The Spring Came Early…

And that means pain. Lots of it. However, first, enjoy two pretty pictures:

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Somehow, crocuses (croci?), escaped from our flower bed and now sprout occasionally in the lawn. I don’t mind, in fact, I like it. But I must watch where I step during these early spring working days. And boy, I do have lots of work. I harvested my coppice a bit late this year because February was way too windy for that to do safely. Now I am in the middle of processing all that wood because I must manage to do it before I must replant my bonsai. The winter was too warm and the spring came way too early this year. I dread the summer.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

This year I have decided to not put all the long thin willow and poplar twigs through the shredder but to bundle them and then cut the bundles into 50 cm segments. It is a lot more work (about 3x) now but I hope it will be less work in the winter. My heating stove does not work well with wood chips, when I put too much in it at once it gets choked up and smokes a lot and later it can overheat because the chips first burn too slowly and then too fast. With bundles, there’s less smoke, and overheating does not happen because they burn more evenly throughout. Thus I can put in the oven more at once and save two or three walks down the steps into the cellar each day in winter. Further, I hope that mice will be less inclined to make nests in the bundles than in the woodchips. I find at least one nest in there each year since I no longer keep cats and traps are useless – they tend to catch more shrews than mice.

But it is hard work – the first two days I was doing the bundling I overexerted myself and could not move or even think and sleep properly for two days after that. Now I have about 1 cubic meter of bundles to cut and still some hazel, maple, ash, and hornbeam twigs to either bind or put through the shredder if they are too crooked.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I also have approximately 1/2 of a cubic meter of ash, maple, and hazel rods that can be cut into 50 cm pieces without binding.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

And about 1 cubic meter of poplar logs to do the same. I will spend several more days, possibly two weeks, doing this. Altogether I estimate this to be circa 20% of my yearly firewood needs. It is more than usual, because this year I harvested all of the coppice, regardless of age. I had to do that so I could try and plant new trees instead of those that water voles destroyed – if I did not cut everything, the new plantings would be completely overshadowed.

I am glad the spring is here but as always I do wish I was more physically fit. It takes me twice the time to do something an average man of my age could do. Well, that’s life, it only will get worse.

My persimmon tree started growing this week, I want to replant it tomorrow and update ya’ll about how it is growing.

Chess, AI and Lessons About Societal Impact

Marcus has used chess several times in his articles about AI on stderr and in comments on Pharyngula and it got me thinking about whether there is something valuable we can learn from how the ascend of AI of sorts has impacted chess. And I think there is. First about the state of affairs as far as AI in the chess world goes.

The good:

The chess-playing AI’s are getting better and more accessible very quickly. What once needed a supercomputer the size of a wardrobe that probably used enough power to heat a household, can now be easily done by a pocket computer running on a battery. This accessibility of high-quality game analysis to anyone with a smartphone has led to a relative chess boom. Today’s young generation has unprecedented access to learning about chess games. Websites like chess.com and Lichess.org are thriving. As a result, new chess masters and grandmasters are getting younger and younger. AI has contributed to humans getting better at the game and has led to more people enjoying said game.

The bad:

Wide and easy access to AI that can easily beat even the best chess player of all time has its dark side too. Cheating both in online and OTB tournament chess is at an unprecedented level. I am not a bad chess player and not an excellent one either. But I am good enough to occasionally be paired with really good players online. And also with cheaters who like to pretend they are good. I do not know the exact number, but I have reported probably over a dozen people for suspiciously good play. One report was rejected at the time but said player was confirmed to be a cheater about a month later. One report was a mistake on my part. All the rest were confirmed to be cheaters, sometimes after a short delay, sometimes nearly immediately. And every year there is a talk about cheating in high-ranking OTB chess tournaments, occasionally even with physical proof  – a few years ago a chess grandmaster lost his title after being caught analyzing his current game with a phone hidden in the restrooms.

The ugly:

The rampant cheating online and some prominent cheating scandals OTB foster a culture of paranoia. Former world champion Vladimir Kramnik embodied this paranoia last year, when he publicly hinted that GM Hikaru Nakamura is cheating, without outright saying so. The only proof that Kramnik provided for his allegations proved only that a high understanding of the game of chess does not automatically translate to a high understanding of maths and statistics and how proofs work. But Kramnik is not alone. Allegedly the talk about cheating is behind the scenes all the time at the highest echelons of chess and suspicions are not uncommon. Rarely names are dropped and proofs are provided, but the suspicions are there all the time. I observed this paranoia in myself after losing a game egregiously and my high ratio of correct to false reporting of foul play is because I do my best to analyze the games afterward and look at some data before reporting someone. I also know that I have been myself probably twice reported for foul play (at least my opponents told me they were reporting me). Both of those reports would of course be mistaken. Funnily enough both of those instances I did not play particularly well and subsequent analysis found really sub-par gameplay on my part.

So, what to do with it, is there something to learn about how to deal with AI overtaking the arts? I think there is.

If anything, chess teaches us that the ascend of highly capable AI into a field does not automatically mean the death of said field. Chess tournaments still exist, and amateur chess players still enjoy the game of skill. People do not want to just see and admire good chess games, they want to see and admire good chessgames played by other people. And I think the same applies to art. Using AI as I tried (and failed) to do is equivalent to a chess player using AI to learn a new strategy or analyze their games. If done properly, it could help a lot of people to learn new skills faster and better than before and unleash an unprecedented boom of art. But people still want to see other people’s creations, not just slop churned out by algorithms.

However, chess avoided destruction by implementing and enforcing strict regulations. That is more difficult to achieve in arts than in chess because there is no overarching authority like FIDE and I do not know how to implement this in the real world. But an effort should be made. If someone uses AI to create a picture and then passes it off as their own creation, they should be dealt with the same way as if someone is caught cheating at chess. No galleries should display art by said artist, no auction houses should sell it and their reputation should be forever tarnished and the community should shun them and ridicule them (the last one appears to be happening, at least). They might not be plagiarizing in the sense the word is understood right now, but they definitively are not creating in any sense of the word.

I do not understand why some people cheat in a game of skill even when there is nothing tangible of value to be gained. But people still do it, my understanding, or lack thereof is inconsequential. Apparently, they do get the dopamine hit after a won game, even though they did not, as a matter of fact, win the game – a machine did that on their behalf. And there are people to be found online who consider themselves to be artists because they write elaborate prompts to stable diffusion. But they are no more artist than a teenager who uses Stockfish is a chess grandmaster.

In my opinion, just as it is not morally (and in a sense legally as far as online chess sites and FIDE go) OK to “commission” your game of chess to an AI and then pretend that you are the one who won, it is not OK to commission an art piece and then pretend you were the one who created it.

Addendum: One interesting thing about AI in chess is that whilst the AI does play better than humans, it is generally lousy at mimicking human play. I have won games in a lost position because my opponent resigned – the position was winning for them, but the winning move was so obscure and difficult to find that they could not find it in time. I also lost winning games because I lost my nerves. AI cannot (so far) mimick the time distribution of moves that people have etc. So far even AIs that are deliberately dumbed down to have a lower level corresponding to human players of some strength for the purpose of training or entertainment feel a bit “off” and there are signs that show that they are not human.

Addendum 2: AI is to art what ultra-processed fast food is to nutrition. And if unchecked, it will have the same consequences on our societal mental health as fast food had and continues to have on our physical health.

A Howlicool Knife

I am still undecided on whether to offer this knife for sale or not. It is a cursed knife, mistakes, and obstacles just kept popping up. I tried to use the oak extract blackening on mild steel fittings and it did not take. So I used heat and linseed oil and the results were great – but they got damaged badly at the last minute when I was sharpening the blade. That damage is irreparable now, although one might not spot it if unaware of its existence. I damaged the blackening on the blade too, but I was able to restore that to an almost new look. It turns out that some paper masking tapes have glue that is damaging to both blackening techniques used. It sticks too strongly after a while and it is nigh impossible to clean it off the metal surface.

Pictures below the fold.

[Read more…]

Still Not a Masterpiece

Strictly speaking, I can never make a masterpiece, because I do not know about any knifemaker’s guild or similar organization around here that could grant me one. And even if I knew, I could not be bothered with going through the hassle accompanied by obtaining one. There was a knifemaking vocational school in CZ, but a quick Google search failed to confirm whether it is still functional. When I found out about its existence, I already had my Master’s degree in Biology and Chemistry and it was not feasible to go back to vocational school at that stage of my life.

Nevermind. I just finished two knives and I do think I did a good job, although they both took an absolutely unholy amount of time to finish. The blades were first seen in the first Overabladeance post. Both blades are highly polished, which makes them a PITA to photograph. I am not entirely convinced my choice of background for these photos was correct but I am reluctant to go through all the hours of photographing it again with another color.

Lotsa of pictures under the fold. [Read more…]

Creativity AIn’t the issue

I tried to use generative AI in my last designs, both for the auroch and for the wild boar. First I tried the AI that is supplied with the latest version of Photoshop. Since I am paying for that, I might as well use it. Then I tried to use Stable Diffusion because it is free. And after that, there is no way in hell I will pay for Midjourney, even if I could afford it.

I won’t post the pictures I got here, the internet does not need more AI-generated crap to pollute it. Suffice it to say, that whilst some results looked at least somewhat interesting, most were total crap and none were useable for my purposes. Right from the outset, I found out that the AI does not actually contribute anything to my work at all.

I am one of those people who has some trouble visualizing things in their mind. Especially human faces. I would be completely incapable of drawing the face of even the most beloved person in my life. That might sound odd for someone who doodled all the time and who used to be sufficiently good at drawing to get into art school where part of the entrance examination was drawing a Goethe bust, but that is the way it is. I generally need some kind of template to get started. However, as I found out with the AI, my inability to form a clear visual picture in my mind does not mean that I start without a clue as to how the result shall look. And that is where I clashed with the AI and lost.

I got plenty of two-headed or six-legged animals, plenty of zebu or bison-like animals instead of aurochs, and a lot of domesticated pig lookalikes instead of wild boars. The pose of the animal was never right, no matter what prompts I used. Even after I wrote “auroch running from left to right” I got a picture of what looked like a pair of six-legged water buffaloes running from right to left. At one time the Photoshop AI even deleted one of three generated pictures because the prompt “auroch bull charging” somehow triggered its anti-porn filter or something.

After a few days of faffing around, I found out that my old process – which I described in my previous post – is actually the better way to go. Because despite my poor visualization skills, I still have a pretty good idea about what I want to achieve and what the end result should look like. The AI did not help with that in any way. I only wanted it to generate the picture to get started, and I haven’t got even that. I had zero control over what came out of it. It was a game of chance and I never enjoyed those.

No doubt that with a lot of work and a supply of carefully selected images to train the AI myself, I might get some useable results, but I also got those with a simple Google photo search and making a biro sketch in a few minutes. And once I had the sketch, once I got started, I built on that.

I do not consider generative AI to be completely useless but if it is creative, to me it was a hindrance, not a plus. Sure, I used it to generate dozens of somewhat unique pictures, but despite me being the one giving the prompts, I was in no meaningful way the one who actually created the result.

The results were pictorial ends to a game of Chinese whispers. Sometimes amusing, sometimes interesting, but always widely off the mark.

My Creative Process

Marcus’s recent posts about AI got me thinking and as a part of my thoughts on the issue, I want to start today by writing about my creative process, using my most recent art pieces. Those pieces being knives, because why not.

For me, the idea of how to create something usually pops into my mind without any conscious effort. I can be sleeping, eating my lunch, or driving my car, mulling over this and that and I get the starting of an idea about how to create something. And then it grows from there organically during the process itself.

Of course, all my knives are influenced by my experiences with using and making knives, as well as the designs I saw, whether conscious of that influence or not. But with these two knives, I can be a bit more specific. One of them started nearly thirty years ago and it is inspired by another knifemaker’s blade that I saw in one of my books. I changed both the outline and the grind profile, but the inspiration from someone else’s work was the starting point. For the other knife though, it started with my first failed attempt at a machete (-click-), thus the inspiration for this specific design was an accident.

When I started to make the two blades, I had no concrete plans for them and I had originally intended to make them with ordinary wooden scales. But as the works progressed, I started to think more and more that they would look splendid with engraved bone scales and I left them lying for a year with that idea at the back of my mind. During that year, I worked on other things, as the ideas for what to do with these two slowly matured in my mind. The bigger one got me on a line of thinking that ended up with the idea of engraving a picture of an auroch on the scale, but I still had no idea about the smaller one.

Then in the fall of last year, I successfully sold a knife with a picture of a roe deer on the sheath and when talking with my mother about what animal to use next, she suggested a wild boar. And whilst I have declined the idea for a sheath decoration (for now), I did think that it would look well on a bone scale, thus I finally got the idea for the second knife. Again, inspiration for one came out of some murky associations in my subconscious, the other one came from a nudge by another person’s ideas.

So with a rough idea in my head about what I wanted to accomplish, I started outfitting the knives. And as I wrote in my previous post, during the manufacture I decided to make the handle scales with hidden pins, which gave me an even bigger area to embellish. And when the knives were finally finished, I could start on the designs for the engravings.

With animal designs, I normally start by looking through my books and the interwebs for photos and drawings for inspiration. Not to copy – not the lest because to find a picture with the exact pose that I could use would be a stroke of luck indeed – but to use it as a guideline for a picture that is not egregiously anatomically incorrect. When I find a picture that is roughly what I want the end result to be, I start sketching. Most of that process can be seen in this picture:

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Nowadays I start with biro sketches on paper that I subsequently refine on PC. In the past, I would go with pencils on paper all the way to the finished product. I wanted to use a whole pig, but I had trouble fitting that on the scale due to its shape, so I decided to use just the head.

When I fine-tuned both designs on PC to my satisfaction, I decided to test whether the boar head would look acceptable, so I made a test piece on an offcut of bone.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

As you can see I made again changes from the previous sketches. Not only because I am not a copy machine, but also because each medium imposes its own limits on the creative process and thus each medium demands some changes in attitude to get a usable result. At this stage, I thought I was finished with designing and ready to set out to work, but my mind kept working. It kept nagging me that the scales looked too empty. There were no visible pins and thus there was ample space to fill. I added a rope pattern as framing around the head, but it still was not enough. I tried to fish my mother’s mind for ideas and she delivered – I should add some spruce twigs. I initially dismissed the idea because I did not know how to implement it, but when I tried to google “spruce twig pattern”, I got an idea for how to do it, I drew it and I was finally satisfied.

Nevertheless, I still only had decorative designs for the right side of each knife. I decided to leave the left side on the auroch blade blank, but I felt somehow that the boar needed to have something on the other side too. And without prompting, an idea came to me in the evening just before sleep – to continue the rope frame around the boar head to the other side and engrave a decorative knot there. As far as which knot to use, this time I did not look for inspiration to others, I simply took two pieces of paracord and arranged them into knots for about an hour until I got a result I liked.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I have redrawn the design on the PC into a shape that fits the scale and thus my designs were finished. I printed them out on paper labels and set out to work.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

The actual realization is more about craft and technique than about the creative process. If you are interested in that, tomorrow there will be a short article on my Knife Blogge about it.

Next time I would like to write about how this all connects to generative AI. I do not know when, but hopefully next weekend.

Hidden Pins on Bone Scales

I wrote about how I make handles with hidden pins before (-click-, -click-) so I won’t repeat myself in this post too much. However, I tried that technique with something new this time – bone scales.

I am currently making two big outdoor knives with highly polished blades. Those blades alone were a lot of work so I have decided to go all the way and make the knives really posh. So I have decided to make the handles with bone scales. However, when making handle scales from bone this big, they were a bit too thin. Thus I have decided to bulk them a little bit with 2 mm micarta (dark brown for contrast). And using micarta gave me the idea to use my hidden-pin technique for bone scales too.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I did not originally plan to make the pins hidden so the holes were placed just as if they were visible (I originally planned a different bolster shape too). So there are six 3 mm metal pins and 4 6 mm bamboo dowels holding the handles together now. The super big holes filled with wood were drilled so big to remove needless mass from the tang and the wooden plugs are there to increase glued surface.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I drilled all the way through the micarta and about 1 mm into the bone. I would not use this technique for bone alone because it is very rigid, stiff, and brittle. But micarta is somewhat pliable, elastic, and strong both in tension and pressure so I think it is an ideal material for the transition between the metal tang and the bone scale.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

This gives me a nice, big surface on which to draw something pretty. I already have designs for both handles and one is half-finished.

Mechanically, I think this handle construction should withstand everything that a classic one with pins going all the way through would. As far as aging goes, the epoxy glue did not fail on any knife I have made yet, but should it fail at some point in the distant future, it should also be relatively easy to fix with new glue.

When Gun Regulations Fail

I have long held that our weapon laws are sensible and functional – not too strict, not too loose, and I still think they are more on the reasonable side than not. But they do sometimes fail, as they did just now.

Czechia had yesterday the worst mass shooting in our history. Mass shootings do occur here, unfortunately, every once in a while. This one was perpetrated by a person who held multiple firearms, legally, because he had no criminal history or mental health diagnosis. His motives are so far unknown, he did not appear to be targeting any specific demographic – his goal was apparently just to cause as much pain as he could.

This does not happen here even remotely as often as in the USA, but even once would be too many. And I am afraid that this incident will be used to argue for further loosening of our already loose gun laws by idiots who think adding more guns to the situation would somehow prevent it, instead of multiplying it.

Improvipairing mah Belt Grinder Again – New Platen

The steel platen behind the belt has been a bit problematic since the start. As you can see in older pictures, it was a piece of angle iron that was on the left side attached to the belt-grinder arm with two screws. The problem was that when I exerted pressure on the right side, it bent ever so slightly and the belt started to wander off and the whole thing behaved a bit unpredictably. I learned to work around the problem, but it was a problem and it needed solving. So this week I finally solved it.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I bought two hinges and screwed them on a piece of 3×40 mm mild steel at a distance slightly bigger than the thickness of the belt grinder arm. Then I drilled two holes through the arm and put in them two carriage bolts with winged nuts. Then I cut slots into the hinges that I could slide under the screw heads and the nuts. Because the hinges are slightly more apart than the thickness of the arm, when I tighten the screws they work as flat springs with a slight bend and it all holds together very nicely.

To serve as the platen I have screwed a piece of 10×50 mm mild steel on. It works perfectly. It is stable regardless of which edge of the platen I work on and I can exert as much pressure as I want, although admittedly, I have only ground bone on it and not steel. I might either harden the platen by carbonitriding it or I can weld a hardened steel plate on the face, but mild steel works just fine too and with my rate of making blades it will hold for a long time as it is.

There is one last problem that I need to solve, and unfortunately, I do not know how. It is also difficult to describe, doubly so in a foreign language, so if you do not understand what I say, the problem is probably not at your end.

I need a reliable and stable way to adjust the belt’s traction. The spanning arm was a bit wibbly-wobbly, and when I fixed that, I got new problems. When I optimized it for a forward-running belt and tried to run it in reverse, it wandered off to the right and fell off. And when I optimized it for a reverse-running belt, it wandered to the left and bit into the arm. After a lot of faffing around I managed to get the belt stable in both directions – but then it was off-center and the sideways position of the spanning wheel had no influence on it whatsoever. The spanning wheel is crowned and that should make the belt tend towards its apex and thus I should be able to move the belt sideways, but it did not have any influence – the same thing happened whether it was near the arm or as far from it as it could go. Only the tilt of the wheel had an influence, but when I fixed the wobbliness, I lost the ability to tilt it.

I have managed to get the thing running by bending the screw on which the spanning wheel is fixed. When I turn the screw now, the wheel tilts, and I can adjust the belt. The problem is that it is too responsive and not very stable, just like it was before. I am wracking my brain for solutions, but so far I have not come up with any that are doable with my equipment.

Belt Grinder Re-Wheeeeeeled

The belt grinder has now all the wheels newly surfaced with micarta and all 30 mm diameter wheels were increased to 60 mm.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Subjectively it runs quieter and smoother now, unfortunately, I did not make a noise measurement before to have an objective comparison. I still have the previous tracking and spanning wheels, but not the motor wheel, so I cannot get it to the previous state now – shame that I did not think of that but whatever. Maybe I will try it with the smaller wheels, maybe not, because when I was at it, I ground even the previous wheels to better roundness than they were, so even they should now run smoother. I will keep the 30 and 40 mm wheels to grind fullers and finger grooves.

The belt grinder has done a lot of work over the years and it shows, but it needs more improvements. The spanning wheel still does not work as well as it should and the belt is not entirely sideways stable.  I do not know how to do that yet, unfortunately. But I do know how to improve the platen behind the belt to make it more stable. That should be done next week when I get some 50×10 mm mild steel that I ordered. I had to order it, because I had nothing suitable in my scrap pile to use, which sucks since money is short.

Improvipairing mah Belt Grinder Again – New Tracking Wheels

My tracking wheels made from alu-tubing had a diameter just 30 mm, so the ball bearings were running really rough when at full speed. and they chattered and were generally noisy too. I have been thinking for a long time about how to make bigger and better wheels. I tried to glue soft PVC on the surface. That stopped the chattering and added ca. 1 cm in diameter, but when it ran at full speed, the PVC was ripped off. I tried to glue on leather, and the same happened. And now I hope I have finally found a solution – to make them from micarta.

I have used a technique that I learned from my older brother as a child when making paper car models. To get nice and sturdy wheels for those models I wound a glue-covered strip of paper around a wooden skewer until I reached the desired diameter. One could get nice, sturdy, and round-ish wheels that way. Later in university, I used the same technique to build a complete chess set (I still have it). So for the wheels for my belt grinder, I soaked strips of cloth in epoxy resin and wound them around the (scoffed and thoroughly de-greased) alu-tube that is the core of the wheel until the diameter was approximately doubled (that should halve the rotational speed of the ball bearings and thus reduce noise and prolong their life).

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

After that, I put the whole thing in a plastic bag and I sucked out as much air as possible with my vacuum pump. I could not do a very good job of it and I also could not seal the bags very well, but I think it was good enough.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

After the epoxy was thoroughly hardened, I cut the excess on the sides and pressed the ball bearings in the tubes. I did not cut the sides very well on one wheel, but that should not be a problem. The wheels also were not exactly round at this stage. This was the snag that stopped me from doing this a long time ago. I knew they wouldn’t be very precise and I do not have a lathe that would allow me to make them really round. But last week I finally got an idea of how to make them round with my belt grinder.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

First I have made a fixture for the wheels from 5 mm mild steel and a piece of board. I could span the wheel on it and push it against the platen of the belt grinder, fix it with a clamp, and then with a slowly running 40 grit belt (and very carefully) I could grind it to a roughly circular shape concentric with its rotational axis. The result was a rough and round-ish wheel and I managed to not hurt myself too badly, only one fingernail is now thinner than it should be. I did not take pictures of that, because I forgot.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

To get a smoother surface I ran the wheel against a slow 100-grit belt a bit and then I changed the direction of the belt and used wood turning chisels and fine abrasive cloth to further improve the surface.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

And it worked reasonably well. The wheels are not perfect, but they chatter less than the previous ones and I expect that with wear the surface will get smoother. If not, I will try to coat them with epoxy mixed with a fine sawdust and polish them again. The advantage of micarta is that It glues well so I can re-surface the wheels at any time. It is also tension-strong so there is no risk of the wheels exploding or cracking mid-work.

Now I will make a new, thicker spanning wheel this way too. And I will add a few mm micarta on the motor wheel as well because it too is not exactly concentric and that too introduces vibrations and noise. This opens a lot of opportunities to make better concentric wheels of different diameters – I still need 3 and 4-cm wheels for grinding fullers and finger grooves and I might need other diameters in the future too.

It unfortunately also means I have to make a new platen. I have jerry-rigged the old one so I can do some light work on the grinder as it is now, but It is not as stable as it used to be because it was built with smaller wheels in mind. But I am working on that problem already and I do have ideas that I think will work. I am also planning on making a new jig for grinding fullers.