What’s something happening in your field of work or study that you think could really change things in the future?
We solved the Ein Stein Problem. And when I say we I mean people way smarter than me and when i say ein stein i actually mean ein Stein as in german for one stone. It’s a shape that can tile the plane infinitely without producing a repeating pattern.
I saw this in the news a while ago, what makes this so revolutionary?
In maths, we are excited about new things even if they seem to have absolutely no practical value or application. Sometimes, things become important later on, like prime numbers, which have been studied just for fun for centuries, and are now the backbone of encrypted communication.
So the only reason why this exciting is because nobody did it before.
Rapid prototyping in general, and additive manufacturing (3D printing) specifically. I used to spend a lot of time prototyping by hand with foam, paper, tape, wood, clay, etc. We would have “arts and crafts week” at work when it was time to step out of CAD and make concept models of some new design. Occasionally some VP would walk by and wonder why the company was paying a bunch of salaried engineers to stick cardboard pieces together with hot glue. Getting decent parts often meant spending thousands of dollars on molding tools to make cast urethane prototypes.
Now I can walk down the hall to one of my 3D printers and get beautiful parts overnight. And there are a ton of companies offering rapid machining and sheet metal forming services. Getting design feedback and finding mistakes is so much faster and easier when I can go from 3D on a screen to real parts in my hand in a few days.
And a few companies have come to market with real-world uses for 3D printing beyond prototyping, like 3D printing titanium joint replacements.
I am watching some amazing things happen with social media decentralization that doesn’t so much effect my work but my personal studies. Seeing this happening and wanting to be able to contribute to it, has encouraged me to try to learn web development again. This time I am going to go about it the smart way with thanks to The Odin Project. I am also keeping a keen eye on the burgeoning offerings of SD-WAN to the consumer market. Some really neat stuff is being contributed back to the community by Slack through their Nebula project.
It’s an exciting time to study and experiment in FOSS right now. The internet is taking a dramatic shift back towards its decentralized roots. It’s fun to be able to participate in ad-free discussions and without being shown content we largely do not want to see because an algorithm is steering us towards it to boost ad revenue.
People using AI to rapid prototype concept art and reference material for 3D modelling on-top of using AI to generate meshes.
Chat GPT is almost exclusively used when it comes to code problems since it has similar hit and miss rate compared to searching solutions online yourself.
I don’t want to keep harping on about AI, but seriously. AI. I work in the creative sphere, and Adobe are (finally) earning their subscriptions. Lightroom’s new denoise DNG tool is massively impressive and not all that resource heavy. Photoshops generative fill solves so many problems with photo manipulation, my team is saving hours a week. On the video production side, crumplePop’s suite of audio correction tools is a game changer, and davinci resolves 18.5 beta has so much that we haven’t explored but I’m excited by.
Also, 32-bit float. Holy shit. It’s like recording audio in RAW. I no longer need to consider resourcing for audio production on smaller jobs.
