Comment by tshanmu
3 days ago
Wow! This is the kind of news that we want on hacker news in 2026. Amazing hacker ethos.
The article could have been better with sharing some photos taken with the new camera.
3 days ago
Wow! This is the kind of news that we want on hacker news in 2026. Amazing hacker ethos.
The article could have been better with sharing some photos taken with the new camera.
Agreed, this is some proper nice tinkering writeup that we get far too rarely now.
Lovely project! I'm a software guy who in recent years does lots of CAD for hobby projects (mainly robotics) and orders custom machined parts (lots of sheet metal construction, occasionally milled parts) along with 3D printing.
I find parametric modelling very zen. Stacking operations is very Lego-like, like stringing up pure functions. Plus I can listen to podcasts while I model, but not while I write code - it engages the brain differently.
Now that LLMs are sapping some of the joy out of programming (I use the tools, they're productive, achieving goals and delivering user value is still satisfying, etc. - but the act of writing code is just more enjoyable than prompting, so it's a tad dispiriting that it's getting harder to jusitify) I also find that I get a lot of satisfaction from doing something with my hands. In some ways it's a safer space for technical creativity.
Can highly recommend hobbies like this.
You're saying you don't want to hear how someone then stuffed AI into their camera?
Imagine a camera that uses one AI to transcribe the image the sensor picked up, and then another one to use the transcription to generate the image.
No need to imagine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36139729
Paragraphica is a lensless, sensorless camera that, when you press the shutter, compiles a bunch of data with GPS, location, time of day etc, and feeds it to an image generator to create the image.