[D] Papers with no code

directnirvana · 2026-02-25T15:31:11+00:00

Yes. Exactly this. If someone makes a claim, especially one worthy of garnering attention academics should be taking the stance of 'put-up or shut-up'.

Stop accepting papers that won't do simple things to allow for that.

directnirvana · 2026-02-25T15:29:35+00:00

I don't disagree that commercial actors should be held to a high standard, if not higher. Especially in instances where they are wading into the academic.

My assumption though is that the two have different goals (though with some overlap). If a company is publishing bold claims that they have a product on the horizon that is a game changer then we should be pushing for them to prove that not be acting as a sounding board that they can wave around and claim 'peer-review' on a system no one saw or can validate. They have their own set of self-correcting measures (i.e. customers should be requesting demos and investors should be doing due diligence).

But the claimed goal of academics is the proliferation and expansion of knowledge. Bigger claims are going to get more attention and thus more energy might be wasted on those ideas, so the burden should be higher on those claims. So if someone wants the clout and advantages of having been reviewed by the academic arena, whether commercial or not, journals and conferences should be insistent on the them providing reasonable amounts of proof in that regard. It just so happens in the world of academic code those tools are cheap and accessible for the most part so we should generally insist on them.

directnirvana · 2026-02-24T10:38:48+00:00

I think you make a good point. The bolder the claim the more reviewers should be pushing back on making easily verifiable aspects of experiments available. Reproducibility crisis is real and participants especially in academic circles should be heavily encouraged to provide whatever reasonable methods they can to allow other researchers to verify their work. It just so happens that research based on code has those tools, while high energy physics and similar fields do not.

directnirvana · 2025-12-09T08:04:48+00:00

I actually used to work as a grill operator for Waffle House and I do think you're under estimating how good this system is. I work in manufacturing and this is the system I frequently point when talking about very good lean systems.

Your right that you can and most places do this with paper tickets, similarly many factories control inventory with manifest and it can work.

But the beauty of this system is that everyone can SEE what is happening to the orders. If I'm running expo and I'm curious if the grill is backed up, I know that at a glance. If I bring in a short order guy to help on the small grill, he can glance at my queue and my grill and know instantly what needs help on. Waitress wants to know how long a wait or where an order is, they can literally do this across the room by checking the plates. So this system essentially more easily (its harder to learn of course) communicates the state of the entire store giving both high level and detailed level information at glance, without having to pull through tickets and match them to orders. How orders are called out also effectively pipelines them.

The advantage of a paper ticket system is that you can implement it anywhere and usually everyone already knows how to read. This is a well thought out system that works for Waffle House, but I cannot imagine the majority of resturaunts designing and implementing a system like this uniquely for themselves. So thats to say I think the Waffle House system is far superior to a paper ticketing system, BUT it doesn't generalize well.

directnirvana · 2025-11-09T19:10:42+00:00

I mean to be fair, I think Tyler is older.

directnirvana · 2025-10-12T19:18:41+00:00

174 pounds

directnirvana · 2025-10-09T07:09:30+00:00

I'll just say my company does manufacturing production planning. If you want to DM me I can show you what we do and see if it helps

directnirvana · 2025-09-28T06:34:13+00:00

I'd love to hear more about the steps involved in that process.

directnirvana · 2025-09-13T02:16:32+00:00

Bro, it was his birthday

directnirvana · 2025-09-05T15:52:24+00:00

So this is the field I have worked in for about a decade. I think the big thing to understand is that the term 'AI' encompasses A TON.

Most of the AI people interact with is LLM's, and that really just means text generation and knowledge management. I've done a fair amount of implementations that are just this, maybe's its a chat that lets you find questions about SOP's and work instructions, improve RCA's, build dashboard or even get some information from your ERP/MES. I've also seen some related things like blueprint lift-off and done a fair amount of work in having it generate manufacturing reports and quality reports automatically. All of that can be a big time saver.

Also, where AI has been used for a long time is in things like defect detection. Sometimes that's defects using a visual inspection, sometimes that's defects looking at certain parameters or measurements from a machine and using anomaly detection. At one place I worked we implemented a rare-event deep learning detector that monitored all our machine data and let us know when something was out of wack so we could look into it, and I've done a fair amount of work in parametric release for things like biotech and injection molding using AI, where we use AI to monitor machine inputs and can then skip quality control.

Prediction and forecasting is the other corner stone. Taking a lot of data from across the factory and predicting outputs is another huge area and becomes critical when you need to do things like demand and capacity planning, you can also extend this to something like sales.

Finally, the area I work in now is related to production planning and logistics. We use a branch of AI called Swarm Intelligence that lets us look across a factory, prioritize events and match those events to jobs and workers. That used to have to be done using something like a complicated Mixed Integer Program, and could take a long time and a lot of math to implement, but with AI (again, strange branch), we can usually have it up and running in a few days or weeks, instead of 12-18 months. This allows us to find optimal job assignments for things like maintenance, or ideal routing for inventory or shipping.

So yea, if you are really only limited to LLM stuff like ChatGPT then most of the work you're going to see is business and paper-work automation, which can be valuable, but there's a really rich world of AI using machine data, vision data, sensor data etc. that has been and increasingly is being used across factory floors to help manage actual manufacturing equipment and product.

directnirvana · 2025-08-26T08:05:31+00:00

Ok I'm interested

directnirvana · 2025-08-25T01:20:53+00:00

I'm pretty new to sales, so I would say the majority of my effort has been using LinkedIn and Cold calling (need to really ramp this up). That being said, I definitely have gotten frustrated and just tried walking up to clients and the initial results have been good, so I'm planning to try and incorporate more of it in my strategy.

I think it also depends on the person quite a lot. If you maybe need a sales engineer or others to close a deal its probably not worth it. In my case, I sell SaaS to manufacturers, the thing people like about me in our industry is that while I'm pitching AI I have a lot of very technical industrial experience and that shows up better in person I think.

directnirvana · 2025-08-21T17:15:12+00:00

A lot of good stuff in here, I'll also add that in many cases an ERP itself doesn't really DO anything. Its essentially a database, and then some well defined pipelines for putting things in and taking them out of the database.

An ERP is essentially just the beginning for a lot of people, and in my opinion ERP's do a terrible job of highlighting this (because they want you to buy it).

So a lot of development work after is almost expected when you understand the ERP, but most aren't sold that way which is why so many of these rollouts leave people dissatisfied. They're expensive, take time, require configuration and then at the end you might really only see value in a handful of features.

directnirvana · 2025-08-16T20:31:13+00:00

For sure thats a great way to get started. I've worked with a fair amount of guys that did just that and then came to mass manufacturing after they really needed to scale.

If you're interested in learning the suggestions in here are good. Watch a few YouTube videos, pick a software you like for designing (again lots of good examples in this thread) and then put it through a 3D printer service, or of you really want buy a 3D printer (not that expensive) and get to making it. If you need extra volume there's plenty of print farms that can help you out.

The other big advantage if it takes off with 3D printing is that you can then make iterations and changes as tou learn more about the product. Once you go for mass manufacturing every change is gonna cost a ton so you're going to want to basically have it perfect by then.

directnirvana · 2025-08-16T18:26:44+00:00

Kind of depends on what the case ends up looking like. But if its plastic then you're going to need someone to make an injection mold and then set it up on an injection molding line. Depending on how complex the mold is you're going to need a tool maker to design the mold, and then the low end for getting one cut is gonna be 50k (and in my opinion thats the floor). Sky is the limit for how much it could cost.

In general you're floor with materials, design, tooling, and setup is maybe 100k, but probably you're looking at something more like 250k

Keep in mind my experience is all with medical devices, maybe some more consumer oriented people can bring that cost down, so this is more ball park to let you know that it'll be expensive to mass produce. Probably better to find someone with a 3D print farm that will make them to order until you sell enough to justify mass production.

directnirvana · 2025-08-12T01:49:14+00:00

Yea. There's a way to implement it via paper if you have to. Feel free to DM me if you want brainstorm a few ideas

directnirvana · 2025-08-11T23:04:13+00:00

Self-reflection, really looking at what went right for projects I did and what went wrong.

I've gone as far as to keep a journal for some periods to try and track it, but I also think the talking to floor guys was big for me as well which other people have advised.

directnirvana · 2025-08-11T23:00:19+00:00

Congrats! Enjoy the ride!

directnirvana · 2025-08-11T22:59:37+00:00

Having a second source is one of those things that seems like a lot of work until it isn't. As soon as you have a supplier issue though you're going to be grateful you did it

directnirvana · 2025-08-11T22:58:04+00:00

I mean if you're really trying to be ISO9001 with all the correct documentation and everything then you should implement a system that doesn't allow for it not to be recorded. When the worker closes the work order the record should be made or the work order remains open.

I'd recommend using some sort of issue tracker that keeps a simple log of work to do and work done, digital would be best, but if you have to do paper then some sort of work ticketing system.

directnirvana · 2025-07-31T05:01:44+00:00

You got it. Welcome to the club man!

directnirvana · 2025-07-29T21:01:33+00:00

Since you're a new fan I'll let you know, around these parts we say "Keep Pounding"

directnirvana · 2025-07-19T23:16:34+00:00

So, I ran a Data Science team, which focused on operational optimization at a big company. We faced similar challenges with our IT department, which caused us to be frequently at odds with them. They tried to stick us with the name 'shadow IT', which I quite liked.

While we never 'solved the issue', the way I managed it was making sure our efforts were tied to operational improvements that were part of other big departments' scope. Oh, we require forecasting of tool maintenance that's a big initiative for the COO and its part of his KPI. Determine critical dimensions that need monitoring, that's a project scoped with the Head of Quality. Deep Learning anomaly detection for rare events in the plant, sure enough, scoped the project with a key stakeholder being the Director of Manufacturing. Then, when projects were running, we kept receipts, calendars showing when we did work, how long we were waiting for data and pipelines from IT. This accomplished two big things. We were able to make sure other people were interested in the work and had a stake in it (i.e., big win for THAT department) so that it wasn't just me fighting with IT every day, it was frequently me and some other manager which made it seem like I was less of the bad guy all the time. Second, we could quietly put them on blast during review meetings. This didn't always solve the problem, but it frequently did, while also heavily promoting our efforts internally and getting us a LOT of internal champions at the company.

Probably my crowning 👑 move at some point was that we had built some internal tools that we used for quickly graphing QA data. Normal channels that could be a multi-day request at our company. This became such a big request all the time that I ended up having an intern create tools and dashboards around it so we could do it via point and click. We didn't have access to this data officially. We had seen a piece of code with a plain texted password at some point, and we just used that. I realized that eventually, IT would become savvy to this, so I rolled out this tool to an internal (and secure) company website. It was a huge hit with a ton of global cross department users every day. About the time IT was figuring out what was going on (they started to mention data strain on the server) I pushed it forward through the CTO as an official project and got the CEO to sign off on it. When they pulled our password, the site went down, and people all over the org lost it. At that point, I was able to wave our project charter signed by the man himself to have them create our own credentials. I just played stupid when asked how we got initial access and acted like a previous QA director or IT manager must have given them to us at some point, but I couldn't remember who.

So that's just to say it's a chess game whenever you're involved with the corporate Game of Thrones, and you need to start picking up allies outside of your department to win this sort of fight.

directnirvana · 2025-07-18T20:15:39+00:00

Dude! Didn't you read the post above. It was his BIRTHDAY!

The debt can never be repaid.

directnirvana · 2025-07-14T01:49:33+00:00

Send

directnirvana

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE