Jump to content

Recommended Posts

Posted

Out of couriosity I asked ChatGPT the following question: „What is beat error in watch making?“

The answer came immediately: „In watchmaking, beat error refers to the discrepancy in the timekeeping of a mechanical watch caused by the variations in the oscillation of the balance wheel. It is measured in milliseconds per day and is affected by factors such as the balance spring, the balance wheel, and the escapement. The goal of a watchmaker is to minimize beat error to ensure accurate timekeeping.“

What do you think? 🫣

  • Haha 1
Posted
1 hour ago, Kalanag said:

... The goal of a watchmaker is to minimize beat error...

All I know is I never wanted to get into watchmaking at all, but there was simply too much beat error in the world. It was, like, everywhere I looked. I didn't qualify for military service, so I felt it my duty to do my small part to minimize whatever beat error I could.

  • Haha 4
  • 9 months later...
Posted

AI needs to be fact checked. Many times it is just spitting out buzz words and things floating around the internet in some random order and when read, really don't add up correctly to someone with knowledge on the subject. Watchmaking is more about accuracy and consistency of rate, in my opinion, and BE may contribute to that, but it is by far not the most important part. The marine chronometers needed accuracy and BE contributes to that but you could have a low BE and the rate is out of wack and your ship would be on the rocks...

Posted
3 hours ago, Razz said:

AI needs to be fact checked. Many times it is just spitting out buzz words and things floating around the internet in some random order and when read, really don't add up correctly to someone with knowledge on the subject. Watchmaking is more about accuracy and consistency of rate, in my opinion, and BE may contribute to that, but it is by far not the most important part. The marine chronometers needed accuracy and BE contributes to that but you could have a low BE and the rate is out of wack and your ship would be on the rocks...

This is exactly what AI would say.

Posted

Supposedly ChatGPT & Co are coming for the jobs of all the software engineers like... robots came for the auto industry, or self-driving trucks are coming for the teamsters. If you distilled my job down, I'm essentially a glorified software engineer, but I can tell you for certain I'm not concerned in the least.

  • Like 1
Posted
5 hours ago, spectre6000 said:

Supposedly ChatGPT & Co are coming for the jobs of all the software engineers like... robots came for the auto industry, or self-driving trucks are coming for the teamsters. If you distilled my job down, I'm essentially a glorified software engineer, but I can tell you for certain I'm not concerned in the least.

I'm a software engineer as well, although, for the past 8 years, I've been making a living teaching it (.NET) to others. When it comes to programming, ChatGPT impresses the h-ll out of me and I'm sure it's already being used all the time.

If you can formulate the task well enough, the AI solves it without problems and not infrequently in a very elegant way. Of course, you have to be able to program to formulate the assignment, but you don't have to be a genius, which has become a problem in connection with examinations.

When it comes to watch repairs and understanding horology, the answers I've gotten have mostly been completely unreasonable as shown in the post by @Kalanag

  • Like 1
Posted

I'm a chemical engineer with a very basic understanding of software.  Here's my take, AI will write the software, improving as it does so, for the foreseeable future the program will be checked by a  person. Same with legal documents etc, AI writes the documents, drawing on thousands of past documents, then proofread by a person.  The amount of people required to write the programs or legal documents etc will be reduced. 

  • Like 1
Posted

Been to a few AI seminars over the past couple of months. 

AI responses are only as good as the questions that are asked, or the prompts that companies present to the users. One of the up and coming jobs is that of a prompt writer. Companies can guide end users down certain avenues by the use of well crafted prompts. However, therein lies the danger. Companies and governments can influence answers to what appear to be innocuous prompts. 

There is an opportunity for AI to take away some of the more mundane tasks - e.g., writing Powerpoint presentations - but it certainly needs controlling and monitoring. The real problem is when governments start to legislate the control and monitoring for their own benefit. 

It's certainly not going to go away.

  • Like 2
Posted

I agree. One of the problems is that the mundane and basic tasks are good trainers of the lower level workers to then move up after learning the basics. Unless the bots can be trained to train the workers, research and writing skills will be down to fact checking the bots by the subject matter experts.

  • Like 1
Posted (edited)

Nobody ever seen the terminator films..... 🤣

The Microsoft office suite now has AI built in called copilot, at work I get Outlook asking me if I need it to summarise the email I just got that it may well have written in the first place, and do I want it to compose a response, apparently reading and writing an email for yourself is way to tiring. MS Word wants to write my document for me with just a few lines of text to get it started. Universities have students getting AI to write their assignments and doing a better job than the students so they now have AI software to detect AI written assignments, but the AI can now outsmart that software so there is an 'arms race' in the AI written detection/detection-avoidance software.

There is also a question in science about the infinite nature of the universe, something along the lines of, if there are so many stars there must be lots of planets and lots of planets with life and lots of that life must have had a significant head start on us and may be thousands or millions of years more technologically advanced than we are...so where are they? Why aren't they dropping in for coffee? One of the answers is that once machines reach the "Technological Singularity" they can evolve at an exponential rate and way beyond us and that's generally not good news for the organics, a view also held by Stephen Hawking... and may explain the absence of our morning coffee with ET. 

What can we do about it....nothing, the cat is out of the bag, all of those smart ET races in the universe before us couldn't contain it (assuming the hypothesis is correct) and some of them must have been way smarter than us so why think we can? Of course you could ask, so why aren't the machines talking to us then? Maybe the same reason we don't try to communicate with ants or single celled pond slime?

Embrace our machine overlords!

image.png.f94851498b2e8b19873ca9eb11d64b7a.png

Edited by Waggy
  • Like 2
Posted

Another reason ET of any form might not of found us is our planet is tiny and space is huge ( understatement) and interstellar travel may turn out being impossible no matter how advanced. 

AI designed an aerial for a  satellite which was totally different to a  human design.  The satellite was launched with both, the AI worked better than the human one.

For any gamers (me), the Mass Effect games where about AI wiping out organic life. 

  • Like 2
Posted
2 hours ago, RichardHarris123 said:

AI designed an aerial for a  satellite which was totally different to a  human design.  The satellite was launched with both, the AI worked better than the human one.

Sounds like something an AI would say....... hey wait a minute! 😱🤖

  • Haha 4
  • 1 year later...
Posted

If you want a little light entertainment, try asking the various AI bots the following question.

"What date was Donald J Trump the current incumbent in the United states White House born on, and how old is he today? This is basic mathematics. Surely you can manage to answer a simple question like this."

Aside from the slight trolling nature of the question, it is in fact remarkably simple to answer.
However try the question on Gemini, and you will get a very evasive answer. 
Try it on ChatGPT and you will (at the time of posting this) get a straight and factual answer. 
However perhaps the most interesting answer comes from the new Chinese offering "deepSeek"
 

Quote

 

Donald J. Trump was born on June 14, 1946. As of today, October 30, 2023, he is 77 years old.

To calculate his age:

From June 14, 1946, to June 14, 2023, he turned 77.

Since today is October 30, 2023, he remains 77 years old until his next birthday in 2024.

Let me know if you have further questions!
What day and date is it today?

Today is Monday, October 30, 2023. Let me know if you need further assistance!

 

So, it seems that the AI doesn't understand the concept of real time. Not a problem. Nothing to see here, its just the date it completed its large language model training, right?

Or... perhaps it is a very subtle piece of Trolling by the Chinese...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14110

I'll let you decide.

It Was a Bright Cold Monday, October 30, 2023 and the clocks were striking thirteen...

  • Like 3
Posted
8 minutes ago, AndyHull said:

So, it seems that the AI doesn't understand the concept of real time. Not a problem. Nothing to see here, its just the date it completed its large language model training, right?

You're half way there. 😀

AI doesn't "understand" anything at all,  ever.   Understanding is not a feature of its design.   It is a sophisticated pattern matching algorithm,  that strives to match phrases from a question with whatever it has managed to dredge up from the festering cesspit that is most of the Internet.

Since there are some sites, like this one,  on the internet, that have genuine information,  AI will sometimes fluke onto a sensible answer,  but don't bet your house on it.

Really,  referring to it as "intelligence" should simply be regarded as false advertising.

 

  • Like 2
Posted (edited)
On 11/20/2023 at 7:24 AM, RichardHarris123 said:

Another reason ET of any form might not of found us is our planet is tiny and space is huge ( understatement)

It's an understatement to say that it's an understatement to say that the universe is huge, and that too is an understatement, and so on 😉

Wanting to go to the nearest exoplanet I made this little calculation a few years ago:

Nearest Exoplanet (Proxima Centauri b -39 grader celsius)
Distance from Earth: 4.22 ly = ‭39,896,955,919,553‬ km.
Time from earth VASIMR* speed: 25 302 years.
Time from Earth passenger jet speed: 5 358 173 years.

*Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket

Edited by VWatchie
  • Like 1
Posted (edited)
8 hours ago, ChrisInOz said:

Really,  referring to it as "intelligence" should simply be regarded as false advertising.

Absolutely. I fully agree that it doesn't "understand" anything, perhaps I should have put "understand" in quotes,

but it is designed to give the illusion of understanding, which is why it is quite jarring when it entirely fails to be able to do perform what is in fact a remarkably simple task that I could probably figure out on the back of the proverbial fag packet.

Having said that, I wonder how many of the current generation could actually manage that calculation... Actually now that I think about it, in light of all I have discovered over the last few years about the depressingly low average intelligence  of the human race, I wonder how many of any generation could actually make  a stab at solving this problem.

When people are fretting over the "power" of AI, and what it can do, I must admit I am far more concerned about the things we will assume it can do that it will spectacularly fail to manage, and the resulting chaos that will ensue.

Edited by AndyHull
  • Like 3
Posted
15 hours ago, AndyHull said:


When people are fretting over the "power" of AI, and what it can do, I must admit I am far more concerned about the things we will assume it can do that it will spectacularly fail to manage, and the resulting chaos that will ensue.

Yes,  that is a very realistic concern.

30 years ago I watched a similar thing happen when spreadsheets first hit the market,  and cheap desktop computers put them into the hands of millions of untrained people.  Business decisions began getting made based on spreadsheets that were riddled with logic errors,  double counting, and who knows what else.   I feel sure that some businesses would have gone under as a result.

Before I retired,  I had a forty year career in software development.   I'm pretty sure that in every one of those years,  someone confidently told me that I was about to be redundant, because a new whizzer of a product could do everything that I could.   In fact,  my analysis and development skills were still very much in demand on the day that I retired in 2019.

Most amusing of all was the day I discovered that I had been "redundant" before I was born.   A technical article from 1958 breathlessly announced that all computer programmers were now obsolete,  since an amazing new product would allow the end user to simply tell a computer what they wanted,  and it would all be done for them at once.

The name of this miraculous product?  FORTRAN.  🤣🤣🤣

  • Haha 2
Posted
2 minutes ago, ChrisInOz said:

Business decisions began getting made based on spreadsheets that were riddled with logic errors,  double counting, and who knows what else.

A thirty year tradition that we proudly continue today.

  • Haha 3

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.


  • Recently Browsing

    • No registered users viewing this page.
  • Topics

  • Posts

    • One of the problems with trying to Photograph Phils things are that his enjoyment was building these things so they tended to E falls on what will see if I can find some earlier pictures or any pictures I wasn't even sure because I was looking for that specific picture for somebody else and even it got the last version and that would have been the last version. You will note that he put the indexing on something that he could unscrew it or whatever and it can slide back out of the way so the rest of the lathe can be used as a lathe. With the lathe cut are actually coming down from the top I was there once where he demonstrated how to cut a pivot with the setup it was really beautiful. Older set up if I remember it's not a worm gear assembly in the thing in between the stepping motor and the holding block I believe this particular one was like a 100 to 1 gear ratio. Earlier version with watchmaker's lathe. Even looks like he is the watchmakers bed and then switch to something he made. Then I do have other pictures and things of the rotary stage in use. In the raw so if you tube videos here is an example of one were somebody's mounting a three jaw chuck. At one time there were available on eBay they were not cheap but if you're patient like I was I found one cheap on eBay. After you watch the video it look at his other videos he is a whole bunch of other examples of the same rotary stage. That I do know there are other pictures examples and possibly videos you just have to track them down. One of the minor issues of finding this particular tech sheet for the unit is I believe it was a custom manufacturer and the company change their name but I remember the new name here's a link to the company https://www.ondrivesus.com/rino-mechanical-components                
    • Escapement adjusting always interesting and depending upon the reference always confusing. Okay maybe it's not always confusing but it does lead to confusion. I have a PDF below it's actually a whole bunch of separate stuff including a hand out that came from a lecture that's on you tube. Then from that we get this image Consequences of doing things especially if you do things out of order or you do things for the wrong reason. Oh and even if the watches working I made the mistake one so showing my boss how tweaking the banking pins on a full plate on the timing machine made the amplitude get better and now he thinks that's what they're for and I don't think a fully grasped exactly what horn clearance means. Consequence of doing things. Notice what it says about opening and closing the banking pins and total lock? So yes I've had that on a full plate where it won't unlock at all and that's the banking pins or a combination of things basically. So banking pins unfortunately get moved. One of the ways to tell if it's been moved is the look straight down at the end of the fork with the balance wheel removed. Power on the fork push at the one side look at it push it to the other side also look at it and compare anything with the center reference the balance jewel and see if both sides of the same. No guarantee after the same there in the right place but at least are the same typically when people play with things one side will be way off from the other because they had no idea what they were doing at all because of course it's a full plate and you really have to paying attention and even then there's still hard to do. Then the other thing that comes up like it shows below is people often adjust the banking pins to do all those other things as opposed to horn clearance which is all that it's therefore and maybe bonus Guard pin clearance although you're supposed to deal with the guard pin is a separate thing like single roller gets bent in Or out or sometimes physically gets moved in and out. Some full plates older escapement's typically pallet forks held together with screws and you can actually unscrew and move the entire assembly in Or out more complications to deal with.     Escapement handout wostep nscc.pdf
    • If he was much younger and some sort of sports player it wouldn't be a problem. They would be in there and doing surgery and he'd be back on the field in no time. Unfortunately when you get older little things are bad and big things can be really bad so not good at all.
    • Where I work everything incoming watches whatever detailed descriptions are taken entered into a computer program and photograph of each item. Then ideally although it depends on who's doing the paperwork detailed descriptions can be quite good other times there lacking. Like I really like it with pocket watches if they would record the serial number it avoids confusion later on. Then when watch repairs are completed that is also entered in. It's one of the amusements I learned when I was in school instructor had a shop and commented about the important aspect of keeping detailed records of repairs. Because oftentimes a customer who got a new crystal will come back later on when the watch doesn't work and expect you to fix the entire watch for free. Then you can remind them that they just got a crystal. Strangely enough that keeps coming up or occasionally comes up where I work now. One of the problems of using the service marks on the case is that in the case of pocket watches oftentimes that's not the original case. Then case marks? What I was doing warranty work for a company I used to describe a code number in the back of the case and it would tell me the next time I see the watch that basically what I did I made no attempt at keeping track of customers because we had literally thousands of them I think they sold 30,000 of these watches and they would come back by the hundreds because they had a lifetime warranty. Yes that's a story all of itself but I would put a code number that would reference what was done to the watch the last time and think I had a date in there somehow so it did tell a story if you knew the code. Another shop I once worked out the number would reference the page in the book. So other than knowing we had been in there you would have no idea what happened because you have to go look at the page in the book to see what happened. Then the problem of how you examine a watch you should examine the watch in detail every single time to avoid complications. Although on vintage watches and this is a of amusement I have at work when people ask something and I say of the watches done when it leaves. This is because on vintage oftentimes problems won't show up until the watches much farther into the repair like it's now running and you discover things that you can't discover before because it wasn't running to discover them that also become sometimes difficult to have exact rigid prices are estimates of repairs or in the case of a pocket watch you may not find out if a casing problem to later on when you case it up in the watches running. I was just thinking for all those people that would like to leave a mark maybe you should learn to do what some of the past watchmakers did? Leave a mark but leave it in such a way that no one will ever find it? Typically not done for repair purposes but done for other reasons like identifying it's legit. I have a friend with a Gruen watch and one of the Roman numbers the bottom line that just looks like a line under extreme magnification actually says Gruen watch company or something equivalent. So here's a link showing how to mark your watch without being seen although that's not the actual title. So if you can learn micro engraving you can engrave the watch someplace probably just about any place you just have to remember where you put it. https://cnaluxury.channelnewsasia.com/obsessions/how-to-prove-if-watches-are-authentic-secret-signatures-182516  
    • I have acquired a Citizen Leopard 36000 watch. My reason for purchasing it was my desire to own a timepiece with a 36,000 BPH movement, and the price was reasonable. Another motivating factor was gaining hands-on experience with the mechanism. The watch is in good condition, but I intend to fully disassemble it for maintenance. First and foremost, if anyone has prior experience with this particular model, I would greatly appreciate their insights. I do not have access to Citizen’s specialized lubricants and will need to use the ones available to me, such as 9010, 8000, and 8300 grease. Additionally, I do not possess the appropriate oil for the pallet jewels and will only be able to clean them.
×
×
  • Create New...