I never understand why people consume content like this accelerated. For me, I feel like if I felt the need to rush through something then it’s not worth consuming at all.
Personally it helps me understand it more because it requires more concentration. I've always needed to be doing something while listening or watching things, but the problem is that I can distract myself doing that and not actually pay attention to the actual thing at all. Turning the speed up forces me to concentrate more and it's harder to get distracted
For me it’s mostly how slow some people talk. This is especially true for some content when I can understand it at a higher speed, for example Dota replays. I feel like I’ll get more out of the time watching two in the same when I can understand 95% of the nuance. I also have ADHD so wanting it to be faster could easily be part of that.
Honestly, not everyone has the same mental clockspeed. I have friends who seem to quite literally think 7x faster than everyone else. But to be fair, they don't do as much side-band emotional processing and tangential thought as me. I process "off the beaten path" of the recorded narrative, so I like realtime speed, bc it lets me relate other thoughts to what I'm hearing. But that's just my slow relational mind :)
I think it is safe to say we know not all people take in information at the same rate. Also some people process different forms of information at different rates. Some people can read a book and understand it clearly. Others see it once and they learn the skill. So no I do not fully believe what scientist have claimed. That may be an average or the normal but not true in every case. Furthermore how do you actually measure what rate of information that video was presenting information at? It definitely was not at a steady rate as well lots of pauses and dead spots. Speeding the video up removes some of that dead space. Also there is the depth of the information. We are not working out space time curvature equations we are being shown precious stone cutting. If I was trying to learn the skill maybe even normal speed would be too fast and slowing it down or repeating sections may be needed. But as I was just trying to get an idea of the subject a faster speed is fine. I guess what I’m thinking is there are lots of factors to consider.
Every new generation faces some form of peril touted to be the coming of end times by the outgoing generation.
From a 50,000-ft view of the collective, it looks gross and seems like there’s no end in sight. However, individuals can still take responsibility to find a balance between excesses that society provides and complete avoidance of any forms of entertainment.
Each generation saying that the next is having their attention span diminished by new media may seem "gross" to you, but that feeling hardly proves any of them wrong.
He seems to be doing everything by "feel". I would imagine that if the stone were 3D scanned it wouldn't be difficult to use some software to determine the optimal orientation to achieve the largest cut stone, for a given cut style.
He's making decisions based on a lifetime of experience. I wouldn't be so quick to assume that can be replaced by a simple optimizer. Additionally, maximizing size is just one goal among many.
The hubris of any software dev is that code can do anything better. For a large majority of things, I would agree. After all, that's why we made computers in the first place. It's also my tenet of workflow automation. I'm not trying to eliminate a person's job. I'm just trying to make the tedious error prone parts of the job less tedious and error prone so that the person is free to spend more time on the things that they are good at and would be difficult to automate.
Automated gem cutting exists, but is only used for lower value stones. If it were such an obvious slam dunk the industry would be using it for stones like this too.
I like to use Toyota as an example, because they famously reject total automation as a desirable goal. The believe having humans in the loop creates a learning loop that gets the best overall result, so they optimize for a sweet spot between automation and human.
To use an analogy from art, automation doesn't replace the artist, it replaces more limited paint brushes. As amazing as recent large model advances are, there's also a clear difference in how effective humans are at using them to get the desired result.
If you're just playing around then a simple prompt to finished image pipeline is convenient and shockingly good. If you're being more specific about the end goal then you need the model to expose more fine grained ways for the user to express what they want and modify the intermediate results. This why you see Adobe et all focusing on that kind of "smarter tool used in detail" approach.
>>If it were such an obvious slam dunk the industry would be using it for stones like this too.
I don't think so, or at least I think it misses where this industry drives value from. I don't know if my comment will seem too cynical for the Hacker News add value to discussion threshold, but - the entire industry is by definition built, completely, around sub-optimization and artificial complexity, scarcity, and meaning. If you want optimal and efficient and automated, you can get it for fraction of the price. The hand made sub-optimal facet is a strong part of the perceived / advertised value.
Yes, because simultaneously it's somehow true that it's a slam dunk to use automation to replace this skill, but yet industry faces some sort of irrational barriers to implement that.
Or maybe, just possibly, armchair opinions from programmers who have never done this and have no idea what the reality is beyond a youtube video have superficial understanding?
A cheap quartz movement (watch mechanism) will be more accurate than most high-end mechanical watches, and yet they keep being made.
I think the main reasons (beside "vanity") are:
a) huge profit margins, limiting the incentive to optimize
b) high start up costs combined with relatively little volume
A system would have to accurately measure imperfections/inclusions, then pick the best design, then it'd either have to cut it themselves or communicate the instructions to the person (who'd have to be willing to use such a system).
The current approach with a human designing and cutting the stone is simply good enough, so there is no reason to change. And something like re-cutting the Koh-i-noor happens rarely enough that I suspect nobody wants to invest in developing the software for it when you can get a close enough result by throwing more one-off manual work at the problem.
Synthetic stones (which I assume are a much simpler problem because they're even cheaper and have fewer inclusions to optimize around) are already being cut by robots (or so I've been told, at least). I think the whole "real natural stone" and "hand-cut" parts are definitely part of the appeal/selling point.
If you care about a "slam dunk", you'll buy robot-cut Cubic Zirconia or Moissanite and call it a day.
I have absolutely not posited the barriers as "irrational". Artificial market segmentation, and increasing value of product through human artistry are increasingly common and not necessarily "irrational". There are any number of products on the market that machine can make better, but we value more highly when it's made by human... in fact, that's true of a very large proportion of products, marketed as "handcrafted" or, since it's 2024, "artisanal and rustic" et cetera :-)
(the line of where "handcrafted" goes from "friendly and community and positive and encouraging neighbourhood entrepreneurs" to "evil and scheming and big-corpo-deceptive" is subjective evaluation, but none of them necessitate "irrational" let alone, as is implied, "stupid")
Anytime something takes a long time to create, there's an expected add to the price. Look at your 18 year old (and older) Scotch/Whiskey prices. Even lab grown gems takes months to "grow". Yes, there is a cartel influence on an artificial scarcity, but even still, it's something that isn't just common everyday discoveries for the vast majority of people. Even without the cartel influence, there would still be value in them vs much more common things like quartz/granite/etc.
'computers' can now rival the greatest painted masterpieces from all of human history with a mere text-based prompt (or less). would you consider those generated works to be masterpieces? or is there something about a work created by human hand and derived from a human mind that can only make them so?
The thing with masterpieces is that they don’t hold that status because they can’t be replicated, they hold it because they were novel, innovative, and unrivaled at the time of their creation.
> The training of painters in past centuries regularly involved copying old master drawings and paintings. To that end, most museums happily allowed students into their buildings for that purpose (some still do). But the practice was not limited to students. Even fully trained old masters copied older masters.
> The practice of copying and recreating paintings by the Old Masters at the Louvre goes back to when the museum first opened in 1793, when any artist could turn up and use a freely available easel to copy a masterpiece.
> ...
> Not all artists copied works to improve their skills. Some took up the practice professionally, since the demand for copies of masterpieces in the Louvre was high throughout the nineteenth century.
> ...
> These days only 250 copyists are permitted to install themselves in front of the museum’s art works, and a two-year waiting list shows that there are plenty of hopefuls waiting in the wings to take up a palette and brush.
> Those granted access have up to three months to work on their copy.
That this exists as a pedagogical exercise does not disprove the original point in any way.
Source: I spent a lot of time in the library copying sketches of the renaissance masters as a kid.
AI is the pencil, not the artist. As cool and capable as large models are they are not even remotely close to replacing self directed human intent. If you do not understand this you do not understand art.
I don't believe there's some magical quality to human intelligence, just that the things we are making today with AI are still orders of magnitude short of the real thing, and that there are still very difficult open questions in that gap.
There are certain jobs that we consider artists, but are very close to someone entering a text to a prompt. Consider a director for theater/film. They are prompting their "tools" (to be reductive) to produce the art they want, and have to sometimes accept when they just can't get the results they want from their tool.
I've kept considering the term hand crafted when reading this thread about what is considered valued art or not as that's what applies to this gemstone TFA directly. Then it went to the painters with brush strokes, and that too keeps the hand crafted idea. That's when I jumped to directors. To step further away from art, and switch it to sportsball. While current managers might have once been a player, now, they are essentially entering text into prompts to get their "tools" to provide the result they are looking for with varying degrees of success. The managers/coaches can't kick/throw the ball themselves to get the results. They just have to get their "tool" to perform better by constantly tweaking the text entered into the prompt. Hell, now I'm thinking parents are constantly tweaking their prompts to get their kids to do something.
Okay, at this point, I'm convinced we're all just part of the matrix.
> Consider a director for theater/film. They are prompting their "tools" (to be reductive) to produce the art they want, and have to sometimes accept when they just can't get the results they want from their tool.
Bluntly, it's clear you have no personal understanding of such productions and did not understand the most important point of my comment and how different it is from piloting a generative model.
Bluntly? You clearly have no idea who I am or what my work experience is like. I have no idea what your response has to do with anything, but I hope you feel better for getting it off your chest.
Humans working on a creative team are not automatons given commands, and this is a pretty basic understanding even if you are super impressed by what large models can do.
I am not super impressed by what LLMs can do, and think the current hype wave is ridiculous. I find them slightly more useful than NFTs.
But if you can't see how a director trying to use phrases like "I see what you're doing, and it's interesting. But let's try saying the actual lines a few more times, and then we'll let you play with it some more", or "okay, that was great. let's do it one more time", or "this time with more energy/angrier/etc", or "that was great everyone! this time, we're going to do the same thing but with..." or any other variations of director speak isn't like a user tweaking their prompt while looking for something entirely different or keeping parts of it while looking to change a different part.
If you can't see how that kind of feedback loop is similar to using a GPT, then you're really being obtuse as it's as blatant as the nose on your face
Almost every time I see an AI generated art piece, I know it's AI generated, and it looks cheap. Sometimes an actual experienced artist uses AI and manages to tweak it to look decent, either by prompt engineering or further manipulation. There's nothing that yet replaces the human taste for what looks good nor what resonates for contemporary audiences. At best, it could be said that AI has further reduced the value of derivative art and photography.
A lot of the AI "art" I've seen looks like a psychotic serial killer made it. There's just something wrong with it, especially when it depicts humans - the eyes are insane, the facial expressions look like the subject wants to cannibalize me. If it were a human artist, I would suggest they seek mental help. It's honestly kind of scary that this is what computers are creating, it's no wonder some people worry about AI destroying humanity.
One time I only input the style of the image basically leaving the description empty. I was wondering what it would come up with by it self. It served a human head on a table. I didn't need a second image.
Hardly. They cannot mimic the brush strokes, the material choices, expressiveness, composition and more. It is absolutely abhorrent to say that any AI is even in the same field, let alone close to art masterpieces.
i appreciate your frank reply. by posing my question in such a way so as to illicit discourse, my position was lost and does read ambiguous.
i would like to not agree with you that plenty of people believe machine-generated work is even in the same universe as human art (including that which is not painted). but i'm afraid you may be right.
my downvoted-to-purgatory comment you've quoted. glad to see that the phrasing of that specific question stuck out to at least someone in the manner i intended.
This is done for some diamonds. About 1:20 in this video you can see them mention how they use computers to aid in deciding how to cut the diamond https://youtu.be/8lk8p0re8Eg
great point... but in thinking about your comment, it occurs to me that then it could no longer be considered "hand cut."
i found it very interesting that he shared he was hoping for 300+ cts., but had resolved to be satisfied with at least 250. so he did alright after all.
A friend inherited a large fine diamond, double digit carat-weight. Rated near perfect by GIA in cut clarity and quality, except for some tiny chips from wear that could easily be fixed by recutting it at the loss of a half carat but its projected such repair would add 6 figures in market value despite the loss in weight.
The thing with gem cutters, is if things go wrong, owner bears the loss.
Would you take that risk?
The linked one has the largest crystal - with inclusions - at 547.1 carats and $1094.
You can get smaller pieces in bulkish quantities for about $2 per carat at about 10 carat sizes (side note: its way to easy to find over priced "healing stones").
You're both right. It is used in low concentrations in some food products to give a wintergreen flavor (wintergreen gum, for example), and in topical analgesics (like Tiger Balm, for example) because it absorbs through the skin and acts as a counterirritant to potentially relieve pain, though studies don't see to support this use. It can be deadly if ingested directly (salicylate is the same thing found in Aspirin) in the form used in the video, and I presume one could absorb enough through one's skin that it would also be harmful in strong concentrations as shown in the video.
If nothing else, it seems like having that much concentrated methyl salicylate would irritate a lot.
It is, oil mist causes causes emphysema when you breathe it in. I have no tolerance for people operating rotary vane pumps without a coalescing filter.
Automated cutting is used for less valuable stones, or when you need to have multiple stones of the exact same size and shape. Hand cutting is used when you want to maximize the yield, so you use the raw stone to guide the final size and shape.
Thanks, that makes sense, when you say 'you use the raw stone to guide the final size and shape' does that mean you might look for things like imperfections in the stone and try to remove those
Yes, finding a shape that excludes incursions is a big part of it. In the video he shows how he uses refractive fluids on the rough surface to make it less opaque so he can spot such inclusions more easily.
Like if the raw stone is elongated you probably don’t want to cut it into a square finished gem, something like an oval cut would have less waste. And instead of trying to decide on an exact size in advance (like, exactly 1 ct), the final gem is whatever it is when the cutting is finished, so if it’s a smidge over you don’t shave it down.
Because you’re dead my with natural objects of varying size, shape, defect, etc. this isn’t taking a 4x4 piece of sheet metal and punching the same shape out of it 100 times.
This video [1] shows laser cutting, 3D modelling, and hand grinding of diamonds in a diamond factory. They discuss when and why they use laser cutting machines a bit.
It's all subjective of course, and not detract from this man's amazing work, but I find the rough stone to be just as beautiful, if not more so than the final polished piece. Especially in those final vanity shots, the shades and imperfections are really beautiful to me.
What I would really love to see is a version of the rough stone but with only two opposite faces polished, so that you can see through it like he did at the beginning of the video with the oil, but keeping all other surfaces rough.
By knowing someone at one of the mines. You can find plenty of specimens online [1] but to get the best ones with large gem quality volumes you'll need to know an insider that can inspect the raw gemstones to find ones with large volumes and sell them to you directly.
Rough math, $1,000 for the raw stone, $5,000 of travel and time to source... $80k sale price with 250 hours of cutting work, $300/hour for master gemcutter, seems very fair.
I think you're reading the "SAMPLE LEGAL APPRAISAL" which is an appraisal for a different item. I think it's just to give you an idea of the form of appraisal they'd provide for insurance purposes.
The appraisal at the end of the video says "$2,375" according to the transcript (was watching without audio) and the sample appraisal (which I guess as your sibling pointed out was just meant as a sample of what an appraisal would look like, in which case I think it would have been better form not to include actual numbers) lists $2150 which is close to that value so I assumed that's the actual appraisal.
Given that the sample actually shows a ring and refers to it in the full text, that's obviously not referring to the object but now I'm wondering about the $2,375 figure in the transcript. Is that just a really bad auto-transcription error?
Seems like a good reason to double check your auto-subtitles. That's a massive difference and the appraisal was meant to be a big reveal at the end so this isn't just a minor detail.
That explains the listed price, it doesn't explain the disparity to the transcript. Given the comments, I presume he said a different figure in the audio track than the transcript (and therefore subtitles) says?
Oh, absolutely. I wasn't questioning whether it would be sold for the price discussed here. I was wondering why the appraisal was that low (turns out: because the appraisal on the website is an unrelated sample and the appraisal in the video was mistranscribed by missing out several digits so the subtitles were off by orders of magnitude).
There are a lot of areas where the label price is based on some underlying much lower value with somewhat standardized factors being applied so I was wondering if there's some implicit "everyone knows this" translation from the "appraisal" to the sale price I wasn't aware of. Hence me pointing out that that would be quite the markup so there is probably more to it than just profit.
in first-year 'Contracts,' 1L's study that the 'fair market value' of any good or service is defined by Black's Law Dictionary, amongst elsewhere, as "[t]he price that a seller is willing to accept and a buyer is willing to pay on the open market and in an arm's-length transaction [ . . . ]"
this definition captures the actual sale price of almost any transaction imaginable quite comprehensively—which is what most people are really asking when curious about the 'value' of a good, like a precious gemstone, or a service.
NB: 'value' is defined by the same as "1. The significance, desirability, or utility of something" or "2. The monetary worth or price of something; the amount of goods, services, or money that something commands in exchange." 'markup' as "[a]n amount added to an item's cost to determine its selling price."
I'm not sure who you're explaining this to and why because it's largely orthogonal to what I said.
The cut gem's label price is based on an appraisal. The appraisal is based on the market rate (a real-world approximation of the theoretical "fair market value" you explained) of comparable gems.
Because based on both the mistranscribed video and the sample appraisal the appraisal seemed to be much lower than the asking price on the website, I assumed this might be because the appraisal is incomplete and doesn't take into account some factor that might be well-known in the industry to not warrant any mention in the video but still contribute significantly to the final price. Notably, just because the appraisal was specified as a dollar amount that does not eliminate the possibility it might refer to something other than a USD sale price.
Given that a lot of luxury goods and collector's items are auctioned off at vastly inflated prices (often as speculative investment or simply money laundering and complex tax write-off schemes), I would have found this surprising but not implausible. Another example would be insurance where "value" might either be the cost to replace something or the depreciated value of the same item, which can be a very different amount (again by orders of magnitude).
disagree. we're just exchanging thought-provoking ideas here, man. wasn't coming at you or thinking i hold some kind of edification authority over anyone here even in the slightest.
Guessing based on years old physics knowledge: Without the fluid, the surface of the stone appears foggy because it's diffusing light (like frosted glass.) The fluid creates a smooth surface on top of that which doesn't diffuse light (like clear glass.) The refractive index refers to how much light bends when it enters a substance. To see clearly, the refractive index of the fluid and the stone should match as closely as possible. Otherwise, the surface of the stone would still be visible under the fluid.
Looks like the type of cheap cut glass you put on a doorhandle. The whole spiel of what an art it is to prepare and how very rare and delicate it is, that's just a scam to get others to overvalue a piece of rock. It also has no utility whatsoever so where they pulled 80k down from 190k from is beyond me. Taking advantage of someone without the reasoning capacity to value a products utility objectively doesn't increase the items market value in reality. I could clean out a retarded person with an overpriced polished apple, but an apple is just an apple and a rock is still a rock. Of course you can at least eat the apple.
Abundant commodities are valued at the average price a person in the group is willing to pay. This "gemstone" is actually beryl, a very common crystal. What they're trying to do is take this commodity mineral and price it like a scarce object. Paintings so scarce as the Mona Lisa with an available quantity of one are priced at auction to the maximum any person on planet Earth will pay. They actually don't even know how to price it they had to invent a competition to discover the number from the greatest fool in the room. If there were two or eight original copies, the value would nosedive. The scarcity provides the value, not the art.
Since 2010 some shrewd businessmen have decided that pink beryl is a coveted gemstone and marketed it like diamonds. But it's totally worthless, as are diamonds. Similarly cut glass looks the same.
How evil is it to target couples who want to get married and start a family, to then start a marketing campaign and invent a tradition to force them to buy a worthless rock for three months of the groom's salary? I wonder how many expecting working class families had less food on the table because of that.
You've got to be very careful about this kind of thing. Stamp it out. Deviating from utilitarian logic gets perilous right fast. Your unborn children will literally starve
It's an open secret the value of diamonds is all marketing.
GE made the first gem quality diamonds in the 1970s. They can be manufactured in commercial quantities since the 2010s. The largest one so far is 511 karats.
So the diamond industry has to market them as inferior, labeling them "lab grown" and suggests they won't retain their value.
Some people buy things because their beauty pleases them and some buy things to signal to others how much wealth they have. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with either. Have you ever bought something that was nicer and more expensive than it needed to be to serve its function?
Utilitarian ideology aside, that rock isn't worth 190k, or 80k or even 1k. It's not that pretty. I'd have a hard time parting with $50 unless I thought I could sell it to someone else tomorrow for more - and there lies the rub. The argument goes that the market sets the value, but this is not a case of that. If one foolish person miscalculates and overpays for an item, the market value for that item doesn't recalibrate to what they paid. There's no market for the item at the new price but that's how these sellers paint it. They pull value from thin air not from scarcity or precision skill but simply by conning the naive. It's a scam plain and simple, wrapped up in superfluous details to sow confusion
