Hacker news

  • Top
  • New
  • Past
  • Ask
  • Show
  • Jobs

3D-printed book turns its own G-code into raised lettering (https://www.designboom.com)

85 points by surprisetalk 4 days ago | 30 comments | View on ycombinator

Fwirt 1 day ago |

I'm sure the idea here was a physical quine, although since it only contains 2.5% of its own G-code it's not really a quine, any more than a "Hello World" program is a quine since the string "Hello World" is in the program text. It would be trivial to generate something like this depending on which part of the G-code you pick.

robofanatic 1 day ago |

Is anyone else confused by thier cookie consent banner? The switches start out gray and become black when toggled. which position means consent? It feels intentionally misleading.

jf___ 1 day ago |

The origins of Automatically Programmed Tools (APT the precursor of g-code) is a fascinating read [1] about the early intentions of -- its a poem forseeing LLM & CAD:

(From THE NEW YORKER) Cambridge, Mass., Feb. Z5-The Air Force announced today that it has a machine that can receive instructions in English, figure out how to make whatever is wanted, and teach other machines how to make it. An Air Force general said it will enable the United States to "build a war machine that nobody would want to tackle. " Today it made an ashtray [2]. -- San Francisco Chronicle, March 28, 1959

That ashtray was teh 1st CNC'd object. Noble [3] speaks about the political angle that was an underpinning motivation

[1] http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=960118.808374

[2] https://mitmuseum.mit.edu/collections/object/2007.037.001

[3] forces of production - a social history of industrial automation (Noble, mit press)

somesortofthing 1 day ago |

I was going to say that this is the first physical quine but then I remembered that we actually had that a few billion years ago.

NDlurker 1 day ago |

Cool idea for printing braille. I bet I could vibe code a program to convert .epub files to braille then to printable copies.

kibwen 1 day ago |

> Manual contains only 2.5 percent of its own G-code in its first version. That low figure is part of the point. Current FFF 3D printing resolution and text scale place limits on how much code can fit onto the object while also describing the volume of the object itself. A fully self-contained version would enter an endless loop, since every printed mark would add more data to be described.

The fact that quines exist means that it must be possible to print a fully self-describing book of this sort, though it's possible that you'd require a more expressive language.

sargstuff 1 day ago |

Perhaps doing the g-code text as barcoding / q-code sequences might permit more code to be included in book?

undefined 1 day ago |

undefined

dyauspitr 1 day ago |

[dead]