Cutting a 700 carat rare valuable gemstone [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
From a 50,000-ft view of the collective, it looks gross and seems like there’s no end in sight. However, individuals can still take responsibility to find a balance between excesses that society provides and complete avoidance of any forms of entertainment.
More specifically with gemstones "Guaranteed to appraise at double the value for insurance purposes."
i found it very interesting that he shared he was hoping for 300+ cts., but had resolved to be satisfied with at least 250. so he did alright after all.
Copying the old masters is often an important part of developing one's own skills as a painter.
https://www.sightsize.com/old-masters-copying-older-masters-...
> The training of painters in past centuries regularly involved copying old master drawings and paintings. To that end, most museums happily allowed students into their buildings for that purpose (some still do). But the practice was not limited to students. Even fully trained old masters copied older masters.
Why copying old master paintings is useful - https://youtu.be/91UXW_hSpnU
The Art of the Copyist - https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/videos/2023/3/copyist...
Art: France’s long history of copying Old Masters at the Louvre - https://www.connexionfrance.com/article/Mag/Culture/Art-Fran...
> The practice of copying and recreating paintings by the Old Masters at the Louvre goes back to when the museum first opened in 1793, when any artist could turn up and use a freely available easel to copy a masterpiece.
> ...
> Not all artists copied works to improve their skills. Some took up the practice professionally, since the demand for copies of masterpieces in the Louvre was high throughout the nineteenth century.
> ...
> These days only 250 copyists are permitted to install themselves in front of the museum’s art works, and a two-year waiting list shows that there are plenty of hopefuls waiting in the wings to take up a palette and brush.
> Those granted access have up to three months to work on their copy.
Source: I spent a lot of time in the library copying sketches of the renaissance masters as a kid.
AI is the pencil, not the artist. As cool and capable as large models are they are not even remotely close to replacing self directed human intent. If you do not understand this you do not understand art.
I don't believe there's some magical quality to human intelligence, just that the things we are making today with AI are still orders of magnitude short of the real thing, and that there are still very difficult open questions in that gap.
I've kept considering the term hand crafted when reading this thread about what is considered valued art or not as that's what applies to this gemstone TFA directly. Then it went to the painters with brush strokes, and that too keeps the hand crafted idea. That's when I jumped to directors. To step further away from art, and switch it to sportsball. While current managers might have once been a player, now, they are essentially entering text into prompts to get their "tools" to provide the result they are looking for with varying degrees of success. The managers/coaches can't kick/throw the ball themselves to get the results. They just have to get their "tool" to perform better by constantly tweaking the text entered into the prompt. Hell, now I'm thinking parents are constantly tweaking their prompts to get their kids to do something.
Okay, at this point, I'm convinced we're all just part of the matrix.
Bluntly, it's clear you have no personal understanding of such productions and did not understand the most important point of my comment and how different it is from piloting a generative model.
But if you can't see how a director trying to use phrases like "I see what you're doing, and it's interesting. But let's try saying the actual lines a few more times, and then we'll let you play with it some more", or "okay, that was great. let's do it one more time", or "this time with more energy/angrier/etc", or "that was great everyone! this time, we're going to do the same thing but with..." or any other variations of director speak isn't like a user tweaking their prompt while looking for something entirely different or keeping parts of it while looking to change a different part.
If you can't see how that kind of feedback loop is similar to using a GPT, then you're really being obtuse as it's as blatant as the nose on your face
This is only true if you misunderstand the meaning of art as a concept and its relationship to humanity.
i would like to not agree with you that plenty of people believe machine-generated work is even in the same universe as human art (including that which is not painted). but i'm afraid you may be right.
Yes.
the answer truly is a simple 'yes.'
I like to use Toyota as an example, because they famously reject total automation as a desirable goal. The believe having humans in the loop creates a learning loop that gets the best overall result, so they optimize for a sweet spot between automation and human.
To use an analogy from art, automation doesn't replace the artist, it replaces more limited paint brushes. As amazing as recent large model advances are, there's also a clear difference in how effective humans are at using them to get the desired result.
If you're just playing around then a simple prompt to finished image pipeline is convenient and shockingly good. If you're being more specific about the end goal then you need the model to expose more fine grained ways for the user to express what they want and modify the intermediate results. This why you see Adobe et all focusing on that kind of "smarter tool used in detail" approach.
I don't think so, or at least I think it misses where this industry drives value from. I don't know if my comment will seem too cynical for the Hacker News add value to discussion threshold, but - the entire industry is by definition built, completely, around sub-optimization and artificial complexity, scarcity, and meaning. If you want optimal and efficient and automated, you can get it for fraction of the price. The hand made sub-optimal facet is a strong part of the perceived / advertised value.
Or maybe, just possibly, armchair opinions from programmers who have never done this and have no idea what the reality is beyond a youtube video have superficial understanding?
Which do you think is more likely?
I think the main reasons (beside "vanity") are:
a) huge profit margins, limiting the incentive to optimize
b) high start up costs combined with relatively little volume
A system would have to accurately measure imperfections/inclusions, then pick the best design, then it'd either have to cut it themselves or communicate the instructions to the person (who'd have to be willing to use such a system).
The current approach with a human designing and cutting the stone is simply good enough, so there is no reason to change. And something like re-cutting the Koh-i-noor happens rarely enough that I suspect nobody wants to invest in developing the software for it when you can get a close enough result by throwing more one-off manual work at the problem.
Synthetic stones (which I assume are a much simpler problem because they're even cheaper and have fewer inclusions to optimize around) are already being cut by robots (or so I've been told, at least). I think the whole "real natural stone" and "hand-cut" parts are definitely part of the appeal/selling point.
If you care about a "slam dunk", you'll buy robot-cut Cubic Zirconia or Moissanite and call it a day.
(the line of where "handcrafted" goes from "friendly and community and positive and encouraging neighbourhood entrepreneurs" to "evil and scheming and big-corpo-deceptive" is subjective evaluation, but none of them necessitate "irrational" let alone, as is implied, "stupid")
https://www.youtube.com/@hedronrockworks/videos
(Not affiliated, just found the channel one day, and enjoy the content)
This allows you to preserve material for making multiple gems where grinding can only result in a single piece.
https://www.moregems.com/collections/morganite/products/294c...
So curious what the raw material cost!
https://www.mineralminers.com/html/morlrgh.stm has some larger sizes, though nothing as large and crystal as the one in the video.
The linked one has the largest crystal - with inclusions - at 547.1 carats and $1094.
You can get smaller pieces in bulkish quantities for about $2 per carat at about 10 carat sizes (side note: its way to easy to find over priced "healing stones").
If nothing else, it seems like having that much concentrated methyl salicylate would irritate a lot.
There seems relatively few videos of such machines on youtube, such as - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnKcl2rw-qg maybe I'm not using the right keywords though.
What I would really love to see is a version of the rough stone but with only two opposite faces polished, so that you can see through it like he did at the beginning of the video with the oil, but keeping all other surfaces rough.
https://www.moregems.com/collections/morganite/products/294c...
Given that the sample actually shows a ring and refers to it in the full text, that's obviously not referring to the object but now I'm wondering about the $2,375 figure in the transcript. Is that just a really bad auto-transcription error?
Wikipedia article on morganite says something like ~$300/carat depending on overall quality.
Micrometer-scale, not nanometer-scale.
Without any gemstone knowledge whatsoever, I guessed at least $40K.
There are a lot of areas where the label price is based on some underlying much lower value with somewhat standardized factors being applied so I was wondering if there's some implicit "everyone knows this" translation from the "appraisal" to the sale price I wasn't aware of. Hence me pointing out that that would be quite the markup so there is probably more to it than just profit.
this definition captures the actual sale price of almost any transaction imaginable quite comprehensively—which is what most people are really asking when curious about the 'value' of a good, like a precious gemstone, or a service.
NB: 'value' is defined by the same as "1. The significance, desirability, or utility of something" or "2. The monetary worth or price of something; the amount of goods, services, or money that something commands in exchange." 'markup' as "[a]n amount added to an item's cost to determine its selling price."
The cut gem's label price is based on an appraisal. The appraisal is based on the market rate (a real-world approximation of the theoretical "fair market value" you explained) of comparable gems.
Because based on both the mistranscribed video and the sample appraisal the appraisal seemed to be much lower than the asking price on the website, I assumed this might be because the appraisal is incomplete and doesn't take into account some factor that might be well-known in the industry to not warrant any mention in the video but still contribute significantly to the final price. Notably, just because the appraisal was specified as a dollar amount that does not eliminate the possibility it might refer to something other than a USD sale price.
Given that a lot of luxury goods and collector's items are auctioned off at vastly inflated prices (often as speculative investment or simply money laundering and complex tax write-off schemes), I would have found this surprising but not implausible. Another example would be insurance where "value" might either be the cost to replace something or the depreciated value of the same item, which can be a very different amount (again by orders of magnitude).
it's largely orthogonal to what I said
appreciate the back-and-forth.
If it really did people would use CNC for this.
https://www.gemrockauctions.com/search?query=morganite&weigh...
1505 ct for $3999 asking https://www.gemrockauctions.com/products/1505cts-morganite-c...
GE made the first gem quality diamonds in the 1970s. They can be manufactured in commercial quantities since the 2010s. The largest one so far is 511 karats.
So the diamond industry has to market them as inferior, labeling them "lab grown" and suggests they won't retain their value.
Objects are valued at what someone is willing to pay for it.
Abundant commodities are valued at the average price a person in the group is willing to pay. This "gemstone" is actually beryl, a very common crystal. What they're trying to do is take this commodity mineral and price it like a scarce object. Paintings so scarce as the Mona Lisa with an available quantity of one are priced at auction to the maximum any person on planet Earth will pay. They actually don't even know how to price it they had to invent a competition to discover the number from the greatest fool in the room. If there were two or eight original copies, the value would nosedive. The scarcity provides the value, not the art.
Since 2010 some shrewd businessmen have decided that pink beryl is a coveted gemstone and marketed it like diamonds. But it's totally worthless, as are diamonds. Similarly cut glass looks the same.
How evil is it to target couples who want to get married and start a family, to then start a marketing campaign and invent a tradition to force them to buy a worthless rock for three months of the groom's salary? I wonder how many expecting working class families had less food on the table because of that.
You've got to be very careful about this kind of thing. Stamp it out. Deviating from utilitarian logic gets perilous right fast. Your unborn children will literally starve