[kibwen]

It's a bit of a touchy subject. It's clear that he's a brilliant musician and self-motivated to the brink of mania, but he struggles with perfectionism and his insistence on reinventing the entire field of mechanical engineering from scratch precludes him ever actually finishing the project to his own impossible standards. If he didn't have a huge community of experienced, fascinated, and often frustrated engineers and manufacturers pointing out his most egregious missteps, he'd be sunk. The past near-decade has involved being sucked into fractal rabbit holes due to unknown-unknowns while obsessing over imperceptible details. The second machine was thrown out entirely and he started from scratch in an attempt to fix what he saw as fundamental flaws with it, and while his process with the third machine seemed promising at first, at this point it doesn't seem like he's really any closer to success.

His videos are often entertaining (he's very charismatic and enthusiastic), and you'll learn a decent amount about engineering. But the most important thing that you'll learn are the unstated lessons: the necessity of compromise and the importance of setting measurable and realistic goals if you ever hope to actually achieve a given result. Though if nothing else, I applaud him for being so open with his efforts, especially when things don't pan out like he was expecting.

[barnabask]

I enjoyed watching his videos for a few years, but I eventually had to stop because it was so hard to watch what you describe. You put it very kindly; I would have called it a channel documenting a slow descent into madness. Maybe it was my own latent perfectionism that made me so uncomfortable watching him obsess, repeatedly restart, second-guess, overanalyze, self deprecate, etc. It’s a hard thing to relive vicariously.

[magnat]

One might say he lost his marbles.

[softjobs]

Upvoted for the pun, with the sad caveat that also it feels like a human tragedy unfolding. :-/

[Sharlin]

I shouldn’t upvote this, but I’ll do so anyway.

[neontomo]

Exactly how I feel about it. When he made his video about engineering principles from Elon Musk (who I admire as an engineer), my heart just sank. I recognised that he'd begun setting standards for himself that are necessary for mission critical projects like space flight and driving, but lost touch with why we are interested in his Marble Machine - which is fun.

[krisoft]

He was always clear on his expectations. He wants to make a machine he can take on a world tour. That's his stated goal.

The consequence of that is that it has to be reliable enough to play through a full concert without maintenance or breakdown, and it has to be robust enough that it can be transported from place to place. These are his hard requirements.

Then there are some less well defined requirements. Which is that the machine has to play nice music and has to be a marble machine as Martin understands it.

This last is the real constraint. Otherwise he could just buy a midi keyboard which would fulfil all the requirements about reliability, robustness and quality of music, but would fail the spirit of the endeavour.

[okamiueru]

All the things you describe, are all reasonable constraints and goals. However, the issue is in chasing sub millisecond standard deviations. Which is amusingly the point at which you might as well buy a midi keyboard.

[kristofferc]

Where does "tight music" come into those constraints.

[andersa]

I remember watching his videos on this topic and never being able to hear any difference between the supposed "good" and "bad" examples.

[krisoft]

I count that under the first of the two fuzzy constraints I wrote about: “the machine has to play nice music”

I agree that there Martin seems to be aiming for a very high degree of repeatability in timing, but it also seems that he has designs which meet those expectations of his and this was not the reason why he abandoned the second attempt. (Ad far as i can tell based on the videos.)

[sbuttgereit]

I have to admit, I find this a bit ironic.

Many of the digital sequencing and notation products I've worked with went out of their way (arguably) to play "less-tight music" through various "humanizing" features.

Yes, we want music that is sufficiently accurate and "tight"... but within the confines of human capability. The slight errors of both time and intonation in some cases give music a much more human feel. Now to be fair, I don't want to suggest that this sort of human inaccuracy is mere randomness either: it's typically not just random error... there's usually a bias and it definitely within limits (unless you're a bad musician of course :-) ).

[pbronez]

He actually partnered with an agency and released a virtual marble machine as an app and VST

[cpach]

I think it was more like a music box

[an1sotropy]

He actually just posted a video in which he admits he lost the plot, and forgot that the real goal is something that is fun. I hope he finds his way back to that!

https://youtu.be/BpJYqC4PWEw

[whstl]

I'm not personally an Elon Musk fan, but the video with a clip of him is actually pretty good IMO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WN90HYiFpAw

Some people will say it's common-sense stuff but it is stuff I see everyday writing software and it's so hard to change. It's refreshing to see a spaceship company having the same issues haha.

[gabesullice]

I try to remember that I've learned my engineering lessons in small doses, over many years, and often in an environment where I wasn't the most senior engineer, without the full scope of the design under my control. As I've grown as an engineer, more of those things have come into my purview, and I still have many more lessons to learn. Martin is speed-running the game, in public, and deserves a lot of leeway.

[kibwen]

> Martin is speed-running the game, in public, and deserves a lot of leeway.

This is how I felt at first, and I appreciated (and still appreciate) the frankness of his verve for experimentation. But by this point I wouldn't use the word "speedrunning" to describe his progress; he appears to have found the practical limits of autodidactism. If his only goal in life was to produce the machine (which, to be clear, it isn't), then it would have been much faster to go to school for a few years and get a degree in engineering, while apprenticing as a machinist on the side. His publicly-broadcast education, while entertaining, is anything but efficient.

[jacobolus]

The people who go to engineering school for a few years generally get engineering jobs, rather than making crazy art projects. There's plenty of room in the world to also fit some autodidacts following their dreams in apparently inefficient ways.

[whereismyacc]

It's not just perfectionism, he struggles to get the machine functional at all. Afaik the original video (this post) is cut together from different runs and generally hides a lot of the scrappy issues with the first machine. He wants to get the new one actually working well enough to play consistently, and to be moved around.

[Zondartul]

I won't say anything about the viability of the design #2 vs #3, but from purely entertainment point of view, it was fun and relaxing to watch his regular tinkering videos while he was working on the second machine, but once he stopped, his channel became an emotional rollercoaster. It's just too emotionally draining to watch the later videos involving machine #3, so I stopped.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

I think in the last video or 2 he finally had the revelation he needs to have a chance at success; he's found that the engineering must support the design, not control it. We'll see if it holds up.

[themoonisachees]

He has had this realization several times over the years. Good luck to him, but at this rate I don't believe he'll ever manage to finish it, and if he ever does he still won't be happy with it.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Yeah, I'm not confident it'll hold. I figure someone will eventually make a marble music machine that's robust enough to tour, but I have doubts it'll be him.

[AceJohnny2]

You are 100% on the mark.

I really loved his series building the second one, but when he decided that it was fundamentally flawed and he needed to rebuild from scratch, I stopped watching in frustration.

He's really talented, but I'm just... sad for him.

[windowshopping]

You know, I always remembered the Wintergatan Marble Machine and occasionally idly wondered why I never again saw anything new from someone who must surely be incredibly talented. This explains that.

[kibwen]

Here's something of his that's entirely unrelated to marbles, it's a handheld modular synthesizer of his own design with an analogue fretboard that he calls a "modulin": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaW5K85UDR0

[mock-possum]

Reminds me of an Otamatone!

[Eji1700]

The “reinventing” issue is so huge in all fields. I’ve watched many smart people try to reinvent or discover things that are well known and tested because they’re not “perfect”.

You really need to be able to evaluate if something is worth your time and it’s often best to just try what exists and only iterate if needed. Especially when you actually need to deliver a product

[tibbydudeza]

Reminds me of my first coding job - I obsessed over writing the best code and as a result I never delivered anything on time and it was full of bugs because I never finished anything and refactored and restarted.

A kind old hand took me aside and taught me about KISS (Keep it Simple) and it must be good enough.