Syntheticate

Branch3D | Senior Developer (Full-stack), 3D Design engineer, Growth lead | Vancouver (REMOTE, North America / South America) | Full-time

Branch is taking on real-time structural design and analysis. Design software for Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) has been archaic for too long, and we're building a novel 3d structural modeling and design tool with real-time design feedback and performance as a focus. We're taking ambitious technical swings! Our team is less than 10, we're incubated within a larger structural engineering firm and leveraging real project expertise. We're in pilot programs with key customers right now, and hiring to scale out to a larger audience. Your ideas will help shape the future of how our product evolves, regardless of role.

We're looking for folks with deep technical experience for developer roles (AEC background not required), or deep industry experience for the GTM side of things. In particular, our design engineer role focuses on a mix of 3d design & front-end experience, with a focus on quality.

Postings with more details at https://www.branch3d.com/careers.

If Branch sounds like your jam, apply via email - dcascaval@branch3d.com, HN in the subject line. Include a resume, any open source or portfolio projects if applicable, and a couple sentences of relevant experience.

This is pretty similar to the caching used by the Grasshopper3d visual programming environment, which also deals with 3d geometry: https://www.grasshopper3d.com/

It's a crucial optimization to enable the kind of live programming environment you're talking about here, especially since some nodes ("components") are much more expensive to execute than others. The DAG of the program is laid out in the workspace, and it means users can smoothly drag sliders downstream even if re-executing the whole program from scratch would be prohibitively expensive. It's a lovely way to iterate on creative visual programs.

It's definitely supported via the `gradientTransform` attribute on e.g. linear gradients, as in this example: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Element/lin...

This strikes me as kind of ironic -- you'd think a language model would do better on questions like essay prompts and multiple choice reading comprehension questions regarding passages than it would in calculations. I wonder if there are more details about these benchmarks somewhere, so we can see what's actually happening in these cases.

Creators aren't worried about others getting the ability to produce. It would be fantastic if everyone could paint, sculpt, carve -- or any number of skills that must be painstakingly built. The fear is that so many things will be produced without thought that, rather than entering a period of cultural abundance, we will enter a cultural stagnation.

This is not because AI tools cannot be used to generate good art! In fact we'll likely see artists adjust their process to take advantage of its strengths. Rather, it's because these tools are used to generate art (whether good, or mediocre) completely automatically, rendering art as a commodity rather than something special to treasure. If you see art as a means to an end then this might seem good. But part of the sheer power of art is in its scarcity; in the rarity encouraging us to take the time to investigate something more deeply, to build up relationships with art and artists, to find meaning and emotion and connection, which takes time and intention.

Imagine an AI-produced endless stream of music that takes all of its cues from your favorite songs and produces high-quality audio tuned exactly to what you like hearing. How long does this remain interesting? How difficult is it to tell this noise from new music which might later shape your tastes? Part of the stagnation this AI revolution represents is an added difficulty of cultural evolution, because instead of there being room for the truly new, we are swamped by imitations of everything that came before.

I found the next two books in the trilogy (The Dark Forest, Death's End) to go much more in depth on the sci-fi aspect; if you're willing to suspend a little disbelief the story is constantly engaging and quite thought-provoking. While the style is different from Stephenson's I think anyone who enjoys Stephenson's books would enjoy the journey and perspective this series offers too!