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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.

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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.

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[Originally written sometime in November '22, but I'm setting its visibility on today as part of the soft launch]

Greetings to whomever parses these symbols and derives semantic value,

This is the first post that I've felt compelled to write; while I've dabbled with a few ideas, nothing has really coalesced until tonight.

First, some info about this company. We're a duo of innovative mavericks who are looking to collaboratively create art that is functional as well as beautiful. We also have more utilitarian products designed to make life better. In addition, we offer several computer design services(Fusion 360, for example, or some photo editing). Our goals are to make products that fit your lifestyle; we craft many bespoke items on request. 

So, that's the company in a nutshell(there's so much more than this), but who are we, exactly? I'm Michael Crow, co-founder of Crow's Contraptions, LLC. My business partner Jason is an excellent carpenter and is in charge of most construction, especially the epoxy work. I'm devising several electronic contraptions for specialized uses, and am also available for consulting on computer vision/AI generative graphics and other advanced computer issues(explicitly excluding systems administration and cybersecurity). 

I've spent the past few days figuring out our first layout for launch, and I'm excited about the future.  This is my first serious business venture and I'm thankful for the opportunities that have led to this time. We anticipate making great things with you!

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