Airfoil (2024)(ciechanow.ski)
134 pointsby brk2 hours ago8 comments
  • underdeserveran hour ago
    Should be (2024).
    • MarleTangiblean hour ago
      I was excited for a moment, and wondered why the RSS feed didn't work, but later realized that the article is from 2024.
  • colechristensen22 minutes ago
    Ok 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)
    • Stevvo14 minutes ago
      Umm 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.
  • an hour ago
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  • greenavocadoan hour ago
    Where can I find more articles where things are explained in this manner?
  • mellisacodes5 minutes ago
    wait what? this is goood!
  • an hour ago
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  • moralestapia2 hours ago
    I 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!

    • bayesnetan hour ago
      It’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.
    • hollowturtlean hour ago
      Don'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
      • dahauns43 minutes ago
        And 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.
        • hollowturtle35 minutes ago
          Exactly and him not publishing any new post in 2025 makes me wonder...
    • estsauveran hour ago
      I 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

      • moralestapiaan hour ago
        Hey, 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!

    • carlos-menezesan hour ago
      Haven't people been saying this since 2023? Yet to see AI build this kind of stuff "quite quickly".
    • _verandaguyan hour ago
      It'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.