coreyp_1

3d print models, parametrically generated.

Blender can run Python... with the app open or headless.

My Blender skills are nigh useless. I know how to describe what I want mathematically with variables/constraints, but I don't know what magical incantation to use to make it appear in Blender... and don't get me started on the hotkeys!

About a year and a half ago, I started writing a script (by hand) to generate a non-trivial widget for personal use (a zigbee controller housing). I sketched my own pencil drawings and wrote about 900 lines of python. It was going really well for a few days, but then life got busy. The file was an experiment (it was named `temporary.py`!!!) that I decided didn't need to die. But I haven't touched it since.

Enter AI... This weekend, after not touching the project for 18 months, I used Cursor to convert my one messy file into a proper, multi-project mono repo for all of my 3d designs, abstract out common Blender commands, scaffold a proper structure for revisions, etc. Then, I was able to use Cursor to finish the design.

I love it! I'm still making my designs (believe me, these aren't 1-prompt creations) but I don't have to worry about the minutiae of Blender's interface and, most importantly, I can use its power.

Side point: I loved it when I could say something like: The body ellipse should have a base whose height is .5 of the body ellipse diameters is .5 the shadow of the body. Using a spline/bezier curve-like profile, it should rise from the floor plane, shrink to 1/3 the size of the body, then grow to meet the ellipse at 1/3 the height of the ellipse, at an angle matching the ellipse's tangent, and parallel to the floor. And it just worked! And I can change the proportions and regenerate the model whenever I want to tweak visual aesthetics.

I have a list of things that I've wanted to model, but the overhead of learning interfaces when I'm already insanely busy is, in a word, prohibitive. This frees me up to build what I can already see clearly in my head, and I love it!

Dr. Thain is great!

Very true. I suppose it's not worth it to me. I've never had an Instagram account, and never used Instagram itself.

I guess I don't need it in my life.

Stay away...

LOL Exactly!!!

I was only doing it because my family asked me to. Meta killed that, too, I guess.

What do you mean by my "existing account"? I didn't have an instagram account before today.

But, as a general rule, I keep all of my accounts separate. There's too many horror stories of a person getting locked out of one account, and then they can't do anything else.

Separate accounts are the only safe option.

I think my takeaway on this is just that Instagram isn't worth the hassle. I did lose the write-ups that I did for my pictures, though (which is why my upload pace was so slow).

I wouldn't know. I only know what it's like to (1) set up an account of any type, which usually requires quite a bit of initial activity, followed later by (2) decreased ongoing maintenance.

But, whatever. They set up an automated system that weeded out a human while letting bots run rampant.

Maybe we need a page about "falsehoods programmers believe about human behavior", but they wouldn't read it. :/

Well, I guess I'm forever lost as a user, since I'm banned for doing the very thing that they encourage... sharing my original content.

I disagree, though, that it's spam behavior. It's "well, it's time to set up my account" behavior.

I mean, it's not like they could provide for a human to review after they asked for me to take a selfie. A selfie that shows the same person as the one that has used the facebook account with the same email address and face for over a decade... No, that's definitely asking too much. Or perhaps informing the user of concerning behavior, because all that they did was point to "community standards", which said nothing about what I was doing.

Apologies... my snark is not directed at you. It's just the exasperation towards a system that makes actual human participation impossible, while assuring that bots are the only ones who can get something done and yet stay under the radar.

That's great! I see it as a lot of people learning about a lot of cool stuff that interests them.

Just because AI was used doesn't mean that it wasn't valuable to that person as an experience, and that it's not also valuable to someone else.

I say good job on shipping a project!

Yes, that sounds like something that a harness would do internally, but not expose. My own project will do something similar for spinning off worker agents. You could expose it, however, by (1) a custom MCP server that assembles and provides the result directly into the context, or (2) see if you can wrangle the skill feature of an existing harness.

The newer models are nice, but the harness is the secret sauce that can make or break the experience. I wish we had better open tools for using/modifying these types of things.

In the future, some LLM will incorporate this into their side-hustle suggestions. :)

In our company, Claude keeps trying to run terraform commands (another team member's experience). Thankfully, it's in a locked-down environment, but it still keeps trying, even if you tell it not to.

In development, it will sometimes do all sorts of wild and convoluted things because the conversation has been compressed and it suddenly can't remember the structure of the project or other critical instructions.

AI should never have access to a production environment. Ever. Thankfully, we enforce that.

I am writing my own harness, and I would love to hear more about what you have in mind.

Can you give an example of your use case?

With 128 GB strix halo, you can't do as big of a model as you would think. You can do larger than having a single graphics card, of course, but that 128 gigs cannot all be dedicated to the model. Remember, the context alone is usually larger than the model itself. I got an EVO X2, and I don't regret it, but by my current calculations, it will take 8 years to recoup the cost, as opposed to just using equivalent, paid commercial options.

They meant that this is a technique that relies on a person's vision, which means that the blind, by definition, are being excluded. They weren't being hostile toward the blind, they were pointing out that the project itself is hostile towards the blind.

There are so many variables here. My question is how much do you have to invest into getting it done right?

Local has come a long way, but it is still limited and slow. And while there are some people who have done stuff like this, the field is so new that you're probably going to get someone that doesn't have direct experience with everything. In other words, they're going to get stuff wrong. You will have to rebuild some part of it. You might not purchase the right hardware. Can you live with this?

In all fairness, though, if you have someone who has experience in evaluating new systems and using them to build something, then you can still be in good shape. I mentioned this, simply because it's a skill that is not as common as we would like in this world. Just look for someone with a track record of delivering functional software using new technologies.

My personal bias is that I love to keep as much local as possible, but I also realize that I bought a $3,000 machine that so far has saved me $5 in tokens from an external API. As I see it, the only real reasons to have local AI at the moment is privacy, but that does fit your use case.

As for a turnkey solution, they have their benefits, but their moat is significantly smaller now than it used to be. Quite frankly, you can vibe code the majority of TurnKey solutions in a weekend. Well, at least the parts that you need.

Sorry to not give more specific answers, but a lot of your questions may depend on whichever developer you decide to use. There's not necessarily a wrong answer in many cases, there are multiple paths to achieve what you are trying to do. If I were you, I would focus on long-term maintainability and security of your system. For example, you can have the best thing in the world, but if you can't pass a SOC2 (or, even worse, your developer has never heard of something like that) then you are going to be in a lot of pain.

https://aosabook.org/en/

These are available to read completely free online, but I do plan to purchase the physical books some day.

[edit] I realize that I should probably give more context to my answer. The books on the site are basically interviews with the authors of the software and they discuss what choices they made as well as the advantages/tradeoffs of this approach. In other words, the direct answer to your question is to learn by reading what other people have written about their own successes and glean from that.

[edit 2] Your favorite LLM could also provide a list of books that are similar in spirit, but there's just something about the series that I linked to that I like.

This resonates with me, but what helped was to come to a realization.

I love coding. I love low level coding. But I haven't written any code in the last 6 months, roughly.

But I don't feel empty or dissatisfied at all. My realization for myself is that I love solving problems and designing elegant solutions. Using AI, I still have to do that. I still have to make choices about how I want specified modules to interoperate. I know the big picture, and can catch when the AI is taking a shortcut.

I realized that it is all still low level design in my eyes. And I enjoy doing it, whether with my own hands, or with AI.

The amazing thing with AI, though, is that it has allowed me to explore so many things much quicker than I could before. It's still my design, my ideas, and even my poor choices that I have to deal with, but it reduces the boiler plate, so to speak.

That, and it has allowed me to explore more than I ever dreamed that I would be able experience.

Nice. I have a friend who is a young accountant. I have tried to get him to consider AI, but he claims that they tried it and it's not that good. I've tried to get him to understand that AI has improved dramatically in the last few months, not to mention the last few years (their point of reference, I believe).

I'm in the same boat. I have 2 old servers that I let get "too" old, and now I'm afraid to touch them to update them. However, with some of the shenanigans that the Linux distributions are pulling around age verification/attestation, I'm considering bailing on them entirely.

Note, I did try Artix, but when it broke last week after a restart (in which evidently something had gone wrong with an earlier kernel update), and I had to pull out a rescue ISO, I decided I didn't want to mess with that. I switched that machine to Devuan, but the jury is still out for me. I don't have any major complaints, but I'm still in the burn-in phase. :) I'm running Arch on a laptop, but they have been a bit hostile in the community with censorship, so I'm just waiting for a free weekend to blast it and put something else on. I don't want political drama in my software.

This all comes at an interesting time, though. This is the first time that I purchased a new laptop and didn't even let it boot into Windows, but instantly installed Linux. And everything "just worked". And now that I'm excited to try Linux, so many of the big players are embracing the steps to erode privacy (AI everywhere... age attestation/verification... telemetry on by default...). It's sad, and I'm just going to "nope" out of any interactions with them.

In anyone in the future is reading this, I ended up vibe-coding a chrome plugin to let me pull the page info as a MCP call. It's working (and I successfully can extract data) using Qwen 3.6 locally (GMKTec EVO-X2, 128GiB RAM).

Thank you for your reply, but I haven't paid for Claude, and I don't plan to with my other subscriptions. Plus, I'm trying to have this be part of my headless automation with my own, local llms. If it weren't hacked together, it wouldn't be appropriate for this website in the first place! LOL

It would help to have some direction of what to do on the landing page.

Editing to give more context:

I'm on an ultrawide and didn't see the help at the top right corner.

But, now I'm thinking: "OK, I typed something... what do I do with it?" Is the intent to copy/paste it somewhere? Take a screenshot? Does it convert to a less-savory format (e.g., latex)? Just looking for some directions.

By the way... congrats on shipping a project!

I gave up trying to read the article when animations started happening when I scrolled. It's annoying and I have better things to do than waste time waiting for your animations to stutter and finish moving around when I'm trying to scan the article. Good luck with whatever you're trying to do.

Have you ever explored the idea of shaped notes?

There's multiple different approaches with both 4-shape and 7-shape systems being common. But the point is that your color system seems largely correlated to it, and there has been research done on the shape note system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_note

I love the hand-drawn illustrations, but I really love the typography.

Does anyone know which fonts (or, probably more importantly, which modern-day equivalents) are used to get this feeling?

Advice: Just pick one thing and do it. (I promise I'm not being snarky.)

The stack doesn't matter. The problem itself doesn't really matter. The "sexiness" of the result doesn't matter. Just do it. Something... Anything! Working through the problem is the goal.

The result: You will learn things that you didn't know that you didn't know, and you will be able to transfer that to your next project.

Rinse and repeat. Then, all of the sudden you will have stories to tell and mistakes that you know you should avoid.

Your first project will be bad, and I mean UGLY! You will make all sorts of bad decisions. Don't use an AI agent to help you write it... you won't learn anything. Don't waste your "best" idea on your first project, either. You will forever be disappointed because you didn't do a good job on it.

If you want to bounce any ideas off us, then go ahead and post them. We could proffer ideas to you, but it really needs to be something that captures your attention. So what are you interested in? Low-level, web, graphics, games, tools, mobile, industry-specific, entertainment, edutainment... the possibilities are wide open!

Good luck and have fun!

How? (Genuine question... I only pay for a handful of AI services, which is <$2/day.)

I'm not doubting you, btw... I've seen others here on HN also saying that they burn through money with AI, I guess I'm just missing something.

In fact, the geek in me absolutely wants to know what's going on, because you have probably found something that I would love to know about! :)

I'm wanting to do the same thing. I've also already written a language (in C) to generate HTML (a template language), so these two go hand-in-hand!

I'm genuinely surprised that copyright is being used to control the use of a "scale" in science, and that the legal threat was used to take down a paper criticizing it as "no more accurate than flipping a coin".

Wouldn't science be under the umbrella of fair use, and publishing papers be under the umbrella of educational use?

It's undoubtedly a money-grab, and it reminds me of the people who extorted restaurants, etc., for singing "Happy Birthday", until the courts ruled that the song was in the Public Domain already (and had been for a very, very long time).

Maybe I'm just old, but I remember the tv advertisements for the dubious 900 numbers (remember Miss Cleo?) that you could call, but you had to pay for the time.

Is there any law that says that I can't just get one of those for use as my personal number and then give that # out as my contact info?