Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#181

Post by kakwa_ » Wed, Oct 11, 2023, 2:23 PM UTC

dantheman wrote: post #116

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For comparison a 42" full-color 60fps TV with remote, speakers, wifi, etc. etc. is $140. Because it's a lot easier and cheaper to manufacture large LCD panels at scale than E-ink film. >It seems like the patent holder could be making a lot more money if they dropped the price. I don't know any company or shareholders that would say no to making more money so if this would actually be true then it would, but that's n…

You say that, but patents traditionally hold back progress. If you look at the amount of horse power generated by steam engines - it spiked after the patents expired. There are probably many techniques and processes that would be tried and developed if it wasn't locked up by patents.

Devil's advocate, but one might argue patents actually incentivize progress.

Without patents, there is far less incentive to seek progress. What's the point for a for-profit organization to spend resources on Research, just to see your innovation immediately copied?

And if said for-profit organization still innovate, it has a strong incentive to keep its innovation as secret as possible. Patents by contrast, incentivize sharing, on one hand it makes the innovation public knowledge, and on the other licensing agreements usually exist.

And in the end, 20 years is really short compared to human history.

Are patents an ideal solution? Hell no, this system is too easily abused (patent trolling, patent thickets, etc), and feels really wrong at times (patents on life-saving drugs for example). But so far, that's the best compromise we manage to mostly agree on in terms of worldwide IP recognition.

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#182

Post by kakwa_ » Wed, Oct 11, 2023, 2:41 PM UTC

adql wrote: post #177

dantheman wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that, but patents traditionally hold back progress. If you look at the amount of horse power generated by steam engines - it spiked after the patents expired. There are probably many techniques and processes that would be tried and developed if it wasn't locked up by patents.

The time period is asinine; 20 years is forever in most industries

Not really. In a lot of industries, +20 years old tech and even +20 years old equipment are normal and competitive.

In tech, yes, 20 years is a lot, but that's more of an exception.

And imho, it's slowing down: A 20 years old computer, like an Athlon 64, today, could probably run most of the usual basic workloads (mail, text, word processing, browsing) with up to date software. It would be slow, but it would work. An 1983 years old computer in 2003 was just obsolete and completely unfit to run any of the usual 2003 software.

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#183

Post by TaylorAlexander » Wed, Oct 11, 2023, 3:04 PM UTC

wayfinder wrote: post #162

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question for you. I always saw the problem as: only one company or limited companies can manufacture them. Those companies are having issues manufacturing them so the price is high. But if more companies were allowed to manufacture them, wouldn’t we see more people solving production problems and lowering prices? If there is one company with low yields and high prices, if everyone is allowed to make them then there i…

Not OP but what you’re saying is absolutely true. But first someone has to invent it. Nobody’s gonna spend a few thousand or million dollars to invent something unless they get their money and more back, so that’s the point of patents. And if they patent something and don’t capitalize on it enough, that’s their loss, because they had to detail their invention in their patent application and that’s public information.…

Actually I think patents do far more harm than good in our economy. In aggregate they slow down innovation significantly by carving a huge moat around every new advancement. Without patents, there’s still loads of natural incentives to innovate. The difference is that instead of fewer larger leaps, there would be many more smaller leaps. You can always make money if you develop a new technology in secret and then start selling it before your competitors have any chance of going in to production. And then there’s always reason to support public investment in research. But patents take new innovations and then legally prevent the hundreds of potential innovators who would have built on that idea and improved it from going anywhere near it. Most innovation is incremental and with patents, that innovation is blocked from the market. This is a huge loss for our economy. The only singular function of a patent is to prevent innovation. (Legally, that is all they do.) The idea that the follow on effect of this restriction is a net gain in innovation is always taken on faith. It’s a story told over and over again. But when you look at things like open source, you can see how many of the arguments for patents simply aren’t true.

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#184

Post by nomel » Wed, Oct 11, 2023, 3:05 PM UTC

callalex wrote: post #153

nomel wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For $2,200, you could run a 35W 43” $160 TV for 29 years , if your power is $0.3/kWh. In reality, much more, with a dim display at night. I understand being eco friendly, but that’s an absurd, entirely negligible, justification. I would claim the reflective display is the killer feature.

As the person you are replying to clearly stated, it has nothing to do with drawing power from a wall socket. It’s about enabling new uses that work on battery power that can last for months/years instead of minutes.

I see now that my perspective was too bound to the context. Thanks.

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#185

Post by solardev » Wed, Oct 11, 2023, 4:43 PM UTC

BoorishBears wrote: post #150

solardev wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What you described is EDR: where non HDR content is artificially limited to allow HDR content to contrast better. In sunlight the screen will stay in SDR and use HDR brightness levels without any tweaks, which doesn't result in washing anything out What do you mean by this? Are you saying the Macbook has a special display mode that only activates when it detects sunlight (as in lumens? or?)? > With infinitely effic…

> What do you mean by this? Are you saying the Macbook has a special display mode that only activates when it detects sunlight (as in lumens? or?)? Yes, if automatic brightness is on, the screen will exceed its standard SDR range in daylight, just like the iPhone. Otherwise you need special software to manually increase the SDR brightness into that higher range, maxing out at 1600 nits. > I meant more that high brigh…

Hmm, this is new to me, thanks for the explanation! I never used automatic brightness, and the manual adjustment never let me set it high enough. I'll have to try it outdoors again with the automatic on (or find that special software that lets me go up to 1600 nit). I'll also bring a last-gen Windows matte laptop out again just for comparison :)

Brightness aside, though, a huge thing for me and glossy screens is the specular reflection. Even when it's not the sun, having a tree or a sign or the person behind me reflected in my screen is very distracting.

Do they not make a high-brightness matte screen?

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#186

Post by diogenes4 » Wed, Oct 11, 2023, 5:48 PM UTC

BoorishBears wrote: post #118

solardev wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sunlight performance of non-eink displays has improved dramatically for example. Can you talk more about this? My phones and laptops are still as bad as ever in direct sun. Did I miss some major development...?

You should upgrade your phones and laptops then: Apple just released a phone that does 2000 nits outdoors, and similarly the MBP can dip into its 1000 nit sustained HDR brightness rating for SDR content if in direct sunlight In reality this is one of those slow burn deals where the improvements in anti-glare coatings, bonding between digitizer and displays, and brightness come slowly enough that it's easy to take for…

> Apple just released a phone that does 2000 nits outdoors, and similarly the MBP can dip into its 1000 nit sustained HDR brightness rating for SDR content if in direct sunlight

I imagine that the goal is to have the sunlight itself provide the lighting for the screen, not just making the existing screen brighter, no? I don't want to be staring at something that's competing with sunlight, I want it to reflect the existing sunlight that's already hitting the display. Granted this may not make much difference in practice but... that's a huge range of luminance to compete with for a theoretically low-power device.

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#187

Post by FirmwareBurner » Wed, Oct 11, 2023, 6:05 PM UTC

maushu wrote: post #131

wahnfrieden wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low market interest

With those prices I'm not surprised.

How many other markets are there for 1Hz refresh displays that haven't already been untapped by e-ink tech? Lower prices won't magically fix the major limitation of this technology that hinder its expansion.

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#188

Post by chefandy » Wed, Oct 11, 2023, 7:36 PM UTC

lawlessone wrote: post #69

bazeblackwood wrote: post #60

Got excited, but then you qualified it was AI. AI art is not generative art, it is reductive "art". It requires samples of the art style you wish to cop, and it always produces something artificial and less than the sum of its parts. On the other hand, generative art is procedural, and represents the thought process of a human being. Better luck making meaning.

I despise how some companies opted to scrape artists works without their permission. But aren't the prompts used also representative of a thought process? The chosen network architecture and the choices of images used to train also represent thought.

Is use of a thought process the standard for calling something art?

Walking into a convenience store and buying milk also requires a thought process, but it's not creating art. Walking into a home store and selecting from various linens to assemble a complementary set requires a creative thought process, but it's not art. The closest analog is commissioning a piece from an artist-- that requires a creative thought process about art but that doesn't make the commissioner the artist.

Most commercial art directors have more granular control of their project's outcome than people generating their AI art have over theirs. While they are credited for their direction and curation of those multiple pieces to create a unified project, they are absolutely not credited for the individual pieces-- the artists that created those pieces are.

Maybe deliberately curating a collection or collaging AI-generated art that, through juxtaposition or some other method, elicited a response or communicated something emotionally that each piece individually could not. But that's not what's happening here. People are commissioning pieces of art from a computer which makes them out of other people's art.

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#189

Post by FirmwareBurner » Wed, Oct 11, 2023, 8:06 PM UTC

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #147

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For comparison a 42" full-color 60fps TV with remote, speakers, wifi, etc. etc. is $140. Because it's a lot easier and cheaper to manufacture large LCD panels at scale than E-ink film. >It seems like the patent holder could be making a lot more money if they dropped the price. I don't know any company or shareholders that would say no to making more money so if this would actually be true then it would, but that's n…

Question for you. I always saw the problem as: only one company or limited companies can manufacture them. Those companies are having issues manufacturing them so the price is high. But if more companies were allowed to manufacture them, wouldn’t we see more people solving production problems and lowering prices? If there is one company with low yields and high prices, if everyone is allowed to make them then there i…

> if everyone is allowed to make them then there is a monetary gain for new entrants willing to solve yield problems [...] That is to say, it’s not that they’re charging high prices out of greed, but that there’s no competition forcing prices down.

What makes you think there would be so much competition on driving down prices of large 1Hz B/W displays that can't display motion videos properly and suffer from terrible ghosting, if patents weren't a thing? Do you think there's large display-tech manufacturers knocking on e-inks door wishing to enter the market for such niche displays and e-ink just keeps saying 'NO'?

If that were such a lucrative untapped market then someone like Samsung or LG would have swallowed up e-ink holdings already or drowned them in lawsuits to squeeze a cross lichenizing deal out of them, but it's not.

Here's the hard to swallow pill: The consumer market for large e-ink displays is incredibly niche that it's not worth entering by second players, and better just leaving one incumbent player deal with their niche little sand-pit.

You're looking for problems that aren't there while also grossly over-estimating the size of this super-niche market.

It's a nothing-burger that, due to lack of knowledge and understanding of the market and technology, HN loves to spin into an emotionally charged straw-man every few months outraged they can't buy TV sized e-ink displays at Wallmart for $199, without even considering the technical challenges, product feasibility, economies of scale and market situation of such a fantasy product, thinking e-ink must be evil or stupid for such a product not already existing.

The truth is, there is no conspiracy and the e-ink market has already self-regulated itself: The mass market e-ink displays like for price tags and e-readers have already gotten cheap enough, while big e-ink displays are very expensive because there's next to no market for them to warrant further optimizations of economies of scale or interest from other players to even bother competing regardless of patents.

Re: Show HN: Building a 42-inch E-Ink frame for generative art

#190

Post by FirmwareBurner » Wed, Oct 11, 2023, 8:08 PM UTC

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #183

wayfinder wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP but what you’re saying is absolutely true. But first someone has to invent it. Nobody’s gonna spend a few thousand or million dollars to invent something unless they get their money and more back, so that’s the point of patents. And if they patent something and don’t capitalize on it enough, that’s their loss, because they had to detail their invention in their patent application and that’s public information.…

Actually I think patents do far more harm than good in our economy. In aggregate they slow down innovation significantly by carving a huge moat around every new advancement. Without patents, there’s still loads of natural incentives to innovate. The difference is that instead of fewer larger leaps, there would be many more smaller leaps. You can always make money if you develop a new technology in secret and then sta…

>Actually I think patents do far more harm than good in our economy.

How so? Nobody would bother investing in R&D if after all their labor and toil, someone else would be legally allowed to copy it for free and get all the profits without having had any of the expenses and risk that come with hardware R&D.

The (US)patent system has its flaws, but without one it would be even worse.