I had a brief look at Aetheris and correct me if I'm wrong but it can't do any CSG between real world assemblies. All code is for special cases like cylinders, cones, planes.
I do not see any code for general NURBS/trimmed-surface SSI. And after SSI classification (what to keep and what to throw away) is just as difficult.
It seems a lot of people are working on CAD kernels these days, in Rust or otherwise, and clanker-written READMEs and messages over-promise on abilities because the authors have never worked with real world assemblies and trust what their agents tell them they "implemented".
I tried importing two simpler STEPs you can find online, boxy-with-surfacetex.step (fails import entirely) and raspberry-pi-4-model-b.step ( Step242Importer.ImportBody fails, Step242Importer.ImportRidgidRoots succeeds, Step242AssemblyImporter.Import crashes).
On the latter a simple BrepBoolean.Subtract(ridgid_roots, box) returns: NotImplemented: "bounded boolean family only supports recognized axis-aligned boxes"
This is a simple as it gets with a real world assembly. A box is just six plane intersections. And Aetheris can't do it.
I also tried a furniture STEP from a designer friend, Sascha Ulber the simple version (w/o rolling ball fillet surfaces) of his Coffy chaiselongue. The STEP came from Rhino3D. It succeeded the Step242AssemblyImporter.Import but all booleans I tried gave the same error as the PI model above.
That ship has sailed. People will do it running models locally.
The best open weight models are more that capable to do this. The restrictions are probably being put in place bby Anthropic & OpenAI to have plausible deniability for possibly incoming lawsuits?
If your training is based on downloading & ingesting anything and everything w/o consent you presented evidence that respecting intellectual property is not something you genuinely care about.
So why should your paying (!) users ... unless you'd get any fallout from that.
Incoming lawsuits don't have any chance of winning, but lawsuits in and of themselves are expensive, so I presume it's about appeasing the software industry enough to prevent the lawsuits from happening, in the first place.
This has nothing to do with egui and is app architecture and business logic being 'held wrong'. It's a classic when you don't really know what you're doing and ask a clanker to "make me AutoCAD" or "make me Photoshop". Or maybe when you don't care at the beginning.
Nothing that can't be fixed w/o changing a line of code in egui.
UI needs its own thread, operations in the backend need to be interruptable by the user, yadayadayada.
Try rerun.io or drop me a PM and I send you a link where you can d/l an alpha of my 3D modeling app mentioned in my comment above. 100% egui. Zero lag.
The central argument, reiterated countless times through the post is "It does not scale".
To which my reply is: "Who cares, the vast majority of apps do not have complex UIs".
And if they do you can come up with a workaround like e.g. rerun did for egui (outlined in the article).
Case in point: my biggest spare time "prompted" project is a now 500k LOC hybrid 3D modeling app. It uses egui.
I'd say modeling functionality-wise it's somewhere between Grasshopper/Houdini, close to 200 nodes out of the box + any number of custom ones
That gives you an idea about UI: node graph, parameter editing, widget overlays, gizmos. A lot of nodes have custom widgets, ramp or curve editors etc.
It's not a simple UI at all.
But I didn't spent a second on worrying about the performance of egui's approach. And while UI shows up on my per-frame statistics it's negligible.
There’s a low ceiling on how much complexity users can process in a UI. We hit those limits sometime back in the late 1990s. There’s no benefit to having a UI that can handle 4,000 buttons on screen at a time.
Technically true, but while they might not be onscreen, sometimes you have a thousands of rows that the user can scroll through, and each row might have multiple input widgets. A UI framework should have a good way to handle large scrolling lists.
There are also photo apps where you can scroll through decades of photos.
Also, text editors should be able to handle large files, and filesystem widgets should handle large directories.
When you pick a UI framework you know how your app looks and what 'complexity' means for your UI. And you make an informed choice of which framework you choose based on that.
Or one would hope you do. As that's part of the job of being a software engineer.
If you give that decision to your clanker and it chooses egui a for spreadsheet app: that's still on you. At least for now.
> And you make an informed choice of which framework you choose based on that.
Experience shows that choices made in the beginning of a project are very often reconsidered later when requirements change. In those cases it is nice if you choose for the worst possible outcome, so in this case you choose for a high performance GUI framework which can scale.
Obviously, today you can just write "please rewrite this badly scaling app with that scaling GUI framework" but I think that's outside the scope of the discussion.
How is that outside the scope when the discussion is about a an AI-prompted blog post that is a thinly veiled advertorial for a most likely AI-prompted new GUI crate?
The fact that you can just prompt a UI kit swap should be at the core of the discussion then; wouldn't you concur?
I have architect friends. They can't draw, they can't sculpt, they have no clue about art history. Or color theory, if you want to go that far. Usually golden ratio/Fibonacci is kinda where it ends. One of them is a professor of architecture, no less.
That said, I'm sure there are architects today for which some or all of this is not true.
Most of the above are subjects an architect student would have had to learn about and demonstrate profienciency in, to earn their degree, a 100 years ago.
I'm sure the change in architecture's priorities played a role in this too. Industrial materials, construction efficiency. The need to mass produce housing, costs and new social ideals, yadayadayada.
And ofc the modernist rejection of any ornament; even that which is there historically, on existing architecture.
My hope is that in a future where we 3D-print buildings or construct them with robots we will see a renaissance of non-functional[1] beauty/sculpture/texture/color in architecture because the cost difference will be marginal/nonexistend.
But then, architecture is also always a mirror of the period. And from that pov it's not looking so great for beauty making it back any time soon.
[1] Yet functional because how can the happiness/joy of the perceiver of architecture be removed from what should count as functional, in architecture?
I've had the misfortune to have met only unlucky and sad architects. One was stuck designing casinos, doing all the opposite things she learned in school: instead of happy open spaces to bring people joy, build a maze with no windows to trap people and suck their money. The other one got laid off and then found a job designing prisons, also an inversion, where instead of nice, bright and inviting places they have to optimize how to punish people and trap them in for years and make sure they never escape.
I don't know what the equivalent for software may be, thinking you'd design cool inverted binary tree algorithms, and instead working on sucking people's information and shoving ads in their faces?
My father-in-law’s brother is an architect. He does (or did) design doors and doorways for prisons. He saw it as a way to make money to live, but it’s not his passion.
For passion, he looks to Frank Lloyd Wright, who happens to also be my favorite architect. I think that was one of the things that endeared me to the family when I first met them. Of course, we both realize the issues with Wright. But, the architecture Wright produced is still amazing, regardless of his personality faults.
I love Gaudi, too. I saw Sagrada Família years ago, when my wife and I took a vacation to Barcelona. I’d love to go back and see it again. But, looking at his house which was turned into a museum, you start to understand why the word “gaudy” was invented.
I’m also a big fan of Victor Horta. My wife and I lived in Brussels from late 1998 to early 2006, and we were only a few blocks away from his house, which they had turned into a museum. He did some of the most beautiful stuff I’ve ever seen. But it was also very difficult to create at the time, and difficult to maintain. Only the richest people could afford that. We are fortunate that we were able to collect a couple of Art Nouveau antiques while we were there. But almost no one here in the US would recognize them, and I doubt many here would consider them beautiful.
Sadly, for production purposes in this modern world, ornamentation must be set aside. Throw all the ugly ass cheap tchotchkes in there that you want, and get your ornamentation and decoration fix however you have to. What you throw that onto or into, it’s almost certainly going to be as bland as humanly possible.
Oh the tragedy of wasted talent, forced to apply their skills toward other people's flawed and antisocial visions. Building casinos and prisons, one a trap for the mind, another for the body.
Unemployed mathematicians. I feel for their tortured souls in this unforgiving world ruled by capital, a form of numerology. They speak a native tongue almost incomprehensible to others, and the beauty they seek is invisible except for mystics like themselves.
Software engineers working in the dungeons of Mordor, seeing their craft and design abused for user-hostile purposes, against the very freedom of personal computing that brought them joy. Now with the industrial production of code, their knowledge devalued and commodified, gardens trampled by outsiders who do not care for the rich history and culture of the field.
I think it's like millennial grey. Not only is it more expensive to add ornamentation, it also hurts resale and repurposing of buildings. Ideally you want mostly identical boxes where you could change the sign to make it a church, a McDonalds, a clothing store, etc every few years.
Or that seems like the goal of commercial builders now, right?
This is the crux. Houses used to be built to be lived in, so ornamentation added value. Now they are commodities to be traded and sold, and variation makes a portfolio harder to manage/less uniform.
Very common in the USA. Queen Anne, craftsman, just to name a few styles, featuring elaborate corbels, crown molding, coves, built in cabinetry, wainscotting etc.
> so ornamentation added value.
When and where was this a common thing?
Depends on the houses. Your neighborhood one? Yeah I get what you're saying I guess, tho some of this probably still applies!
Large urban buildings? I recently-ish randomly watched this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBOXF-FION4 "Why Everything We Build is Flat" i.e. how availability of caulk contributed to less beautiful houses (in urban settings at the least).
I wish people would stop calling it millennial grey. It's Gen-X grey. Kim K and Kanye were the ones who built the logical conclusion in their contrast-less white casa; millennials are born maximalists who pair tech accoutrements with actual wood grain because their fondest memory is of being sat in front of a PS1 and a CRT housed in a stained oak cabinet in their childhood den, wires, manuals, remotes, and jewel cases hither and thither.
Yeah I've noticed that millennials are often maximalists, years and years of ghastly 'landlord white' paint jobs contributed to that as well I think.
I'm currently renting but looking to buy in my area, I'm sure I'll find the chemical stripping of horrible white gloss paint and the painting over of 'minimal' white walls with a riot of colour outright cathartic. The house I'm renting would look so good if someone took the time to undo all the bodge jobs and cheap decoration choices I think. The lovely hardwood doors have proper brass hinges for example but it's all covered up with decades' worth of horrid white paint. Half the houses round here probably have gorgeous hardwood floors under crappy laminate or lino, and almost all have nice fireplaces I'd love to reinstate and use with a wood burner.
Does it actually hurt resale value? Anything with style won't be universally loved, but will make something more attractive and valuable to some. It certainly hasn't stopped fashion and design in other products. Is the solution for "This won't be to everyone's tastes" to make everything into something that nobody actually likes?
The real estate industry (gag) says that because the whole goal is to turn housing into standard product that they can sell with the least work possible.
That's why you see houses for sale where they repainted everything grey, ripped out the mature landscaping and put down plastic and dyed wood chips.
I am romantic, I would actually love to move into a house that carries the mannerisms, tics, and aesthetic of the previous inhabitants like a permanent ghost, and add mine on top. It feels like a world that was and will be without me, where I struggle to leave a trace by respecting and appreciating the traces of others. When I saw some minor graffiti from a child in the wardrobe of a house I rented, I loved it.
Fads come and go, but people's tastes are longer lasting and even fashion is cyclical. There's still a thriving market for 1950s-style kitchen appliances and Art Deco designs from the 20s and 30s. If you think a house looks really cool, you're probably not going to change your mind.
When we built our house a few years back, our builder gave us 3 total paint colors, for the entire house. Anything above that was $500/room. So, we let our kids pick out their own room colors, leaving us with one color for the rest of the house.
We chose Millennial Gray because it goes with anything, not because we especially liked it. It was a perfectly acceptable option for free.
By now we've repainted half the house or so. But the rooms where the gray remains are just fine.
I get your point, but I still feel the need to say here clearly: No, I don't. Identical interchangable boxes are not what I would call a ideal standard for housing.
re commerical buildings today, absolutely. Most developments, especially retail ones have the goal of being wrapped up in a commerical real estate portfolio. That might be a REIT or held by a private investor. Their goal is to collect buildings with the widest marketability for retail. They are not generally curating locations with intent. Though some owners specialize in that in high density tourist or luxury retail spaces.
To be fair, this isn't entirely new. The American West was strewn with cheap wooden structures that all looked alike with big fake fonts with hand painted signs. Those mostly rotted so they're uncommon in our lexicon outside of movies.
This applies to most fields. Far more people get advanced education now but just necessarily as you cater to a larger group of people you have to diminish the end goal and operate more by procedures and standardization. That reverberates and diminishes the skills of the more competent people who would have been able to learn all of the above a century ago, because now all the institutions cater to a larger body.
I disagree about it being a mirror of the period as some absolute rule though. Insurance policies, building code/zoning, educational structures and the rest are all choices people make.
The cost thing is always absurd to me as in medieval guild systems during the great plague people found resources to build great cathedrals. Acting like cathedrals were cheaper then compared to now is just absurd.
We have the resources we just choose to use it to create trash and then burn it, and to punish anyone who tries to make anything that isn't trash.
It has nothing to do with that. Architecture has to branches - artistic and technical one. These people are the technical kind of architects. It is a STEM field and job. They do a lot of math, physics and that sort of thing is school. Because, the kind of jobs they get require that.
The people designing cathedrals were the finest engineers of their time. Imagine how you would go about suspending a ton of stone 50 feet in the air before industrial machinery, let alone carving it into a nice shape.
That has absolutely nothing to with what I wrote. I was not writing about history of 400 or 500 years ago nor about people with unlimited budget and building spanning 150 years from start to finish.
I was talking about what architect as a job means today. There are two branches and the technical one exists, because it is needed and useful.
It has nothing to do with culture bullshit, diminished skills and all that, frankly, crap. And if you want experimental architecture and arts, there are plenty of those too. It is just that this guys friend is not that arts guy.
I was an architect. There's some truth to what you're saying, but to be honest we rarely get the chance to enact such grand visions. Normally the stars have to align with the perfect client who has limitless budget. These crafts don't come cheap, you know! Gaudi does things with wood that frankly shouldn't be possible.
The other aspect I think also deserves attention is that as our lives have become more digitised and online, our care and attention towards the physical realm has degraded a little. We no longer need exquisite masonry to fire off the synapses - we have the endless scroll and the 24-hour news cycle.
Finally there is a small amount of survivor syndrome happening too - we keep the beautiful buildings but ignore or forget the enormous unhygienic slums that often co-existed with our most beautiful architecture.
I don't understand the bit where they can draw? How did they pass the entrance exams or their classes? The architects I know basically had to draw all day, everyday.
>They can't draw, they can't sculpt, they have no clue about art history. Or color theory, if you want to go that far. Usually golden ratio/Fibonacci is kinda where it ends. One of them is a professor of architecture, no less.
I only have a couple of architect friends, but wow, they actually have exactly these skills and interests. Amazing artists and designers in their own right. They seem to know a lot about how philosophy interacts with architecture too! Interesting to know they might be the exception.
we've reached meta-ornamentation, our structures can now do without their own adornments as they themselves become ornamentation for a city, there is no shortage of striking and breathtaking architecture, but it is certainly true that modern low density residential leaves much to be desired, and that it is a great shame that we have left the 1830s-1930s so far behind.
> And ofc the modernist rejection of any ornament; even that which is there historically, on existing architecture.
There's an ideological capture of postwar architecture departments. Talk to a dutiful architecture student and mention classical architecture, and don't be surprised if you get some eye-rolling or stock dismissals ("it's anachronistic", "it's pastiche", "it's expensive", "it's unoriginal"). People - and that includes students - tend to go along with the prejudices of their professors, both because of ignorance and because they want to "fit in".
There are some maverick departments[0], however.
> My hope is that in a future where we 3D-print buildings or construct them with robots [...] the cost difference will be marginal/nonexistend.
The cost isn't the issue. Societies much poorer than our - and we are the wealthiest we've ever been in history, materially speaking - have produced magnificent artwork and architecture. We simply have different priorities. I don't remember who it was who said this, but if you want to know what a society worships and holds in highest regard, look for the tallest building in the city.
> We simply have different priorities. I don't remember who it was who said this, but if you want to know what a society worships and holds in highest regard, look for the tallest building in the city.
I remember reading an article on HN about how people stated that they preferred traditional Western architecture styles, but what was built by architects was something very different. It was presented as revealed preferences contradicting stated preferences.[1]
But I think it is more about priorities, like you said in your first sentence. People may prefer traditional styles, but individuals have limited power/time, and there are other things to worry about, so their effort goes elsewhere, not on supporting their preferred architectural styles.
Would prefer 3D printed buildings try something new; for example 3D print underground living and bedrooms for energy efficiency and just have dining + kitchen at surface level
There is enough antique architecture still standing to appreciate
We can allow ourselves the freedom to dream and explore new ideas just like the long dead gave themselves
> because the cost difference will be marginal/nonexistent.
It will not happen because the rich will always keep standards of living of the average and poor people just at the low level that they will not rebel.
> It will not happen because the rich will always keep standards of living of the average and poor people just at the low level that they will not rebel.
You're mixing up two issues. The need for oracles is a "hard problem" but it's not the problem in this case.
USDC has a central issuer that can freeze funds because that's the only way you can currently have an asset that "looks like" dollars on a crypto ledger. Someone gets a dollar, mints a unit of the bearer token, and pinky swears they'll redeem it. It's a systemic concern that calls into question the legitimacy of the system, but that's not an oracle.
But I don't see USDC being mentioned in my reply or the comment I replied to.
And calling the need for oracles a "hard problem" is a neat euphemism the point of which escapes me. It's not solveable.
As someone else wrote: when something goes sideways with their assets the crypto posse call for law enforcement. Or they bent their own rules (DAO/ETH hard fork, 2016 e.g.).
I assumed a basic level of abstract thinking since this is HN.
For the point I illustrated it does not matter. Everything is needed. The record somewhere will not be sufficient to get you your flat back when you return from holidays. Nor will a the police w/o a judge. Or the judge w/o having the the record to look at.
And re. "always a computer": trust me, in Germany where I live, it will not be a computer for years to come. Everything is paper here. :D
"Oracle" being the cover for crypto bros who dont want to admit they need "the legal system" to fix thier mess. Its all idiology and freedom when you are poor but once you actually own something of value, like a flat, suddenly you want lawyers and police to keep you safe from bad people.
I do it routinely. It goes in a glass container that sits in water in the ultrasonic cleaner. It doesn't throw off noticeably more vapor than IPA that's just sitting open.
wait, IPA in an ultrasonic bath? isn't that asking for fire? normally ultrasonic baths are warmed, so you are heating a liquid and causing cavitation in something that has a flashpoint of 11c.
That part we can argue about; the upsetting part, if you bothered to actually read the article, is this:
The WaNPRC says the monkey studies have contributed to an understanding how prenatal domoic acid exposure may affect learning and memory: “These findings remain relevant to public health.”
However, there is no clear evidence that the experiments led to changes in public health recommendations.
That's how it always goes. We're told that animal research is vitally important and needs grant money. But then when a study is actually published, we're told "that's just an animal study, you can't draw any conclusions from it".
Hi author here, thank you for testing bbtree, bbtree works best if you can implement the `InlinkeKey` trait, would love to see the workloads and check if I missed anything? feel free to create an issue in the repo!
I do not see any code for general NURBS/trimmed-surface SSI. And after SSI classification (what to keep and what to throw away) is just as difficult.
It seems a lot of people are working on CAD kernels these days, in Rust or otherwise, and clanker-written READMEs and messages over-promise on abilities because the authors have never worked with real world assemblies and trust what their agents tell them they "implemented".
I tried importing two simpler STEPs you can find online, boxy-with-surfacetex.step (fails import entirely) and raspberry-pi-4-model-b.step ( Step242Importer.ImportBody fails, Step242Importer.ImportRidgidRoots succeeds, Step242AssemblyImporter.Import crashes).
On the latter a simple BrepBoolean.Subtract(ridgid_roots, box) returns: NotImplemented: "bounded boolean family only supports recognized axis-aligned boxes"
This is a simple as it gets with a real world assembly. A box is just six plane intersections. And Aetheris can't do it.
I also tried a furniture STEP from a designer friend, Sascha Ulber the simple version (w/o rolling ball fillet surfaces) of his Coffy chaiselongue. The STEP came from Rhino3D. It succeeded the Step242AssemblyImporter.Import but all booleans I tried gave the same error as the PI model above.
reply