Yeah, like, we’ve got a fairly nice sporty-ish sedan that’s approaching 300k and since we’ve only got one car we kinda have to be ready to buy a new one quickly, I’ve done some of the thought process based on our needs and where we are in life. And the thing is, I like a nice car but I’m unclear on exactly how nice of a car I would actually appreciate driving, given that I don’t like to die or hurt other people, so I’m not going to go 3x the speed limit on some backroad and have never gotten a speeding ticket just that the upgrade from a 1.8L engine ecomony-ish sedan to a 2.5L engine sporty-ish sedan did feel real nice.

Meanwhile, one in-law got a Porsche so another in-law on the same side of the family had to trade in his Audi SUV for roughly the same SUV on the Porsche side and it’s all some douchebag power fantasy.

But, yeah, I like seeing actual-car-persons nerd out because I know enough to get at what they are nerding out about. Joy is much funner than douchebaggery.

There’s a lot about the hatred of Bambu that’s just sinophobic. Which is too bad because there’s plenty of completely rational reasons to avoid Bambu printers.

I have a pile of hobbies and I guess one common thread is obnoxious dude shit. And I say this as a male type person.

3D printing is a weird one because 3D printers are hella good for all kinds of stuff, from the more “femme” coded hobbies to the “dude” hobbies. But somehow the not-male people I know engage with some of the same communities as I do and for some reason I always get a lot more useful answers to my questions. There’s a certain aesthetic to homebrew open source 3D printers and it’s kinda industrial.

Electronics hackery is worse because it’s a lot more “masc” coded. Even software stuff isn’t quite as bad because at least there there’s been concerted social pressure.

Photography is sad because if I work with a female model I have to go through a whole process for her to make sure that she’s going to be safe during our shoot, some of which I didn’t even fully realize that was part of the process for a while. And pretty much all of the semi-pro-to-pro experienced models have at least one story and sometimes Names Are Named and it’s someone I’ve met, so I have to be constantly on guard.

Okay, so understanding that Boeing has been shipping airliners that boing instead of fly or have some bolts missing…

My dad was a frustratingly retired aerospace engineer because there was this period of the 90s where we actually did shrink the defense industry until 9/11 and the contractors started figuring out exactly how to “bribe” people. And one of his side complaints is that any aerospace engineer is probably actually good at being a general-purpose mechanical engineer, except that they’ve generally made the hard stuff actually safe earlier along, but nobody will hire them. His example being fully-automated-digital-engine-controls and fly-by-wire and having three redundant chains.

So, in the aftermath of the whole Toyota throttle-by-wire thing that really didn’t go a whole lot of useful ways, I decided to check out his observation and I did some googling to discover a page where some big company was advertising to the auto industry at large their throttle controllers. And they talk about how they were built with “aerospace technologies” to be reliable and safe. And, looking farther along, it seems like that was not actually three redundant chains, just three threads of execution on the same processor.

Oh yeah, and generally any airplane that does have fly-by-wire and FADEC there is going to always be a set of reversion modes and people have to know about them. Obviously some aspects of this are far stricter because a car can just pull over to the side of the road… but also it needs to do that safely. Witness poor Anton Yelchin dying ignominiously because of the digital gear shifter thing on his Jeep.

But, yeah, the underlying problem is that the cultural expectation is to make cars that will go most places containing capabilities that a vehicle might never actually use in its entire service life and require the minimum amount of knowledge and basically zero knowledge above the collective cultural understanding of a car that’s only mildly changed since a fully-mechanically-linked control system.

Oh yeah I feel a weird version of this, ugh. See, I’m a big fan of going places and I like complicated mechanical toys and I guess I actually know a lot of deep down details about cars especially after a year or so stint doing car-related tech things, but I’m also an environmentalist who hates cars.

So, like, goofy engine swap projects, actually racing the damn sports car, actually taking the SUV off road to see something cool, details required to engineer a V12 sports car that doesn’t spin out, et al are all interesting to me but then literally everything to do with car culture seems like folks who are driving their super-fancy tuned vehicle in a traffic jam wasting gas spouting right wing BS.

Funny, just this morning I woke up to someone commenting on one of my pieces of art that I’d posted on Reddit that if I hadn’t put in the comment how I did it, they’d have thought it was an AI generated picture.

It’s super-painful to be a technologist and an artist at the same time right now because there are way too many people in tech who have no understanding of what it means to create art. There’s people in the art community who don’t really get AI either, of course, but since they are trending towards probably the right opinion based on an incomplete understanding of what the things we see as AI actually are, it’s much easier to listen to them. If anything, the artists can labor under the misapprehension that the current crop of AI tools are doing more than they actually are.

In the golden age of analog photography, people would do a print and include the raw borders of the image. So you’d see sprocket holes if it’s 35mm film or a variety of rough boundaries for other film formats. And it was a known artistic convention that you were showing exactly what you shot, no cropping, no edits, etc. The early first version of Instagram decided that those film borders meant “art” so of course they added the fake film borders and it grated on my nerves because I think it was the edges from a roll of Velvia, which is a brilliant color slide film. And then someone would have the photo with the B&W filter because that also means “art” but you would never see a B&W Velvia shot unless you were working really hard on a thing. So this is far from the first time that a bunch of clueless people on the tech side of the fence did something silly out of ego and ignorance.

The picture I posted is the result of a bunch of work on fabbing, 3D printing, FastLED programming, photographic technique, providing an interesting concept to a person and an existing body of work such that said person would want to show up to some random eccentric’s place for a shoot, et al. And, well… captions on art exist for a reason, right? It adds layers to the work to know that the artist was half-mad when they painted it and maybe you can tell by the painting’s brushwork or just know your art history really well but maybe you can’t and so a caption helps create context for people not skilled in that particular art.

And, there’s not really “secrets” in art. Lots of curators and art critics will take great pains to explain why Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko so if you are still wandering around saying “BUT IT LOOKS LIKE GIANT SQUARES” that’s intentional ignorance.

Now, I’ve been exploring my particular weird genre of art for a while now. Before AI, Photoshop was the thing. Much in the same way as I could have thrown a long enough prompt into a spicy-autocomplete image generator, I also could have probably photoshopped it. Then again, the tutorials for the Photoshop version of the technique all refer back to the actual photographic effect.

Describing something as it’s not has long been a violation of social norms that people who are stuck in a world of intentional ignorance, ego, and disrespect for the artistic process have engaged in. In the simultaneous heyday of Second Life and Flickr, people wanting to treat their Second Life as their primary life caused Flickr to create features so people could mediate this boundary. So, on one level, this isn’t entirely new and posting AI art in the painting reddit is no different from posting filtered Second Life to the portrait group on flickr. It’s simple rudeness of the sort that the unglamorous aspects of community moderation are there to solve for.

I have gotten quizzed about how I make my art, but I’ve never seen anybody go off and then create a replica of my art, they’ve always gone off and created something new and novel and interesting and you might not even realize that what got them there was tricks I shared with them it’s so different. Artists don’t see other art in the gallery and autocomplete art that looks like what they saw, they incorporate ideas into their own work with their own flair.

Thus, there’s more going on than just mere rudeness. I’ve been doing this for a long time now and the AI companies have a habit of misrepresenting exactly what content they have stolen to train their image models. So it’s entirely likely that the cool AI picture that someone thinks my art looks like is really just autocompleted using parts of my art. Except I can’t say “no” and if there was a market for people making art that looks roughly like mine, I’d offer paid workshops or something.

Cool, I’m building up a Voron Zero although I will get started on a Trident after I’m done with the Zero probably.

I feel like your two line description bear-ly scratches the surface of possibilities here.

A WipeoutXL-esque hover racing game, maybe with open-world-racing-game vibes, with the deep technological complexity of a flight simulator like X-Plane.

I spent a bit of time in college tooling around with it, actually, even though it turns out that years later I’m really glad I didn’t end up in the game development industry.

Way I figure it, it would require you to think about systems-level issues. It’s a Formula-One styled thing so if you end up exceeding the altitude limit in competition, ten second penalty to your time. Do you want to use a lifting-body styled groundplane? Or lift-fans, knowing that that comes out of your power budget but will do a better job of keeping you away from the altitude limit, less susceptible to other people’s wing vorticies, and avoid needing sturdy wheels? Etc.

As open world games have gotten more open world and popular these days, I suspect that the difference between then and now is that it might be funner with tune codes a la Forza Horizon so that you could play it without being quite as much of an expert. And maybe a lot of the more complicated mechanisms might actually be a little less intrusive when you can spend a bunch of time tooling around the landscape running into trees without the strain of competition before you actually get going.

There’s a lot of flight simulator players and frankly part of the joy seems to be that, when it is really really complicated and accurate, you are learning skills that might be useless-ish but there’s still that joy of learning and also of playing around with a large dangerous object that could kill a lot of people and not being worried about that when you flip an airliner upside down. And/or the “I could be an airliner/stunt pilot if the FAA wasn’t so damn restrictive on the medical” vibes.