My recollection, now quite fuzzy but deeply entrenched, is the key is to never touch the throttle. The LSO would yell at you but I noticed your speed slowly drifts down from drag until it's just inside the acceptable range at touchdown. Managing heading and altitude is not all that hard, so my brother and I had a pretty solid success rate to the amazement of our friends.
I'm quite struck by the title of this announcement. The box being drawn around "your world" shows how narrow the AI builder's window into reality tends to be.
> a new way to connect your apps and tools to Claude. We're also expanding... with an advanced mode that searches the web.
The notion of software eating the world, and AI accelerating that trend, always seems to forget that The World is a vast thing, a physical thing, a thing that by its very nature can never be fully consumed by the relentless expansion of our digital experiences. Your worldview /= the world.
The cynic would suggest that the teams that build these tools should go touch grass, but I think that misses the mark. The real indictment is of the sort of thinking that improvements to digital tools [intelligences?] in and of themselves can constitute truly substantial and far reaching changes.
The reach of any digital substrate inherently limited, and this post unintentionally lays that bare. And while I hear accelerationists invoking "robots" as the means for digital agents to expand their potent impact deeper into the real world I suggest this is the retort of those who spend all day in apps, tools, and the web. The impacts and potential of AI is indeed enormous, but some perspective remains warranted and occasional injections of humility and context would probably do these teams some good.
Mannkitchen Pepper Cannon. I absolutely adore this device and have bought a few as friends for discerning cooks and mechanical gadget lovers. Build quality is utterly fantastic and the quality of the grind is excellent. Most importantly the ability for it to grind copious amounts of pepper with minimal input is unmatched. I tried just about all the other ones recommended on various forums but none match up, not even close. Yeah it's $200 but oh man is it nice.
It's a buy once cry once situation for me. Very happy with my Pepper Cannon and I no longer have to give myself RSI grinding enough pepper for cooking large meals.
If you're in Shapr3D you should change all your radii and fillets to "G2" in stead of G1.*
Currently all your corners (excepting the ones that use Apple's supplied bezier points) appear to be tangent but not curvature continuous. As someone with the utmost respect for the learning amateur I would like to kindly inform you that having G1 corners from just hitting "fillet" is the #1 way for design cognoscenti to ascertain that a model was built by an engineer. Alternatively you could try to mimic or offset the G2 curves Apple already paid a bazillion dollars to fine tune.**
* this particular industrial designer x mechanical engineer does not use Shapr but I do see G2 / curvature continuous fillet tools exist via their support page.
** this designer also thinks Apple's and Dieter's corners are too squashed square and has been building devices with slightly sharper and more accelerated corner curvature as the world's natural bends are parabolic or catenary. So roll your own and find your aesthetic voice!*
Interesting you said that, but I used G2 almost everywhere, except in the inner holes of the phone part. If you share a picture, I can happily show the Sharp3D equivalent. Maybe the G2 curvature wasn't as aggressive as it should be?
Huh, well apologies for the assumption though I merely have the blog images to go off. When I look at the render that shows the top ortho and the one for the bottom cable geometry the highlights end fairly abruptly. The only curve that visually looks C2/G2 to me is the acute angle blend between the tray edge and the back of the phone cradle, that has a nice acceleration of the radius in and out of the transition.
It's possible the Shapr rendering engine is not very subtle, or perhaps the G2 math is accurate in a strict sense but the output is not very differentiated from G1. It's mathematically possible for there to be a continual change in local radius, i.e. be curvature continuous, while still having local changes be sufficiently aggressive that it visually appears discontinuous at a human scale. Each CAD kernel seems to make these things in its own way, hence different industrial design studios will strongly prefer the use of certain 3D CAD programs to make their final master models (e.g. Alias). Personally I drive CREO as for ages most manufacturers overseas used pirated copies of Pro/E or CREO and thus I could send them "native" surfaces. In that program my preferred curvature continuous coefficient range was 0.52-0.57. I don't have Shapr access handy so messing around with the coefficients and finding a result that you like is outside my domain -- and perhaps you already did!
Still, all that is on the modeling side, but the best way to actually check the visual smoothness of your corners is to use analysis tools like curvature combs to check how aggressively the model is making transitions. It doesn't fundamentally matter if you use the built-in automatic tools or manually adjust b-splines in your NURBS: the smoother your combs change the smoother your corners will look. [I checked the support page for Shapr to see if it supports curvature comb analysis and saw nothing about it, so you may be out of luck on that front until future updates.] Absent that you have to just spin the model in CAD and see how smoothly the highlights roll around and hope the built-in rendering engine is doing its job well.
One last item of subjective crit in sculpting smooth models: when applying a fillet to an edge that turns a corner, such as your interior pocket, you'll have a less visually cramped and abrupt appearance if you use a fillet chord (edge radius) that's nontrivially smaller than the chord length of the turn it has to make (corner radius). Maximized fillets that come to hard corners and make a full spherical bubble, e.g. your initial models shown in gray, generally look less natural than those that allow the fillet to turn the corner. This lets the highlight work its way around in a racetrack form instead of getting "stuck" in the extremes.
Nice work dude, I wouldn't comment if it didn't seem like you're dedicated to making continual improvement and learning new tricks.
Thank you for the comment. I learned a lot from you and will look into these. Are there any resources I could use to learn more about these, especially sculpting smooth models?
Quite welcome! Sadly I don't know of any resources that are really useful when you try to put things into practice. Most of the tutorials / blogs / forum posts I've seen are not really that constructive nor sufficiently detailed to get into the truly useful practicalities. I personally learned the trade by (a) working in an industrial design studio as the token engineer & CAD jockey with "real" industrial designers pushing me to do better, and then (b) building my own kilohours of practice in aesthetically driven CAD modeling. Now as the design lead & manager on most projects it still takes me months of coaching my employees on subtleties to get things right, and even each project still requires an unreasonable amount of time tuning curves and corners. Like all professional practices this rabbit hole goes real deep. Still, you can get pretty far with brute force iteration and careful attention to detail. I think your progress thus far demonstrates that quite well.
My favorite watch at the moment is a replica Moonswatch on a decent NATO strap. I am always quite tickled that wearing a copy of a copy that gets any street cred / sense of history. Two degrees of separation, two orders of magnitude less money out of pocket.
My replica Moonswatches cost $25US, looks fairly spiffy, hint at space history, are super lightweight, and keep time. I have a handful of nice watches but I have come to appreciate the combo of comfort / cheap / cheeky.
I also bought a fantasy Moonswatch based on a Japanese render artist's interpretation of Omega's "dark side of the moon" watch. It's a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy! (Moonwatch > dark side > swatch > render > rep.) As a designer of hardware products I think it's a super fun piece of commentary on modern branding and manufacturing.
I've been daily driving a 2013 MBP. After occasional memory upgrades, hard drive upgrades, and battery swaps this decade-young computer of Theseus runs great.
But the real reason I'm not upgrading is because of software compatibility:
1. This is about as new a machine I can get that runs Adobe CS6 & Lightroom with perpetual licenses. (F your subscription)
2. The new M machines do not appear to run the Intel-driven CAD software I currently run in Bootcamp, not even in emulation. (I'm not keen on owning 2 machines for my dayjob, nor wholly converting to Windows.)
Meanwhile my less mission critical software has gotten cheeky lately and started telling me my machine is too old. Spotify and Signal both refuse to update further and launch with big nastygram windows saying so. Wheeee.
For #1, I can’t imagine either switching over to open source or an Adobe competitor isn’t going to easily surpass CS6 with how old it is. I have to think GIMP has caught up with and surpassed CS6 by now.
For #2, I think if it was me and I really wanted to stick with the Mac and upgrad I’d just run Parallels. Sure, it’s yet another license, but it runs a lot of stuff pretty well, including some 3D games, so I think it might be worth trying.
Another part of me wonders if Crossover/Wine could run that CAD software.
Of course, you want to be able to run these on a trial before you buy any hardware.
If you’re not aware of OpenCore Legacy I might as well mention that in case you need a newer version of macOS on that hardware.
my current dd laptop is also an early 2013 MBP, which I had installed Linux on a few years ago. however recently I picked up music again and preferred to use Mac for certain software. oh man was the reinstallation process a nightmare. the recovery install didn't have a browser that would render the Firefox download page. the Mac app store didn't have downloads for the highest version of macOS I could install on Intel architecture. it was problem after problem but now in finally running the last version I'll be able to run: 11.17. funny how much can change or become obsolete in only a decade :D
I definitely use his blog to be thoughtfully informed when it matters. As a 40ish startup guy myself I take on many roles, including helping set product and technology strategies. But I also need to work in the weeds most of the time and don't often have the opportunity or headspace to just ponder the big picture, so having someone else inject perspective at the right time can be very useful. Thus I tend to read Bens work in huge gulps as a new project kicks off, grabbing as much perspective as possible to feed a new initiative with ideas that have evolved and simmered over time.
Moreover, being able to think at a strategic, systems level about the technology landscape is a trained mindset and it helps to have sources of inspiration accordingly. Reading the work of people who think in ways you also wish to be able to think seems like good training for your mental muscles. Like all commentary and advice you learn to keep what you think is relevant and supplement it with your own information and ideas, but having the framework and the examples can absolutely push your further, faster.
Beauty in the eye of the beholder and all, but the Swedish work is largely quite pretty and readable where the Estonian guidelines are an excellent of what designers do when they can get away with it or the client is too compliant / eager to be different. (source: am designer)
The intro claims the character of the Estonia brand is "nordic, surprising, smart" but the Aino font in particular seems way too focused on being surprising at the expense of legibility, which certainly diminishes expression of the smart element.
Just today I attended a 4th grade parents orientation at a Silicon Valley school where they noted they will be placing new emphasis on handwriting and cursive, specifically in order to build up legibility and hand stamina specifically for extended written exams.
The teachers are anticipating a return to hand written testing at high school and college levels in the AI-assisted present/future, so they are preparing students accordingly. (Then we visited the coding class and STEAM classrooms.
It's not a Luddite reaction, more of a practical response to witnessed trends.)
The grade school pendulum has already started to swing from Chromebooks back to bluebooks.
