ecjhdnc2025

Well there was one at university that pretended to be about hill walking.

I think your reading is fair considering what I actually wrote!

It's just not quite what I had in mind. But what I wrote is still quite scrappy; that line is missing at least an "in general" to broaden that point out beyond iTerm 2 specifically. I need to slow down a bit more.

I don't really agree with you on the LLM side of the equation, and I am bothered by the idea that this is where we're all headed. But where I think this integration is not ridiculous is in doing this at the GUI level.

There is an argument for saying "why isn't this a utility at the remote (shell) end", but of course from the perspective of OpenAI API calls being added to everything and calling out from the command line, that would be worse, because you'd be installing it everywhere.

So if it belongs anywhere (colour me wholly unconvinced) it definitely belongs somewhere within the terminal client itself.

But as I say, I don't use iTerm 2. I did take this opportunity to look at what iTerm 2 offers, out of fairness to the author, and it is obviously an impressive bit of work. Maybe when I find a need for Python scripting like that I'll come back to it.

I am fully aware that eventually I will need to engage with it -- not least because I want to be teaching.

But I'm really interested in finding a maximally-ethical way through it all. The MagPi magazine has just started an article series about applications of ethical, non-infringing models and on-device AI, so I think there must be an emerging trend line around that.

Though whenever I see people talking about ethical AI stewardship the debate seems to be about one specific corporation which is run by a guy who launched a "let us scan your iris and we'll give you crypto" business.

It's an interesting point. I too am deeply skeptical and worried, and I would be concerned people think I am "anti-AI". Which I am not -- not least because it's a sixty-plus-year-old discipline that has a development history that spans long before OpenAI and the current burst of empty calories.

But if there's something I am building into my personality, it is rejecting (and calling out) grift. That is what makes me seethe about this entire big picture. The hype, the cultural parasitism, and the callous, blasé "oh yeah if you're not using this already you're probably fucked" FUD/FOMO shit smoothie that generative-AI people seem entirely too comfortable dishing up.

People who even seem in a hurry to jump on that hype train are going to catch the same side eye.

Re: iTerm2 specifically: I don't use iTerm2. I didn't mind it when I did. I wish the developer luck; terminal apps always need more attention. And in this case I don't think a tickbox to switch something on would trouble me.

But if I really relied on a product, seeing its developer divide attention and start shoehorning in LLM APIs to gain a bit of contemporary relevance would at least slightly bother me.

Like when one of your least rigorous-thinking friends or relatives starts talking to you about some opportunity to do with Ethereum. Not often a positive sign.

(This Gitlab issue is not the silliest overreaction I've seen. At the height of the Apple/Samsung Android lawsuit proxy war, I once saw someone demand in a support thread that Wacom remove some Android connection tools that one or more of their smart tablets were using, because Android was "stolen property" or somesuch obviously Jobsian phrasing.)

I agree with all of this -- particularly the exploration and discovery aspects.

But a side note on this:

> You can’t cost-effectively improv your way through an animated movie the way a director and actors can with a camera and a set.

The Jim Henson Company is working on exactly the technology that supports this, actually -- the business of live puppetry capture as distinct from, say, motion capture.

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

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

This kit is expensive/bespoke but I don't know that it's _that_ expensive, set against how much money goes into making movies with large-scale bluescreen work these days. And it's wholly amenable to improv.

Her debut solo album was Waits and Waits/Brennan covers:

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

Eclectic choices even for Waits songs. Though I'd like to hear her take on Poor Edward or Fish And Bird or Soldier's Things

Awesome!

My home studio doesn't have plain, unobstructed walls for some simple shots, and while a paper roll backdrop is a good substitute, sometimes you want a wall, or a corner, or you just want to use wallpaper.

So I built a massive construction with doubled-up cardboard sheet, girders made with pallet corners, these gigantic split pin things and hot glue, and then I spray-mounted wallpaper on it.

I also did it at the wrong time of year, when the air was still too damp and the heating needed to be on, so it didn't last an enormously long time before things rippled, because it turns out cardboard has some quite organic behaviours in moist air.

So it was almost a failure. But I'd absolutely do it again, replacing the cardboard with foamcore or thicker insulating board.

It was a really fascinating, liberating process to take that much control over the process, and I've been doing similar since, assembling my own photographic tools to a level that looks a bit like obsession.

I think maybe many software developers here don't understand the parallels between doing this sort of thing and assembling your "stack" for a few applications.

A true photographer's "tools" barely even start with the camera. There's a whole array of tools beyond that, beyond peripherals, that extend into the scene or into methodology.

There's a right amount of time for artistic endeavours and it has all been used up by our niche metaprogramming project.

> Even without getting into semantics about "what is art", the reality is that this is promotional material for advertising. This wasn't commissioned by a rich patron to put up on exhibition for MoMA.

99.9999% of all art is not commissioned by a rich patron to put up on exhibition for MoMa. It's just something that artists do.

IT geeks are all for imposing their own creative restrictions on their work -- using Haskell when the competition is using PHP, developing their own distributed network persistence layer on top of SQLite when there are products out there that already exist but they just don't like for pseudospiritual reasons.

But artists who just make pictures are expected to be cost-effective and not to put any value on their artisanship?

Compositing like this is a nearly inevitable part of almost all product photography, I think? Anything that has motion will lean towards compositing for all the surrounding elements. Except those incredible people who built motion rigs for burger drop ads.

Capture One (the kinda sorta still industry standard tethering/photography capture software in the marketing industry, for all the high-end kit) has a really nice tool to help with previsualising compositing live.

Yes. But why would you do all these computer-ish things to provide a backdrop for a computer? Where is the creativity in that? Where is the attitude, the whimsy, the irony, the juxtaposition?

Considering how much of current technology stems from geeks just proving that their crazy idea could work and looking for money for it afterwards, the disrespect here for another geek's craft and intuitions is wild.

"The actors should be nonunion."

Five small, unremarked-upon words that illustrate OpenAI's positioning perfectly.

Sheldon Cooper can afford a nicer apartment.

As much as I love blaming things on MBAs, the culture of OpenAI looks at least as much like what happens when you make a room full of real-life Big Bang Theory nerds very rich by rewarding their fantasies of a world free of balanced human interactions.

We have to look at the reality that the worst excesses of the new Silicon Valley culture aren’t stemming from the adults sent to run the ship anymore, and they aren’t stemming from the nerds those adults co-opt anymore either.

The worst excesses of the new Silicon Valley culture are coming from nerds who are empowered and rewarded for their superpower of being unable to empathise.

And I say that as someone who is back to being almost a hermit. We got here by paying people like us and not insisting we try to stop saying what we think without pausing first to think about how it will be received by people not like us.

It’s not a them-vs-us thing now. It’s us-vs-us.

First they came for the Sheldon Coopers, and I did not speak out

This is how anything political (big or small P) works.

Aspirations keep people voting against their interests.

I personally worry that the way fans of OpenAI and Stability AI are lining up to criticise artists for demanding to be compensated, or accusing them of “gatekeeping” could be folded into a wider populism, the way 4chan shitposting became a political position. When populism turns on artists it’s usually a bad sign.

Wise. Stops people saying "and don't call me Shirley!"

Form follows function, art imitates life, dog owners grow to look like their dogs...

Right, but would that have been achieved with a clause open-ended enough to allow this additional paperwork on exit?

Or would that have been an "if you break the law" thing?

Seems unlikely that OpenAI are legally in the clear here with nice clear precedent. Why? Because they are backflipping to deny it's something they'd ever do.

Must it?

Not clear what you mean.

Do you mean it is generic to do that in contracts? (Been a while since I was offered equity.)

Or do you mean that even OpenAI would not try it without having set it up in the original contract? Because I hate to be the guy with the square brackets ;-)

> Personally I don't think it's a right vs left thing. It's more about authoritarianism and the desire to crush the people you feel are violating the rules, especially if it seems like they're getting away with violating the rules. There are just some differences about what people think the rules are.

Oh I agree. I wasn't making it a right-vs-left thing, but rather neutering the idea that people perceive it to be.

I would not place myself on the political right at all -- even in the UK -- but I see this idea that bad-faith is an alt.right thing and I'm inclined to push back, because it's an oversimplification.

OpenCanAIry

Propaganda at a national level, it's always been that, and I take your point for sure.

I think perhaps I didn't really make it totally clear that what I'm mostly talking about is a bit closer to the personal level -- the way people fight their corners, the way twitter level debate works, the way local politicians behave. The individual, ghastly shamelessness of it, more than the organised wall of lies.

Everyone getting to play Roger Stone.

Not so much broadcast bad faith as narrowcast.

I get the impression Stalinism was more like this -- you know, you have your petty level of power and you _lie_ to your superiors to maintain it, but you use weaponised bad faith to those you have power over.

It's a kind of emotional cruelty, to lie to people in ways they know are lies, that make them do things they know are wrong, and to make it obvious you don't care. And we see this everywhere now.

This really is OpenAI's Downing Street Christmas Party week isn't it.

> This reads like more than standard restrictions.

It reads like omertà.

I wonder if I'll still get downvoted for saying this. A lot can change in 24 hours.

Edit: haha :-P

Right. The big change is bad faith argument developing into unapologetic bad faith developing into weaponised bad faith.

It accelerated rapidly with some trends like the Tea Party, Gamergate, Brexit, Andrew Wakefield, covid antivax, and the Ukraine situation, and is in evidence on both sides of the trans rights debate, in doxxing, in almost every single argument on X that goes past ten tweets, etc.

It's something many on the left have generally identified as worse from the right wing or alt.right.

But this is just because it's easier to categorise it when it's pointing at you. It's actually the primary toxicity of all argument in the 21st century.

And the reason is that weaponised bad faith is addictive fun for the operator.

Basically everyone gets to be Lee Atwater or Roger Stone for a bit, and everyone loves it.

Well that’s rather lovely.

If you are a notable person and I have video of you kicking a puppy, and I publish it because you are a notable person and kicking a puppy is wrong, what would damage your reputation is kicking a puppy. Not me publishing it.

This act of expanding the definition of propaganda to include the simple publication of harsh critical journalism is unbecoming.

I've not watched 100 hours of videos at all and I've made and printed fully parametric designs with four variants driven by two configuration tables. I don't think it's that hard to learn.

> The absurd separation between Parts and bodies and whatnot.

Again, Parts/Bodies, it's confusing (and Part Design should be called "Single Body Design" IMO) but there are videos that explain the difference.

(I gather it comes from CATIA, and CATIA users are comfortable. Either way you don't have to use both; it's possible to never touch Part Design and do absolutely everything.)

I don't think I got it initially but now the difference is useful. There could be more work to allow non-Part-Design Parts to be wrapped in Part Design bodies. There's a macro (pdwrapper) for this, and Realthunder's branch built it in.

There could be better explanations on how Part Design works, how you build a Part Design Body from existing Parts and how you later combine them.

> The 5 different assembly benches, none of them good.

I feel this pain and I mostly avoided it by just using static placement. There's a new built-in Assembly workbench with a sophisticated solver that is being added in 1.0 which will land in the next two to three months (and is already in 0.22-dev and Ondsel 2024.2). I am going to dive in with that.

> The crashes.

Not a problem I have on the Mac at all now; 0.21 is really stable. Though startup crashes are common on Linux due to W****nd and the complexities of compiling support for it. The Flatpak appears to solve those. Ish.

> The way you need pixel precision to grab a vertex or an edge.

There is a preference setting (a newish one) that makes edge selection rougher/easier.

> And if some operation cuts a part in multiple disjoint pieces, only one survives.

Only in Part Design, which (in mainstream FreeCAD) is concerned with only one contiguous object. In fact, that operation actually fails. (A Body can be started with a compound of multiple pieces, but the first feature has to join them).

RealThunder's branch can support Bodies made of separate solids, and maybe that will come to mainstream once the TNP fix, which is a prerequisite, is in.

Outside of Part Design, objects split as you'd expect.

I don't think FreeCAD is perfect. That would be silly. But none of the "free" plans of the commercial cloud packages are right for me.

Alas, fully fixing the issues with fillets and chamfers may be impossible, because those specific problems are quite foundational issues in OpenCascade. I don’t know if it’s even possible for FreeCAD to know that a fillet would fail by testing it, because of limitations with the responses that come back from the kernel.

It might be possible to predict which edges would have problems, but I think that would involve repeating geometry calculations outside the geometry kernel?

Specifically the main problem with fillets/chamfers in OCC is that the new face cannot completely consume/replace an existing edge.

That is to say -- I think!? -- that one of the edges of the new fillet/chamfer is always an existing edge just displaced, and no edges are destroyed. If an edge would be destroyed, then it fails?

But this is just my colloquial/folklore understanding.

There have been newer versions of OCC that FreeCAD has not yet switched to, I think. (And there is a new (Chinese) fork, called OpenGeometry.)

So maybe there are some fixes already in the pipeline or in the future. But they are somewhat out of the FreeCAD project's control, is my understanding.