š #086 - You are the drawing machine now + Good/Bad AI
Short, late, angry, and so's the newsletter.
I think this book was designed to personally, specifically irritate me. I saw it in the local shop on the way back from posting letters, walked past it, and ended up turning back to buy it, just so I could continue my annoyance even longer. You win Thomas Pavitte!
Look at that tiny hand in the bottom right, filling in that spiral with various thicknesses to make the image appear. You are the pen plotter.
Inside are 20 pages like this, TWENTY, this is page 12ā¦
It was first published in 2017, and, according to the front, ā2 MILLION COPIES SOLDā - for 20 pages of spiral outlines!!
Iām so disgusted hereās the videoā¦
Obviously Iām being dramatic, and Iāve always loved people who make stuff like this; I like to think of them down in their workshop figuring out new puzzles and ummm, things - almost like crazy inventors. Thomas is therefore a legend; and somehow also made dot-to-dots good(er-ish).
Iām mainly annoyed that I didnāt realise selling the idea of the outline of something to publishers was somehow an option.
Hey publishers, if you want something like this, hit up the pen plotter community Iām sure thereās loads of fun stuff you can do beyond the AI slop colouring in books that seems to be filling the shelves.
# THE JOY OF DOING IT YOURSELF
The ājokeā I sometimes make ā about using a drawing machine to take the tedium out of drawing ā is that itās wrong, of course.
Sometimes we want to do something slow and methodical, a break from everything else; solving a crossword, colouring squares in on one of those stupid colouring the squares in puzzles (that I donāt like), word searches, Sudoku, and for me, writing code.
Often these things arenāt hard, theyāre a process we can go through and at the end, complete, satisfying.
Thereās also this, which Iām sure youāve probably seen some version of by now.
# BUILDING TOOLS & AI
I got asked about the UI in this photo the other dayā¦
ā¦which is an update to my āMinimal Viable Plotting Toolā that I first wrote about way back in newsletter #14 Works on my Machine, April 2023, just over three years ago.
The title there referencing that itās a very different experience writing tools for your own use, taking your own very specific way of working and computer/hardware set-up into account, vs making it work for everyone else. Despite that, because I knew not everyone could write code, back then I made that code public on GitHub for anyone brave enough to try and use it.
Weāll come back to this in a moment.
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Pen plotter artist gre recently published his tool for controlling his drawing machine; āWeb interface for controlling an AxiDraw pen plotter from a Raspberry Pi.ā
Which is different to mine, because of course gre has different requirements to me.
One of my requirements was that I should be able to see progress from the other side of the room, thus big round clear progress bars/circles.
Meanwhile targz wrote over on reddit, hereās a snapshot of part of it where heās talking about using AI to link together all the tools he wants to use.
Much like my tool and greās tool, itās primarily a UI over the top of various command line tools that make them work in a more intuitive/useful way, but each of these āappsā is clearly tuned to match the needs of each of us.
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Back to my UI; in 2023 I put my code onto github so other people could attempt to install and use it, because Iām an artist who knew/knows how to code these things, and perhaps other people donāt, they just want to spin something up someone else has shared and use it.
Since then Iāve gotten more drawing machines and wanted to control them all from one UI, remotely, so I too threw AI* at it and basically went ātake all this and update itā.
*currently a MacBook Pro M4 Max with 128Gb memory and all the cores, using Ollama, and (for the nerds) qwen3.6:35b-a3b-coding-mxfp8 for long running code tasks.
I could have updated the code myself, and I know how to update the code myself, but Iāve written this type of code hundreds of times before and I like the idea of computers actually doing stuff for me while I go eat lunch.
In reply to the person asking I said this (very permissively)ā¦
Probably the most sensible thing to do is clone the repo, point AI at it and go āWork out what this code does, itās overly complicated, I want something that allows me to simply and easily do...ā - and then give it a list of what youād want it to do and turn it onto your own personal tool.
Which is where I think we are with AI.
We donāt have to totally rely on someone elseās view of how a small tool should work, we can relatively easily spin up something that works for how we operate.
I want AI to do all the boring things Iāve done countless times before, unless, I feel like relaxing, getting into a flow state and tinkering.
However, Iād rather spent that flow state and tinkering writing code to make art, and I absolutely do not want AI to be involved in that process.
Kitty, my studio āAI PAā - absolutely does a bunch of boring metaphorical ālaundry and dishesā around the studio, she does not get her paws on my art process (apart from those postcards that one time).
# BAD AI
However this also popped up on the reddit the other dayā¦
This person very kindly shared an app theyād made, a kinda of Swiss Army Knife of pen plotting tools, processes and goodies. Incredibly useful and handy for people trying to get into pen plotting.
A treasure trove of helpful things.
Various repliesā¦
That's very cool! Thank you for sharing! I'm new to this world and I want to play a little bit before buying a plotter Your app seems perfect for this
Very nice - thanks for sharing this! Iām looking forward to checking this out over the weekend.
Thanks for collecting together all the interesting math stuff, and thanks for sharing!
Oh, but waitā¦
Where, āi honestly canāt remember all the resources i used as references ā¦ but ā¦ thank youā appears to translate to āI didnāt care to make a note of where I grabbed all this stuff from because I donāt give a fuck, but thanks for all the code, projects and work everyone else has shared, Iāve taken it all and ādumpedā it into thisā.
As someone whoās freely shared code with the community, published projects where you can view the source code, where Iāve commented on the source code so people can look through and learn from it, and whoās making a whole damn series on YouTube about how to code for drawing machines, did my code get ādumpedā into the tool, did your code? Who knows, because they āhonestly canāt rememberā
Cool, cool.
Oh waitā¦
ā¦no shit, and youāre welcome I guess.
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Itās things like the above that sometimes makes me want to yank all my code, projects and examples off the web, and stop sharing, because this is going to happen. I guess you can thank that dude for that.
But as they sayā¦
ācheck it out if you like. it's free, open source, MIT license, all that jazz. i know a lot of people on here have their own algorithms which way cool. maybe this could give you ideas or inspiration. or just pick apart the code and use what you like for your own project.ā
https://github.com/pywkt/plottter
Although they also sayā¦
āa note on exports: the ai overlords thought it would be cool to throw the axidraw stuff in there, but i don't own an axidraw (or anything compatible) so if anyone with one of those feels like testing that feature out that would be cool. let me know if it works out for you. same with the gcode export, i was about to test that out, but i broke one of my motor drivers and haven't gotten around to fixing it yet.ā
ā¦so YMMV.
Can you even open source and MIT license a shit load of other peoplesā stuff (with their own licenses) thrown into AI?
# THE END
Letās all try again in two weeks time, when Iāll send out the next more upbeat newsletter, 14th May.
Love you all
Dan
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