[HN Gopher] Ink and Switch Constraint System (2023)
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       Ink and Switch Constraint System (2023)
        
       Author : mpweiher
       Score  : 59 points
       Date   : 2025-04-18 17:09 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.inkandswitch.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.inkandswitch.com)
        
       | dhash wrote:
       | One of the cited references is Guillermo Webster -- and while the
       | article lists uncmin as the desired artifact, the project that
       | uncmin was developed for takes the concept beyond layout to back
       | solving for desired program outputs.
       | 
       | Carbide [0] is the project that encapsulated some of this in a
       | workable demo. It's really cool!
       | 
       | [0] https://alpha.trycarbide.com/
        
       | jauntywundrkind wrote:
       | See also their blog post on Fuzzy Constraints (2023).
       | https://www.inkandswitch.com/untangle/
       | 
       | Madly in love with how forward a frontier Ink & Switch cuts
       | towards. Trying to make software less of a handcrafted artifact
       | that each individual corporation builds on their own, as they see
       | fit, and making computing a broader more universal project, with
       | more regular hooks for humans to get themselves in the loop.
       | 
       | A lot of "why are we still writing dead programs" vibes, in great
       | ways. https://jackrusher.com/strange-loop-2022/
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33270235 (181 points, Oct
       | 2022, 61 comments)
        
       | nyrikki wrote:
       | A reminder, for those who find TAOCP useful, Knuth released
       | "Volume 4 Fascicle 7, Constraint Satisfaction" last month. It
       | connected a lots of dots for me, but like most of TAOCP may/ or
       | may not be useful standalone depending on the individual.
       | 
       | It helped unify what can be a complex intersection of fields with
       | conflicting terms in a way that I could guess the direction this
       | post was going.
        
       | Animats wrote:
       | Nice.
       | 
       | Constraint solving like that has been a feature in CAD programs
       | for years. Here's Autodesk Inventor's 2D sketch mode.[1] You get
       | an error if you try to overconstrain something. There's a
       | symbolic solver checking for over-constraint.
       | 
       | Under-constraint is harder to deal with. There's a count of the
       | number of additional constraints needed to specify the drawing
       | fully. You don't have to get that count down to 0, but if you
       | aren't just sketching for illustration, it's expected that you
       | reach the fully constrained and dimensioned state before cutting
       | metal.
       | 
       | Scaling problems dominate as drawings get more complex. It's easy
       | to do this for high school geometry problems. It's hard to do it
       | for jet engines. User interface design for dense drawings is
       | really hard. What do you do when stuff is on top of other stuff?
       | The big, expensive CAD systems (Autodesk, Dassault, SolidWorks)
       | have struggled through the scaling problem.
       | 
       | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3LB0f-keL8
        
       | WillAdams wrote:
       | The comment on constraints which still blows me away is the
       | footnote on the readme for Dune 3D:
       | 
       | https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d
       | 
       | >1. I ended up directly using solvespace's solver instead of the
       | suggested wrapper code since it didn't expose all of the features
       | I needed. I also had to patch the solver to make it sufficiently
       | fast for the kinds of equations I was generating by symbolically
       | solving equations where applicable.
       | 
       | (anyone looking for an easy-to-use opensource 3D CAD program
       | should consider it)
       | 
       | For folks not familiar w/ Solvespace it's a light-weight 3D CAD
       | program: https://solvespace.com/index.pl
       | 
       | Probably a bit more approachable for folks is:
       | https://www.cadsketcher.com/ which adds the Solvespace constraint
       | solver to Blender.
        
       | Duanemclemore wrote:
       | This is a rad read. I love everything ink and switch does, and
       | Ivan's podcast "The Future of Coding."
       | 
       | There is an important age-old piece of advice though: "never ask
       | a man his salary, a woman her age, or Ivan when he's going to
       | publicly release hest."
        
       | keeganpoppen wrote:
       | i will just say that i think these guys do amazing, amazing, very
       | thoughtful work.
        
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