Well, tomorrow is the big day. Maybe "big" is an overstatement. There will be a lot of changes over the coming weeks. I didn't give myself enough time for launch(in my defense, I have a day job and I thought some functionality would be built into our e-commerce platform instead of getting nickel-and-dimed), and it will be a chaotic mess. Good thing starting the actual company happened May '22 so I don't have that organizational figuring-out to do as well. I'm taking off a half-day tomorrow to properly manage the launch, so that means updating pictures, trying to add functionality, and more.
In other news, I was going to have a really cool print to share with this blog post. It failed after 22 hours of printing and getting 92% done. That's 3d printing for you. Even with a quality machine, there will still be failures. The joy of this one is that it detected there was a problem and kept it from getting worse.
I do hope that we get some interest in the CAD/3d printing side of things. I tried for years to get into 3d modeling when I first got into computers. Rhino3d was amazing but too complicated for my younger self, although I did manage to make some image compositions with X-wings flying above a local lake. Fun times. Fusion 360, though, was the first program I ever found that let me take what's in my head and put it solidly into a computer. I started using Fusion on 12/20 in 2015, and since then I've put hundreds of hours into creating things. In August 2019, I went half-in on a Prusa i3 MK3S to start my 3d printing adventure. It has opened many doors and brought insights to me that I would not have just by working in software. Today is not that day nor is this post an example of what is to come, but I hope to write more detailed posts in the near future once we are officially launched.
Until then (about 14 hours from now), I just have to keep all my plans on something resembling a track. And hey, it's not like anything's gonna happen on launch day, right? That'd be pretty crazy and very statistically unlikely. Please forgive the current (as of 10/19/22) mess and check back often. I want to build community here.
P.S. This print[see featured image] failed in at least 2 ways, but I'm putting it up here to remind myself that any process can fail, it's how you recover from your failure that matters. I could have put another image of a CAD success I had; the only thing holding me back from my first b2b sale is that he hasn't tested it yet. That would be neat, as it's a well-engineered part. However, while I can sell both that and the subject of this post's featured image, I imagine more people will want the latter.
I often wonder where we're at on the S-curve of AI technology. No function curve in the real world is truly exponential; there's always an inflection point where the advances go from being commonplace to being wrought only with great effort. We've seen this all the time in history. Even today, Moore's Law is effectively dead and has been for a while. These days I only get excited about faster storage transfer speeds. Which, when you take a moment to think about, is quite remarkable. In my lifetime, floppy disks(although I also remember the 5 and a quarter disks too) went from high tech storage to miniscule. My phone takes pictures larger than the entire floppy's storage by 3 times and stores it in a chip about the size of my fingernail in less time than it took for the old floppy drive to send the command and spin up the floppy drive to start writing data. What a time to be alive. Sorry, that was a bit of a digression.
Speaking of amazing times to be alive, what a difference a year has made. Ever since people started taking attention seriously("Attention is All You Need", 2017), this field has had its Cambrian Explosion especially since 2022. I took some time off work to study ChatGPT3(and generative AI in general), and the second day off OpenAI released ChatGPT4. Blargh. At that time, I just resigned myself to realizing that even if I spent every waking moment thinking about the advancements, I won't push the field. I've used this time to build a robot platform(for multimodal AIs), which ended up getting selected for a staff creative residency program where I wore many hats(electrical engineering, chemical engineering-ha-, CAD designer, programmer) to try and get my bespoke robot to play my trumpet. I was able to verify the possibility it would work within the week I was given, but integration was the nightmare it usually is. I carefully designed my interfaces and even then I learned so much more about fabricating in the real world versus software.
I know nobody ever reads these things so I'm going to close out so I can publish while it's still today(don't worry, I had an excellent afternoon nap after I actually filled in all the new website template sections), but I did want to thank everyone who has visited(I can see y'all's ghosts in my web interface; keep visiting, it's like Tinkerbell getting more energy by the audience clapping). Some of you very dear and special people to me have seen the website before today; all I can say is, you brave souls. The rest of you will never know how awful it was, only how awful it is now(subject to change later). Anyway, I'm going to make the graphic for this blog entry's featured image and call it a night while it still is.
Time exists so that everything
doesn’t happen at once.
Space exists so that it doesn’t
all happen to you.
Over the past year, while we've not been focused on sales, we have been laser-sharp on honing our skills with new equipment and materials. Our latest gear is a Bambu X1 Carbon 3d printer. So far, it seem to be a significant step forward compared with our other Prusa i3 MK3S, which has been quite a workhorse in itself. Now that we're actually launching the business and moving into a more active stance, it made sense to invest in a printer solely for the business(the Prusa is co-owned), and to be able to print things that the Prusa is just unable to print reasonably. It's been here a week so far, and it's pretty awesome. The image for this blog post is from a test model I printed(we can't sell this exact model commercially, but I can easily do a custom version if there's interest). While the Prusa can print this model, the X1 Carbon finished way faster than it could. The color change effect is caused by the glow-in-the-dark filament used to make it.
Unfortunately, part of the new printer doesn't seem to be functioning properly. I'm working with the support team to get a resolution. When it's fully functional, though, we'll be able to offer COLOR lithophanes for the first time. These are a great way to have a physical copy of a digital memory. While we wait for the fix, we're having a 50% off sale for the black-and-white lithophanes.
I would love to just use a generative AI and write the rest of this, but what little audience will ever read these blog posts, I feel I owe you the respect for having made it this far. We will always denote AI-derived text as distinct from human writing so far as is natural, and expand our capabilities with new features as they become available.
With that said, I absolutely need to give a shout-out to Jason and his creations, as well as Joey over at Generative AI Networks, who is the mastermind behind our valued AI Corvie. There's another whole two blog posts(or more), but you've already suffered my rough draft writing enough and I need to wrap this up. [did I write this just to avoid having to work on the website tonight? it's technically an update to the website...]
P.S. I still didn't even write about 2 or 3 other topics I wanted to address. There needs to be more hours in a day.