What’s something happening in your field of work or study that you think could really change things in the future?
We solved the Ein Stein Problem. And when I say we I mean people way smarter than me and when i say ein stein i actually mean ein Stein as in german for one stone. It’s a shape that can tile the plane infinitely without producing a repeating pattern.
I saw this in the news a while ago, what makes this so revolutionary?
In maths, we are excited about new things even if they seem to have absolutely no practical value or application. Sometimes, things become important later on, like prime numbers, which have been studied just for fun for centuries, and are now the backbone of encrypted communication.
So the only reason why this exciting is because nobody did it before.
I don’t want to keep harping on about AI, but seriously. AI. I work in the creative sphere, and Adobe are (finally) earning their subscriptions. Lightroom’s new denoise DNG tool is massively impressive and not all that resource heavy. Photoshops generative fill solves so many problems with photo manipulation, my team is saving hours a week. On the video production side, crumplePop’s suite of audio correction tools is a game changer, and davinci resolves 18.5 beta has so much that we haven’t explored but I’m excited by.
Also, 32-bit float. Holy shit. It’s like recording audio in RAW. I no longer need to consider resourcing for audio production on smaller jobs.
Interesting about 32-bit float, is this just a recent thing? I’ve been using it for 15 years in Ardour. What difference does it make for you?
consumer-grade field recorders can now capture in 32-bit float (I used Zoom F2s and have a Zoom F6), which reduces/removes our need to set levels beforehand or during. It effectively just has a ridiculous dynamic range.
I guess the technology has just recently made its way onto the scene for these sorts of products.
Rapid prototyping in general, and additive manufacturing (3D printing) specifically. I used to spend a lot of time prototyping by hand with foam, paper, tape, wood, clay, etc. We would have “arts and crafts week” at work when it was time to step out of CAD and make concept models of some new design. Occasionally some VP would walk by and wonder why the company was paying a bunch of salaried engineers to stick cardboard pieces together with hot glue. Getting decent parts often meant spending thousands of dollars on molding tools to make cast urethane prototypes.
Now I can walk down the hall to one of my 3D printers and get beautiful parts overnight. And there are a ton of companies offering rapid machining and sheet metal forming services. Getting design feedback and finding mistakes is so much faster and easier when I can go from 3D on a screen to real parts in my hand in a few days.
And a few companies have come to market with real-world uses for 3D printing beyond prototyping, like 3D printing titanium joint replacements.
