Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Kanchipuram Saris and Thinking Machines

altermag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–49 of 49 posts

Re: Kanchipuram Saris and Thinking Machines

#41

Post by random_ind_dude »

adityaathalye wrote: post #22
alephnerd wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need a digital ledger - these are ODOP goods [0] so it's fairly straigtforward to identify authenticity based on the wholeseller's GI tag [1]. GI Tagging for ODOP products is taken extremely seriously as the products associated with ODOP tend to be associated with locally powerful khadi cooperatives and because this is a personal project of Modi and Shah as they started their political careers in Khadi Coop…

Your information about tagging is relevant and useful---and a valid critique of the techno-solutionsim espoused by the piece. Words that could have been spent on talking about the incredible technology that handlooms actually are. But keep the votebank politics out of this man. Every political leader in the history of the country has espoused such kinship and love for the handicraft. Their reasons are their own. Khad…

Yeah. If anything, Modi/Shah would probably burn those co-operatives to the ground if they could. Tamil Nadu hates the BJP.

Re: Kanchipuram Saris and Thinking Machines

#42

Post by rakejake »

This started decently enough and then the author went all over the place. I'm not sure why detailed explanations of neural nets and smart contracts were needed here. It really feels like trying to ram in a tech solution for what is effectively a market/social problem.

Using computers to aid in designing is not specific to Kanchipuram saris. While I realize people always approach it from the POV of saving a dying art, I'm unsure if K.saris can really fall under that umbrella. Clearly the demand is there and the issues here arise due to inefficient and possibly corrupt market practices rather than the art itself dying. A lot of space was used to explain the lopsided economics on the supply side but there's not enough attention paid to the demand side and the marketplace dynamics.

Re: Kanchipuram Saris and Thinking Machines

#44

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

My immediate thought is that if automation is really needed for the preservation of traditional patterns, then the right tool for the job is not unreliable, only probably approximately correct, generative AI approaches like GANs and Diffusion models, but Good, Old-Fashioned, symbolic AI approaches widely used today for procedural asset generation in the games industry like L-Systems or texture synthesis algorithms and Wave Function Collapse.

Wave Function Collapse in particular is itself based on convolutions, like CNNs, to preserve translational invariance, but it also preserves equivariance by means of a constraint satisfaction procedure. It's cool stuff and dirt cheap compared to training a CNN from scratch*.

_______________

* On anything but ImageNet/CIFAR 10.

Re: Kanchipuram Saris and Thinking Machines

#45

Post by atulatul »

aitchnyu wrote: post #43

Wish they showed more of the Jacquard loom. Indian (and maybe other) students learned it as a predecessor of modern computers, using punch cards to automate patterns.

ICYMI Recently this link was posted on HN

https://www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stor...

Re: Kanchipuram Saris and Thinking Machines

#46

Post by adityaathalye »

random_ind_dude wrote: post #41
adityaathalye wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your information about tagging is relevant and useful---and a valid critique of the techno-solutionsim espoused by the piece. Words that could have been spent on talking about the incredible technology that handlooms actually are. But keep the votebank politics out of this man. Every political leader in the history of the country has espoused such kinship and love for the handicraft. Their reasons are their own. Khad…

Yeah. If anything, Modi/Shah would probably burn those co-operatives to the ground if they could. Tamil Nadu hates the BJP.

No. Same feedback to you, as to alephnerd. Don't feed the beast.

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Kanchipuram Saris and Thinking Machines

#47

Post by donkeybeer »

adityaathalye wrote: post #40
zanthum wrote: post #34

Looking past the writing style, which I intensely dislike, I am very disappointed in how the article identifies a real problem (Hari is not paid enough) and gives inane solutions (saree NFTs). Why is Hari not paid enough? 1. "The visual language of the loom is deteriorating into digital gibberish" 2. "the chemical dyes are poisoning the very water the weavers drink" 3. "the market is flooded with fakes that have dest…

To add to your critique... The piece proposes fast fashion as a solution to the woes of essentially a bespoke, made-to-order craft. How can this not lead down the path from the alleged Prada-ification to a (inevitable) Zara-ification of the woven product... motifs clashing with motifs; culture and context loudly absent. Quoting: "For a heritage boutique, this offers a data-driven way to align traditional korvai patte…

The nice thing about the belief in the irrational is the market works as long as this brand of irrationality is believed in, suppose aspirational buyers find the cheaper but physically equivalent product finally within reach, I can bet they won't give a shit about these imaginary things.

Re: Kanchipuram Saris and Thinking Machines

#48

Post by skyberrys »

This was a wild and fascinating read. I thought from the title with Thinking Machines that I would be reading about a hardware startup but instead I got labor markets in India, convolutional neural networks, jacquard looms and Crispr all in one article. The additional beautiful illustrations peppered in between were a great break from the chaos of reading too. This makes me wish for a better way to understand the dyes in my clothing.

Re: Kanchipuram Saris and Thinking Machines

#49

Post by margalabargala »

gowthamgts12 wrote: post #2

damn that’s one greatly designed website.

It's okay, but the scroll bar is broken and is super jarring every time it decides to hijack it. Could be easily improved by fixing the user experience by having the page scroll when the user does.
Post reply on HN