Top all-time · #1964
Gianluca Gimini
Personal blog · gianlucagimini.itdesign
Gianluca Gimini writes Gimini, a personal blog at gianlucagimini.it about design. Since 2016, 40 different Hacker News readers have linked it 44 times, most often “Velocipedia”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
My name is Gianluca Gimini and these are my concept based and my aesthetic based projects. Find more on my website
Most-linked posts?
- Velocipedia27 people · 30 mentions · first linked 2021-05-05
- What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)11 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2016-04-12
What Hacker News says?
I love this one https://www.gianlucagimini.it/portfolio-item/velocipedia/ People drawing bikes, scroll down to see they having made renders of all the drawings. Hilarious
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on “Gemini 4 Argon”Submitted What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016) as a story · 566 points
HN discussionI remember a submission a few years ago about a guy asking others to sketch bikes. Most of the time the drawn bikes wouldn't be rideable. https://www.gianlucagimini.it/portfolio-item/velocipedia/ HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17699017
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on “Gemini 4 Argon”Submitted Velocipedia as a story · 430 points
HN discussionThere are a lot of structural details that people tend to gloss over. This was illustrated by an Italian art project: https://www.gianlucagimini.it/portfolio-item/velocipedia/ > back in 2009 I began pestering friends and random strangers. I would walk up to them with a pen and a sheet of paper asking that they immediately draw me a men’s bicycle, by heart. Soon I found out that when confronted with this odd request…
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on “The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles”Submitted Bicycles from Sketches (2016) as a story · 193 points
HN discussion> A normal person spending as much time as they like gets you the pictures that I linked to in the previous post, because they don't really know what a bike is. 45 examples of what normal people think a bike looks like: https://www.gianlucagimini.it/portfolio-item/velocipedia/ A normal person given the ability to consult a picture of a bike while drawing will do much better. An LLM agent can effectively refresh its…
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on “The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles”Submitted Velocipedia as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> Ask 100 random people to draw a bike and in 10 minutes and they’ll on average suck while still beating the LLM’s here. Y'see, this is a prime example of what I meant with ""Average human" is a much lower bar than most people want to believe, mainly because most of us are average on most skills, and also overestimate our own competence". An expert artist can spend 10 minutes and end up with a brief sketch of a bike…
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on “The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles”Submitted Velocipedia as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://www.gianlucagimini.it/portfolio-item/velocipedia/
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on “The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles”Submitted What happens when you ask someone to draw a bike? as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> In that case we'd expect a human with perfect drawing skills and perfect knowledge about bikes and birds to output such a simple drawing correctly 100% of the time. Look upon these works, ye mighty, and despair: https://www.gianlucagimini.it/portfolio-item/velocipedia/
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on “The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles”Submitted Velocipedia as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAs a side-side note, ever asked someone (friends, family, etc.) to draw a bycicle by heart? This guy did: http://www.gianlucagimini.it/prototypes/velocipedia.html
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on “Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?”Submitted Bikes from Sketches as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIn general, I would not expect questions around expect people to remember details about a logo just from a name to work very well. People in general can't do that even with extremely famous logos: https://www.signs.com/branded-in-memory/ Nor can they generally even draw a bike, with physical necessity available to guide them: http://www.gianlucagimini.it/prototypes/velocipedia.html However, it is absolutely a reason…
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on “AWS icon quiz”Submitted Velocipedia as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAs odd at is - this[1] design has a couple elements that have been reproduced in the real world. While the exact 2wd system shown in the rendering would have some real issues, 2wd mountain bike systems do exist. They can rely on impressively strange chain routing[2], a system of gears and internal shafts[3], or just an electric hub[4] (which is admittedly, not really the same thing). As far as the one-sided frame go…
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on “What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)”it's hard to imagine people getting a bicycle this much wrong http://www.gianlucagimini.it/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Gian... not that I'd draw it with perfect mechanical fidelity, but there are bicycle defining parts missing there.
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on “Velocipedia”It is harder than you may think for many people... https://www.gianlucagimini.it/portfolio-item/velocipedia/
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on “Claude Opus 5.5 Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis (Max)”I feel like we would end up here: http://www.gianlucagimini.it/prototypes/velocipedia.html
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on “Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Nets”You're in for a treat! Here's a curated collection of bicycle drawings, complete with full renderings of some of the most interesting designs. http://www.gianlucagimini.it/prototypes/velocipedia.html
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on “Aphantasia: 'My mind's eye is blind'”Check out the Velocopedia project for something else along this line of thinking: http://www.gianlucagimini.it/prototypes/velocipedia.html Turns out nobody quite knows how to draw a bicycle. They get the gist but the details don't make sense.
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on “Study urges caution when comparing neural networks to the brain”Reminds me of these odd bikes: https://www.gianlucagimini.it/portfolio-item/velocipedia/
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on “Things I Have Drawn is a site in which the things kids draw are real”There’s also a great art/design project about exactly this. Gianluca Gimini asked hundreds of people to draw a bicycle from memory, and most of them got the frame, proportions, or mechanics wrong. https://www.gianlucagimini.it/portfolio-item/velocipedia/
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on “Claude Opus 4.6”I bet someone shares this link every time you post about bicycles, but since I didn't see anyone share it yet in this thread, I'll take the opportunity to do so: https://www.gianlucagimini.it/portfolio-item/velocipedia/ Turns out even humans can be pretty bad at drawing bicycles :)
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on “Claude Opus 4.8”I skimmed the info, but didn't see this project somewhat related to drawing bicycles mentioned https://www.gianlucagimini.it/portfolio-item/velocipedia/
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on “Show HN: Bicyclopedia”Nice project! The name reminded me of another bike-related project that you may find funny (or infuriating) to browse, since it kinda feels like the inverse of yours :p https://www.gianlucagimini.it/portfolio-item/velocipedia/
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on “Show HN: Bicyclopedia”Humans are super bad at drawing bikes: https://www.gianlucagimini.it/portfolio-item/velocipedia/ Does being bad at drawing bikes make a machine more intelligent/human?
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on “Agentic pelican on a bicycle”
