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In our tour at work, they show off a 3D printed, computer optimized part. It looks very similar to that tensile structure; ver organic looking. The customer d

In our tour at work, they show off a 3D printed, computer optimized part. It looks very similar to that tensile structure; ver organic looking. The customer didn’t like the look, and they had to fill in some areas to make it look less alien.

coldtea 7y ago
>The customer didn’t like the look, and they had to fill in some areas to make it look less alien Instead, they should have sold it as more organic and advanced to the customer, and explained why it is so, like the article did... That would gain them even more respect from the customer, whereas now they merely caved in and looked incompetent of getting it right at first (since the customer nows thinks it's his complains that made them finally do it properly).
- wlesieutre 7y ago
  You're assuming they didn't
  - coldtea 7y ago
    From the end result described either they didn't try or they weren't successful in doing it. If they did there wouldn't be any changes made to appease the customer.
    - wlesieutre 7y ago
      The fact that the customer was buying 3d printed computer optimized parts in the first place probably indicates that "more advanced" was explained to them. There are any number of reasons they might not have liked it. Maybe it looked odd because it didn't match the rest of the design. Maybe they were worried about their own customer (of the end product that the part goes into) thinking it didn't look sturdy enough. If you're designing parts for a rocket then by all means worry about every ounce of weight, but for most stuff if the customer wants it to look less weird you can just make it look less weird. And then charge them for the extra material.
klyrs 7y ago
Once, I found a curious challenge in optimizing a bitwise formula for a particular computation (by hand it took hours; brute-force, a program found the essentially-unique optimal solution in a fraction of a second). I showed it to a fellow mathematician... he was mad because he couldn't determine rhyme or reason in the solution I found. Wicked smart guy, outclasses me as a mathematician by far... but he essentially rejected my result because he couldn't ascertain how to reproduce it by hand (despite me having a relatively simple proof of optimality).

coldtea 7y ago

>The customer didn’t like the look, and they had to fill in some areas to make it look less alien Instead, they should have sold it as more organic and advanced to the customer, and explained why it is so, like the article did... That would gain them even more respect from the customer, whereas now they merely caved in and looked incompetent of getting it right at first (since the customer nows thinks it's his complains that made them finally do it properly).

wlesieutre 7y ago
You're assuming they didn't
- coldtea 7y ago
  From the end result described either they didn't try or they weren't successful in doing it. If they did there wouldn't be any changes made to appease the customer.
  - wlesieutre 7y ago
    The fact that the customer was buying 3d printed computer optimized parts in the first place probably indicates that "more advanced" was explained to them. There are any number of reasons they might not have liked it. Maybe it looked odd because it didn't match the rest of the design. Maybe they were worried about their own customer (of the end product that the part goes into) thinking it didn't look sturdy enough. If you're designing parts for a rocket then by all means worry about every ounce of weight, but for most stuff if the customer wants it to look less weird you can just make it look less weird. And then charge them for the extra material.

klyrs 7y ago

Once, I found a curious challenge in optimizing a bitwise formula for a particular computation (by hand it took hours; brute-force, a program found the essentially-unique optimal solution in a fraction of a second). I showed it to a fellow mathematician... he was mad because he couldn't determine rhyme or reason in the solution I found. Wicked smart guy, outclasses me as a mathematician by far... but he essentially rejected my result because he couldn't ascertain how to reproduce it by hand (despite me having a relatively simple proof of optimality).