3d printing is not the default fabrication method now that we’re getting good at it. It just shines in certain applications.
Getting a little theoretical here
With the current state of the technology, 3d printing lags behind some traditional manufacturing techniques like machining and in terms of speed, cost, quality, available materials, etc. except for some relatively niche cases.
However, that gap is closing a bit every day, it may or may not ever catch up completely or surpass the old technique in those aspects
But if it does ever get close, I could very much see 3d printing being a preferred method
Subtractive manufacturing like machining, by design, creates a lot of waste, all of the chips and off cuts that are removed from the stock are either discarded or require additional energy and/or materials to recycle.
And things like injection molding require custom molds that wear out over time, and can be expensive to design and manufacture
And in either case, you’re largely locked into making one thing on an assembly line at a time, and to switch over to a different product you’re probably going to need to switch out a lot of the molds and tooling, recalibrate everything, etc. which can be time consuming.
With 3d printing, you could theoretically use only the amount of material that’s actually in the finished product (if you design it that it doesn’t require any external supports ) you don’t need any custom tooling or mold, just generic, interchangeable nozzles (for FDM, LCD screens or lasers or whatever the equivalent is for other printing technologies) and you could switch production from one item to another by just hitting print on a different file.
Again, we’re not there, may never be there, but it’s a cool thing to think about
kescusay@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Exactly. It’s not true. Any company that fires all of its developers and sets up some poor intern to prompt-engineer updates to their codebase is going to fail spectacularly.
Source: I’m a software developer and use LLMs regularly. There are certain tasks they are very good at, but anyone who commits unexamined code generated by an LLM gets exactly what they deserve.
lectricleopard@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Ok, im a hardware dev. They’ve tried to make us do software style project management every time there’s a new fad (agile last time). It usually doesn’t fit.
What do you find them useful for in your role? Like a coding partner, you can ask questions? Or linting? Im at a loss in my role. I need to know the proprietary code base to write a single line of value. We aren’t allowing anyone to train an ai on our code. Thats a huge security problem if anyone does.
kescusay@lemmy.world 4 days ago
So there are a few very specific tasks that LLMs are good at from the perspective of a software developer:
And that’s… pretty much it. I’ve experimented with building applications with “prompt engineering,” and to be blunt, I think the concept is fundamentally flawed. The problem is that once the application exceeds the LLM’s context window size, which is necessarily small, you’re going to see it make a lot more mistakes than it already does, because - just as an example - by the time you’re having it write the frontend for a new API endpoint, it’s already forgotten how that endpoint works.
As the application approaches production size in features and functions, the number of lines of code becomes an insurmountable bottleneck for Copilot. It simply can’t maintain a comprehensive understanding of what’s already there.
JustTesting@lemmy.hogru.ch 4 days ago
one other use case where they’re helpful is ‘translation’. Like i have a docker compose file and want a helm chart/kubernetes yaml files for the same thing. It can get you like 80% there, and save you a lot of yaml typing.
Wont work well if it’s mo than like 5 services or if you wanted to translate a whole code base from one language to another. But converting one kind of file to another one with a different language or technology can work ok. Anything to write less yaml…
Omgpwnies@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I use it to generate unit tests, it’ll get the bulk of the code writing done and does a pretty good job at coverage, usually hitting 100%. All I have to do for the most part is review the tests to make sure they’re doing the right thing, and mock out some stuff that it missed.
WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today 4 days ago
They are getting faster, having larger context windows, and becoming more accurate. It is only a matter of time until AI simply copy-cats 99.9% of the things humans do.