All of Nate Sharpe's Comments + Replies

Thanks Malcolm, I'm glad you found it valuable!

As someone who spent the first two years out of college designing a full mouth electric toothbrush as the lead mechanical engineer, unfortunately making one in your garage is unlikely to go well. Bristling (or tufting as it's known in the industry) is pretty much only done at very high volumes - minimum order quantities don't go lower than 100,000 (or at least they didn't back in 2010/11). One of the reasons our toothbrush didn't make it to market was that there's no established method for prototyping small quantities of tufted products because at this poi... (read more)

I can see this being automated given the visual capabilities in the latest models along with a healthy dose of input from existing practitioners. Do detailed teardowns of different products across many different industries, with images of each component and subassembly along with detailed descriptions of those images (what the parts are, what they're made of, how they were made, what purpose they serve as a whole and what purpose various features are serving). This could then start to create the textual training data to then allow the models to generate su... (read more)

There are obvious approaches that haven’t been well explored. For example, we can create a lot of data using simulations, although there will be a gap between simulation and reality.

For the specific field(s) in question here (mechanical parts/products), I think there's really three mostly separate domains - design, prototyping, and high volume manufacturing. The latter two seem easier to me (how to make a thing  or a million things given an input picture/drawing/CAD), but the former (given a product spec, design a thing that satisfies the product requ... (read more)

instead, documenting this granular, real-world knowledge is impractical and inefficient.

I would add that unlike software and law, that work directly with text that is then easily shared, searchable, and intrinsically composed of a finite set of discrete tokens, people working with the physical world cannot easily share or search amongst the infinite set of continuously variable physical features. As a mechanical engineer, I've often bemoaned the lack of a "stack overflow for product design" or similar, and I think this is a big part of why such a thing doe... (read more)