Though it's possible that generating the STEP first is easier to do, and that the plan could be backporting the feature tree using another method / model would then enable editing.
Yes, it would seem post hoc feature tree requires the constraints that come from context in your head, but I could imagine that for most cases a "drafter's intuition" in AI may be sufficient, and you could build an interface to allow that to be mostly given up front and then through iterate post generation.
I could imagine the stepwise approach may allow AI training to be more constrained / efficient that trying to do the whole thing in one go.
Murex were the shells whose excretions were used to make the Tyrian purple of the Mediterranean. Tyrian referring to Tyre, one of the major Phoenician city-states.
It was so iconic that the "Punic Wars" are called that because Punic = Phoenicia = "Purple People".
Carthage was the Phoenician colony that outlasted the home country.
Also, the Phoenicians were the descendants of the Canaanites, who (according to one etymological theory) are also named after the color purple.
The Phoenicians were a semitic people like the Jews, and they gave the world its first alphabet which was adopted by both the Hebrews and the Greeks. The Greeks added vowels, and the Romans adopted that alphabet and it became roughly the one we use today.
If you go to the Wiki page (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet) and scroll down to the Table of Letters header, you can see how the letters evolved from Egyptian hieroglyphs to the letters we use today. It’s particularly interesting to me that our letter “B” (which the greeks called “beta” and which forms the tail end of “alphabet”) was originally a house, and the semitic languages called it “bēt” which was their word for house, which you can still see today in Biblical place names like Bethel (house of God—“El” was a very old name for God).
It's interesting how, unlike Sumerian cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphs that were complex systems that came from dedicated scribes of the court, Phoenicia's alphabet was the kind of pragmatic system you can imagine a more mercantile society developing.
It's wild that it turned into the scripts: Latin, Greek, Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and beyond.
Also interesting is Chinese script, which was saved from this by Stalin telling Mao that China should keep its unique writing, which Russia of course was already doing. Mao did do the simplification, but he turned away from his previous plan to standardize the latin script for Chinese.
Murex also has significant religious significance to Jews. It is the source of the biblically mandated blue threads for four cornered garments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tekhelet
Also for those who aren't familiar, there's also "hand scraping" for flatness which is more common and used for things like refreshing the "ways" (ie precision linear bearings) on a lathe or other precision machine tool.
This is done like the "dye / rub / scrape" method described above, which I believe is still used as it's superior to grinding for these applications.
Yea, that's what I figured, but I also wonder how well anyone is driving in the slush and if the LIDAR / cameras are that disrupted by snow / ice / salt.
Yea, this "lack of seriousness" really gets under my skin, and I really hope there's a broad cultural backlash to it soon, as this being the permanent culture seems toxic and exhausting.
That said, this is about the messaging aspect. Trump say could lack seriousness of rhetoric, but still be seriously pursuing his self-interests.
It's hard to unsee metamodern in movies once you see it. I did a 'self aware waldo' monologue in high school drama class, didn't realize it was meta modern.
Not a movie, but according to the wiki article linked a little further up the book “A Visit From The Goon Squad” by Jennifer Egan has metamodern qualities, and I heartily recommend reading it. It’s fantastic. The section in the format of a PowerPoint presentation about her brother that one of the main character’s daughter gives at her school is incredibly beautiful. One of my top five experiences reading.
I didn't really have a firm top 5 in mind, I meant it more in the sense of "this was very memorable indeed".
But what the hell, it would be fun to reminisce some more.
Kind of cheating because the book is a classic, so this is just for the story: I was 15 years old in 1996, and we took a family vacation near Westhoek in Belgium. There's a nature reserve with sand dunes. I spent a few days lying in the sand dunes while reading "Dune" for the first time. This was at the same time that Hale-Bopp was visible in the night sky. It's still one of my favorite books just because of how visceral that reading experience was.
"Diaspora" by Greg Egan starts in 2975 when the majority of humans are disembodied computer programs running in simulated-reality communities. Originally, humans were uploaded/digitized but by this point, new digital consciousnesses come into being. The first chapter describes the "birth" of such a consciousness, and again, I found reading this to be a very visceral experience, and rather beautiful. Given that this was written in 1997, it is also surprisingly prescient of today's understanding of auto-encoders and how LLMs train.
"The Carpet Makers" ("Die Haarteppichknüpfer" in the original German) completely blew my mind as a teenager because of how the story was structured. It starts with a description of a family that - like many other families - is working on an elaborate carpet made from human hair, a carpet that it will take them an entire lifetime to complete. Then the book begins to zoom out and you learn more and more about the universe it is set in, but not in an annoying fashion where a curtain is being pulled back and the author feels very clever. Its unusual structure exposed me to the idea that Sci-Fi didn't have to be primarily about rockets, if done well, it could just be quite good literature that happens to be set in space and speculates about technology and it's sociological impact. Other works demonstrate that better, but this is the one that made me realize that.
And then finally, and from quite recently, my hands down favorite short story ever. And it's actually metamodern! First you'd need to have read "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" (https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf) by Ursula K. LeGuin, who is generally worth reading. In 2024, Isabel J. Kim wrote "Why Don't We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole" (https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/), and it's great. I re-read it every now and then, and it chokes me up every time. The way the prose is a complete juxtaposition to the original story: rough, unpolished, conversational. It pulls no punches whatsoever, and bounces between humor and moral horror. 10/10, will read again, many times, whenever I happen to think of it.
A lot of modern movies are metamodern. The example on the Wikipedia is Bo Burnham's INSIDE, which is very metamodern. But I'd argue most movies are at least somewhat at this point self aware, fourth wall breaking commentary. Top Gun is an example of a modern movie - not metamodern, where there is diversity but it's not at all self aware, fourth wall breaking or commentary.
I'd say in response that he's missing (or, at least, gestures towards but doesn't explore) an element of post-modernism - at least in literary criticism, which I know more about than specifically film - which is that it's inherently a critique of power relationships. The key post-modern observation is that all narratives are deliberately constructed - in other words, someone chooses what to include and what to leave out - so Who tells a story, and Why they tell that story in that particular way, in order to advance What view of the world is instrinsic to understanding them.
Maybe we - artists, critics, and audiences alike - are generally exhausted by that right now. Politics are particularly fraught, and decades of post-modern art and thought certainly can't claim to have advanced utopia, so what we're calling meta-modernism is certainly a response, but it's closer to (my generation's rallying cry) "whatever, man", than it is advancing a solution to anything we see ailing the world at the moment.
Like anything in culture and art, its opaque if you dont know the context, because its all a long conversation where everything is a repsonse to something before. This i feel is a response to how irony and cynicism (which were responses to dogmatic cult like obedience) get tiring and at some point people want sincerity rather than just poking fun at thing
You know how people now hate the "umm that just happened" style of comedy writing? Its basically thay backlash. People dont want quippy remarks and tearing things down, they was genuine appreciation for things
I feel if we think about it more it might have a relarion to shamelessness. But im not so sure. Shamelessness seems to be opposite of cynicism by itself
Well said, and I really like the idea of shamelessness being in relation to earnestness and cynicism.
A lot of times the earnest promotion of an authentic belief can still come off as shameless, but the audience often still finds that mostly endearing if still cringe.
However, I feel like the "as a strategy" part of the title implies that it is not just shameless, but also mainly a cynical strategy - as in "having no shame about lying", not just " having no shame about my authentic special interest".
Having spent my whole career in the manufacturing tech world after starting in the maker world (I started HackPgh), I love Open Hardware, but find it not a great fit beyond boards (Arduino, RPi, etc.).
I think the core issue is one of how expensive / complex the iteration cycle is, with even sophisticated circuit boards being possible to make on a hobbyist budget, but sophisticated 3D printers and other complex machine tools quickly get beyond what a single person's budget / shop can really support the development vs. mass produced closed machines.
Add to this that even the extremely well funded hardware startups: MakerBot, FormLabs, DesktopMetal, OnShape, etc. have all either totally failed to create better tech at all, or have been quickly commodified without a major impact to the hardware development process.
I've been asking: "When was the last time a new hardware dev product got >50% market share throughout industry?", and I think the answer is SolidWorks in ~1995 making affordable(ish) 3D CAD software.
This means all hardware dev tools have lagged, not just open source ones.
My take is that we need more non VC funding (gov't / foundation) of the basic science and early R&D, as VCs are forcing these companies to commercialize too quickly, and the tech doesn't get there, as operations is hard enough, let alone with half-baked tech. This happened to my last company Plethora, doing automated CAM + rapid CNC.
> Add to this that even the extremely well funded hardware startups: MakerBot, FormLabs, DesktopMetal, OnShape, etc. have all either totally failed to create better tech at all, or have been quickly commodified without a major impact to the hardware development process.
They simply succumb to the tendency to rest on their laurels the moment they start making money, and then especially stop investing in software, which is where Bambu have their edge, as many of their improvements are software related.
i.e. if you spend upfront in software you can create an improved experience with the same parts for every subsequent unit. The Chinese have actually internalized this lesson, while in the west we have forgotten it.
Re: "succumb to the tendency to rest on their laurels the moment they start making money"
I don't find that true of any of the companies I mentioned at least. They all were/are going hard on development, but the tech problems were just really hard compared to funding, and they never made any major breakthroughs on capability.
Chinese companies have been great at going from 1 to n in the 3D printing space with a lot of cost, reliability, etc. refinements, but I haven't seen a transformative technology from them yet either (re: comment on ~1995 SolidWorks being the last one).
> but I haven't seen a transformative technology from them yet either
The fact you would think this is the core of what I mean. Cultures in countries which have active and powerful manufacturing sectors view the increase in reliability the Chinese have achieved in 3D printing to be transformative. In the west we're way too focused on perpetual paradigm shifts, but never invest the effort in exploiting the developed technology to the fullest potential, and so sit around wondering why we are losing wealth generating capacity to the east.
Yes, it would seem post hoc feature tree requires the constraints that come from context in your head, but I could imagine that for most cases a "drafter's intuition" in AI may be sufficient, and you could build an interface to allow that to be mostly given up front and then through iterate post generation.
I could imagine the stepwise approach may allow AI training to be more constrained / efficient that trying to do the whole thing in one go.
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