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Mechanical Watch

ciechanow.ski

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Re: Mechanical Watch

#331

Post by jclardy »

Prcmaker wrote: post #235
_fat_santa wrote: post #2

There's something magical about mechanical watches. Maybe it's just knowing that you have this perpetually winding machine on your hand (in the case of "automatic" mechanical watches). Also knowing that the thing will last forever, take care of it and it will probably outlive you. Can't say that about an Apple Watch. If you want a good mechanical watch that won't break the bank I suggest picking up a Seiko SKX (thoug…

I've been using the same mechanical watch, more or less every day, for a little over 12yrs now. Miyota movement, stainless body, Sapphire window, about $300. In years of machine shop work the movement survived fine, and has one scratch on window from some tungsten carbide. Has kept brilliant time, maybe a minute a month, and taught me that my watch being accurate to the second was something that, for me, just didn't…

I’ve got a cheap Seiko 5, the SNK809. Bought for $50 new in 2013, wore it for a few years then it moved with me in drawers for the past 5. I pulled it out last week, wound it up and it works perfectly, gaining just 4 seconds a day.

Re: Mechanical Watch

#332

Post by kaba0 »

jseban wrote: post #324
kaba0 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Abstraction is the only thing that makes any of our advancements possible. Not even the simplest of math theses could be proves without a “framework” of relevant lemmas, nor could you write even a single hello world without the layers upon layers of abstractions written carefully over the decades. Sure, there is also bad abstraction, but the problem is the bad part, not the concept itself. Without abstractions you wo…

Well, if the abstractions were peer reviewed and put through the same rigour as mathematical proofs, that's a whole different topic. The equivalent would be a mathematical services company, who created "free" abstraction packages that required you to rewrite all your math, away from the scientific community standards, to fit their abstractions, and who also made money on consulting and selling books. And the big bene…

But it is not math - we only have empirical evidence and not even much from that.

Who is to tell whether the OSI model is ideal? It is more than likely not it, but we can’t measure these things up front, there is an insane cost associated with changing it, etc. Yet again, what is the alternative? We can’t manage complexity any other way, and essential complexity can’t be reduced.

Re: Mechanical Watch

#333

Post by lifthrasiir »

throwaway2214 wrote: post #190
10000truths wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree with you, but I don’t mind minification when appropriate, as it can serve a functional purpose with tangible end-user-friendly benefits (less downloaded over the network = faster response times). But if you want to be friendly to the tinkerers, you could always host both the *.js and *.min.js versions, and have the webpage just pull the latter - anyone who wants the unminified source can remove the “mi…

minified js is not greatly smaller than gzipped js, I think the whole minification thing is a swing and a miss and now we have to deal with source maps and shit, and build pipelines and etc $ ls -la -rw-r--r-- 1 jack 197609 330905 May 4 22:56 watch.js -rw-r--r-- 1 jack 197609 152172 May 4 22:55 watch.min.js $ gzip watch.js $ gzip watch.min.js $ ls -la -rw-r--r-- 1 jack 197609 43690 May 4 22:56 watch.js.gz -rw-r--r--…

Gzipped JS is generally much smaller than minified JS, but minified-then-gzipped JS is even more so. The minification (assuming gzip) doesn't make a much difference in this case only because the input file is not that large at all and compression algorithms have a natural bias for larger inputs. You can (rightly) claim it is bad to have a JS file large enough that the minification makes a difference after all, but you'd be moving a goalpost then.

Re: Mechanical Watch

#334

Post by amai »

In 20 years we will see similar visualizations about car engines which used petrol instead of electricity. We will be awed by the complex mechanisms, which were necessary at that time to make a car drive as we are awed now by the complexities of mechanical watches.

Re: Mechanical Watch

#335

Post by zwog »

amai wrote: post #334

In 20 years we will see similar visualizations about car engines which used petrol instead of electricity. We will be awed by the complex mechanisms, which were necessary at that time to make a car drive as we are awed now by the complexities of mechanical watches.

You don't have to wait 20 years, he did one last year: https://ciechanow.ski/internal-combustion-engine/

Re: Mechanical Watch

#336

Post by cycomanic »

yiyus wrote: post #304
kragen wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, they probably are, I didn't intend them as tutorials but as a better representation of the actual scutwork necessary to draw a triangle. Object-oriented languages are not a good way to do 3-D rendering. If you want to write pixel shaders in JS you can totally do that but you will have to run them on the CPU; as it happens I wrote a program last week that works that way: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/tram…

> you may find out that the real problem is that solid-state physics isn't object-oriented I am saving this quote for future use. Thank you :)

Funny, I would argue that the rock on my table is very definitely an object ;)

Re: Mechanical Watch

#338

Post by zlippslip »

My brother is a watch maker and fixer. It's an art that's becoming rarer and rarer with the advent of smart watches. Although his job is surprisingly secure because very wealthy people tend to pay a lot for their very fancy watches to be fixed or made. It's kind of sad how far we're moving from watches which last hundreds of years as heirlooms with minimal maintenance, to electronic waste generating items with components made as cheaply as possible and at most last several years before their irreplaceable battery dies and you purchase another.

Watches are robust technologies that work without internet connectivity, are crafted/maintained by people paying attention to mechanical parts that are sometimes about as thin as human hairs. Humans have used them for hundreds of years and they are really freaking cool.

If you think the animation is awesome(it is), consider owning the real thing. Not just for my brother's sake, but maybe for your families.

Re: Mechanical Watch

#339

Post by causi »

rapind wrote: post #181
reaperducer wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I would be able to pause a movie and click on anything I was seeing to get more information I remember the cable companies promising this when everything went "digital." I also remember when the movie studios promised us one of the big advantages of DVDs over VHS was that we could watch the scenes of a movie from any angle? Yeah, that never happened.

And the director / talent commentary tracks, which were sometimes really great (Vanilla Sky comes to mind). I think that was only common for a really brief period unfortunately. To be honest I think it just failed from a market perspective (cost vs revenue). I could be wrong and maybe it still happens a lot? Suspect the angles thing was the same. Sounded cool but no one wanted it (or to pay extra for it).

It still happens a lot but those tracks rarely make it onto the streaming service copy. Usually you need to buy the disc version.

Re: Mechanical Watch

#340

Post by indigochill »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #319
grishka wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure about the by hand part? There's a lot of repetition, it feels like at least some of it must be generated.

I wish he'd write a post about how he developed these visualizations. How does one even learn how to make something this amazing?

> How does one even learn how to make something this amazing?

I haven't done anything quite this amazing, but I have created other things with minimal upfront knowledge and "the way" is simple: just jump in and give it your best shot with what you already know, identify the most glaring deficiency in what you made, take your best shot at solving that, and repeat that process until you have something cool. You can also use this process to focus what you spend time studying/learning, as you backfill the information you were missing to figure out how to overcome whatever obstacles you encounter.

It does take time, but you know what they say about long journeys and single steps. Sometimes there are no shortcuts and you just have to take a lot of steps.

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