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But in 0.22-dev there is a good sketch offset/sketch frame tool that would let you make an outline wall in 2D that you can then pocket.

Another approach is to make a SubshapeBinder of a face, offset that and pocket it directly.

Fillets and chamfers work but they have OCC bugs and limitations; there are ways to work around them but whereas in Fusion360 you might place geometry on a chamfer, with anything built around OCC it is better to treat chamfers and fillets as “dress-up” only, and do them last. Anything structural is definitely better done in a sketch or with a subtractive sweep on an edge.

Bosses: you can taper pads/extrudes easily enough, and there are some tricks involving copying external geometry of sketches and face/shape binders that can help you match them up across bodies.

None of this is to suggest that FreeCAD is easier than Fusion360. It’s not, and it’s definitely something of a lifestyle choice. (You won’t hear me telling you that you should use GIMP over Photoshop, though).

But it also doesn’t have Fusion360’s limitations: ten or five projects or whatever at a time, reapplying for the license every year, STEP support that could get taken away from you again when Autodesk decides to reassess the free tier, etc.; and I can share FreeCAD as easily as I can share my designs.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Fusion360 is bad or Autodesk is a particularly unusually bad actor. I just don’t want to be dependent on the whims of closed source free tiers in cloud software until I absolutely have to be.

So far, my limitations in CAD have nothing to do with FreeCAD, and my 3D printer isn’t the slowest part of the puzzle. In both cases the issue is me.

The problem of the “right way” is definitely FreeCAD’s primary issue; it’s not as easy to mix the guided flow of Part Design with the more generalised tools in the other workbenches as it should be. (Sketches on curved surfaces are a classic example of this.)

But there is an increasingly broad range of tutorial materials out there now, and the major changes around Ondsel and FreeCAD 1.0 will only improve things.

I would hope that better revision control options eventually arrive in core thanks to collaboration tools like Ondsel’s Lens, but the solution in this blog post might work in the meantime.

Another commenter suggested FreeCAD would be better if it just worked with rich directories natively. That would be nice.

Fillets and chamfers are bespoke each time, and any kind of reflection on the structure of the resulting model is essentially impossible because it is a declarative language as well as a mesh modeller, STEP export is impossible. With anything complex you will drown in variable declarations and various bodges, and there is essentially no help for multi-body projects or assemblies.

The Python/OpenCascade-based CadQuery and Build123D are bRep systems with many programmatic advantages, and because they are bRep you have generalised fillet and chamfer operations (within OpenCascade’s limitations). You also get face, wire and vertex operations on generated geometry, even some assembly support.

On the JS side of things, CascadeStudio and replicad both use the emscripten cross-compilation of OpenCascade.

Personally, I really like FreeCAD, and I’ve used it for complex things. But I am not going to suggest everyone should use it.

Jeez, this place.

Because it interprets the file as a sequence of Part object manipulations, it's a very useful way of getting a bRep representation of an OpenSCAD document, so you get the opportunity to generate a clean, minimal STEP file.

OpenSCAD cannot do this itself, and the other conversion approaches just get you a triangle mesh packaged in a STEP file.

It's not perfect -- you get a mesh if you use Minkowski or hull operations. But it's good.

That is all I wrote and all I meant.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718752#13721644

I don't much care if words are being put in my mouth but I do point it out.

But then again as Maya Angelou said:

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."

The question of whether it prevents things from happening is a question of statistics.

I suspect the data doesn't support your claim, and that certain categories of crime have indeed been deterred. But neither of us can know without that statistical analysis.

You're putting words into my mouth.

You get what you pay for.

Yes, the tory government have been trying to stack the governance of the BBC with their own people, but it doesn’t always go the way they expect.

Almost nobody worries about these transport safety cameras because we don’t fear or tolerate overpolicing in the same way.

Of course there should be safety cameras on public transport!

And if a US tourist was on a night bus in London they too would be happy there were cameras. A nation of drivers has a very different calibration, I suspect.

The vast, vast majority of CCTV systems in the UK, that are part of this “culture”, are just store and private CCTV systems that police can get access to with a warrant, by going door to door. The same as in almost all western countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...

There’s almost no police CCTV network, and there’s no reality to the fantasy element of police being able to see you wherever you go in the UK in real time (with the exception of a few crowded high crime areas where tourists get robbed, ironically, and a few high violence and terrorism risk areas, public transport facilities and live road traffic cameras).

There are some council-owned networks in high crime areas which are pretty contentious, and then there are these police facial recognition vans which are clearly offensive bullshit overreach.

In particular a lot of visitors misunderstand the prevalence of cameras pointed at our roads, which are not live feed cameras at all but speed-triggered safety cameras.

Basically it’s important to understand that the vast majority of cameras in the UK are people and businesses legally protecting their own shit, just like in the USA.

One key cultural difference is ANPR. In America the general perception is that privacy includes where you go in your car, because you treat it as a portable living room. There’s never been that presumption here. ANPR systems probably can track cars in metropolitan areas and on some motorways, but live traffic cameras are unusual in most of the country.

There is definitely a slightly less self-centred lean to the balance of individual rights compared to community safety compared to North America. But this is also part of why we don’t have to put up with anywhere near the same risk of violence or crime, even in areas that are significantly more densely populated.

We also have pretty good laws governing this stuff.

In short, Hot Fuzz ain’t real, and I think North Americans like to project this idea of a surveillance culture onto the UK without considering that they are likely under the exact same sorts of surveillance in the same sorts of places, without as many of the same legal protections.

(And with plainly discriminatory surveillance systems like Shotspotter to boot)

Do you think retailers in the USA and Canada are not using the systems described in the article? Because you would be wrong if you do.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-12592563/wal...

I have a hilarious photo of my then very young nephew, who was hiding from us behind a curtain, but only his face is covered. I think about it often when I wonder if my perception of the world is actually still that removed from that of others.

Neatly put.

Really what she is describing is the development of her self-consciousness, self-image, self-awareness, and awareness of the process of thinking within that, that comes from being introduced to language.

On the wikipedia page for her there is a quote:

I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten — a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free!

It is as if what she's saying is that the loss of her sight and hearing locked her away from a dim sense of who she was before.

Most of us can't remember things from 19 months old as adults and likely wouldn't have been able to remember them at the age of seven. But she was locked away with sense memories of her 19-month-old experience of the world for all that time.

Her writing really is fascinating and eloquent. It brings to mind Harold Bloom's theory that Shakespeare essentially invented a terminology and model for describing our inner monologues.

It depresses me that there will now be a phalanx of motivated reasoners trying to shoehorn her story somewhere into their projections onto the current technological obsession.

Proponents of these tools can keep saying this, but it doesn’t make it true.

Almost nothing these tools can do really helps the creation of art.

I'm as surprised by this as you are.

Perhaps we actually are unusual.

Same as the Brexit changes relating to this.

But it is not really a cynical statement about art. It's a cynical statement about government policy towards the arts.

In the UK, Brexit has done a great deal of slow-motion damage to the prospects of British artists (and the opportunities for British audiences) and it is difficult not to see the government's intransigence towards work travel restrictions for artists as an arts policy rather than just an immigration policy.

The truth is everyone knows LLMs can't tell correct from error, can't tell real from imagined, and cannot care.

The word "hallucinate" has been used to explain when an LLM gets things wrong, when it's equally applicable to when it gets things right.

Everyone thinks the hallucinations can be trained out, leaving only edge cases. But in reality, edge cases are often horror stories. And an LLM edge case isn't a known quantity for which, say, limits, tolerances and test suites can really do the job. Because there's nobody with domain skill saying, look, this is safe or viable within these limits.

All LLM products are built with the same intention: we can use this to replace real people or expertise that is expensive to develop, or sell it to companies on that basis.

If it goes wrong, they know the excited customer will invest an unbillable amount of time re-training the LLM or double-checking its output -- developing a new unnecessary, tangential skill or still spending time doing what the LLM was meant to replace.

But hopefully you only need a handful of such babysitters, right? And if it goes really wrong there are disclaimers and legal departments.

I did work at a dot com (well a dot co dot uk) back in the 90s where I had varying jobs, and arguably the most successful two I was the front end guy for (but these were successful because of who they were for, not the development; the back-end was a nightmare in one of these). We had to invent things.

Apart from that, I've always just done everything. And I'm good at it all. Slightly conservative or risk-averse after almost three decades, maybe. But still good, and still up to date and learning.

And I'm burned out and want to quit, or get away from the Web, or at least teach (which I've also done).

I don't think newer web developers necessarily understand the luxury of specialising in one part or another. A lot of us didn't get offered the choice.

(But then again, I'm shocked by how many newer developers lack basic competence that I think only comes from deeper understanding of the full stack. There are non-idempotent GET requests on this very website where I am typing.)

ETA: I think in a lot of small shops, developers still end up getting dragged across this divide through circumstance. The web does not really have a front-end/back-end divide, no matter how much recruitment managers, engineering team leads and tech bloggers would like it to have.

Eloquently put :-)

"In a few years" you'd have the benefit of the current, bespoke tools, plus all the work you've put into improving them in the meantime.

And the LLM would still be behind, unless you believe that at some point in the future, a radically better solution will simply emerge from the model.

That is, the bet is that at some point, magic emerges from the machine that renders all domain-specialist tooling irrelevant, and one or two general AI companies can hoover up all sorts of areas of specialism. And in the meantime, they get all the investment money.

Why is it that we wouldn't trust a generalist over a specialist in any walk of life, but in AI we expect one day to be able to?

Don't people make notes of that somewhere they can look it up?

I mean, you're not going to use this to generate command line arguments for commands you've never heard of before, you're likely not going to use it for commands whose outputs are crucial or behaviours unsafe, and if you do you're going to need to use your actual knowledge to check it hasn't hallucinated something dangerous before you run it -- which means consulting the manual and doing the work.

I get that man pages are a particularly rich, standardised form of training text, I just don't believe there is as much advantage in asking an LLM.

This is one of those areas where I think people project success onto LLMs where there is none. It's like the songwriting example. Sure it can write a bad song fast, but so can literally anyone half-skilled, and if you want to help it write a good song, you're going to have to redo half the work.

This is just like having a bad dishwasher.

So it all needs checking. It's the classic LLM situation. If you're trained enough to spot the errors, the analysis wouldn't take you much time in the first place. And if you're not trained enough to spot the errors...

And let's say it does work. It's like automated exchange betting robots. As soon as everyone has access to a robot that can exploit some hidden pattern in the data for a tiny marginal gain, the price changes and the gain collapses.

So if everyone has the same access to the same banal, general analysis tools, you know what's going to happen: the advantage disappears.

All in all, why would there be any benefits from a generalised model?

I am not at all sure why.

This is an enormously valuable concept: that plots require both participants and also people who do not just direct it or order it, or even just design it, hands off (often called "the architect of the plot"). They need people who are there from start to finish, like an author is; involved in every corner.