*I would recommend reading that, because the secondary and tertiary effects of this are just beginning. *Also, archiving today’s digital crafts that will be swiftly forgotten, that will be quite an interesting challenge, much like preserving silent film. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/a-coder-considers-the-waning-days-of-the-craft (…) In a 1978 essay titled “On the Foolishness of ‘Natural Language Programming,’ ” the computer […]

*This is the broken-down, second-hand Italian car that caused Tim Leatherman to create the original “Leatherman Survival Tool” in the 1970s.

*Collectors of many different kinds like “curios.” If you’re collecting the gamut, you’re interested in expansions of the gamut. *I’m not even sure that this is an “aesthetic.” It’s more like a scientist diligently searching for “extreme cases” in order to illuminate the phenomenon under study.

*They don’t yet exist. That is why, by contrast, videos like this do exist.

*These are core makertainment videos because makertainment isn’t merely about having a working space, it’s about having a video studio. *Also, there is no standardized way to have such a property, so the people who attempt to do it are often thrown out of their rental spaces. This is commonly a bigger problem in California […]

*That’s a pedestrian cross-walk button, downtown on the Via Garibaldi. I wonder who builds those cicruit boards. *That must be the biggest construction crane that I’ve ever seen in Torino.

*Very shiny and glittery, and every blade looks damascened.

*It’s interesting that the cost of prompts and platforms is becoming a major issue. From: The Prompt newsletter https://www.theprompt.io/p/write-great-llm-prompt I’m seeing four things with folks who use LLMs in production right now: GPT-4 can do many things very well, but it can become quite expensive for production. Builders turn to GPT-3.5 Turbo for cost savings, […]

*These various tools for assessing and testing multitools are quite interesting. Some of them are decades old. https://www.leatherman.com/blog/enter-the-torture-chamber.html Before any Leatherman multi-tool design is put into production, it must run a gauntlet of stress tests. Some engineers call the room housing these machines the Testing Lab. Tim Leatherman himself has dubbed it something more colorful: […]

*It’s interesting how much variety there is in “luxury” knives. There’s the technical-prowess ones, the artsy decorated ones, the rare-materials ones (“mammoth uvory inlays”), the obscure-manufacturing=processes ones, auteur knives from prominent knife designers in the “art knife genre,” and even some knives that function particularly well. *Also, note the Italian manufacturers.