News– Page 3 – Crow's Contraptions

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main...

MEDITATION XVII Devotions upon Emergent Occasions John Donne

I am going to take a more relaxed and ambling path with regards to this entry. First, I'd like to properly introduce the company. I'm Michael Crow, and I've always harbored an interest in technology and computing for as long as I can remember. I was persuaded to start this company after my co-founder Jason convinced me to design Spraymore. Part of the reason we took so long to do a launch was going through the patent process; while ultimately we decided Spraymore didn't contain sufficient novelty on its own to be patentable, at least it seems like almost all of the patents that remotely resemble it expired before I was born, and the ones that weren't expired before 2015, meaning I think we should be fine to sell this. The concept has just been lost to time. Speaking of which, I have a next-gen Spraymore that I'm actively designing, but the CAD design has been (unnecessarily) challenging. Once I finish and test it, we'll again work through the patent process for it to see if the changes are sufficiently novel.

I do have a day job which I will not further detail other than to specify that any contract work will not involve sysadmin or infosec-related work. I'm trying specifically to focus on CAD design, 3d printing, epoxy and AI research here. Which, admittedly, is already a big stretch for a small company. Good thing this isn't our primary income, for now. Maybe you can help be a part of our growth! Right now, we're trying to find space to fully expand our epoxy side, which is one reason we don't have as many examples of that as we'd like. But any merch sales do help us. I think. Our first poster shipped today and the sale is showing a net positive, so whatever math I did last year seems to be working still.

I mentioned epoxy twice before, so now I need to introduce Jason, the hardware side of the show. He's a man of many talents, and has wanted to do epoxy tables for a while, so since we were already establishing ourselves as a plastics manufacturing company(through 3d printing Spraymores), it was easy to add that as a core competency. We currently are looking for more working space(some companies start out of garages--they're lucky). Expect to see a lot more from Jason's Creations in the near future!

Finally, there's Corvie[pronouns: ze/zir] and zir creator, JJ Alan over at Generative AI Networks. He has spent hours tuning Corvie's functionality and allowing access to a near-cutting edge GPT3.5 implementation, which you can access by talking to Corvie. The interactions do get logged into a CSV where we can take your orders for further review.

Oh wait, I'm not done yet. There's so much more. The curated AI gallery is something I thought about last year and did some work towards(the AI drawing of a smiling sunflower is one of my better results). I have recently come across two artists whose work in the area is really good, so I'm helping to promote their space. So if you buy one of their works, they also get a portion and you're helping support them too.

Finally, there's the "roofshot" projects. I'm not trying to take anything to the moon; merely achieving something off the ground is quite fine for now. My friends and I made a robot in a long weekend over a spring break last year(that was an unexpected perk of being a business owner), which has led to many more opportunities that I would write more about if it wasn't already almost tomorrow. (I promise I get sleep).

Ultimately I want this company to grow into a space where people can interact with humans, machines, and tools in a way that maximally allows them to experience self-actualization and gain knowledge about this amazing universe we live in. I'm not trying to make huge profits but I am trying to help improve the conditions of those around me, including our customers who ultimately benefit from our products and expertise.

P.S. Hackathon is a weekly get-together where some of my friends and I discuss our projects, what we're having problems with, and be in a positive learning environment. We've been doing it over 10 years and it's still going strong. 10 years ago we were talking about building quadcopters and working with those control algorithms, now I've got a robot that incorporates AI vision processing in the camera itself. Technology has been wild ever since You Only Look Once[https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02640]. I'm reminded of a great(okay, that doesn't narrow it down) XKCD that did not age well as a result of that paper: https://xkcd.com/1425/ . Anyway, I've got to get some rest now, as the actual real launch is coming up faster than I'd like.

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.

Everything Happens Slowly At First, Then All At Once

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.

On Slow Starts and Inauspicious Beginnings

[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!

News

On Hackathon and Personal Growth

The S-Curve

Everything Happens Slowly At First, Then All At Once

On Slow Starts and Inauspicious Beginnings