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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Thank you. Why am I doing it: I re-discovered Blender a couple of months ago and followed the famous Donut-Tutorial. After that I made some minor things, then I modelled and animated my Laptop, and now I’m challenging myself with a bigger project with more complex shapes. And boredom.

    I’m working in the Architecturial field, so I know how to work in 3D in general. In architecture, however, I need to consider all kinds of measurements correctly - that is someting I dont’t need to do in Blender for an extent. I just enjoy the build.

    I tried Blender before (I think it was Version 2.x) but in the end it didn’t work out for me. Meanwhile the software got better.

    Back when I still studied (couple of years ago) I did some renderings using Cinema 4D, since we had it on some universities computers. But I didn’t model anything in C4D. I had a CAD Software, which wasn’t that capable of 3D back then, but one could draw precicely. For the 3D stuff I used Sketchup. I could interchange the files (mostly dxf files) between the programs. For renderings I imported a 3DS-file into C4D and put textures on it. Our software at work is capeable of creating rendered images.

    My goal is to import the car model into our architecture software at work and sneak it into a rendering.


  • I’m currently modelling my car using Blender. The screenshots show the progress of approximately 2 weeks (entire weekends and a few hours after coming home from work). Some parts are created rather fast, and some parts take hours to get the shape correctly. Worst part in that matter ist the front bumper with its fog light. It took almost the whole weekend. The hood was made within an hour, since it has a simpler shape, compared to others.

    For reference I use photos, where I do the details by eye measure. To get the general shape I traced the views (front, back, side, above) from drawings of the cars manual using Affinity Designer beforehand. This alone took me over one week, beause I only could do it after work.







  • I think this is because it is pretty boring to film a computer in action, because it does noting - it doesn’t move for example. So beeping sounds were added for every action a computer would do: opening or closing windows, transferring files to a disk, calculating,…

    These sounds were added at a time computers were not that common in every household and to emphazise that the computer is doing something. In recent movies, computers are more silent.

    Another thing film makers did to show interaction with a computer is the constant usage of the keyboard. Every thing is done with the keyboard. Open a window: type 5 sceonds on the keyboard. Transferring a file onto a disk: type the whole bible on the keyboard. This was done because it would be pretty boring to show someone use the mouse or drag-and-drop files.

    It its somehow compareable to the movie trope of constantly reloading a gun. You can see this often in older movies: the protagonist is going inside a building and he is reloading his gun. Then he stops a the corner of a hallway and is reloading the gun again - despite no shot has been fired. This was also done to show the audience that a gun will be involved.


  • Of course many comments in this threas are exaggerated; there won’t be played any ads into your brain.

    But there are some implications for the usage of Neuralink that are worth thinking about it - especially when it comes to privacy:

    Given that it “just” runs with firmware, so that the implant can function in a way most stable and reliably, and also given that there will be no subscription model involved into all of that, will the user (patient) be able to control the functionality of the implant (e.g. controlling the intensity of the eletric signal sent out from the implant to counteract the intensity of a tremor)?

    And how will that happen? One thing I could think of is to control the implant with a smartphone app. How good will that smartphone app be? Will it be programmed sloppily like these apps we know from Internet-Of-Things-Apps and have a ton of bugs? Are those (medicinal!) apps secure in terms of privacy? What is with the product support? Will the implant be discontinued after a few years (and also the app)? What if your smartphone fails (no power or hardware failure, or after an update it doesn’t work)?

    A friend of mine has an app to monitor her blood sugar. She is not qute satified with the app. Luckily the provider of those diabetes sensors provided a separate device, so that the app is just an addition for measuring when you are travelling, for example. But in their last iteration they tried to omit the separate device, probably in order to save costs. My friend had to explicitly ask for it.

    With that in mind I’m not keen on having control on such medicinal devices with a smartphone only. If the smartphone fails, there would be no backup. Will such similar things be the case regarding Neuralink?



  • I’m sure these implants will give much needed ease to patients who suffer frem tremors like parkinson and other neurological diseases. But the things I’m mostly concerned about are:

    • Will health insurance pay for the implant in a one-time-payment? Will it be a subscription model? What happens when you can’t pay your subscription? Will it be shut off?
    • Will the implant be operated through firmware (like a pacemaker) or software, which reqires frequent updates? If so, will there be - like computer software - “new features” implemented (“With version 2.0 you will be able to share your Neuralink experience with other Neuralink users. Your data may not be leaked, pinky promise.”
    • What if a certain mentally unstable CEO throws a tantrum that will affect the performance of the Neuralink implant negatively? Will there be any legal protection from such thing?