Ted Wu, PhD, Able Software

Creator of Mesh2CAD, 3D-DOCTOR and R2V software at 15+ granted patents. Opinions my own.

[Ted Wu, PhD, Able Software @ted3d]

🚀 Just launched: Mesh2CAD – Convert triangle mesh from 3D scans into solid CAD models (IGES, STEP) in minutes.
✅ Automate retopology
✅ Quad B-Spline solid output
🎯 Save hours of manual work
🔗 https://t.co/qtlo49Dfaj
#CAD #3Dscanning #ReverseEngineering

[Ted Wu, PhD, Able Software @ted3d]

@ruima I've been using an Honor folding phone for over 2 years, just a great phone with a big screen. Never had any issue with the crease. Got one with 1TB storage, so never need to worry about space.

[Ted Wu, PhD, Able Software @ted3d]

That’s exactly the problem I wanted to solve—matching what’s actually in your paint box, not generating a theoretical palette. The hardest part? Pigments aren’t always as predictable as their names suggest. Some behave differently when mixed. Always interesting & humbling. 🎨

[Best Mobile App Awards @BestAppAwards]

@ted3d Matching to the paints someone already owns is sharper than another palette generator. Which paint system fought the matcher hardest?

[Ted Wu, PhD, Able Software @ted3d]

@BestAppAwards That’s exactly the problem I wanted to solve—matching what’s actually in your paint box, not generating a theoretical palette.
The hardest part? Pigments aren’t always as predictable as their names suggest. Some behave differently when mixed. Always interesting & humbling. 🎨

[Ted Wu, PhD, Able Software @ted3d]

🎨 Artist Color Mixer is live on Android — now on Google Play! iOS artists can join the TestFlight beta today.
Point your camera at any color and get a mixing recipe from the paints you already own. Your studio, in your pocket.
https://t.co/9G8nXSeCDc

[Ted Wu, PhD, Able Software @ted3d]

Point your phone at any color. Artist Color Mixer turns it into a pigment recipe from the paints you own — live camera matching, auto palettes, and harmonies for oil, acrylic, watercolor & more.
Now on Google Play. iOS beta on TestFlight. 🎨
https://t.co/9G8nXSeCDc

[Zhai Xiang @ZhaiXiang5]

In 1999, a Pittsburgh high school history teacher donated 5,000 USD to a Chinese farmer planting trees in an Inner Mongolia desert.

The following year, he traveled deep into the Mu Us Desert to meet her in person. Together, they planted a tree in the sand.

26 years later, he returned to find a forest.

His name is Ronald Sakolsky. And over the past few days, this retired American teacher has been welcomed almost like a superstar wherever he goes in China.

He called himself a simple American and his donation a simple act. But China remembered anyway.

This morning he visited one of Inner Mongolia's top high schools, and reunited with an old friend, a teacher named Zhang Xiao, who back in 2000 had walked him into the Mu Us Desert as his trip coordinator. Both of them had once been part of the same China-US teacher exchange program, active from 1996 to 2014.

In the late 1990s, Zhang crossed the Pacific to teach at a school in Massachusetts.

Ron crossed the same ocean in the other direction, coming to teach in central China.

A quarter of a century later, two teachers who had once stood together in the sand were standing side by side again, this time in a schoolyard.

After the talk, Ron went downstairs to plant a tree with his Chinese colleagues. Two little kids had heard the American grandpa was in the building, and they ran up to say hello, grinning, calling out "Grandpa S!" Ron crouched down and gave each of them a high-five.

On the ride back to the hotel, he told me every single day of this trip had made him happy, but today was different. I asked why.

He had been back in a school, he said, surrounded by teachers, surrounded by children. And he has been a teacher his whole life.

Two decades + ago, Ron came as a teacher and planted a tree.

Today, he found himself back in a school, planting another one, with a new generation watching.

Maybe that is what Ron planted in China 26 years ago. Not just trees, but a kindness that was still growing when the next generation came along.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

I'm typically not one to toot my own horn but I think I may have written the single best article on Xinjiang this past decade.

Never has writing an article taken me so much time: almost two months.

It involved, as amply documented on this platform, a six-week RV roadtrip through Xinjiang during which I posted so relentlessly that I suspect several of you muted me somewhere around day six, and are only reading this now because someone told you the ordeal was finally over 😅

More seriously, I did what unfortunately all too few writers do these days when writing about a topic: I genuinely went deep.

Not only did I travel almost everywhere in Xinjiang and spoke with hundreds of people in the process, but I also spent a further 10 days afterwards in Urumqi - the province's capital - to engage with the local intelligentsia (journalists, university professors, public servants both junior and senior, XPCC/Bingtuan executives, businessmen, etc.) to get as accurate a read on the place as I could.

Meanwhile, when back in Urumqi after our roadtrip, I placed my 2 daughters in a holiday camp with local Uyghur kids - learning as a result something no discussion with an adult could ever tell me: what life is actually like for Uyghur kids in today's China.

On top of all this, I read widely and voraciously. The academic historians - Brophy, Gladney, Rudelson. The UN reports. But also books like Li Juan's wonderful Winter Pasture, a Chinese writer's account of living through a winter with Kazakh nomads in the Altay region.

The end result is an 8,000-word article that, I hope you'll agree, does something no article on Xinjiang has done in a very long time: treats the place and its people with the depth they deserve.

Maybe uncharacteristic for me, I don't shy away from the uncomfortable parts - on either side. I write about the omnipresent police checkpoints and the institutional paranoia as candidly as I write about the breathtaking shallowness and lies of the Western discourse on the topic.

If you're looking for propaganda - whether pro or anti-China - you'll be disappointed. If you're looking for honesty and nuance, however, I think you'll like it.

Enjoy the read here: https://t.co/K39WByvjvG

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

These camps do exist 👇, in several versions (not only farming but also military, for instance): I personally know several families who sent their kids to one.

They actually answer a uniquely Chinese phenomenon: the parents and grandparents' generation that built modern China grew up in incredible poverty and hardship. As they see it - which is probably correct - they worked their way to prosperity precisely because of this, because hardship gave them grit and made them tough.

However, they now face the paradox of their own success: the comfortable lives they worked so hard to give their children might be the very thing that destroys that very success - the kids being too soft and weak to sustain it.

There was a very popular movie in China around this 2 years ago called Successor (抓娃娃, Zhua Wawa). The story is about a billionaire couple - who themselves grew up poor - who go to absurd lengths to raise their son in manufactured poverty, convinced that only hardship can forge a worthy successor.

It became a massive hit precisely because many Chinese parents recognized the anxiety behind the joke.

Same story for China's political class. If the cultural revolution had one silver lining, it's that it produced leaders hardened by genuine suffering. Xi Jinping himself spent years literally living in a cave as a sent-down youth, working as a farmer.

He can relate to China's poorest and did so much against poverty precisely because he understands intimately what poverty is.

I'm pretty certain that a question that haunts the Party is the same one that haunts those parents: can leaders who never knew hardship hold this thing together? How can we make sure that people who rise to the top - in the Chinese vernacular expression - ate sufficient bitterness (吃苦, chī kǔ)?

In a way, it's also what happened to the West. The so-called "greatest generation" - the De Gaulles, Churchills, Adenauers - were forged by the hardship of 2 world wars and the Great Depression.

We're now, in Europe, two generations of leaders after them and let's just say you can tell. Macron, Starmer (or Burnham) and Merz are mere managers of decline, and that's being generous.

De Gaulle had this wonderful expression about weak men: he would say "c'est du thé" ("it's tea" - as in weak, flavorless, watered down). No doubt that's how he'd call every single one of them.

This counterexample might actually be the biggest present we unknowingly give China: a cautionary tale that their anxiety is justified.

I wouldn't be surprised if every time Xi meets a Macron or a Starmer it gives him cold sweats about what China's future leaders might turn into and he secretly calls a politburo meeting to order a review of whether rising cadres are eating enough bitterness.

[Ted Wu, PhD, Able Software @ted3d]

After months of painter requests, Artist Color Mixer is now on macOS! 🍎 Native builds for Intel & Apple Silicon, signed & notarized by Apple. Unzip, drag to Applications, done. Free trial here 👇

https://t.co/E2iOn0Shwt

#macOS #ArtTools #Painting

[David Fishman @pretentiouswhat]

A new essay about China, and what it means for national welfare stats when you develop so rapidly.

The basic idea: China's welfare statistics will only fully represent modern China when all its living generations were themselves raised in modern China. 🧵
https://t.co/CkiYyJTyfK

[David Fishman @pretentiouswhat]

Some version of this question comes up all the time: "If China is doing so well, then why is its _____ statistic still so low vs. developed countries?”

Sometimes the answer is truly that China still has work to do. Other times, it's that the aggregate statistic is capturing and averaging in a population that spent most of its life in a much poorer country.

For example: In 2006, 43% of Chinese workers over 65 had never attended school. By 2022, that figure had fallen to 14.3%.

The explanation isn't that millions of retirees suddenly went back to primary school. The cohort itself changed. The people entering retirement grew up in a different China than the people aging out of the data.

[Evan Osnos @eosnos]

5/5 The contest is not simply over speed. China has too much power in Xi and cohort; America has too much in Trump & Silicon Valley allies. The edge will go to the country that resists ideology and corruption—and gives people agency in their future. Read: https://t.co/YILzidBVQF

[Ted Wu, PhD, Able Software @ted3d]

"Simply upload a photo, select your medium, click a color — get exact mixing ratios." 🖌️
Mandy's Minis tested Artist Color Mixer on Warhammer box art using our Citadel color set. Spoiler: it works.
Full review → https://t.co/lGK9OWdYHz

[Kathleen Tyson @Kathleen_Tyson_]

This makes me wish I could cancel my @ft subscription more than once, maybe 100x today.

[Kevin Bankston @KevinBankston]

I’d *love* to hear the major US labs unequivocally deny having distilled China’s models, or each others’.

[Ted Wu, PhD, Able Software @ted3d]

https://t.co/E2iOn0Shwt

[Ted Wu, PhD, Able Software @ted3d]

As a painter I've wasted so much paint trying to match colors from photos. So I built a tool that just tells me the recipe. 🎨

[Ted Wu, PhD, Able Software @ted3d]

One-time license, no subscription. Free licenses for teachers & artists in need. Desktop app, works offline. Built this because I needed it — hope it helps your studio too.

[Ted Wu, PhD, Able Software @ted3d]

v1.5 just dropped with:
• Custom palettes & color history
• Auto-dominant color extraction (2-64 colors)
• 6 harmony schemes
• Custom medium sets (clone & edit every pigment)
• PDF recipe export

[Ted Wu, PhD, Able Software @ted3d]

Load any photo, click a color, and Artist Color Mixer gives you the exact pigment mix for oil, watercolor, acrylic, pastel — 7 mediums. Covers 414 pigments from W&N, Gamblin, Vallejo, AK, Scale 75, and more.