Posted by helloplanets 16 hours ago
https://store.steampowered.com/app/241240/Contraption_Maker/
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_&_Al's_Incredible_Toons
The answer appears to be free weights did the job and people only became sedentary recently.
For ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clark_Collection_of_Mechan...
EDIT: now I find stuff like "walking table" and I wonder if that kind of thing predates 3d printing.
Way more telling that "draw a pelican on a bicycle"
Then create a modular simulation library and point and click simulator where all the component variants are covered so that the user can piece new systems together using those components.
AI videos of steam trains make a horrid mess of the engine linkages. Some wheels rotate in the wrong direction. Wheels rotate on stationary locomotives. Just keeping rails in parallel is beyond many Stable Diffusion type systems. Trackwork with switches is just rails all over the place. Some videos can't even keep the train wheels on the track.
Pseudo-historical AI generated videos on machinery related subjects are awful. I saw one recently on rolling mills. There are blatant errors. Some rolls are turning in the wrong direction. Useless rolls facing sideways to the direction of slab travel. Gears that don't do anything. Steel entering rolls headed for the roller, not the gap.[1]
That's for a rolling mill, which is a large but simple machine. AI misunderstanding of things with moving parts is even worse. There's now more AI slop about historical machinery in search results than real-world content.
The side project was dropped as life got in the way, but I really enjoyed looking at all the different mechanisms.
Its great, but also pretty tragic.
For those who also haven't seen it before who might follow: the presenter (who demonstrates the mechanical mechanisms) lost his wife to a heart attack in 2024, kept the channel going for another 1.5 years, made a seemingly happy 'My Last Video' video that presented the end as just running out of new things to talk about, then he killed himself.