Even the phrase "world-changing" might be a bit too strong.
It's enabled some acceleration of product prototyping and it has democratized hardware design a little bit. Some little companies are building some buildings using 3D printing techniques.
Speaking as someone who owns and uses a 3D printer daily, I think the biggest impact it's had is that it's a fun hobby, which doesn't strike me as "world-changing."
It might not lead to singularity but for people who work in academia, in terms of setting and marking assignments and lecture notes, for good or bad AI has had an enormous impact.
You might argue that LLMs have simply exposed some systematic defects instead of improving anything, but the impact is there. Dozens of lecturing workflows that were pretty standard 2 years ago are no longer viable. This includes the entirety of online and remote education which ironically dozens of universities started investing in after Covid, right around when chatgpt launched. To put this impact in context, we are talking about the tertiary and secondary sector globally.
> This includes the entirety of online and remote education
I don't get this. Either you do graded home assignments which the person takes without any examiner, which you could always cheat on, or you do live exams and then people can't rely on AI . LLMs make it easier to cheat, but it's not a categorical difference.
I feel like my experience of university (90% of the classes had in-person exams, some had home projects for a portion of the final marks) is fundamentally different from what other people experienced and this is very confusing for me.
This is an easy quip to make, but it's also pretty wrong. 3D printing has been a massive breakthrough in many industries and fundamentally changed the status quo. Aerospace is a good example, much of what SpaceX and other younger upstarts in the space are doing would not be feasible without 3D printed parts. Nozzles, combustion chambers, turbopumps etc are all parts that are often printed.
I actually think the response makes the point. LLMs are useful, and will provide certain innovations, but they aren't a panacea. At the top of its height, proponents talked like 3D printing was going to make parcel delivery obsolete, and that's the same hype you see with language models "threatening" all knowledge workers
I honestly don’t, although maybe that hype cycle was before my time.
But this seems an unfair comparison. For one, I think 3D printing made me better, not worse, at engineering (back when mechanical engineering was my jam), as it allowed me to prototype and make mistakes faster and cheaper. While it hasn’t replaced all manufacturing (or even come close), it plays an important role in design without atrophying the skills of the user.
Honestly, both are pretty good for prototyping. I haven't found AI helpful with big picture stuff (design) or nuts and bolts stuff (large refactorings), but it's good at some tedium that I definitely know how to do but guess that AI can type it in faster than I can. Similarly, given enough time I could probably manufacture my designs on a mill/lathe but there is something to be said for just letting the printer do it when plastic is good enough (100% of my projects; but obviously I select projects where 3D printing is going to work). Very similar technologies and there are productivity gains to be had. Did the world change because of either? Not really.
I find AI has the potential to do that (in my software development job): But so far I'm only using it occasionally, probably not as often as you used 3D printing.
Well yeah, the singularity isn't close by any measure.
But 3D printing and AI are on totally different trajectories.
I haven't heard of Mattel saying, "we're going to see in what places we can replace standard molding with 3d printing". It's never been considered a real replacement, but rather potentially a useful way to make PoCs, prototypes and mockups.
Yep, I think this further illustrates OP's point—hobbyists building low-stakes projects get enormous benefits from LLM tooling even while professionals working on high-stakes projects find that there are lots of places where they still need something else.
3d printing will slowly edge its way into more manufacturing. The humble stepping motor really is eating the world. 3dp is one manifestation of it!
Back to AI though.
I just checked the customer support page of a hyped AI app generator and its what you expect: "doesn't work on complex project" "wastes all my tokens" and "how to get a refund"
These things are over promising and a future miracle is required to justify valuations. Maybe the miracle will come maybe not.
I'm not sure why you continued using words when you summed up 3D printing with those four words. In the time it takes to print 1 object, you could have molded thousands of them. 3D printing has done a lot for manufacturing in terms of prototyping and making the first thing while improving flexibility for iterations. Using them for mass production is just not a sane concept.
Yes for sure. 3d printing isn't going to replace everything because 3d printing is a type of manufacturing method with pros and cons.
But in the time it took me to convert a picture of my cat to a 3d model using AI and print it, I could have ... got on the phone to the injection molding lab, and asked about availability to produce the mold for that cat.
3d printing fits the niche where either you need to model or make something bespoke that it isn't worth setting up custom machinery.
The point is 3d printing is useful and the tech is improving and it will get more and more useful. It won't take over manufacturing of course (just like Rust won't take over all programming).
> Remember when 3d printing was going to replace all manufacturing? Anybody?
Sure, but I'd argue the AIs are the new injection molding (as mentioned downthread) with the current batch being the equivalent of Bakelite.
Plus, who seriously said 3d printers were going to churn out Barbies by the millions? What I remember is people claiming they would be a viable source of one-off home production for whatever.
for small run manufacturing, 3d printing is absolutely killing it. the major limitation of 3d printing is that it will never be able to crank out thousands of parts per hour the way injection molding can and thats ok. creating an injection molded part requires a huge up front investment. if you're doing small runs of a part, 3d printing more than makes up for the slow marginal time with skipping the up front costs alltogether.
No, because 3D printing was never going to replace all manufacturing. Anyone who said that didn't even have a basic understanding of manufacturing, and I don't recall any serious claims like that.
3D printing has definitely replaced some manufacturing, and it has had a huge effect on product design.
These anti-AI articles are getting more tedious than the vibe coding articles.
My photoresistor nightlight can "see" that it is dark and it "knows" to turn on the light - not only does it not have training, it does not have any code!
And if you think that is amazing, my bi-metallic strip thermostat "feels" the temperature and then modifies the environment because it "knows" if it's hot to turn on the A/C, and if it's cold to turn on the heat - no training or code!
All of this AI stuff is just unbelievably incredible - what a brave new world (of word games)!
The nightlight and thermostat's response to stimulus is nowhere near analyzing a picture of a clock tower and responding with "Image of a city's tallest, historic landmark with a sepia filter." To me, recognizing the umbrella in the spoon is one of the most impressive items they list.
It's not just another name for that, though. That's in a very, very wrong location to be the source of Atlantis myths. If Atlantis had a real basis, which it doesn't, it would probably be the pre-glacial-retreat land off the coast of England like Doggerland or off the west coast of Ireland.
The relevant (unvalidated) theory is that Atlantis was an empire that covered north western Africa (Morocco, sharah, etc) - at least, and which had a port city around where Tangier is today, and a capital city at the richat structure (pre-younger dryas).
The theory comes with several hypotheses which have not been validated or invalidated yet. to invalidate the theory would require significant (strategically chosen) archaeological surveys of the Sahara and the richat structure. The theory is falsifiable, and has not been falsified yet. That doesn't make the theory of Atlantis true, it just makes it undetermined.
I would say Atlantis is like a slightly more falsifiable and slightly more plaudible version of Russell's Teapot. We have zero reason to think Atlantis existed and zero indications of it. Is it possible that there was an advanced civilization that somehow left virtually zero evidence? Yes, but why? There are plenty of much less advanced civilizations which left plenty of trace and while we cannot know exactly how many civilizations left no trace an advanced civilization tends to leave a lot of traces. And why would Plato know of it?
"I would say Atlantis is like a slightly more falsifiable and slightly more plaudible version of Russell's Teapot."
Falsifying a vague hand-wavy theory of Atlantis, I agree with you. But the specific theory that Richat structure was the home of a large city 13,000 years ago that was destroyed in a flood? I wholeheartedly disagree. It's falsifiable and probably could be done with less than 1/100th the archeological investment that's been made into Egypt.
"Is it possible that there was an advanced civilization that somehow left virtually zero evidence? Yes, but why?"
Several cataclysmic meteorite strikes that ended the ice age, triggered younger dryas, caused biblical flooding, rapid environmental change, etc.
I don't think the geological evidence of this is being refuted, just the consequences of it on our understanding of human civilizational history.
1. Cataclysmic meteor strikes ending the ice age? Aren't they more likely to prolong it?
2. Is there any evidence of either glaciation or flooding at the Richat structure?
3. If no on 2, then why should their civilization leave virtually zero evidence, even if it collapsed? Macchu Pichu is still there. Teotihuacan is still there. The Nasca Lines are still there. Chan Chan is still there. The Minoan ruins are still there. If this was just an abrupt collapse. why should it leave no trace?
1. Yes. I don't know, but there is lots of geological evidence that 12-13,000 years ago there were several cataclysmic meteor strikes, and the earths temperature swung up and down wildly, eventually settling at a much higher temperature (ending the ice age). I am pretty sure this is accepted by the geological community.
2. There is evidence of tremendous flooding, yes. You can actually see it on google earth yourself if you go look...
3. The theory assumes there was massive flooding, which is why we have to look harder for evidence (careful subsurface excavation) compared to sites like Macchu Pichu. Also Macchu Pichu is 600 years old, and the theory of the Richat structure housing a city assumes it was destroyed 12,900+ years ago.
4. Keep in mind that it's widely accepted that 13k years ago the Sahara was lush grasslands and forests.
> I don't know, but there is lots of geological evidence that 12-13,000 years ago there were several cataclysmic meteor strikes, and the earths temperature swung up and down wildly, eventually settling at a much higher temperature (ending the ice age). I am pretty sure this is accepted by the geological community.
You're wrong about this. There's not a lot of evidence for the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. In particular, the best evidence--an actual meteoric impact crater--is completely missing. This is why proponents have instead suggested either that it was a series of large airbursts or an impact in the Laurentide ice sheet itself, to be able to keep a large crater from forming.
The current consensus hypothesis is that it's a reconfiguration of the glacial lake outflows on the margin of the Laurentide ice sheet that induced a breakdown of the thermohaline circulation system, which also explains some peculiarities of the Younger Dryas (like its effects were a lot worse in North America than the rest of the world).
Thank you for taking the time to point this out respectfully. Looks like you're absolutely right about the current consensus, and my summary didn't fairly reflect all the evidence.
Times like this I wish I could edit older comments. I would update it to incorporate what you are saying and diminish the confidence in the impact hypothesis.
Dude. Somebody told you you're wrong, and you listened? Refreshing to see.
And I'll try to return the favor. If they were airbursts, and so were providing heat but not stuff thrown up into the atmosphere, then I could maybe see meteors ending an ice age.
I think there is consensus that Doggerland was wiped out by a massive tidal wave generated by the Storegga event. This feels like it deserves mention in any arrogant certaintist article like the one above.
The article would be good if it asserted "we don't know".
I had never even heard of this before this comment. I have now learned it's a very unique geological formation in the Sahara consisting of concentric rings of raised stone. It appears to be entirely natural and the scientific consensus is that no city has ever existed on the site nor did human artifice have anything to do with its creation.
For someone to post a comment like "I thought everyone knew" is so egregiously deceptive and misleading that the comment should be flagged. It's tantamount to posting "I thought everyone knew area 51 recovered aliens from Roswell." It's a conspiracy theory masquerading as an ordinary remark.
Worse, it's one that uses a psychological trick to dodge the burden of proof, because "everybody knows", so if you ask for evidence, you're admitting you're not among the "knowing ones". "Everyone knows" is not evidence.
I spent hours playing with mine in the mid 80's! The key takeaway - then and now - is that you can generate an incredible variety of motion with a single motor and a well designed gear-box; no software required!
As a kid growing up in the 80's and 90's in St. Louis - nitrous "whippets" were sold in every grocery and convenience store. I never considered myself a drug user when I was a teen - because every drug I enjoyed (nitrous, cough syrup, caffeine pills) were all legally available....unlike those dirty hippies and their marijuana!
It's been decades since I hit a balloon - but man those moments when I did were incredible.
many years ago an old wizard once said to me in passing 'the gas brings you closer to god', and ever since i have been reminded many times that he was very wise in his knowledge of magic
The coda to this fascinating saga is that today - in a post publisher, open distribution marketplace - STEAM, the predominate game distribution gateway, allows anyone to publish just about anything for a $100 deposit and a 30% commission per sale. The predictable end result is that 19,000 new games were uploaded to STEAM last year alone, and over 100,000 titles are available for purchase on the platform.
The predictable result is that unless a studio has a lottery-win statistically equivalent outlier or a $50m marketing budget, a new game is swallowed up by the shear volume of titles. 1 in 5 games on STEAM never even earn back the $100 deposit.
The majority of games released on steam are not serious games. There are tons of amateur, ugly, content-lacking games that are people’s first (toy) game.
Marketing (both the product part and the promotion part) are required, but in most cases all you (indie) need is a quality product (by far the hardest part) and some a small chunk of time or money devoted to marketing. Indie marketing mostly consists of social media posts, streamers playing their game, and trailer reveals (ign et al)
Steam then does its own thing and will promote your game internally after around 300 sales, and will continue to boost if it converts
This is true - but the scale is beyond what most people imagine. STEAM revenue last year was nearly $11B - while the median revenue for a game that makes it into the top 8% is estimated at $799. So 17.5k releases earned less than $800, with something like 10k making less than $100.
I hate to be so mean, but I'm surprised a crash hasn't happened yet because this situation of saturation right now is far far worse than 1983. As a gamer, there are just way too many games now, a slow down would be nice because may be then only passion projects or ones with actual investment can rise to the top.
I sort of understand the difference though...essentially steam's income stream is somewhat from gamers but you also make money from developers, and so there's no real incentive for devs to try too hard. That's why the "crash" hasn't happened yet.
Part of the reason for a crash was that the deluge of low-quality games hit a wall of limited retail space.
The retailer had to be much more of a curator. I'd be unsurprised if plenty of them lacked the knowledge and foresight to pick winners, so they ended up with racks full of lemons (like the famously bad 2600 Pac-Man) that eventually had to be flogged off at clearance prices. This also made it hard to have a breakout hit-- even if you did everything technically right, was it going to be in the right stores in the right quantity when lightning struck?
Part of it was also, of course, that the 2600 was running out of gas as a platform, it was going to be harder and harder to keep interest up, but that could have been more of a gradual fizzle (like how 8-track tapes or pre-revivial vinyl faded from the market) instead of a dramatic pop.
With digital distribution and a "pay on purchase" selling model, Valve can stock 170,000 titles without any real risk on their part. At worst, the search tools get a bit clumsier, but it's easy enough to put "trending/popular/liked by friends" features in place, and "Lamia Princess Dating Sim XVI" is still there waiting for the 6 people who want it... until it goes viral and sells six hundred thousand copies.
So the lament in this comment and from the parent post I made is from a gamer perspective. I understand your take on why it isn't crashing giving the situation...namely I get why steam and the devs don't pay any price. As an (albeit older) gamer though I definitely feel fatigue. In a normal market demand pressures exist and are natures way of correcting suppliers but in the modern steam world it's like demand doesn't even matter anymore.
This may be true but shouldn't be read as an indicator of any shady business on Valve's part. Steam makes most of their money from commissions, not developer sign up fees.
Steam sells a lot of games and the game market as a whole is over 70% PC (and about 40% console with overlap).
I agree - it's not an indicator at all of shady business by Valve. If anything, Valve is the least shady and most transparent player in the game industry.
Valve forbids developers from selling their game on a different store at a lower price than steam, that's a bit shady. Not
too bad, but not amazing either.
And in contrast to Atari, this works for Steam because Steam isn't paying a giant pile of resources per title. The fractions-of-a-cent-per-GB raw cost of digital distribution means they don't risk getting sunk over-hyping an E.T... They can let a thousand indies make a thousand E.T.s, and it doesn't matter because they're also the place you download Helldivers 2 or Monster Hunter Wilds.
On one hand it absolutely does allow for niches to be filled, but on another it's a dumpster full of trash with gold in-between. There's a danger of either fatigue or slump sales over time. Maybe another Nintendo Seal of Quality on the horizon will emerge.
While Steam could do that, there's no incentive for them to. They can lay out $0 into such a project and let third parties sift the trash for them and do journalism on letting potential customers know what games are good. Win-win.
It's not a good thing: if it was a good thing Steam would have done it at launch.
Steam only got traction because they were curating. There were loads of places you could dump games: people were installing Steam because games they cared about were on Steam. And getting on Steam in the early years was a guaranteed boost in distribution because they were hand picking quality games.
Somehow they managed to drastically reduce the value proposition twice (first with Greenlight, then with Direct) and keep the same cut, while the value-adds like Steamworks have gotten commoditized (see EGS)
In the early days the value proposition for both sides was staked on curation, but yeah you're totally right: their install base expanded until it encompassed enough people who don't mind having barrels of slop shoveled down their way... and that allowed them to do away with the curation.
But if you're on the other side of the equation that's paying for the privilege of being in dumped into the slop trough it's not a good deal.
You're paying the same amount to get dumped into a cesspit with minimal support as the earliest titles were paying to be hand picked like a golden child and paraded around high-intent buyers.
I'm curious when the cutover occurred in consumer sentiment from "We use Steam because we need to for some specific titlese" to "We use Steam because it's the most convenient way to purchase"
I feel like quality games usually get decent sales. I've rarely, if ever, seen a genuinely great game getting burried for too long among the trash. Maybe it's just bias though.
It turns that there are actually not that many hidden gems. The indie game dev community has a lot of discussion about hidden gems, and the prevailing opinion is there are very very few, especially in the avalanche of crappy games that is today's landscape.
It would be pretty hard to review 52 games every day of 2024 to determine if any great games are being lost among the trash. The scale is just too large for most people to really understand - imagine the size of a physical store it would take to display 19,000 game boxes just in "new release" - much less the 100,000+ titles available in STEAM.
Reddit: I've seen and wishlisted or ignore every game on steam. https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1dm3gxh/ive_seen_a...
It turns that there are actually not that many hidden gems. The indie game dev community has a lot of discussion about hidden gems, and the prevailing opinion is there are very very few, especially in the avalanche of crappy games that is today's landscape.
Another code might be that Nintendo is still selling super well, producing great games and consoles, and just crushing it even with that kind of competition.
Broadly speaking Nintendo is competing with all forms of entertainment for people's time and money, certainty
But in terms of selling game consoles and games? I actually don't think anyone is really competing with Nintendo
While Sony and Microsoft have chased hardware power and "next-gen" consoles, Nintendo is exploring and solidifying different niches.
You can see this really strongly nowadays. Every game Sony releases eventually winds up with a PC port, and many of them are even released on Xbox. Meanwhile Nintendo has an incredibly strong library of games for Switch, many of which cannot be purchased for other platforms. Not just first-party titles either. Other studios make games that can only be played on Switch hardware
It really is impressive that Nintendo has managed to design game consoles that have maintained its individual identity, while Sony and Microsoft have both basically settled on "just a mid range PC with a custom OS" more or less
You buy Nintendo for Nintendo games, as in first-party games. Everything else is just a plus. That has been the case since I'd say N64 days. Before that it was still a toss up, especially with Sega. After that, Nintendo drifted wholly into its own world, supporting its own worldview, and others were competing for third party titles and using specs in the marketing as if it mattered - which it did if same game was available on multiple target platforms and you were buying for that.
> You buy Nintendo for Nintendo games, as in first-party games
There are still Nintendo console exclusive third-party games, too. They often don't stay exclusive if they are successful enough, but they do happen
But largely you are correct
The truly impressive part is just how large the First Party Nintendo ecosystem is. They have a ton of IPs that you can only get on Nintendo systems. Pokemon alone is the most valuable franchise in the world
I’d argue their last two custom hardware competitors were xbox 360 arcade (the indie store) and cell phone games.
(I’m counting competitors as “the game mechanics are more important than production values”)
In a massive self-own, Microsoft killed arcade at xbone launch (worst. console. ever.), and cell phone games were ruined by pay to win (most games) and lack of first party physical controllers (the other games, e.g., Apple Arcade).
These days, it’s just steam, abandonware and nintendo. I used to pay for nintendo online to get the emulation games, but the library kind of sucked, and (more importantly) if you pay for it, there’s no way to turn off in-game ads for online play in stuff like mario, making the entire system inappropriate for kids.
I’m curious to see how the switch 2 does. The lock screen on our switch is wall-to-wall ads for it, but nothing looks compelling so far. The kids are more excited about an old switch 1 port of a wii game...
Technically there are also second-party games, which are independent companies exclusive to them like those from HAL Laboratory (Kirby), Intelligent Systems (Metroid), Game Freak (Pokemon).. maybe things have changed, but yeah.
The distinguishing feature of Nintendo is they're a toy company. That's the angle they approach the whole ecosystem from. It tends to result in consoles with features that are unusual (or, more specifically, it has ever since they decided to get off the CPU/GPU integration competition train Sony and Microsoft have first-class tickets on and made the Wii instead).
It's also why they released a fancy alarm clock with the same breathless excitement as a new game console.
> Every game Sony releases eventually winds up with a PC port, and many of them are even released on Xbox.
It's the other way around, Microsoft games on PC and more recently PS5. Sony sometimes releases their games on PC (often years after console) but AFAIK the only one they've released on Xbox is MLB The Show and that was MLB forcing their hand if they wanted to keep the license.
Nintendo has a digital store with all sorts of cruft on it, too. They're not curating or limiting releases in the same way as they did on the NES with the seal of quality.
Even during the video game/satanic panic of the 80's, it was acknowledged that video games - even at that early stage - allowed children who are introverted or less physically adept to experience "winning" and the satisfaction of overcoming obstacles. It seems the ability to acknowledge that there are also benefits to these new emerging systems of interaction has been lost.
I don't really recall that the people pushing the Satanic panic narrative were the same ones making nuanced arguments for the social benefits of video games and D&D.
If anything, the existence of an Internet supporting direct discussion like this between strangers like we should make vastly more nuance available at the median now than then.
What a shame we all seem to spend so much time making such poor use of it! I grew up on the dream that global communication would lead to global understanding. Imagine my disillusionment on discovering at last the besetting, lethal flaw in this beautiful revel: that we've nothing better than humans to give the job of doing it.
Kids (and humans) are wired to follow individuals who express themselves with authority and confidence - hence the long history of "confidence-men" and politicians throughout history.
If you place that ability to communicate with confidence and authority in an individual with male gender traits who is tall, fit, socially attractive, and has a deep voice - nearly everyone around them will do what they say; even to the extent that doing so many be against the best interest of the individuals listening.
AI speaks with utmost confidence in every interaction - not just kids, but all humans will have a preference for it.
We live in an ex-urban area of SW Ohio and after years of nearly zero outages, in the last two years we have had several 12+ hour outage events following pretty standard spring storms. We are experiencing a boom in new construction around us as farms are converting to new subdivisions, and have been told that electrical infrastructure is less stable while construction activities are occurring. All of the subdivisions have buried utilities - but they also all tie to a pole near the entrance, the poles all follow roads, and inevitably a car takes out a pole and entire neighborhoods go dark.
