Its worse than that. Cameras (plus DToF if you want tracking in the dark), imus, gyros, and necessarily onboard compute/SOC to handle processing that data. Shipping it all off to a remote computer and then making the round trip creates an untenable amount of lag. Thats not even accounting for controller and hand tracking.

And once you have the pipeline and computation power to enable inside out tracking all on device, adding an OS is essentially free.

It really is a damn shame, but before AI, it was cryptomining. Desktop GPU prices have been inflated to nonsense levels for gamers, to the point where console vs. PC isnt even really question anymore.

And even with increased priced you often still get paltry amount of RAM. All for market segmentation due to AI use cases. Which is bad as requirements have crept up.

Really frustrating for a hobbyist 3D artist. Rendering eats gobs of RAM for complex scenes. I'd really love a mid-level GPU with lots of VRAM for under $500. As is, I'm stuck rendering on CPU at a tenth the speed or making it work with compositing.

3d rendering can use multiple GPUs right? Maybe pick up a couple MI50 32GB cards off Alibaba. A couple months ago they were $100 each but it looks like they're up to ~$160 now.

In some ways though, the increase in visual fidelity has been _marginally_ improved on a per-year basis since the PS4/Xbone era. My GPUs have had much, much longer useful lives than the 90s/early-2000s.

AMD just tried to get away with stopping support for cards that were still being sold new in stores. Nvidia cards are just getting worse and more expensive over time (https://www.xda-developers.com/shrinkflation-is-making-nvidi...).

Part of what made PC gaming in the late 90s/early 2000s so exciting was that the improvements were real and substantial instead of today where we're stuck with minor improvements including bullshit like inserting fake frames generated by AI, and the cards back then were usually pretty easy to get your hands on at a normal price. You might have had to occasionally beat your neighbors to a best buy, but you didn't have to compete with armies of bot scalpers.

Exactly plus upscalers are pretty amazing. Upscaling from 1080p to 4k is 80-100% of the quality of native rendering at a far lower cost.

Now if only major studios would budget for optimizations..

If you stay off of the upgrade treadmill, you can game with a pretty dated card at this point. Sure, you cannot turn on all of the shines, but thanks to consoles, a playable build is quite attainable.

If you're willing to accept the performance level of a console, then you can buy a second-hand 3060 for cheap.

Agreed that more studies are required. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25705824/ This and some others studies correlate a 40% reduction in all cause mortality (that is, 40% reduction in risk of dying from anything) with sauna use. Even if the correlation is proven to be weak, still seems worth it to get a shvitz whenever you can.

> "We performed a prospective cohort study of a population-based sample of 2315 middle-aged (age range, 42-60 years) […] During a median follow-up of 20.7 years […] A total of 601, 1513, and 201 participants reported having a sauna bathing session 1 time per week, 2 to 3 times per week, and 4 to 7 times per week, respectively."

They are comparing the health differences of the number of sessions, using only people who claim to do sauna at least once a week over 20 years. They have nothing to say about lower frequency or no sauna at all.

"Chinese national" feels like a pretty critical detail to this sentencing time.

Can't wait to cash my $2.43 check is 3 years!

Ok, so dont shower, and punch my date in the nose. Got it!

It's an intriguing idea, but the scope of any such formal definition would essentially be the entire scope of physics, materials science, thermodynamics, etc. For much more bounded problems (like that very fun website you linked) I think something like that would be more attaintable, but still challenging.

Take the example of the differential gearing shown. I doubt there exists any functional differential/mass produced assembly that looks exactly like the example presented. The concept of differential gearing may be able to be broken down into more symbolic representation of forces and motion, but at some point it becomes simplified to the point of impracticality.

All models are wrong, some are useful.

Form follows function.

Same here. I had no idea they were this toxic, I feel like someone should have told us this as children!

>Living this way, he acknowledged, incurred a “20 percent cognitive” overhead.

Great article. I wish I had the time, money, and dedication to be able to try some of the techniques, even if only for the principle of it. But like the author says, it really is a Sisyphean effort. There is too much convenience, too much money, too much power in your data.

I appreciate that you have given this some thought, but it is clear that you dont have much or any professional experience in 3D modeling or mechanical design.

For the guitar amp, ok. Maybe that prompt will give you a set of surfaces you can scale for the exterior shell of the amp. Because you will need to scale it, or know exactly the dimensions of your speakers, internal chambers, electronics, I/O, baffles, and where those will all ve relative go eachother. Also...Do you need buttons? Jacks/connectors/other I/O? How and where will the connections be routed to other components? Do you need an internal structure with an external aesthetic shell? Or are you going to somehow mold the whole thing in one piece? Where should the part be split? What kind of fasteners will join the parts and where should they be joined? What material is the shell? Can it be thinner to save weight? Or need ribs or thickness for strength? Where does it need to be strong?

These are the issues from 30 seconds of thinking about this. AI (as suggested) could maybe save me from surfacing an exterior cosmetic cover, given presice constraints and dimensions, but at that point, I may as well just do it myself.

If you have a common, easy, already solved an mechanical design problem (hinge e.g.), then you buy an off the shelf component. For everything else, it is bespoke, and every detail matters. Every problem is a "wine glass full to the brim"

I think you’re jumping too fast to the “vibe CADing” extreme. It’s been a while since I’ve used Solidworks in anger so I’d rather use ECAD as an example: I’d kill for the ability to give Altium a PDF datasheet and have it generate footprints or schematic components tailored to my specific pinout for a microcontroller. Or give it a pdf of routing guidelines and have it convert those to design rules tied just to those nets. Those are the details that take up most of the time (although I’d still spend quite a lot of tine verifying all the output).

In MCAD it’s less of a problem because all the big vendors like Misumi, McMaster, et al have extensions or downloadable models but anything custom could probably benefit from LLMs (I say this as someone who is generally skeptical of their vision capabilities). I don’t think vibe CADing will work because most parts are too parametrized but giving an AI a bunch of PDFs and a size + thickness is probably going to be really productive.