Different people engage in different ways. I think OP is telling us what got them over that initial habit adoption hurdle. Sometimes spending money on something makes you use it.
My example case is I paid for a year of gym membership up front so I could feel the total I'd spent more tangibly. That got me to go regularly, even if I was just showing up to recovery stretching at first. Now I enjoy going and I look forward to it, and I didn't need a PT to motivate me this time.
It looks like it has a 3d draping view, but it didn't seem very good yet. Check out Marvellous Designer, that's what anyone doing digital-first uses.
Drapey clothing is probably the easiest to freehand without a pattern though. It's accurate fits that need more measuring, planning, temporary stitching, test garments, etc.
It's nowhere near Marvelous Designer. Marvelous Designer is for making 3D clothing for games, animation, and such. It's a limited version of Clo[1] , which is for making real-world clothing. Clo lets you design clothing, put it on an avatar, and watch it move and drape with clothing physics. It looks real. When you see good clothing in a game, it was probably created with Marvelous Designer.
Then Clo exports a file for fabric cutting compliant with the ASTM D6673-10 standard, Standard Practice for Sewn Pattern Data Interchange, which is used for the production of garment patterns. It's kind of clunky, being based on Autodesk DXF, AutoCAD's export format from the 1980s, but it's what the industry uses. You can bring such files into anything that reads DXF and view them. So a widely used formal descriptive language for fabric cutting already exists. You can send those files to a contract garment manufacturer and get garments back.
Marvelous Designer is just Clo minus the cutting pattern export feature.
It's not an accurate recollection at all. In 1990 a couple of us 12 year olds snuck into the university library to use the web to look at the Marathon website. It took 5 minutes to load some trivially-sized gifs and a tiny amount of HTML. They had a pretty decent connection for the day.
Web pages took a minute to load, now we're optimising them for instant response.
The Classic Mac OS model in general I think is the best that has been or ever will be in terms of sheer practical user power/control/customization thanks to its extension and control panel based architecture. Sure, it was a security nightmare, but there was practically nothing that couldn’t be achieved by installing some combination of third party extensions.
Even modern desktop Linux pales in comparison because although it’s technically possible to change anything imaginable about it, to do a lot of things that extensions did you’re looking at at minimum writing your own DE/compositor/etc and at worst needing to tweak a whole stack of layers or wade through kernel code. Not really general user accessible.
Because extensions were capable of changing anything imaginable and often did so with tiny-niche tweaks and all targeted the same system, any moderately technically capable person could stack extensions (or conversely, disable system-provided ones which implemented a lot of stock functionality) and have a hyper-personalized system without ever writing a line of code or opening a terminal. It was beautiful, even if it was unstable.
I’m not too nostalgic for an OS that only had cooperative scheduling. I don’t miss the days of Conflict Catcher, or having to order my extensions correctly.
Illegal instruction? Program accessed a dangling pointer? Bomb message held up your own computer and you had to restart (unless you had a non-stock debugger attached and can run ExitToShell, but no promises there.)
It had major flaws for sure, but also some excellent concepts that I wish could've found a way to survive through to the modern day. Modern operating systems may be stable and secure, but they're also far more complex, inflexible, generic, and inaccessible and don't empower users to anywhere near the extent they could.
> unless you had a non-stock debugger attached and can run ExitToShell
You could also directly jump into the ExitToShell code in ROM (G 49F6D8, IIRC). Later versions of Minibug had an “es” command that more or less did the same thing (that direct jump always jumps into the ROM code, “es” would, I think, jump to any patched versions)
> The Classic Mac OS model in general I think is the best that has been or ever will be in terms of sheer practical user power/control/customization
A point for discussion is whether image-based systems are the same kind of thing as OSes where system and applications are separate things, but if we include them, Smalltalk-80 is better in that regard. It doesn’t require you to reboot to install a new version of your patch (if you’re very careful, that’s sometimes possible in classic Mac OS, too, but it definitely is harder) and is/has an IDE that fully supports it.
Lisp systems and Self also have better support for it, I think.
ENVY suffered of a problem that many other Smalltalk technologies suffered: a conflict between a culture of proprietary zeal as a business model and powerful network effects of adoption. Visualage in general was plagued by this. I used to blame Microsoft and Apple successes for the pervasive push for lock-in and "integration" as a feature that defined the era so strongly.
You had on the one hand had a technology that desperately needed adoption to build a culture and best-practices documentation, and on the other hand you had short term profit motive seriously getting in the way, so what you had that was completely cutting edge for decades, eventually it wasn't anymore - or the world moved in another direction and your once revolutionary technology became an ill fit for it.
By the 2000s with monotone and darcs, but specially with the rise of git, other standards for versioning have superseded what could have been. Smalltalkers already by the 2010s should have been wise to try to incorporate what is clearly a standard now but instead a bunch of invented-here systems for versioning and repositories and hybrids have developed in its place. And by incorporate i don't mean "let's make X for ST" but making it core in their implementation so that the system itself is more easily understood and used, even if its to take pieces of it away and use them which is actually a strength and not a weakness! contrary to some brand of 90s-era beliefs.
Generally speaking, to this very day it's regarded as cool and as a feature in ST world that something is ST-only, conveniently "integrated" into the system as tightly as possible and, implicitly but insidiously and glaringly, near-impossible to use elsewhere except maybe as a concept and laundered of its origin.
Right, but my point is that users didn’t have to write extensions because developers had already written one for just about any niche use one could think of.
And it wasn’t just theming. Classic Mac OS extensions could do anything from add support for new hardware to overhaul the text rendering system entirely to giving dragged desktop icons gravity and inertia to adding a taskbar or a dock. The sky was the limit, and having a single common target to do any of those things (vs. being split between the kernel and a thousand layers/daemons/DEs/etc) meant that if it could be done, it probably had been.
You’d need to touch many different parts of the OS to write those extensions. The difference is that, on MacOS classic, there isn’t much of a boundary between user space and kernel space.
I’ve done a couple MITM toys with Windows 3.x and the trick is always exposing the same interface as the thing you want to replace, even if you only do something like inverting mouse movements on odd minutes, you just pass everything else down to the original module.
It's not that different from how some creative Mac games were doing 3d lighting on 2d textures prior to 3d accelerated hardware being available. The neat part here is that it runs on a Gameboy Colour.
Check out Rustler Grand Theft Horse on the Epic Games Store, it's the same top-down format, very GTA-like but set in medieval times, yet has all of the modern banter. It's so great.
A couple of months ago I had to write a CDL-based triangulator to solve a use case where ear-clipping doesn't support the shapes we had.
We had no AI policy at the time so I had to read up on CDL and implement it by hand. The concept is straight-forward and I also targeted regularity as acceptance criteria for the mesher, but making it optimal was hard.
I ended up having to park it after the ticket ran out of time, but now we have an AI policy this was the first problem I gave it. What it put out was similar but better structured and more informed.
I worry a little that AI will stunt our problem-solving in 20-30 years, we still need new algorithms, even when ML is capable of producing a model that can do the same thing. But right now it's much better at the things we've already done than we are.
Unfortunately I'm not seeing any good systems for hierarchical problem solving in the current agents. Ideally, an agent would set up a higher-level thought process of comparing ways to understand the problem statement and ways to solve it and rank them like a human mind does, so it could try different strategies for looking up resources and go back and forth between them as they seem to bear fruit or not.
Instead of going meta about their strategies for identifying their tasks and reasoning about them, they currently stick to one conception of the task and try different tactics for implementing different strategies for solving it within that conceptual frame.
Furthermore, they don't seem to have a reliable way to ask themselves if they're taking too long to do something that should be easy yet. Maybe one in fifty times the latest agents will say "This is taking too long, let's step back and look up how other people do it," but humans do that for most human tasks.
I don't think appropriate use of some, but not too much, meta-reasoning and meta-meta-reasoning on the fly will be easily solved without some kind of mental parallelization advance, which might come tomorrow but might not come for two or more years.
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As for society, we need an AI takeover for the simple reason that we're facing real bad shortages of diesel fuel and days of agriculture-suitable weather in the next decade, which makes the former the less bad outcome. Given that AI will outcompete humans for all economic roles in such a scenario the only way it can happen humanely is human preservation through uploading or as pets.
Literally every other option is on a spectrum of negative outcomes from extinction to Greer's 2013 essay on the ten-billion year future.
My example case is I paid for a year of gym membership up front so I could feel the total I'd spent more tangibly. That got me to go regularly, even if I was just showing up to recovery stretching at first. Now I enjoy going and I look forward to it, and I didn't need a PT to motivate me this time.
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