#068: The Future of CAD, Minimum Viable Brand, Why Do Anything in Life?

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 an exciting innovation within CAD, how to get Wikipedia-like reports for research topics of interest, how to create a 'Minimum Viable Brand', and more.

The Future of CAD

​Zach Dive recently shared one of his latest projects, a tool called Adam that uses AI to generate CAD in seconds. Traditionally, the hardest part about generating CAD designs has been ensuring interoperability between different CAD systems and maintaining design integrity during complex modifications or optimizations.

With Adam, you are able to generate precise control of the dimensions, and you can even do it on your phone. This is an exciting development that will help those in engineering, automative, aerospace, architecture, and all types of manufacturing jobs.

Get a Wikipedia-like report on your topic with AI

My friend recently shared an extremely cool project coming out of Stanford. It's called Storm, and essentially, you provide a high-level topic that you are interested in, and this AI model will generate a 'Wikipedia-like' report on the topic.

The whole premise of Storm is to support interactive knowledge curation. It's a great tool for research and provides an ample amount of citations for each section of its generated Table of Contents. For those interested in an example, I gave it the topic of 'Open-Source Film Production Using Blender and Unreal Engine'. Here was its generated output:

Minimum Viable Brand

Building a brand is really hard. Whether it's for a company or your own personal brand, it often feels like a struggle to figure out what to discuss. This can be a paralyzing feeling, and one that could potentially prevent people interested in building a brand stop before even starting.
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One case I noticed from this was of Erman Malak on Twitter. He wrote, "I'm 32 years old, but trying to find my voice and build a personal brand as a designer on X feels a lot like a teenage identity crisis."
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The thread has lots of people offering support and general advice, but no other response garnered as much attention as one suggested article to read by Brad Hussey. The article is called 5 Keys to a Minimum Viable Brand (MVB) by Nathan Barry, the CEO of ConvertKit.
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It's a short article that only takes a couple minutes to read, but one of the main takeaways is this: "A Minimum Viable Brand is where you build out your online presence - not to become a full-time creator but to demonstrate your expertise."
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This Minimum Viable Brand increases your surface luck area while making you be seen as an expert within your field by the general public. If you have ever been curious about making a personal brand, this is a great place to start.

"The Great Merging Has Begun"

One of the scarier scientific breakthroughs I recently came across was this virtual video of a computer GPU being implanted into a brain. It came from Science Corp, and essentially the company has created its own line of neurons that it's fusing with existing animal's neurons via an implant. Outlined in this article, it suggest we may even have 'monkeys playing poker' at some point in the future.
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Besides the potential Planet of the Apes implications, this development represents a huge leap in brain-computer interface technology. This could lead to revolutionary applications, such as reading and downloading thoughts, implanting cognitive maps, and restoring brain function after damage.
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But of course, the natural tendency is to look at where this could go wrong. The main risks include Foreign Body reaction (FBR), mechanical mismatch, and electrode degradation. To mitigate these risks, several approaches are being explored like biomaterial design, biohybrid architectures, and soft scaffolds.
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While still in early stages and requiring substantial further research and investment, this technology has the potential to transform our understanding of the brain and open up new possibilities for augmenting human intelligence, with implications that extend far beyond current medical applications of brain-computer interfaces.

Why Do Anything in Life?

Really. What is it that motivates us to do anything in life? This flowchart from @hamptonism beautifully lays out what it means to start from an existence of existential dread & emptiness to becoming an 'absurd hero'.
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It left me feeling inspired when I first saw it, and I hope it leaves you with a similar sentiment for ending the week strong:

ₕₐₘₚₜₒₙ — e/acc @hamptonism Why do anything in life? 2:6 AM • Jan 26, 2025 519 Retweets 3882 Likes Read 58 replies

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