thelazyone

Aside from the refreshing fact of this not being yet-another-perlin-noise video, the author makes some good point about feasibility of corrosion algorithms and how those can be heavy and don't work well on a "just in time" generated map.

The second solution in particular is fascinating, although it doesn't offer a good solution to generate a seamless heightmap in the current state. I guess that combining that with some Perlin noise to determine which areas get to have starting seed points for the ridges would work?

Thoughts?

Special mention to the remarkable work of graphics and rendering that is behind the video. Some of those 1-second transitions imply a considerable amount of custom code, from the corrosion examples to the various overlaying heightmaps.

I'm very much torn between Plasticity and MoI for my next sculpting project. I've always used Blender but for some stuff I'm finding myself in need of some proper NURBS tool. I've spent a few hours on Plasticity, I'll do the same with MOI and see how it goes! :)

Currently the only thing that is stopping me from an insta-buy is that the export quality seems to be pretty low poly, even when the detail slider is all the way to 1.

Of course my trial version is nowhere near there, but watching several videos it appears that even the highest settings still are far from a proper high-poly export.

Since I work with 3D prints, that is a blocking issue for me, BUT the videos are all several months old.

Anyone with a more recent experience with Plasticity has something fresher information about that?

This is a good question - not only for the actual ethics of the training, but for the future of AI use for art. It's both gonna damage the livelyhood of many artists (me included, probably) but also make it accessibly to many more people. As long as the training dataset is ethical, I think fighting it is hard and pointless.

"Using open source code is a skill: knowing how to navigate repos and someone else’s code, understanding how to troubleshoot and navigate communities to get help, discerning between quality projects and junk… this experience is a hard-won component of being a modern software explorer. It can take you further than you might realize, past mere bits and into the land of electrons and atoms."

Very wise words. Coming from sw/hw industries I probably could work around heat pump microcontrollers without too much hassle and I well know the pain of physical components messing up your debug process. But such industries rarely rely on open source, and all the OSS I used was for personal projects. That is definitely a big limit for my future work opportunities! :/

I wonder what kind of interesting applications could be done on e-ink harnessing the advantages of the long battery life and not suffering by the slow refresh rate. Sure, porting doom or implementing a terminal is an interesting and probably challenging feat, but still it's applications that don't shine on an e-ink device.

Maybe some "slow" strategy game, that updates upon certain events but might remain unmodified for hours at a time? Or - more in general - an application that is required to be on for a long time but really doesnt' change often.

That's an interesting take! Currently I see two reasons why I wouldn't do that:

1 - Since I'm either working for game companies or for my own project (https://fsd-wargame.com/) using AI-generated things is kinda damaging in terms of marketing. You never know when some uproar could arise against a project/game solely based on more or less petty outcries against AI. I generally sympathize with artists, but sometimes it's just whiny.

2 - My illustrations are line-art and cartography (https://www.artstation.com/thelazyone) , which are not the easiest to handle with AI. I'm sure that with enough effort there's gonna be a good model, but I haven't seen any so far.

Well put. Big fan of the "Commercial illustrators will keep their jobs, but will mostly need to learn to use AI as a part of their workflow to maintain a higher pace of work" part.

I'm a sometimes-illustrator (but my style is pretty far from what Generative AI is doing), and I recently published a 1.1 of a game manual which uses Midjourney images. I'm currently investing in a "proper" illustrator because the MDJ images lack character, but it's also true that in a few months from now this might change: I'll stick with the illustrator to have more consistency in the images, but probably the AI could do a fancier job there.

Besides, the "things will change in 2 months" point is a good one, but it's been used since a year and a half and things haven't changed yet. Sure, the quality of the produced images improved, but not in a qualitative scale.

Side note: the link civitai to leads to https://sambleckley.com/writing/civitai.com/images which is a dead link.

I think that the initial question was "why a 0 resistance compared to a ridicously low resistance". And my point is that it's easier to get a superconductor than some material with "ridicously low" resistance. As you said, silver is unusable for potent magnets, and such is any other non-superconducting magnets.

Probably if we had materials with a billionth of the resistance of silver they would work, but we haven't. And we have superconductors, luckly. :)

I think it's a fair question. I guess the answer is "because we have superconductors, and no material with 'very small resistance' instead".

Also note that while there is zero resistance you still have parasitic currents and general interaction with the rest of the environment. So no perpetual motion for us today!

Sounds like a logical step forward from current debuggers! I had some colleagues who bragged of not needing debuggers for their workflow... Well, sometimes I really do.

Yeah, the other replies were pretty convincing about that point.

That's a fair point, well made. In that case --- yeah, we just have to wait and hope for better solutions/materials for our screens!

There's a big difference between having a solution and point out that there is no theoretical hard trade-off. ^^"

If the update was truly pixel based there should be no ghosting/artifact whatsoever. Looks like global refreshes or cleanup are still relevant, while ideally each pixel could be completely independent.

Trade-offs are a problem, but in this case i don't see any physical reason for this to be a theoretical trade-off. More like a limit of the current technology.

Even local refreshes however are somehow rectangle-based, no?

Which means that the resetting operation kinda works globally anyways, masking out everything between the xmin, xmax and ymin, ymax.

I'm really speculating here, but this was my impression every time I saw individual areas changing without a gobal refresh.

Heh. Not a fan of js apps (npm or not), but your article was enjoyable to read.

I remember an anti-nuclear talking about the Finnish project for long term storage.

He was depicting the project cost (4 billions) as ridicolously high and therefore unfeasible. Interesting that each plant (around 10 billions?) of Finland could use it for 100 years... seems like a no brainer to me!

Well said. I actually just wrote a comment to appreciate the non-drama of the article. But it's true - the same article could have been written about that guy that probably got crushed during construction or had an unlucky encounter on the highway.

I guess the "flash of blue light" carrying silent death is itself an unnecessary dramatization of a dull accident. :S

Kudos to the article for not fuelling radiation-related fears!

Slotin died because a stupid, preventable accident, and Plutonium is indeed dangerous. But stupid, preventable accidents happen in many industries and they are just as lethal. I appreciate that the events are well described, but no unnecessary rethoric is added to that.

(I'm still burnt by the amount of gut-wrenching drama they added in Chernobyl)

That is true, but this doesn't pose a theoretical limit to a 30 fps monitor.

I suspect that the current technology works by "setting" in place whole regions of the screen at once, and that this kind of process is inherently slow. Maybe in a (not so distant) future it'll be possible to have individual pixels changing, in a similar way as an mp4 doesn't update all the image when not necessary.

Or not. So many technologies just embank somewhere and find their niche.

It feels that way, yes.

I wonder when the line is drawn (pun intended) between an low-level UML description language and a SVG-like formatting language with english words in it. :/

The Copic Multiliner might be a good option then. They are just great in my opinion (But I use them for traditional illustrations), although a bit pricey.

Seems like a considerable upgrade from PlanUML (https://plantuml.com/ - which is amazing, but sometimes you just can't seem to be able to align the stuff the way you want too). In fact, it seems that the code is slightly less readable compared to PlantUML, I should try to recreate some tangled messes and see how the alignment options work!

Again regarding the choice of pens: How does the plotter behave with a softer tip? I'm thinking of the Tombow Fudenosuke pens - they have a wonderful soft tip, which allows for calligraphy in the hand of humans.

When used by a plotter, by changing the Z depht it would be possible to have very interesting dynamic variations, wouldn't it?

I can see how easy it would be to break the tip too, so better buying a bunch of those.

If you want to try what could be the top-of-the-range of non-rotring pens, instead of the W&N you could use the Copic Multiliner. They're pretty hard to find in Europe, not sure in US. The flow and general feel is just great.

Not sure if I would compare paneer and Khoya (i don't think you could make Gulab Jamun out of paneer), but I agree on the rest of the line. My main point is that there's an abundance of how to articles that are ignoring ricotta entirely, and that's sad! :(

Something that most "make your cheese" articles forgot to mention (and this is no exception) is that that large amount of leftover whey can - and should - be used to make ricotta.

https://www.theprairiehomestead.com/2014/02/how-to-make-rico...

Making ricotta from fresh milk is just not an accurate way to make ricotta. And, if done properly, is probably even more delicious than any cheese you have been making.

Thank you, sir! :)

Joined the discord.

Aesthetically I can totally see how a 2D visualization could look great. But then you end up with curved roads and buildings hiding other buildings and things become very confusing.

One interesting change (but it's a big one, at least aesthetically) would be to force a certain angle of view, rather than allow a complete pan-tilt. Something in a "total war" fashion, so to speak. Or - at least - allowing such camera to be used in the options.