How feasible would it be to scale this up to several feet in diameter? Like if you wanted to scan furniture? The device itself by default looks to hold much smaller items.
The dinosaur example lists an iPhone as source and none of their scanner models. It is also saying that it was recorded at a dinosaur theme park in Germany. This one might be meters long.
In that case I think you just take hundreds of photos by hand, probably with software which varies the focus as you take them so everything has a chance to be in focus.
The device is a way to automake taking those ~300 photos (number from the marigold example).
Can you please explain a bit more about why it's a difficult photogrammetry challenge, or point me in the direction of resources so I can learn more about it myself? This is an exact project on my projects list, so I'd love to have a better grounding in the topic when I get around to diving in to it.
Edit: I'm more focused on getting a dimensionally accurate/stable model, vs an esthetically pleasing one, if that matters. The hope is to be able to scan a broken chair and be able to design a jig in CAD that I could then 3d print for holding a specific piece in place while everything goes back together.
Most recent gaussian and nerf to mesh algorithms are surprisingly good at getting reasonable results for objects that traditional photogrammetry would struggle with.
The main challenge are reflective and uniform surfaces (e.g. lether or coated wood). See this overview what you'd want for perfect photogrammetry: https://openscan-org.github.io/OpenScan-Doc/photogrammetry/b... and also the challenging surfaces lower on that site
Same, which is why I asked. My naive intuition is that if you had an industrial grade turntable, like the one in the below video, you could hack together a hardware setup.
The way I like to think about it is to split work into two broad categories - creative work and toil. Creative work is the type of work we want to continue doing. Toil is the work we want to reduce.
edit - an interesting facet of AI progress is that the split between these two types of work gets more and more granular. It has led me to actively be aware of what I'm doing as I work, and to critically examine whether certain mechanics are inherently toilistic or creative. I realized that a LOT of what I do feels creative but isn't - the manner in which I type, the way I shape and format code. It's more in the manner of catharsis than creation.
You cannot remove the toil without removing the creative work.
Just like how, in writing a story, a writer must also toil over each sentence, and should this be an emdash or a comma? and should I break the paragraph here or there? All this minutia is just as important to the final product as grand ideas and architecture are.
If you don't care about those little details, then fine. But you sacrifice some authorship of the program when you outsource those things to an agent. (And I would say, you sacrifice some quality as well).
Quote: "Toil is the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and that scales linearly as a service grows."
Variations of this definition are widely used.
If we map that onto your writing example, "toil" would be related to tasks like getting the work published, not the writing process itself.
With this definition of toil, you can certainly remove the toil without removing the creative work.
You can remove a lot of toil from the writing process without taking away a writer's ability to do line edits. There's a lot of outlining, organization, bookkeeping and continuity work AI automates in the early draft/structural editing process.
Most writers can't even get a first draft of anything done, and labor under the mistaken assumption that a first draft is just a few minor edits away from being the final book. The reality is that a first draft might be 10% of the total time of the book, and you will do many rounds of rereading and major structural revision, then several rounds of line editing. AI is bad at line editing (though it's ok at finding things to nitpick), so even if your first draft and rough structural changes are 100% AI, you have basically a 0% chance of getting published unless you completely re-write it as part of the editing process.
It all depends on how you split the difference. I wouldn't call the emdash vs comma problem toil. It's fine-grained and there are technical aspects to the decision, but it's also fundamentally part of the output.
Agree that it's not the best for UI stuff. The best solution I've found is to add skills that define the look and feel I want (basically a design system in markdown format). Once the codebase has been established with enough examples of components, I tend to remove the skill as it becomes unnecessary context. So I think of the design skills as a kind of training wheel for the project.
Not to self-promote, but I am working on what I think is the right solution to this problem. I'm creating an AI-native browser for designers: https://matry.design
I have lots of ideas for features, but the core idea is that you expose the browser to Claude Code, OpenCode, or any other coding agent you prefer. By integrating them into a browser, you have lots of seamless UX possibilities via CDP as well as local filesystem access.
Lee Pace's performance in that show is one of my all time favorites. It's incredibly hard to play a charismatic marketing guru because in some sense, you're not acting. In a given scene, the character might be trying to convince people around him of some crazy idea, but if he hasn't convinced you, the viewer, then the entire illusion falls apart. So he really has to do in real life what he's pretending to do on screen.
Funny that this came up today. Last night I started re-watching the series after several years. Just this afternoon I was reflecting on how genuinely charismatic Lee Pace's Joe McMillen is.
You really feel it. Even when we know he's a manipulative sonuvabitch. It's mesmerizing. You have to admire his ability to spin shit into gold. The man has vision.
There's a sequence around S01E07 that I'm looking forward to reaching again, in which Joe is out on the front lawn with Donna's daughters during a hurricane and it's FEELS like magic. His performance feels earnest, and hypnotizing, and genuinely magical as he puts on a show for these young girls in the rain.
There's something intangible and hard to describe about the series. The writers have a way of making it transcend it's core drama and feel very different from just about any other show I can recall. Somehow it feels like pure creative expression that manages to defy outside expectations and tell a story that feels true to life and convey the ambitions of creative people who are fighting to make something beautiful.
It's shocking how few people have seen this show, let along watched it. Part of that probably has to do with how inaccessible it is on streaming. It's only readily available on AMC+. And no one has AMC+.
This is one of those shows that would likely shoot to the top if Netflix got the rights to it and even did a mild push. It's genuinely peak prestige TV.
That is where I originally watched it. It was on Netflix at one point. And now, it is not. Which is most of the problem with streaming service in general.
Scroll past the subscription options to find the full series listing. "Box Set" licensing terminology is as anachronistic as "Seasons", but both are used in Apple TV product listings for non-subscription streaming media purchases.
I'm not seeing anything anachronistic about either term. "Seasons" is absolutely aligned to the way television series are still produced and distributed. "Box Set" implies physical media. Using the latter term to refer to something else sounds like a case of false advertising.
Apple offers refunds for unwanted digital purchases, and this description in Apple TV app:
When you purchase access to this item, you can permanently download it to your iPhone, iPad, Mac, or PC. Once downloaded, you can access this without an internet connection, and Apple can't remove it from your device.
Wait, so it's actually a standalone, DRM-free download? If that's the case, then while the term is still somewhat misleading, it's considerably less so than I assumed.
Not DRM free, but unlike most streaming services Apple TV will download purchased media via different countries or VPNs and has no time limit to watch the download. In practice, it "just works". Buying all 4 seasons individually would be 4x$13=$52.
I don't see how it qualifies as a legitimate download or ownership. You cannot save the file to a disk you control and you have no way to ensure you have continued access to it. Apple or the IP holder can cause this "download" to dissapear from your device/account without prior warning. Its actually written in the terms.
With the advent of digital music, "record album" morphed from referring to the physical medium, to referring to the recording that would be put on it. I think something similar is happening for "box set".
Not sure I'd agree. "Record album" never specifically referred to anything physical, and just means "collection of recordings", regardless of what medium is used for them.
The term "album" by itself did originally refer to something physical -- a collection of photos bound into a book by a glue made from egg whites ("albumen") -- but the semantic shift to "album" meaning any kind of collection offered as a single unit happened well before "record albums" were a thing.
But the term "box set" has not experienced a comparable semantic shift, and still implies the presence of an actual box.
It's available on Prime Video (at least on amazon.de). For a long while they would only sell access to season 1, but I've just checked now and all 4 seasons are available at the moment.
What gets me about this show is how it nails the emotional cost of building things. Most tech dramas focus on the product or the money. HaCF focuses on what it does to the people. The relationships that get wrecked, the compromises you make, the way obsession eats everything around it. If you've ever been deep in a startup you feel it in your chest watching this show.
I have watched the first two seasons a few years ago and didn't continue because I was getting so emotionally invested it was making me anxious, not just in front of the screen but also for quite some time afterwards. I'm looking forward to finishing it once I decide my skin has grown thick enough :D
> There's something intangible and hard to describe about the series. The writers have a way of making it transcend it's core drama and feel very different from just about any other show I can recall.
[actors gathered] at Pace's house on weekends to prepare dinner, drink wine, and discuss the scripts and their characters.. "it was really nice, because you got to hear other people's point of views about your character." For the third season, Pace, Davis, and McNairy lived together in a rented house in Atlanta, with Toby Huss joining them for the fourth season..
Rogers called Lisco the duo's mentor, saying: "He.. showed us the ropes.. it was a master class in how to run a room, both in terms of getting a great story out of people, and.. being a really good and decent and fair person in what can sometimes be a brutal industry.." Between the second and third seasons, all of the series's writers departed to work on their own projects, requiring Cantwell and Rogers to build a new writing staff.
I have Lee Pace on the radar since Singh's The Fall.
Your assessment of movie magic is only partially correct. Obviously, a character has to be convincing by himself but the heavy lifting of the illusion is done by the peer characters acting as if they believe the role he plays.
"The king is always played by the others"
Not sure who is to credit for this quote but in my opinion it is one of the most important insights to understand how movies work and also why movie characters are never relevant role models.
He's also extraordinary in Apple's Foundation, some say he carries the show. I treasure The Fall and every frame of it, in this he's uniquely blended with other great actors and images.
Apparently part of The Fall's magic stems from the fact that the girl playing Alexandria (Catinca Untaru) somehow didn't really understand that she was playing in a movie. The director, as well as Pace, received some criticism for this manipulation. She also didn't really continue acting afterwards.
IMO the plot of Apple's "The Foundation" is an infuriating insult to the original series. However, the production is great and Lee Pace is awesome as usual.
I think it's best appreciated as an original space opera that just happens to have the same name, especially given that so much of the show is genuinely original.
I generally agree, and also that it's impossible to take a book to video without change. I tend to try to think of it like this, imagine Bob and Jim watched a battle scene, but one from the west, the other from the east side. Bob wrote the book, Jim the movie.
Naturally, although it was the same battle, they'll have seen different things up close, and have different views on the battle overall.
Having said that...
It's like someone wrote the Foundation movie three generations after the book was written, turned into a play, and then told over the campfire for decades.
It literally has no more connection with Asimov's works, than Star Wars is like Star Trek. All of the technology is different, the size of the Empire is wildly different, literally almost nothing maps.
Is it good? Yes, sorta. But it's not Foundation, by any stretch. It's not even remotely in the same "world".
My problem is that the show essentially "says" the opposite of the novels.
For compelling TV you need recurring characters for the audience to become invested in. But the whole point of Foundation was that the individuals don't matter (mostly).
The show had to jump through all these hoops to keep the same actors around and make them heroes. And it expanded/emphasized the metaphysical element in a way that undermined the psychohistory. And IMO makes/will make (honestly don't know where they're at now) the series ending reveal far less interesting and thought provoking.
Last season's Brother Dude was awesome. I really felt sad for him. I have to say, however, my tolerance for manipulative sociopaths is very low - I'd totally punch McMillen in the face.
I was only aware of The Fall for its brilliant photography.
Often in movies you have the scrappy character that rises to the occasion by making a great speech, winning everybody over. I used to love those scenes.
Now, I've realized, in real life they wouldn't have let them finish their first sentence.
stuff like this. if i enjoy a movie but the script simply doesn't check out from a rational perspective (plot holes, implausible behavior, inconsistencies etc.) then i sometimes decide to switch to a fairy tale mental mode where those issues are excused magically. only works with some movies. kingdom of heaven comes to mind.
Project: Hail Mary, a fantasy world where geopolitics are trivially simple and every state in the world collectively agrees how great it would be to cede power and work together. (And therefore enable a genuinely fun and amazing science story which was the actual focus of the book to begin with, 10/10).
I remember seeing this discussed around the show The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, which is about a midcentury NYC divorcee getting into the world of stand up comedy. Overall it works and is a funny and enjoyable show, but there's definitely some of the standup routines depicted on-screen that are not actually as funny as the baked-in audience laughs might indicate. Because yeah... you can't really fake delivering good standup, even with a whole writer's room preparing the jokes and all the editing magic in the world, you still have to actually stand there and tell them in a funny way. That part can't be faked.
It never occurred to me that the jokes were oversold. I think the show is genuinely funny, with a very high batting average. Easily one of the funniest shows on television.
I sure do miss 'Mrs. Maisel'. What a stellar series.
I think I really loved Barry for exactly the opposite of this reason. Seeing a truly great actor play a bad actor was both impressive and hilarious at the same time.
Sadly, Season 1 Joe is just incohesive. Like, you want there to be some structural reason behind his madness and there just isn't any, because there's too much of crazy. Season 2 tries to walk much of that back.
I haven't yet seen season 3 and beyond, but it's clear the OP blogger agrees:
> The best thing the show’s writers ever did was realize that Joe wasn’t the most interesting character.
Like, Lee is a good actor for sure, he was just given a poorly story crafted role.
If you like Lee Pace, check out The Fall (2006). It's my favorite film, incredibly ambitious and funny and yet virtually unknown to the public. Lee's performance is incredible, as is his young co-star's.
Yeah, it's somewhat splintered in that you're unsure what movie you're watching between different parts, but I have a strong love for movies that dare, and that one certainly does.
I'll also second your comment about the kid, which is one of the best child performances I've seen.
Are we watching the same clip? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
This is from the pilot and I watched it based on high recommendations, and I couldn't keep going because the character you're describing as so convincing and charismatic is so dramatically unlikeable!?
In this scene, he is:
* disrespectful and entitled with a coworker
* privileged and self-important about his background with a client
* then makes an admittedly pretty rousing speech, but TBH the show doesn't really trust us to understand that "this is meant to be inspirational" because it keeps cutting to the other character reacting "inspired", which is significant because
* he doesn't make the sale
* then proceeds to verbally scream abuse at the other character.
and then i'm supposed to be excited about watching the two of these start a computer company together? ..........why?
The guy gives me chills, he reminds me of every sales douche who has ever tried to pull the wool over my eyes, or sell a customer something so horrendous and undeliverable as to be actively business ending.
> The guy gives me chills, he reminds me of every sales douche who has ever tried to pull the wool over my eyes, or sell a customer something so horrendous and undeliverable as to be actively business ending.
The thing is, Joe is supposed to actually have substance and vision. He's not faking it. The difference is that all those sales guys are pretending to be someone like Joe.
No, Joe wants to have substance and vision. The tragedy of his character is his slow realization that he just doesn't have it. Indeed it's the tragedy of all the main cast that each has some of what it takes to make something truly revolutionary, but they lack some key aspect. They each know that another has the missing piece they need, but they can't sustainably maintain a relationship with them.
There's a line in the first season that runs as an undercurrent through the whole show ("Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets you to the thing"). Joe originally says this to make the viewer think about technology, evoking the dawn of the personal computer and subsequently the internet. But later on, you're invited to re-interpret that statement as being about people: computers and technology were the thing that got the main characters to work together. It's the -people- that are the thing.
Part of what makes the show so good is that it's one of the few renditions in TV / movies of the joy of engineering something, and the constant tension that comes from working with great people. Great people inspire you, but they also challenge you. The show does a great job of portraying realistic conflicts that arise between different personality types and roles, as well as cleverly exposing the limitations of those personalities. With just Gordon, you'll get a stable and well engineered product but it won't be revolutionary. Joe has the vision but he can't actually _do_ the substantive part. Cameron has great substance and technical ability, but she's impractical and inflexible. Donna is responsible, effective, and clear-eyed - but unchecked, purely rational decisions erode the soul of a company into nothing. These differences frustrate our characters, and yet there can be no success without them.
I think many of us spend our whole careers chasing those rare moments where the right people are in the room solving problems, butting heads, but ultimately doing things they could never do all by themselves.
He's basically supposed to be a Steve Jobs character - manipulative, with weak technical knowledge, but with high charisma. The part where he takes credit for Gordon's work is very much a reference to the Jobs/Wozniak relationship.
I dont know about substance, but possibly vision. Its an old pattern, he kept selling more until the technical reality caught up with him. And he would abuse the technical staff to try and squeeze more out, but mostly because his reputation was riding on having sold it.
It was easy to dismiss the show at the time because, though Pace’s performance was great from the beginning, it felt like he was a Temu Don Draper in an 80s Mad Men wannabe with ‘tech’ replacing ‘ads’.
The show is not at all that if you stick with it for even a short while.
Totally agree, he was incredibly good in that show.
He's also really great in the show Foundation, with a pretty different role. I watched Foundation much more recently and it took me a while to realize it was the same actor from Halt.
I got really disappointed at the mainframe booting into PC-DOS with a CGA font on a 3278 terminal. The show made such an impeccable job at rebuilding the 3033 CPU and the 3278 terminal just to make such a horrible job depicting its boot process. A VM/SE banner or an MVS login screen would have been sufficient (if inaccurate, if we are looking at the operator console). Did the research point out mainframes don't run PC operating systems?
Lee Pace is a first rate actor but I could not recognize him or indeed, most of the characters in this show, as representative of their roles. I struggled to suspend my disbelief. The show felt like it was written by people who imagined what it must have been like rather than people who had any experience of it. I still enjoyed it somewhat. Not Silicon Valley good but okay.
I'm always surprised Lee Pace doesn't get more recognition; I've loved a lot of his quirkier projects like Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies, and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, but it's not like he hasn't also been in mainstream things like The Hobbit and Guardians of the Galaxy.
He's in very heavy makeup in Guardians of the Galaxy (and his blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in Captain Marvel), and while you can get a good look at his face in The Hobbit, his character doesn't get much screentime and isn't especially prominent - and indeed I don't think the Hobbit trilogy really turned any actors into household names which weren't already.
I love Lee Pace but there really hasn't been a blockbuster where he's front and center.
That's fair. I think his starring moment was really Pushing Daisies, but that kind of thing is not for everyone; even just the hyperreal aesthetic would be a barrier for some.
I really liked the show despite Lee Pace's performance.
Pace really nails the intense Jobs vibe, but having seen his other work, it seems like it might not be 100% acting. There's consistency to the off feeling he gives across roles.
Gordon's role was probably the most setting accurate, but I do feel the story would have suffered if the entire cast was realistic to 80s standards rather than translated into late-2010s sensibilities.
> I struggled to suspend my disbelief. The show felt like it was written by people who imagined what it must have been like rather than people who had any experience of it.
This! It's not a bad show but people calling it the Best Drama are wildly overselling it.
The articles I can find say he's staying on as a EP, just stepping down as the main show runner. That seems very different than leaving the show behind.
Maybe I should watch a full episode but this clip doesn't sell -me- on it. Heavy handed and a bit phony. Great talent in these scenes, not directed or crafted for my tastes. I'm saying my feelings not downvoting!
Anyone modeling themselves after someone, isn't going to have that electricity.
You really have to believe in yourself and your plan, and have a real plan even if its in flux, to communicate like that and carry it off. But when audacity is backed up by substance, it really gets people's attention.
I hate to pile on since it's already getting some criticism, but I agree. It's kind of a good example why designers don't purely rely on mathematically consistent designs. Getting things to "look right" often means shifting pixels here and there ever so slightly, so that the math is a bit off but it feels better on the eyes.
Generally agree with the idea of calm technology, but I feel like inlay hints are a bad example. They actively give me anxiety because it makes the code feel harder to read, it takes my attention away from the code, and it feels more awkward to edit the text because you have these virtual characters getting in the way and having to re-render as you type, causing a shift in your cursor position. It's not at all calming for me, lol.
Congrats on launching. I spent a decade trying to build a design tool. I think I built almost 40 prototypes, to various degrees of completion. Never got to a point where I felt it was good enough to share. It's an incredibly difficult thing to do, so kudos to you for sticking with it.
Thank you, and I know exactly what you mean. I myself have rewritten the entire engine ar least three times until I was happy with the performance and the overall outcome. It’s been a long learning experience. As a developer at heart, this project scratched every itch I had from a software engineering perspective :)
Yes. This. I read a post-mortem about developing v2 of an app last month because getting insight into the thought process of the builder is super interesting (to me). It's probably not for most people, but it definitely has an audience.
there are various little things scattered around the github org - a js framework, a treesitter grammar, some old docs, a vscode extension, a vim-style editor, an AI-powered code editor geared towards design, etc.
Are you still working on this? Because I like the words I see on your GitHub -- vim-style bindings, keyboard driven, sounds like you write a definition language for your designs, basically?
Lik Matry is to Figma as openscad is to traditional CAD (Fusion 360, etc)?
Though that does sound like a huge project to take on!
I don’t know enough about CAD products to evaluate that comparison, but the core idea was to expose language as a design tool. First through code, then through keyboard commands (hence the vim idea). It’s still pretty fun, but LLMs have changed the conversation around what a designer even is, and I’m currently re-evaluating.
Matry might pop up in another form. I’m considering turning it into an actual browser for designers. Right now designers are getting into the code and using Claude/Cursor to make changes directly. But they still have to know how to get the app running locally, which is a hurdle. So if they could just navigate to the site, make some design changes directly in the browser, Matry could then take the changes and create a PR on GitHub for them. Designer wouldn’t have to fuss with any dev tools. Kind of a cool idea.
I really think I might be done with Apple. The only thing keeping me using them is how much I hate Android. The _millisecond_ a competitor arrives, I'm dropping my iPhone like a bad habit.
Off topic, but is there anything specific that you hate about Android? I find it acceptable. I'm trying to cut down my phone usage so maybe I'm more tolerant.
I'm wondering what adjectives you hope to apply to a phone operating system. I'm content with mine when I don't have to think about it, for which "acceptable" seems about right, and discontent when I do.
GrapheneOS on a Pixel is that competitor. Open source, more secure than Apple, compatible with nearly all Android apps. It's all the positive aspects of Android without the downsides (Google).
I keep hoping and wishing for a daily drivable linux phone that's compatible with all the us networks to come along. I'll keep hoping and wishing. Someday I hope we will get there!
I tried something similar a couple years back, and fully agree. Safari is atrocious for trying to create a good mobile experience. It almost feels intentional.
It's important to understand that he's talking about a specific set of models that were release around november/december, and that we've hit a kind of inflection point in model capabilities. Specifically Anthropic's Opus 4.5 model.
I never paid any attention to different models, because they all felt roughly equal to me. But Opus 4.5 is really and truly different. It's not a qualitative difference, it's more like it just finally hit that quantitative edge that allows me to lean much more heavily on it for routine work.
I highly suggest trying it out, alongside a well-built coding agent like the one offered by Claude Code, Cursor, or OpenCode. I'm using it on a fairly complex monorepo and my impressions are much the same as Karpathy's.
I had the same reaction. So when people were talking about this model back in December, I brushed it off. It wasn't until a couple weeks ago that I decided to try it out, and I immediately saw the difference.
My opinion isn't based on what other people are saying, it's my own experience as a fairly AI-skeptical person. Again, I highly suggest you give it an honest try and decide for yourself.
reply