Fr0styMatt88

I think this is a great point. When looking at ‘best practices’ for constructing robust parametric models I keep thinking “this is so much like software engineering where the programming language is the CAD system” (as an aside, I’ve tried OpenSCAD but found the rendering UI waaay too slow even with simple stuff to be usable for me).

So as a model builder you end up trying to build these higher-level abstractions into your model, where the parameters are your top-level interface.

I think CAD is so much like programming in those ways, although I could just be biased since I’m a software engineer.

I was subscribed to Shapr3D and had been using their parametric beta before switching to Linux and even in that fillets would mess up what I could do with my models afterwards.

The impression I’ve gotten while learning FreeCAD is that making a CAD ‘just work’ is incredibly difficult and the commercial packages probably have a lot of very messy workarounds and heuristics in place to work like they do.

I will say that the FreeCAD weekly builds have made massive strides; I believe the toponaming fix is in the latest mainline weekly now and Ondsel have been contributing great work back from their branch as well.

I’ve been playing around with the weekly version and using the OpenDark theme. It looks pretty slick.

It seems like a really exciting time for open-source CAD (hopefully!).

Man I miss Microsoft Soundscape (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/soundscape/), although it has been open-sourced.

As visually-impaired I can't really make use of stuff like street signs that much. I mean, I _can_, but I have to be really conscious about it and I've never really gotten good at it. With Soundscape, you'd wear earbuds and it'd read you out the street names as you were approaching them, but the street names would be read out from the correct direction using spatial audio that was also head tracked.

So for the first time I felt like I could start using way more cues to build that map in my head. Unfortunately I discovered it far too late because about a year (I think) after I started using it, it was discontinued. Would love to see a fully device-local version of something like this.

Okay just in case someone who knows reads this. Why doesn’t Youtube Premium background play work with members-only videos?

Became a member of a channel with spoken content and can’t even lock my phone when playing a member’s only video.

Posts and complaints on this go back years, with zero explanation from Youtube as to why this is, if it’s intentional or a bug, etc.

Not the OP but I think they don’t because it’s more profitable and makes a more addictive experience for the user.

Think about it - an app can directly influence the amount of matches you get. Show your profile to everyone at the beginning, a fair number of matches. Not paid yet? Show their profile to fewer people, then when you think the user is about to leave, ramp up the visibility for just enough matches to keep them hooked.

User just paid for the Gold tier? Increase their profile visibility… Not too much though, you want to create that dry spell so you can repeat the cycle and get them onto the Gold Plus tier.

For-profit dating apps are essentially gambling apps.

Thank you for showing up, it would be great to hear more of your input. #1 is so, so key. Dating apps made me feel terrible about myself and invisible (“why am I getting no likes?” — for context I’m a guy).

It wasn’t until I realised I had no idea who my profile was actually being shown to that it all started to make sense and I realised that’s the lever that apps can pull to make money.

Fundamentally though I think your comment about human behaviour is spot-on and at the end of the day my belief is that dating is something you just can’t short-cut with technology. Parabox of choice and low investment are garbage-in, garbage-out so to speak. You can’t ‘Uber Eats magic food box’ dating.

Does anyone know of a similar list like this but for medicine? This is awesome.

For me they’re like a whitish-purple (intensely purple) but bright like any other regular light. About as bright or only slightly dimmer than the objects that glow from them.

I have been curious in the past about how much of it is that effect (ie- how much further away from the ‘visible’ UV spectrum I can actually see). It’d be interesting to know.

Fellow aphakic here, can confirm. I never knew what people were talking about when they said blacklights, they just look like a real bright intense pinkish/purple light.

I only realised one day when I noticed that some kinds of lights looked really dark through my glasses but really bright when I took them off.

So much this. I use Shapr3D on my iPad, my Macbook and my Windows desktop. I often need to export STLs or 3MFs for 3D printing from one to the other. On Windows, iCloud is an absolute trainwreck. It'll often get stuck on a single file and not update anything else. You never know when it will update. You actually never know when the iPad or iPhone is going to upload to iCloud. It's frustrating. There's no way to force it.

Obsidian is worse. I have an iCloud vault and often files will get duplicated for no reason on Windows.

If the iCloud app ever gets updated, the update notes are obtuse at best. Actually, I don't know if it's ever been updated since I was forcibly switched to the Windows Store version of it.

I don't understand the rationale at all.

One other thing — people losing their vision can have visual hallucinations when awake as well - it’s called Charles Bonnet Syndrome:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_release_hallucination...

Oh yeah absolutely. I mainly do notes in my personal life, coding is a whole different thing that I’m still in the process of figuring out lol

The way I’ve come around to digital tools is that I consider them a different, externalised type of memory augmentation. They give us another type of memory.

If someone interrupts me and asks me to do something that I can’t attend to right then, there’s two options (assuming I want to do the thing):

- Hold it in my working memory until I’m able to fully context switch or put mental effort into transferring it into long-term memory

- Immediately note it down, then make no further effort to remember it

The same applies for random ideas that might pop into my head that are unrelated to the task at hand.

I'm going through my own journey with this at the moment, the thing I keep telling myself is that "this item will have a better life somewhere else" and "my house isn't a landfill". It's tough though.

Plus selling stuff is a full-time job really and it's annoying AF if it's not your day job. So I guess the question is - are you going to ever sell it? If not, then it doesn't really matter if it's expensive, it's just taking up space.

I’m with you on this one, but I also have nystagmus in both eyes. I’ve been curious but also somewhat apprehensive about stuff starting to rely on eye tracking and whether these edge cases will get handled.

Probably best for me not to be an early-adopter in this case :)

Edit to add: Can confirm that Apple stuff is amazing with accessibility, so I’m not surprised there are alternative input methods. My main thinking towards the future is around how nystagmus and foveated rendering will interact. That’s a giant and fascinating research topic I imagine.

I feel like note-taking is improving my personal life since I decided to embrace it.

I’ve always had the bad habit of “Sure I’ll do that for you!”, then meaning to remember and forgetting about it. I was that person that you couldn’t rely on to follow through with stuff.

I over-estimated my own memory in the moment and yet at the same time I was too afraid to really embrace note-taking because I was worried that if I started relying on notes, would that make my brain weaker?

I decided to try and dive in, after all I owe it to the people I know to be better at this.

It’s actually had the opposite effect on my memory - I find the action of taking the note makes the memory more solid and frees space up in my head to get back to other things.

For me, being able to use scribble on my Apple Watch is what made it feasible. I have a notepad on my wrist and can discreetly write notes whenever I need to.

From there, they go to Drafts as my inbox. At night I can glance over them; some will stay there as to-do items, some will be sent to Obsidian for longer-term storage and others might be deleted or end up as reminders, etc.

It’s great. It bridges that gap between my working memory and long-term storage really well.

Yeah but this doesn’t scale. Like, there’s an assumption in these conversations that okay — glass bottles are better, but does that mean that now I’m going to hold on to and reuse every single glass bottle I ever receive from now on? Realistically? Then extend that to everything you use.

I can imagine ending up with a house full of glass bottles. Where does it reasonably stop for the individual?

The conversation also highlights that our intuitions about what the most environmentally friendly thing is can’t be trusted.

Individuals can’t solve this, that’s for sure.

For those TV/media centre/home server use-cases, I suspect it’s also that enthusiasts might already have a collection of older, good-enough hardware for that purpose as well.

One subtle thing I only realised while writing that comment is that I don’t ever have the TV as the only source of light in the room before going to sleep. The bedside lamp is always the thing that gets turned off. I wonder if psychologically that makes me associate the lamp as the thing that anchors my sleep and not the TV.

I’ve struggled for a long time to have a good sleep routine but over the last few months I’ve found some things that actually work for me, to the point where people now think of me as one of the early people at work. I don’t know if this will specifically help deep sleep but my hunch is that for me it has.

What’s worked for me:

- A good memory foam pillow and a new mattress

- Using light as well as sound for my alarm clock. I have my smart lights gradually turn on in my room over a 15-minute period in the morning and have an alarm set on my watch.

- Counterintuitively, having a TV in my room.

So my night routine now is that I’ll retire to my room, get ready for the next day (put clothes out, go over my reminders/notes if I feel like it, etc), then lay in bed and watch a video or two, then dim my lights to a setting I only use for the last part of the night (bedside lamp only at minimum brightness). It’s turned out to be a surprisingly-good sleep hygiene cue for me. I’ll usually then wind down with some more videos but I’ll inevitably start feeling drowsy and then it’s lights-out and the TV gets switched off.

I also switched showering from the morning to the evening and I also make sure to change out of my work clothes when I get home.

This means that in the morning I have very little to think about. I have to just plant my feet on the floor and get moving. Since everything’s already prepared I can do this pretty mindlessly. I don’t drink a coffee until I get into the office.

After a few days of forcing myself to get up like this consistently, it actually started feeling weird not getting up when I first wake up with the morning lights on. I love travelling in to work before the crowds and having quiet time in the office to get work done. Another awesome benefit is that I can relax the routine a bit on the weekend and yet still get up at a reasonable time to have the whole day to do stuff, while at the same time still feeling like I ‘slept in’.

I always considered myself a ‘night owl’ but this experience has made me reconsider. If I don’t have a good routine my sleep pattern will drift later and later and I’ll feel crap all day, whereas keeping this routine I’m getting up earlier and my energy levels feel way more consistent throughout the day, so I don’t know, maybe I’m an early bird that had poor sleep or something.

I like the Quest 2 but you’re so spot on about the battery. I have to plan a day ahead — ‘maybe I want to use the Quest 2 tomorrow, better plug it into the charger and make sure everything is updated!”.

Although (tangent incoming!) I think omitting the OLED from the Quest 2 was a bit of a mistake. My theory is that the screen actually has more to do with why most games in the library have that same-y bright cartoonish look, rather than just the limitations of the XR2. It’s a relief the Apple headset is going OLED, if this leak is to be believed that is.

The cultural aspect is so, so huge and as a person unable to drive due to my visual disability I’ve felt it very acutely ever since I was a teenager.

Getting your first car is/was essentially a rite of passage into adulthood, not just a way to get around. All the movies and ads told you that. Pick a girl up to take her somewhere? Nope, can’t do that. Are you even dateable if you can’t drive? Watching all your friends get their license and feeling like you missed out on graduating to adulthood? It’s painful. Want to use buses and trains? That’s cool but be careful of all those ‘bad people’ that want to rob you and don’t travel too late at night or too early in the morning, it’s unsafe!

A car is a symbol of freedom, independence and safety for many people. Freedom to roam about wherever you want, whenever you want as you please, without having to rely on your parents. I don’t blame anyone for thinking this way, it’s what we’ve been fed by culture for as long as I can remember.

Not that these perceptions are accurate when I look back on it, they’re as much to do with my own insecurity as a disabled person as they are to do with general society. It’s nice to know that this isn’t a thing everywhere in the world.

FWIW I don’t hate cars (I think I’m as much of a fan as anyone that grew up with gear-head mates) and over the years I’ve come to terms with never driving and quite like the financial convenience of not owning a car, but still. As others here have alluded to, giving up cars is a huge societal zeitgeist change, not just a change to do with infrastructure.

Yeah totally agree.

Your dependency isn’t the problem if you have ADHD and the medication helps you. The actual problem is all the bullshit around getting the drug and the bullshit stigma around it.

The fact the system treats you like a ‘crack addict’ is the problem. Could you imagine how absurd it would be if say, type 1 diabetics got treated like addicts because they depended on insulin?

The system around ADHD drugs is just fucked and needs to change.

WizardLM-7b would be a fantastic model to try out as well. Though that might be out of date tomorrow (or already!) given how many models are being released at the moment :)

Worse than touch screens are those touch buttons (you know, where the thing is just printed on the outside of the TV).

I have no idea why, I'm fluent with touchscreens in the usual way but something in my brain just.... I don't know. Theoretically it should be the same, right? Except it feels horrible and wrong and I even have trouble trying to find the button.

Probably because I'm vision-impaired and an actual touchscreen is usually backlit and easier to see, while for physical buttons I've always compensated by using my sense of touch more (move hand towards general area of button, narrow it down with my fingertips).

The lack of the tactile click also certainly has something to do with it as pointed out above.

I'd actually be really interested to know from any UX design people here that work on this kind of thing - am I an outlier or does everyone hate them?

I’ll give you a concrete example from a few days ago in my job.

I needed a quick utility window in the Unity editor to see what animations could fire animation events and what those were.

I’m somewhat familiar with the editor API, enough to know what to Google and roughly where to go in the docs. I don’t do it enough though to really learn it beyond that point. So I’d estimate I could spend maybe one and a half hours, counting research, coding something, testing it and then context-switching back to what I was working on.

On a whim I asked ChatGPT (GPT-4) if it could do it for me. Formulating the prompt took a few minutes. I included a short bullet list of what I wanted and told it what Unity version I was on.

In almost an instant, it did it. I copied the code into a new file, added it to my project and it worked.

Time from idea to the first working version was around 10 minutes.

I asked for some minor refinement and then asked how I could extend it. It gave me starting points and taught me something new about Unity. All that slow doc searching, Google searching and forum-trawling was gone.

It’s like having my own personal dev assistant.

To that point, humans have a whole proprioception system (as well as the direct sense of touch) and auditory system to help feed that spatial reasoning system.