What about aluminum? I haven’t been able to find a welder willing to work on my custom bike frame, so I’m considering learning to do it myself after taking a welding course. The custom car builders on TV make it look easy, but aluminum seems like an incredibly difficult material to work with.
It's difficult find a welder willing to work on an aluminum bike frame not because aluminum is hard to weld. It's not so bad to stick two pieces of aluminum together in a new-to-them way with the right tools as long as maintaining the original strength isn't important.
But strength is important for bicycles. And aluminum bike frames are already built down to a given weight -- they don't have much in the way of extra strength to lend.
The heat of welding permanently changes the way the surrounding metal works. That's not ideal for safety devices like a bike.
Heat treatment can be done later (and is done when aluminum frames are built), but that's a different process to learn and it's pretty far beyond the gamut of what most welders are willing to deal with. Most welders don't have the bike-sized oven that's needed, let alone the training and experience to get it right, and with a sample size of exactly 1 it's a risky operation. It's easy to get things like warped tubes out of this process and turn a beautiful piece of wall art into scrap metal.
If you get a quality tig welder aluminum isn't too bad. It's definitely more difficult than steel but I taught myself to weld AL without too much trouble. Practice on some scrap for sure before your bike - it'll be easy to blow a hole in thin bike tube.
The biggest challenge I've had in welding aluminum as a hobbyist is that I rarely know what aluminum alloy I'm working with. Most things don't say what type so we're left guessing what filler is appropriate. If you use the wrong filler it could be prone to cracking again in the future.
Also for thicker aluminum preheating is very important. The aluminum transfers heat away very quickly so you get cold lumpy welds if you don't have both parts pretty hot at the start.
I agree with that and stand by these words. If people want to call it gatekeeping, so be it. Programming, software engineering if you will, is a serious discipline, and this craze needs to stop. Software building should be regulated and properly accredited as any serious activity.
I work in robotics and with quaternions (mainly 6DoF SLAM and used to do robot arm kinematics), but I don't get the use case for this. Maybe provide some example use cases?
We're heading to a future where (when) friction is a luxury. Anyways, I thank the organizers for the rare opportunity. Long live Blogosphere.app, long live blogs.
This. My personal style have always been llm-like, including the generous use of em-dashes, and "not-only-this-that" style mannerisms. It' increasingly difficult to retain reputation.
Neural cellular automata are interesting because they shift learning from “predict tokens” to “model state evolution.” That feels much closer to a transition-based view of systems, where structure emerges from repeated local updates (transitions) rather than being encoded explicitly.
I'm working on a theoretical/computational framework, the Functional Universe, intended for modeling physical reality as functional state evolution. i would say it could be used to replicate your CA process. Won't link it here to signal my good faith discussing this issue - it's on my GH.
from https://voxleone.github.io/FunctionalUniverse/pages/executiv..., "The Functional Universe models reality as a history built from irreversible transitions, with time emerging from the accumulation of causal commitments rather than flowing as a primitive parameter." Is it fair to say that time is simply a way of organizing a log file on a dynamic reality? I interpreted "composition of transitions" as a system of processes. I think the hard modeling problem is interpreting interactions between processes - that transitions don't simply compose, that observed transitions may be confounded views of more complex transitions. I gather NCA would be granular enough to overcome that.
That’s a very good objection, and it’s pointing at a real pressure point in our framework.
Short answer: it’s close, but incomplete. It’s not that time organizes a log of reality; rather, reality is the accumulation of committed transitions. What you’re calling a ‘log’ it’s the ontological structure itself.
I gather you're basically saying: what we see as a transition ≠ what’s actually happening at the fundamental level. This is a legitimate and deep problem.
You’re right that observed transitions may not compose cleanly. In the Functional Universe, composition is a property of fundamental transitions. What we observe are often coarse-grained projections of many underlying transitions, which can obscure compositional structure.
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