6 ms·
Airfoil (2024)
- Lwrless 8mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39526057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39526057
- dang 8mo agoThanks! Macroexpanded: Airfoil - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39526057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39526057 - Feb 2024 (296 comments)
- moralestapia 8mo agoI was just thinking the other day about how AI will pretty soon be able to create this kind of explainers on everything quite quickly. Amazing times!
- bayesnet 8mo agoIt’s kind of sad IMO. Bartosz has made a ton of these super interesting and meticulously designed explainers. Something thrown together with AI is much more likely to be made by someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about, and I’m worried that the sheer volume will crowd out actually quality content like this.
- SecretDreams 8mo ago> and I’m worried that the sheer volume will crowd out actually quality content like this. It's a valid fear.
- hollowturtle 8mo agoDon't think so, and we should stop spread damaging narrative like this. I'd say it's already able to imitate this kind of explainers(badly) thanks to his training data. All the subtle teaching nuances, effort, know-how and visual creativity that people like Bartosz Ciechanowski put on this kind of work is not reproducible if not statistically imitating it
- dahauns 8mo agoAnd the usual corollary: Not just thanks to his training data, but because training data of that kind and for this kind of topic - still - exists.
- hollowturtle 8mo agoExactly and him not publishing any new post in 2025 makes me wonder...
- carlos-menezes 8mo agoHaven't people been saying this since 2023? Yet to see AI build this kind of stuff "quite quickly".
- _verandaguy 8mo agoIt's been said before, but this prediction isn't amazing, imo. I look forward to Bartosz's articles because they're rock-solid sources of information and the visualizations are both easy-to-understand and surprisingly light on performance. It's all shockingly digestible. Honestly, as popular science writing goes, this is art as far as I'm concerned, and art is best when it comes from a place of passion and conviction, something AI will never be able to reproduce.
- estsauver 8mo agoI think it's actually already there. It's definitely possible to make these sorts of explainers with something like a Claude Code, you just have to spend a fair amount of time making sure that it's actually doing what you expect it to do. I think the biggest danger with something like a Claude Code is that you get something that looks functionally correct but that the details are suddenly wrong on. I wrote a little bit about this on my blog for some of the places that I've done visualizations actually, and I think it's remarkably easy to iterate on them now. https://estsauver.com/blog/scaling-visualizations https://estsauver.com/blog/scaling-visualizations
- moralestapia 8mo agoHey, that's a pretty great article! Thanks for sharing. (I hope you don't get downvoted by Chichanowski's fanboys. Sad to see people being against innovation, on this site of all places.) I think it's only a matter of time, AI history has been a cycle of "yeah, but it will never do this", then literal weeks later it does it, lol. We should think about how each part of the iteration cycle you describe can be improved. This is definitely a problem that can be solved!
- mock-possum 8mo ago> Someone like Bartosz Ciechanowski is still operating at a level I can't touch. His work reflects years of accumulated craft and a visual intuition that I don't have. Seems like you’re contradicting yourself a bit here- is it actually possible to make the sort of explainers from TFA, or is the author operating at a level you can’t touch?
- jkubicek 8mo agoGood rule of thumb: it should take less time to consume content than it does to create it. I don’t know how long it takes Ciechanowski to create these explainers, probably a few months? It shows and it’s well worth spending your time reading through his content meticulously. How long does it take for an LLM to crap out an equivalent explainer? 60 seconds? You should be spending less time than that reading it.
- tolerance 8mo agoIn order to be taken serious I feel like statements like this need to be qualified with who the claimant is imagining to be responsible for generating the anticipated output. The ‘A’ in AI isn’t for ‘autonomous’. Bartosz Ciechanowski could generate an explainer like this using Claude today if he wanted to. But would he? If someone like him had the mind to do it then they could instead. But where’s it at? These types may hold themselves to a standard above this method. No shame in that.
- underdeserver 8mo agoShould be (2024).
- MarleTangible 8mo agoI was excited for a moment, and wondered why the RSS feed didn't work, but later realized that the article is from 2024.
- greenavocado 8mo agoWhere can I find more articles where things are explained in this manner?
- burkaman 8mo agohttps://ciechanow.ski/archives/ https://ciechanow.ski/archives/
- ubj 8mo agoThe author of the Airfoil article has made several similar tutorials on various topics: https://ciechanow.ski/archives/ https://ciechanow.ski/archives/ For machine learning, Distill.pub has some excellent hands-on tutorials. For example, here's one on momentum: https://distill.pub/2017/momentum/ https://distill.pub/2017/momentum/
- matsemann 8mo agohttps://explorabl.es https://explorabl.es collects various
- lloeki 8mo agohttps://ncase.me/projects/ https://ncase.me/projects/ And going kinda meta, learning about the principles: https://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/ https://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/ https://vimeo.com/906418692 https://vimeo.com/906418692
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- colechristensen 8mo agoOk that's long, one top line thing people tend to miss in these flying explanations is that airfoil shape isn't about some special sauce generating lift. A flat plate generates any amount of lift you want just fine. Airfoil design is about the ratio of lift to drag most importantly and then several more complex effects but NOT just generating lift. (stall speed, performance near and above the speed of sound, laminar/turbulent flow in different situations, what you can fit inside the wing, etc)
- Stevvo 8mo agoUmm no, at zero degrees AoA as the first diagram on the page shows, a flat plate does not generate lift. But nobody actually questions that a flat shape can generate lift; we all made paper planes as a kid.
- wat10000 8mo agoThere are about a million places incorrectly "explaining" that airfoils create lift because the top path is longer and this means the air has to go faster. A flat plate would not create lift in that case. The fact that paper airplanes obviously can fly somehow never stops people from repeating this.
- kqr 8mo agoPaper airplanes do not have barndoor wings, though. Most of them have stepped camber through the way they are folded. It's not finished but I started writing this to clarify: https://entropicthoughts.com/paper-airplane-aerodynamic-stability https://entropicthoughts.com/paper-airplane-aerodynamic-stab... Scroll down to "trim and angle of attack". (I hope there's nothing embarrassing in there. It's an old, early draft.)
- colechristensen 8mo agoUncambered airfoils also don't generate lift at zero degrees. What constitutes "0" for curved airfoils is convenience. You want lift, you put a flat plate on an angle, anything fancier is for Lift/Drag, Thrust/Weight, etc.
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- mellisacodes 8mo agowait what? this is goood!
- huqedato 8mo agoThat's the missing course for the first year of any Aerospace Engineering faculty.
- random_duck 8mo agoI wish there was an infinite number of blogs that where this good.
- nntwozz 8mo agoBartosz Ciechanowski, the gift that keeps on giving.
- nvitas 8mo agoHe usually posts these brilliant explanations once or twice a year but nothing in 2025. I hope he finds the time to continue because the lessons are really really brilliantly told.
- darksaints 8mo agoThis is absolutely amazing. For those of us programming nerds that want to play with aerodynamics, I can't recommend AeroSandbox enough. While the code is pretty obviously written for people who know their way around aerodynamics and not so much around programming, it is remarkably powerful. You can do all sorts of aerodynamic simulations and is coupled with optimization libraries that allow you to do incredible aerodynamic optimizations. It comes included with some pretty powerful open weight neural network models that can do very accurate estimates of aerodynamic characteristics of airfoils in a fraction of the time that top tier heuristic solvers (like xfoil) can do (which are already several orders of magnitude faster than CFD solvers). https://github.com/peterdsharpe/AeroSandbox https://github.com/peterdsharpe/AeroSandbox
- peterdsharpe 8mo agoThank you for the kind words! :)
- Wistar 8mo agoOh man. This guy. His work is simply some of the best explanation content I have ever seen
- maximgeorge 8mo ago[dead]
- scotthenshaw3 8mo ago[dead]
- robshippr 8mo agoThis is so cool. I've become more interested in aerodynamics since I've started watching F1 and reading Adrian Newey's book. This is such a great post, especially the diagrams in the velocity section.
- seemaze 8mo agoI say it every time it pops up; I’m a huge fan of ciechanow.ski! They should receive an unlimited grant to produce educational content for the digital generation’s benefit.
- Cthulhu_ 8mo agoHere's how you can help: https://www.patreon.com/ciechanowski https://www.patreon.com/ciechanowski
- ivanjermakov 8mo agoNit: paragraphs in footer are misordered.
- queuebert 8mo agoThese are amazing illustrations, but I don't understand the emphasis on pressure differentials. That is not how wings generate lift. Due to attachment they deflect the flow, and the momentum change generates an upward force [1]. The practical point of understanding the flow over the wing is to keep that flow attached so that you can deflect it or reattach it if you get out of sorts. 1. https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/k-12/VirtualAero/BottleRocket/airplane/right2.html https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/k-12/VirtualAero/BottleRocket/a...
- stevenbhemmy 8mo agoThe explanation you described is the greatly simplified "high school friendly" explanation. It's not wrong, per se, but it's incomplete. Even your link explains: "The net fluid force is generated by the pressure acting over the entire surface of a closed body. The pressure varies around a body in a moving fluid because it is related to the fluid momentum (mass times velocity). The velocity varies around the body because of the flow deflection described above." I.e. pressure differential is experienced as lift and is caused by the flow turning. Explaining the actual cause of the flow turning and resulting lift (and why attachment is maintained along top surface) requires looking at fluid dynamics/navier-stokes including pressure differentials, viscosity etc. The pressure differentials allow a more comprehensive way of breaking down the forces at play. I like this video for a more comprehensive understanding without getting too in the weeds with the math: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa2kBZAoXg0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa2kBZAoXg0
- rawgabbit 8mo agoHe should have started his lecture with the chart shown at the 26 minute mark. Saying when we measure the pressures on the airfoil, we see high pressure at the front and bottom of the airfoil. Let me explain what is going on… I found his explanation at the 13 minute mark to be hand wavy. He talked about flow turning and momentum change but just hand waved away why pressure is higher at the bottom of the wing.
- roelschroeven 8mo agoYou are correct in that the deflected airflow exerts an upward force on the wing (or at least a force with an upward component; there's also a backward component (called induced drag if my memory serves me well)). The way the airflow exerts that force is through pressure differentials: air under the wing having higher pressure than the air above it. Momentum change can describe physical interactions, and it's often easier to calculate things that way, but actual physical forces still exist, and can also be used to describe the same physical interactions.
- alanbernstein 8mo agoI really like this pure-math way of looking at airfoil behavior: https://complex-analysis.com/content/joukowsky_airfoil.html https://complex-analysis.com/content/joukowsky_airfoil.html