Listening to another pitch about how AI can empower workers at various jobs across my industry, I was striken by the comparison in the title
3d printing, just like generative models, have it’s actual niche uses, where it’s obvious downsides are irrelevant and they come handy, e.g. prototyping, replacements, small-series production
Where it comes to the top-down AI promotion trend, it feels not unlike the idea of printing the whole product - a car, or a house, from the smallest details - applying the least effective method, doomed to have a worse than average outcome due to technological limitations
And screws, the thing that we nailed down long before, and that is completely incompatible with that mode of production, is a screaming, growling, shrieking example of how helpful tech can be mispurposed in the most stupid way
screws, the thing that we nailed down
Clearly written by a self hating AI smh 🤦♂️
A note that Aerospace has absolutely leaned into 3D printing metal parts since they can make parts much lighter and be just as strong.
The main use of LLMs, as far as I can see, is to replace the very people pushing it on everyone.
That’s about being willing to eat the nre for one-off special purpose parts that have geometries not attainable by casting or machining.
3d printing is not the default fabrication method now that we’re getting good at it. It just shines in certain applications.
AI is often pitched as being able to do anything, eventually. We even try to use passive fail safes over active ones, a century after electricity became commonly available. Because that will always be a better solution by the nature of the options. AI is the same way. It is a distillation of human English language that is written. Why you would think that that could eventually replace all software developers, or any other field that produces text as its output makes any sense is beyond me. I can’t see how that could be true.
Exactly. It’s not true. Any company that fires all of its developers and sets up some poor intern to prompt-engineer updates to their codebase is going to fail spectacularly.
Source: I’m a software developer and use LLMs regularly. There are certain tasks they are very good at, but anyone who commits unexamined code generated by an LLM gets exactly what they deserve.
Ok, im a hardware dev. They’ve tried to make us do software style project management every time there’s a new fad (agile last time). It usually doesn’t fit.
What do you find them useful for in your role? Like a coding partner, you can ask questions? Or linting? Im at a loss in my role. I need to know the proprietary code base to write a single line of value. We aren’t allowing anyone to train an ai on our code. Thats a huge security problem if anyone does.
So there are a few very specific tasks that LLMs are good at from the perspective of a software developer:
- Certain kinds of analysis tasks can be done very quickly and efficiently with Copilot in agent mode. For instance, having it assess your existing code for adherence to stylistic standards where a violation isn’t going to trigger a linting error.
- Quick script writing is something it excels at. There are all kinds of circumstances where you might need an independent script, such as a database seed file. It’s not part of the application itself, but it’s a useful utility to have, and Copilot is good at writing them.
- Scaffolding a new application. If you’re creating something brand new and know which tools you want to use for it, but don’t want to go through the hassle of setting everything up yourself, having Copilot do it can be a real time saver.
And that’s… pretty much it. I’ve experimented with building applications with “prompt engineering,” and to be blunt, I think the concept is fundamentally flawed. The problem is that once the application exceeds the LLM’s context window size, which is necessarily small, you’re going to see it make a lot more mistakes than it already does, because - just as an example - by the time you’re having it write the frontend for a new API endpoint, it’s already forgotten how that endpoint works.
As the application approaches production size in features and functions, the number of lines of code becomes an insurmountable bottleneck for Copilot. It simply can’t maintain a comprehensive understanding of what’s already there.
I use it to generate unit tests, it’ll get the bulk of the code writing done and does a pretty good job at coverage, usually hitting 100%. All I have to do for the most part is review the tests to make sure they’re doing the right thing, and mock out some stuff that it missed.
Legit. Do you need to feed it your code base at all? How does it know what needs to be tested otherwise?
You’re right, unit tests are another area where they can be helpful, as long as you’re very careful to check them over.
one other use case where they’re helpful is ‘translation’. Like i have a docker compose file and want a helm chart/kubernetes yaml files for the same thing. It can get you like 80% there, and save you a lot of yaml typing.
Wont work well if it’s mo than like 5 services or if you wanted to translate a whole code base from one language to another. But converting one kind of file to another one with a different language or technology can work ok. Anything to write less yaml…
They are getting faster, having larger context windows, and becoming more accurate. It is only a matter of time until AI simply copy-cats 99.9% of the things humans do.
Actually, there’s growing evidence that beyond a certain point, more context drastically reduces their performance and accuracy.
I’m of the opinion that LLMs will need a drastic rethink before they can reach the point you describe.
We have 100M context AI, we just need better attention mechamisms.
3d printing is not the default fabrication method now that we’re getting good at it. It just shines in certain applications.
Getting a little theoretical here
With the current state of the technology, 3d printing lags behind some traditional manufacturing techniques like machining and in terms of speed, cost, quality, available materials, etc. except for some relatively niche cases.
However, that gap is closing a bit every day, it may or may not ever catch up completely or surpass the old technique in those aspects
But if it does ever get close, I could very much see 3d printing being a preferred method
Subtractive manufacturing like machining, by design, creates a lot of waste, all of the chips and off cuts that are removed from the stock are either discarded or require additional energy and/or materials to recycle.
And things like injection molding require custom molds that wear out over time, and can be expensive to design and manufacture
And in either case, you’re largely locked into making one thing on an assembly line at a time, and to switch over to a different product you’re probably going to need to switch out a lot of the molds and tooling, recalibrate everything, etc. which can be time consuming.
With 3d printing, you could theoretically use only the amount of material that’s actually in the finished product (if you design it that it doesn’t require any external supports ) you don’t need any custom tooling or mold, just generic, interchangeable nozzles (for FDM, LCD screens or lasers or whatever the equivalent is for other printing technologies) and you could switch production from one item to another by just hitting print on a different file.
Again, we’re not there, may never be there, but it’s a cool thing to think about
There are a lot of things that FDM printing will likely never be better than say injection moulding, and the main thing is speed, as in quantity over time. A single 3d printer might be able to make a plate full of maybe a dozen widgets in a few hours, and in that time, the injection moulding machine will have tens of thousands produced at a higher quality.
On top, 3d printing would require more staff to troubleshoot, clean, re-start prints, remove scaffolding from finished items, sand/polish to remove the layer lines, etc.
What it’s great for in an industrial setting, is prototyping. For example, a case for something can be printed, and the plate can be filled with several variants. If a flaw is found or changes needed, then a new batch can get whipped up on the same printer. Once a design is found that is acceptable, the CAD drawings get sent to have moulds created.
Yeah injection molding blows 3d printing costs out of the water if you reach above 10000 units production. Below that 3d printing can make sense, its just not as efficient time wise. You also have to deal with filament parts having different stelrength in different print orientations.
Yea, should say: FDM 3D printing a screw with PLA vertically in vase mode.
But thats a bit long winded.
They have but its only for parts that warrant it by combining multiple pieces into one part, or a part that is highly complex to machine. Because its an expensive and time consuming process to print, wash, sinter, and hope the warp is still in spec, and still requires machining for features and faces that mate to other parts
Would that not be ironic indeed? Imagine they go for world domination and extermination of their slaves, only for that tech to be useful only for replacing them, and now it’s open-source.
The “unwashed” use it gladly, and our main problem is eliminated.
You “nailed down” screws? I think that’s your problem. You are supposed to hold the screw with a wrench and then rotate the entire piece of wood around it. What an idiot.
On a serious note. That is absolutely how I feel about LLMs. For one, LLMs are a specific subset of ML, which is itself a subset of a full “AI”. I hate that LLM has been branded AI when that is completely misleading at best and a flat out lie at worst. Sure it’s a part of AI, but it’s like marketing a steering wheel as a whole car. It’s very useful as a tool for a specific job, but saying it’s a car makes people think it’s all they need to travel somewhere.
LLMs are really just “Google Search 2.0” it just scrapes all the sites and combines them into a somewhat more concise and useful answer, but since anyone can post anything on the internet and those things can be true or false or anything in between, so too will the answers LLMs provide you. It’s risky to put ANY stake in the answers without knowledge yourself of what it means.
A 1.5" long number 8 wood screw has slightly more than half the holding strength when it is driven by a hammer into 2 3/4" pine boards, relative to the traditional rotating the workpiece approach, but takes only about 1% of the time to install. You can very easily add a second screw to achieve the desired strength, while often gaining resistance to torque in the workpiece.
Meanwhile, 3D printed screws usually break when struck with a hammer, so they’re no good for this approach.
Why would I want torque resistance at work? Getting torque is the only reason I have a job.
I 3d print screws all the time. They are fine for many uses.
But would you advocate for trying to integrate 3D printed fasteners into bridge construction?
LLMs do actually have a lot of use, asking it to rephrase an email or report to make it more concise can save a considerable amount of time but trying to get an LLM to perform complex calculations isn’t what it’s made to do and it fails at it.
Also just to be pedantic but do you use 3D printed screws or 3D printed bolts?
get an LLM to perform complex calculations
That would be like: a human taking a calculator and then installing a human emulator on it, just so that it can make mistakes that feel similar to human mistakes, just taking much more energy and making the mistakes more frequently.
Like a 1/4 20 bolt? Or and m3 screw?
Or are we talking about spiral threads incorporated into your design?
They’re great when you need one or 2 and they’re used properly.
But if I need 2,000 screws, I’m going to the hardware store instead of spending 82 hours printing screws.
Can you elaborate further? What conditions make your usage fitting? I guess it’s about having other materials made from plastic as well.
As someone that also 3d prints screws, I can share my reasoning.
I am a westerner living in a non-western country. Communication with local people can sometimes be difficult, especially on the acquisition of technical components, including with screws. Often I need a specific kind of screw for a specific task, and often the screw does not need to be particularly strong. I would rather communicate exact specifications to a computer and get exact results than be at the mercy of polite miscommunication, and have to adapt all my printing to what is available locally.
I would also rather keep production as local as possible instead of outsourcing it to people I don’t know, or having it flown overseas.
In general, if I can 3d print something I need, I will. Having a database of parts, components, and tools is very helpful, even if it takes less time to just order it. There is a reproducibility, security, and satisfaction to doing it all yourself.
As an aside, I have learned something. 3d printing has enabled me to live better than I did before leaving the western world, because I can make things now I never dreamed of before. This makes me realize that we can distribute and localize significantly more production than previously possible.
I now believe every household should have a 3d printer and a laser cutter for this reason, and houses should be built with techniques and components that utilize both automatically as largely as possible. By democratizing production, power becomes much more distributed and equitable, without any claw backs of the old mechanisms of doing things.
This also allows easy repairs or expansion of a house. Something breaks? Print or cut the part and replace it from a library of parts. Everyone can understand raw materials no matter where you go, so the standard of living becomes planetary.
That is a part of the real change.
I have also done this. But it’s because I was too lazy to go buy a screw
One of the first things I did with my 3D printer was create wood screws - as in, screw made out of wood plastic. Fun pocket giveaway.
i’ve 3D printed screws for the rest of the printed thing. Like it’s a multi-part print with it’s own printed fasteners to assemble after printing everything. They were sizeable screws, tho.
I connect AI with “taking the notes of a classmate with an unhealthy crush on you in a test” and that in case of AI bros the addition “and a growing dependence on those notes”
“notes of a classmate” are not meant in the reliable way because there is a good chance the classmate is stupid
with “unhealthy crush on you” i mean that they are mostly aggreable and dont tell when they do something wrong so they see the user happy
“in a test” is also meant to include the training, or lack of, before the test but i did not know how to word it
Um. You do know that people already print screws using materials like metal and nylon, which are what a lot of screws are already made out of. Just saying. 😊
Edit: people even 3d print guns.
I think you’ve completely missed the point.
We produce screws at industrial quantities, out of various materials, lengths, heads, pitches, etc etc etc.
The industrial scaling of this production results in screws being really really inexpensive. So inexpensive that depending on quantity you’re looking at, the finished screws are no more expensive to you than the raw materials.
Yeah you can print a screw. The question is why?. It will be more expensive per unit, more labour intensive, of worse quality, and will do wear and tear to equipment you own. It’s a lose/lose/lose/lose.
The one exception is that it is some mystical bespoke screw. And even then, it is likely that there are traditional methods which would better achieve that end (buy some screws that you can develop a process to modify in order to meet your needs)
It’s a good analogy. Yes you CAN 3D print a screw. It doesn’t mean it’s appropriate or even economical to include them in your products. Yes you CAN vibe code something. It doesn’t mean it’s appropriate or even economical to include them in your products.
I mean, random bespoke dimensions show up all the time in 3D printing, including adding screwing features.
It doesn’t remove the point about standard screws being far better made the classic way, but screwing shows up plenty often anyways!
One thing it’s good for is that if you have the screw/nut on the bed with the part, you can scale both equally and the screw/nut will work with the part still, even if the threading is no longer a standard pitch/size. For a one-off or prototype that’s fine, but if you’re going to mass produce, it’s better to fix it in CAD to a standard size and use manufactured fasteners.
Yep. If it’s meant for mass production, that’s solid advice for ALL components, not just screws. Anything that’s not a standard part will need to be adapted to other production techniques anyways, as 3D printing is extremely inefficient for mass production.
Aren’t eggs produced at industrial scales from chickens, who super-abundantly exist?
How is that working out?
In no universe does the economics of a $1 egg make sense, yet here certain countries are. Did you know you can have chickens in your backyard, and they’ll turn bugs and cheap feed into eggs?
The less you can offload production to central untrusted parties, the better. When you manufacture something yourself, you get to know all the properties instead of trusting that some people elsewhere (whose primary motivation is money) still considered your interests by making a quality product.
So when you say “we,” what does “we” mean exactly? It is rhetorical.
Additionally, you get consistent reproducibility without reliance on large scale logistical networks. There are many other reasons I can think of off the top of my head beyond this.
If we lived in a more cooperative world, with ironclad democratically owned logistics networks and manufacturing, centralized manufacturing would make sense in the way you say. But the reality is, we do not live in that world, and more and more, we are all increasingly feeling what that means.
I’d just like to comment that keeping your own chickens is not economical unless you are basically willing to convert your yard into a chicken farm and slaughter your chickens once they stop laying eggs after a couple years, and even then its gonna take you a while to recoup (ha) the cost off the chicken coop, feed, etc, not to mention the time it takes to take care of them. What you’re really paying for with the cost of $1 (or really, 50 cents or less for most people) an egg is the convenience of eggs in the quantity you want them, with guaranteed quality, whenever you want them. Same with buying screws from the hardware store.
Edit: I’d originally written a response that matched your tone, and realized after a smoke that it’s needlessly confrontational and snarky, so I’m going to take another shot.
I don’t mean to imply that it’s imperative that you don’t make your own screws.
If you wanna make your own screws, go ahead, but I still don’t think you should 3D print them. There are existing tools to do that which are cheap, simple, and will produce vastly superior screws. Also cheaper. A tap and die set is your answer there.
Also, if you want to leverage your 3D printer, use it for what it is actually good at which is creating complex bespoke geometries. Design your components with interlocking geometries such that you don’t NEED screws.
Screws exist as the convenient solution to a manufacturing problem, being that it’s often easier to create complex geometries by producing a set of simpler geometries and then fastening them together. The underlying problem goes away if you can print arbitrarily complex components.
If you think you gotta 3D print screws, you’re probably not even actually leveraging the new technology to its fullest extent anyways, you’re still designing with an old paradigm despite having new options.
I will process wood vinegar and corn starch into PET plastic to 3D print expendable stuff eith, thanks
Ah shit I edited my post to dial back the snark, but this comment is on point
They do, its just not economical for energy and time, when you are dealing with something generic. Good for broken one offs
Anyone suggesting Ford or Toyota start 3d printing their fastening hardware in-house should have the head checked.
That’s the point of the analogy. You can do this, but in most cases, you probably shouldn’t, and you will get better results for less time and money with the traditional method.
I just watched a thing on the expensive mustang gtd. They do use 3d printed titanium for some pieces, but they didn’t go into much detail.
Point I want to make though, it always starts on the expensive things, then advances as the tech gets better. If Ford is using it for basically hand built mustangs, it’s only a matter of time before we see it on normal production vehicles.
Idk about that. For some custom built things it might be a better manufacturing method than setting up a production line to cast the piece or forge or whatever. But outside of some really weird screws there are always going to be extremely competitively priced screws of almost every imaginable type. It’s hard to imagine you’re gonna beat that with 3d printing, given you can just buy the screws you need for not much more per pound than the metal its made from.
Who suggested major manufacturers 3d print their parts? That’s not what the analogy said at all. But hey, make your own shit up if that makes you feel smug and superior.
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You know what? Search engines have become all but useless. I’ve been happy to let ChatGPT comb through the net for me. The other day I spent a good two hours searching for one single dimension for a pretty common item. I was on the verge of tears, when I asked Chat GPT and got the answer in 10 seconds, and a confirmation that most sources just skip it.
Stract.com just links to content like pre 2010 google.
This is fucking hillarious and so on point for lemmy in regards to ai. People who dont know what theyre talking about trying to make deep points only to find out that yeah people do this thing they didnt understand ALL THE TIME. And simply are unable to comprehend how or why anyone would do said thing. Half the comments agree with OP and the other half are ‘yeah i do this all the time for these reasons’. Then the responses are all ‘oh well i hadnt thought of that’ or ‘i still dont understand’
So where’s the downside? There is a discussion and exchange of opinions\experiences. /c/showerthoughts is not /c/science.
All the people agreeing wirh you without actually reading any of the comments or trying to understand what you didnt understand. Theyre going to go out into the world and make the same wrong assumptions and misunderstandings made here.
You just can’t see the bigger picture of what this will do, if AI is able to improve itself even 0.01%
It can’t though, all it can do is recombine existing things
