#065: "Good to See You", Practical Digital Painting, Summer of Math Exposition

Hi All!

We are pleased to welcome you to this week's edition of Undiscovered, a newsletter with exclusive resources and insights expanding from the material found on our main site - becketu.com.

This week, we will take a look at the current issue with digital painting and the solution, how Barack Obama greets those he meets, a complete guide to building with Cursor and other AI apps, and more.

Let's dive in:

Practical Pigment Mixing for Digital Painting

Digital artists familiar with software like Adobe Photoshop, Procreate, Adobe Fresco, and Clip Studio Paint often encounter a common issue when blending colors. When combining two distinct hues, such as blue and yellow, the resulting blend often appears as a muddied or desaturated version of the expected color, rather than the expected green. This phenomenon occurs due to the linear blending algorithms used in most digital painting software, which average the color values without accounting for the nuances of color theory and light behavior

​@Jxmnop shared a paper that discusses the potential software solution to this. This describes the problem well:

jack morris @jxmnop turns out the way paints mix (blue + red = purple) is much more complicated than how light mixes (blue + red = pink) they have to use a little bit of nonlinear modeling to capture this, and "add" paints in this nonlinear latent color space jack morris @jxmnop no AI here, just the coolest paper i've seen in a while 2:10 PM • Jan 3, 2025 82 Retweets 2291 Likes Read 5 replies

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So what's the solution for a digital artist looking to paint in a lifelike manner?

Enter, Mixbox. It fashions itself as "a practical library for paint-like mixing" and its the only software that can achieve this output. The project is fully open-source and a fun way to let your inner child out if you're feeling creative.

Coolest Website Designer I've Found Recently

One website I've been obsessed with recently is yejis.world from the incredibly talented designer, Yeji Seo. She's currently a student at the USC Iovine and Young Academy where she studies integrated Computer Science, Product Design, and Entrepreneurship.

On the site, there's an area where she showcases her previous projects and a collection of creative experiments. What I love about her designs, is how minimalistic, organic, and "real" they feel.

Her homepage looks like a computer desktop filled with her current favorite music rotation, her current design inspirations, musings on life, and a small photo album on life. If you're looking for a creative way to showcase your own work, be sure to check her out.

"Good to See You"

One of the most interesting videos I came across recently, and felt compelled to find again, was a video of Barack Obama greeting a group of people. What stood out to me, is that instead of saying the typical "Nice to meet you", he says "Good to see you".

Twitter user @allgarbled was the first to share this video with the commentary I thought was appropriate, "That's how you know you're interacting with someone who shakes a lot of hands".

I then tried to think of why this felt like a unique and persuasive greeting technique for Obama - someone well known for his charisma and public speaking ability. One user in the replies mentioned the following, and I believe its the correct take as to why this works so well:

Carlos Mucha @mucha_carlos @allgarbled You’re missing the real value-add, what if you’ve met Obama before? If he says “nice to meet you”, you’ll feel bad he doesn’t remember you. From his POV, he’s not faced with micro-decision at every handshake whether he’s met person before. The generic “good to see you” suits all. EVIL bryan johnson (PARODY) @allgarbled Classic move to greet every single person with a “good to see you” instead of “nice to meet you” That’s how you know you’re interacting with someone who shakes a lot of hands https://twitter.com/elxmapping/status/1876149442409267280 5:40 PM • Jan 7, 2025 1 Retweets 8 Likes Read 2 replies

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Complete Guide to Cursor Apps and Building With AI

I know we've been sharing a lot of guides to building with AI apps lately, but for those looking for a quick way to catch up on everything, these two tweets from Lenny Rachitsky and Riley Brown are a great place to start.

​Lenny's tweet Is useful because it has a graphic that shows an overview of the three types of AI dev tools. This includes chatbots, cloud development environments, and local development assistants. The tweet includes a link to a guest post by Colin Matthews which shows how to turn your idea into a working prototype in minutes.

​Riley's tweet Is also great because it shows a list of his best tutorials on how to use Cursor. This includes an absolute beginner's guide to using Cursor, making an iOS app using Swift and Xcode, and a Cursor + Replit tutorial with Auth DB.

The Hidden 3Blue1Brown Site

​Some people debate whether or not the YouTube channel 3Blue1Brown is more of a 'math entertainment' channel rather an educational tool that will help you solve problems. Although I think it's more than just math entertainment, it's a valid criticism for those without a solid math background. A program like Math Academy is more suited for those looking to perform and interact with direct math problems.

That's not to say 3Blue1Brown can't be useful. As @animeshsingh38 pointed out, '3b1b is just the tip of the iceberg'. Animesh shared a site called some.3b1b.co which is the Summer of Math Exposition, an annual competition to foster the creation of excellent math content online.

Here, you'll find a plethora of videos that showcase interesting, real-world application of math. This includes topics such as what Is P vs NP actually about, what school didn't teach you about mazes, how to make a computer create beautiful string art, and more.

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