subtle than any set computer program. In a lot of ways, "he just uses a few tricks" is akin to the way a mathematician will say "and the rest of the proof is elementary" (when it's still quite long and hard for anyone not versed in a given specialty). I mean, before category theory was formalized, the proofs that now are possible with it might classified as "all done with this trick" but grasping said trick was far from elementary matter.
I argue would not take a tremendous jump in performance for an AI to begin their own journey similar in kind to the greats, the only thing standing in their way (as with all contemporary mathematicians) is the extreme specialisation required to reach the boundary of unsolved problems.
Not that LLMs can't do some impressive things but your narrative seems to anthropomorphize them in a less than useful way.
I sell 12-24V fridges with adjustable temperatures on them
More than a handful of times I’ve had customer returns because the fridge is “broken” and when I inquire further they refuse to use a fridge which deviates from the set temperature for any amount of time (even by one or two degrees)
By giving users the affordance of knowing the exact temperature - they’re appalled to realise it’s not a magic black box, and that the compressor kicks in to bring it back to temperature, and kicks out when it reaches it
They no doubt have no issue with their domestic fridge, which does not afford them the ability to see the exact temperature, despite functioning the same under the hood
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