Payphones are rather seldom seen these days, friend.
Not to disagree with the principle, but it's somewhat opaque as to what your point is.
I've hazy memories as well of reports that payphones were being more surveilled (a camera placed nearby, for example), or tapped / monitored more than other phones, particularly if in areas with other known issues. Nothing that's turning up in DDG searches though...
I don't think I've ever heard a mechanical engineer say "torus" in my life unless they're talking about the car. When you are doing feedback with a human operator you use terms like "make this thicker" or "rotate that this way" while pointing at them. Text does not have this.
The first image on the actual paper really tells the whole story. CAD for mechanical design, by necessity, requires pretty immense specificity. It is more onerous to type out "now raise the height of the torus relative to the base 4mm" than to click on "extrude" and type 4 or drag a handle.
Injecting a natural language layer into the workflow is just not optimal. CAD itself is not a difficult tool to learn and use effectively. There are essentially no layers of abstraction that an LLM can assist in cutting through, and no obfuscated rules or languages to learn.
I think of it this way. If there was someone sitting at my computer, and I had to do all of my CAD design by explaining what I wanted them to do verbally, I'd rip out my hair.
LLMs are doing for programmers what virtual CAD did to the drafter 35+ years ago, optimizing the effort expanded to create the thing already in your brain
> If there was someone sitting at my computer, and I had to do all of my CAD design by explaining what I wanted them to do verbally, I'd rip out my hair.
Isn't this how a lot of machine shops operate, or how things operate internally in larger manufacturing factories? Customer/person-from-different-team comes in and explains what they want to do. Maybe they have some sketches or pictures of similar parts. Then there is back and forth with the CAD guy to build the thing.
One critical difference is that the CAD guy is usually smart and you have to explain to them things at a more high level, along with some written down hard numbers that need to be obeyed.
Definitely for fine adjustment you're going to still use the manual CAD tools, but you can describe things much faster than you can model them. Good prompt engineering is important here as much as for any other AI use case.
For example let's say I need a parametric model of an involute gear with a 14.5 degree pitch angle and a 0.5 inch hub with an 8-32 set screw where the OD, number of teeth, face length, and shaft diameter are all variable. It takes seconds to write the prompt and then adjust the variables to what I want whereas it would take tens of minutes to actually model even for a highly skilled drafstman.
The time savings get more extreme the more the modelling work is looking up information online. For example if I wanted a model of a lightbulb electrical connector, 95% of the work is just going to be googling. Technically you could have an LLM just tell you all the dimensions you need and then model it yourself, but that's definitely still going to be slower and you have to put in the effort to figure out what each dimension refers to. It makes sense just to cut out the middleman.
Add in the fact that CAD is in fact a difficult tool to use and learn effectively. There is a subset of the population that is very good at picturing and orientating objects in 3D space in their minds, and engineering is mostly limited to these folks. For those whose minds work differently, CAD is extremely tricky to learn. An alternate method of interacting with models that does most of the heavy lifting such that a person only needs to tweak a near complete model could be extremely helpful to many people who would like the benefits of CAD design but have struggled to learn the software. It's no different than AI generated art opening digital art to those who are not good with digital artistry software.
Not attempting to be sassy, sorry, but maybe I can explain my point a bit better. If you are making something complex enough to warrant you yourself designing it (something unique, custom, new), then CAD on its own is the best tool (right now!). I have models with thousands of parametric features linked to hundreds of other parts in an assembly. I would need to write a novel to achieve those same features with an LLM.
If what you want to make is simple enough that an LLM would be able to nearly one-shot it, then that model either:
1. Already exists somewhere (like the gear above)
or
2. Is simple enough that a couple hours of training videos will give you all the skills you need to make it yourself
While you're probably right about >90% of situations that fluent CAD users face, I think you might be suffering from a lack of imagination about situations where an LLM could help do work which would otherwise be tedious or mistake-prone. And then you have the non-fluent CAD users, just like the non-programmers who are now vibe-coding: this stuff can be a game changer for them even if it's far from "good" right now.
>I think of it this way. If there was someone sitting at my computer, and I had to do all of my CAD design by explaining what I wanted them to do verbally, I'd rip out my hair.
I, on the other hand, have used LLM + OpenSCAD to design stuff - while I pulled my hair out everytime I had to sit and write OpenSCAD primitives or use a UI CAD like FreeCAD or Fusion360 and their horrible unintuitive interfaces.
virtual cad did something major compared to drafting - you switched from only being able to represent certain views of an object, to having a stored full representation of the object.
you could sculpt a model à la ILM for star wars or the architecture models, but the only way to have a copy of the object was to make one.
the virtual cad also brought in the ability to do analysis with FEA and get approximately smooth undestandings of the stress and strain on the piece, rather than manually calculating the critical points and stress raisers for doing analysis
No they don't, they tell you and other vehicles to stop. You would fail your driving test if you depend only on the traffic lights and don't bother to verify it is safe to pass yourself.
The main function of a traffic signal is the green phase, not the red phase. A traffic signal increases throughput by allowing drivers to ignore crossing traffic.
(If safety/the red phase was the purpose, the intersection would use a roundabout instead.)
I mean, it depends on where you take your driving test. In a lot of places in the US (especially in some rural areas), you may still pass. In some cases you might not even drive near a stoplight during the test.
If you "know a guy" you can even pass a driving test without ever getting behind the wheel of a car. Road licensing is in complete shambles in the last 10 years. A lot of "workarounds" and corruption.
Lost me here. It usually means something will require exponentially more resources, and eventually a finite limit (money, time, raw materials, land, energy, lifespan, speed of light, etc) will be hit.
I'm not sure what you mean, we have already scaled up AI exponentially. The amount of AI compute in the world has been doubling every 7 to 8 months [1], so it is already exponential despite not being able to do human or super human research. The % of all AI compute going towards academic style knowledge research is quite low as well. So it stands to reason AI Compute used to do research would in fact scale up exponentially if we did figure out how use weights in a datacenter to do frontier research.
That doesn't mean were going to go right to Dyson spheres so that every possible molecule is going towards scaling.
I had a relative for which it was CNN. We even share the same political views, but watching that stuff or having it on in the background literally from 8 am until midnight is tiring.
when in a hotel on vacations we sometimes have a television and hence bbc or cnn... i used to nickname cnn "the fire squad": whatever the topic they're just shouting and hyperventilating... it is tiring indeed
I do find it amusing how on the internet the X and Y can be governments or corporations, or the hosted platform itself. Seems like something a competent "we control everything" organization should be able to prevent. But as long as you do nothing but come back for another helping of rage, I guess they're fine with it.
Cuz the actual nuanced reality is that it’s structural. (Most) corporations don’t want to control the world but they do have their own self-interests, but because there are so many corporations there’s always some corporation controlling some facet.
For another example of a structural problem, California has been trying to add housing for the past few years but it has been one piecemeal solution after another. People who own homes don’t want their lives to change, cities like how they are laid out already, parking requirements exist to prevent developers from skimping at the time, environmental reviews are meant to protect the environment… at no point was anyone thinking “I want a housing problem that leads to job flight and homelessness” — everyone is just solving their own problem at the time but together it creates a major structural obstacle.
The people at YouTube don’t actually care about controlling the narrative. They just want to make money while removing problematic content, but they’re not exactly sure what problematic content is and Google tends to invest in algorithms more than support, but the end result is channels get randomly removed sometimes.
The world’s problems are hard because not because people are generally malicious, but because everyone is just doing their own thing. That’s why the only fixes are structural, but structural solutions are really hard.
I really forgot how stupid cable tv was 20 years ago. In my area, that old stuff is now getting broadcast over the air, which is the only kind of tv I get. It's not the history channel's Ancient Aliens exactly, but it is all the 2nd tier offshoot stuff that didn't air on the big cable channels. About half of them are "about" Hitler, and the topics are treated so unseriously you get things like "Dude, look! This door has an H on it! This must have been where he went!"
It's so stupid you almost can't help watching, but I'll be dammed if they didn't get me to. Wild times.
I can assure you that people protesting the the one near where I live barely know or care about AI, but they know something is up when a giant evil fuckass building shows up seemingly overnight. Who knows what sort of horrible things are going on inside, it's not like you'll be allowed in to check. The only connection to AI is that the AI companies placed the order for it.
My town also protested when Walmart decided they wanted to install one of their mega shopping centers here. A big building means someone has too much money, and its only a matter of time until they use it against YOU.
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