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agys

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Xiaomi-Robotics-1 16 hours ago

Personally I’d love to see a general purpose machine, able to do all works demanded. This kind of vision doesn’t require any imagination: it’s easy to envision a world where you just replace humans by a human-shaped machines with perfect dexterity doing all sort of tasks. Voilà and welcome to the future!

But I still need to see a convincing humanoid doing even the simplest actions like grabbing a soda can from the fridge (from behind the cake), open it, and pour it into a glass and bring it to my desk, possibly in less than 60 minutes. It doesn't matter if it costs 30k if it can’t do anything useful for now. The gap is still too wide and far far away. Hence the missing “proof”.

Delivery robots in the hotels in China have the shape of a bin, not of a maid.

Text art tools 3 days ago

Couldn't agree more. The issue here is that it doesn't feel experimental or innovative at all. It just follows some weak design trends.

It’s not demonstrated yet as we still have to see a robot (humanoid or not) doing mundane tasks in full autonomy, efficiently and convincingly.

It still looks inefficient to have a humanoid robot vacuum a house by using an ergonomic tool designed around the human body.

Designing a non humanoid robot is the way to go. The design of new tools and appliances for hybrid human/robot use will eventually follow: the zip line for the shoe bag required way too much precision work.

Text art tools 11 days ago

The layout of the publication is almost unbearable… Considering that it’s a magazine a bout (graphic-) design I’d say they failed miserably.

I buy mostly music on Bandcamp and iTunes/Music is my sole driver for my 30k local song files. It's unfortunate that it has been neglected over so many years. There is a plethora of well known bugs and the sync with iPhone works most of the times, but not always and is in general quite cumbersome. The UI has become ridiculous over time (for example: it features two search/filter fields). It would be an easy mark to simply fix and polish it a bit. Sad.

The three finger drag is an ergonomic marvel, combined with tapping (vs. clicking) and a couple of four finger gestures it’s perfect. I don’t use (or drag around) a mouse since very long; not even when heavily using Photoshop and similar pointer-heavy applications.

I think I’m absolutely the target audience: I’m a designer, programmer, animator. Crispness at 4k is still quite good at 1m distance from my face. I’d buy it without hesitation if it came much, much larger.

Indeed! The big monitor is about 1m from me, the median a bit below my eyes. The laptop on which I type on sits in-between and the two screens align almost perfectly (optically). This setup works well for me and I feel it’s very ergonomic. That's why I can't go back to tiny (<32") screens anymore.

Too small… I got used to my 4K Philips OLED 42" that I hung directly on the wall in front of my desk (no stand at all)… USB-C cable also charges the MacBook. This size is so good to work with; so much screen estate.

I used different types of dithering (ordered, error diffusion) in many of my design projects as a visual language, static or animated, mostly for projects related to tech/computers/blockchain, sometimes combined with ASCII art.

There is a certain warmth (or maybe it’s just nostalgia) of these older techniques that can be harvested and combined with new ideas or new takes.

(Apologies for the Instagram links).

D.Y.O.R.:

https://www.instagram.com/p/DH1AjFzi3c6

D.Y.O.R. (printed):

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cjfzy23sCOg

Titles:

https://www.instagram.com/p/DHITpNYiWtF

Experiment on controlling the amount of dithering:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CYO_h9Yh18e/

This is an old project by Studio Moniker (Amsterdam)… I was once at a presentation of their work at Resonate in Belgrade (memories…) and they explained that the slight delay before the reveal of the underlying image is added artificially to add a bit of drama.

Btw, the correct image is loaded through a Voronoi diagram.

FFmpeg 8.0 11 months ago

LLMs and complex command line tools like FFmpeg and ImageMagick are a perfect combination and work like magic…

It’s really the dream UI/UX from sience fiction movies: “take all images from this folder and crop 100px away except on top, saturate a bit and save them as uncompressed tiffs in this new folder, also assemble them in a video loop, encode for web”.

I really love the less famous stories by Andersen that involve objects or insects… A needle, a coin in a foreign land, a teapot that feels empty, a tree (that wants to be cut down!) have deep inner thoughts; a butterfly in love! In all those stories the last sentence introduces some sort of a final twist.