ecjhdnc2025

Craig Murray is not simply (or perhaps really) a journalist; his constant tangles with the intelligence establishment have little to do with his writing and very much more to do with his antagonistic relationship with the British state during his former career:

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

I have a lot of time for how he thinks and what he's achieved but he's a campaigner, not a journalist.

The point is reasonable: journalists don't tend to attract individual attention from the intelligence services. Their editors and publishers do, but that is to be expected due to their specific role in publication and is often appropriate; I am quite sure state security apparatus the world over quietly leans on publishers, including in the USA.

Do a google news search for 'narendra modi site:www.theguardian.com' for example, sort by date, and you will see stories going back to at least 2019, and that is just the 30 pages result limit.

Do an advanced date search, key in a range, and you can easily find criticism of Modi's populism and the BJP's Hindu nationalism going back to 2010.

There are more than 40 pages of articles on The Guardian's site for the subject of Modi alone:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/narendra-modi?page=40

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/17/narendra-modi-...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/14/narend...

Here's an article from 2010 talking about Modi's involvement in riots in Gujarat when he was governor there:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/mar/28/gujarat-narend...

Here's an article from 2003:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/18/india.uk

I don't think I need provide more evidence?

In the USA, criticism of Modi admittedly is pretty spotty, but that's more to do with the abject failure of US journalism to consider anything beyond its borders until there's an easily quantified or enumerated crisis.

But I am fairly sure if you pick a US newspaper and do a similar search you will find similar criticism.

I have no idea what supports or does not support your CIA argument, but concern about Modi is newer even than concern about the rise of the BJP and Hindu nationalism. And that concern isn't just international.

I think if you could separate out what Modi has done for India's national pride and infrastructure from what he's doing to the rule of law, and have the former without the latter, everyone would be happy.

(You can make this point about almost any very populist leader)

Based on the standard you are suggesting, yes. But not based on the Merriam-Webster definition you're quoting.

Criticism -- even the harshest criticism -- is not inherently for the purpose of injury.

I don't know if you can really get away without learning general things about CAD systems if you want to make complex things, because those general things are so influential on the existence and design of real world objects.

It's like saying "but I don't really want to learn about different programming languages or software design, because I only want to write apps for iPhone."

If you want to make very simple objects and not learn deeper concepts, use TinkerCAD. It's fine. Weirdly competent in places; people pull off crazy stuff. It uses a simple physical world model.

Beyond that, you need more abstract tools. Ultimately you have to decide whether you want to exist within the (shifting) free plan limitations of a commercial cloud package, spend money on something like Alibre Atom3D, pay the cloud firms, or use something open source.

I'm not sure if it should be surprising that the open source systems are more of a commitment.

FreeCAD (main branch) has one fundamental limitation which is being mitigated -- the topological naming issues -- and some smaller issues to do with fillets/chamfers, but apart from that is a disorganised-but-competent, open source workbench-based system.

And the tradeoffs are not straightforward. This is less like Photoshop vs GIMP and more like ArcGIS vs QGIS. Is ArcGIS initially more coherent? Yes, allegedly. Is it universally more powerful? No.

FreeCAD is really a lot like QGIS, IMO.

You can learn QGIS, and when you learn it, you might decide that the freedoms and flexibility it offers are worth the pain. Or you might front up the cash for ArcGIS.

The Mango Jelly Solutions videos, the Joko engineering videos, the Adventures In Creation videos and thehardwareguy's videos are excellent.

There is no doubt that understanding how to mitigate TNP is important, though. Many of the videos do not go into this each time (which will be good once the issue is mitigated, very soon, but is obviously an issue at the moment).

The fundamental issue I see with bad Youtube tutorials is people skipping from Part Design to other workbenches without understanding that they are not wholly interchangeable. That is, all Part Design Body objects are Parts, but not all Parts are Part Design Body objects. Part Design is a subset.

There is at least one excellent video by Mango Jelly Solutions going into the detail of why you should choose one over the other.

But the guts of it is that Part Design does have an ordered flow -- it's a sequence of steps from a simple to a complete object, executed one after the other and implicitly booleaned together. So it has additive features and subtractive features.

Whereas in a non-Part-Design workflow, you are in charge of when something is cut from something else; there's no subtractive tooling, only boolean tools. More CSG-ish.

A good grasp of FreeCAD involves understanding Part Design's relatively special guided flow, and that outside of it is a more open-ended approach.

The RealThunder developments to Part Design after TNP was fixed do go a long way towards making this less relevant (Part Design can work with multiple bodies rather than being focussed on a single body, and you can "wrap" non-Part-Design objects in a Part Design Body object more freely without using a macro). And that way you get to use Part Design much more like Fusion 360.

But there are definitely FreeCAD proponents who would say that Part Design is training wheels for what is really going on, and that there's no substitute for many general concepts inside Part Design. The latter is true; also the implicit booleans in Part Design make some of the PD operations slower.

In my experience it proved to be to do with an underlying library in the Snap (Coin3D I think? probably?) not having been built with Wayland support. I imagine that explains it for almost everyone.

Whereas the older FreeCAD 0.20.2 distributed by Ubuntu did have that support. That was highly stable.

This (and issues sorting out the relative size of the interface when dealing with fractional scaling) is absolutely a pain point. So I use it on a Mac at the moment.

Though a friend who had trouble in the same way has found that the recent Flatpak install works (with some unsetting of XDG_SESSION_TYPE)

Answer is: it’s not. To all three. And collectively we can decide to be better. This is why artists are pushing back. One day perhaps the tech world will understand that they aren’t Luddites but instead champions for humanity.

But yes, the syntax is IMO much better because it isn’t trying to be so clever.

But there’s no denying that FreeCAD is still a bit of a lifestyle choice :-) I love it, but I don’t try to sell everyone on it yet.

Alibre Atom3D is the entry level package, but the whole thing seems very much like the Affinity suite model. It looks very good.

I don't know if that is impossible but it would be an incredible amount of work for one person to manage. He last merged a year ago, AFAIK.

I'm sure some people will stick with it over 1.0 for a good while.

(ETA: For clarity, I think he basically saved FreeCAD.)

Though I think the sketcher improvements that have gone into 0.22 (and aren't in RealThunder's work) are absolutely more valuable, and I'd rather see the facilities you mention reimplemented on top of those.

I'm not convinced by the automatic subshape binder bit; I think that is better handled explicitly.

Maybe we will see something that formalises the master sketch workflow, but I don't think it is particularly universal as a design technique. To me it seems it would maybe be better to see some kind of improvement to the selection mechanism for importing geometry from other sketches. I find that a little opaque.

I would like the built-in part design wrapper facility. And I think there are improvements in the cross-section view; I think Persistent Section Cut is often more hassle than it is worth.

As interesting as the RealThunder branch is, it's one guy's fork of experiments, and he didn't have to get agreement from anyone else or follow anyone's coding standards but his own. And for better or worse that fork is now (edit: likely) a dead end, and all the energy (edit: and money) is elsewhere.

Some great stuff has come from that branch but I don't think there's any reason why it should just be automatically blessed.

There are master sketch workflows. Youtube videos are out there for those (Mango Jelly Solutions has at least one).

The “losing faces” issue is the Topological Naming Problem. This is very soon to be mitigated and it can be worked around in the meantime (offset your sketches from a base plane rather than attaching them to a face). Though it is I gather still murderous in one of the assembly workbenches. The fix is coming soon.

Many of your other concerns would be addressed by doubling down on the parametric stuff, I think. The Spreadsheet module can help solve a lot of problems that are otherwise solved by the methods above and may be easier to keep track of. You can do calculations in there more or less as you would in a typical spreadsheet, and then give cells of the spreadsheets aliases that you can refer to in expressions anywhere in your design.

FreeCAD is really fundamentally parametric, and once you get into that, you have a bunch of options.

It’s always worth doing your fillets last, but the other thing I would say is, where a fillet or chamfer is more than presentational as it were, build it into a sketch. Or cut it with a groove. Those operations are more reliable in OCC.

Many interesting features, and as it is bRep you have faces and edges, some access to constraints, the ability to import STEP etc. (oh and fillets/chamfers, with the usual OpenCascade caveats)

I have not got into it yet (mostly I am a happy FreeCADder) but your feelings about OpenSCAD resonate with me and this looks like it addresses many of them.

On the one hand OpenSCAD was the first thing that ever gave me any confidence that I would be able to make my own designs to print, and on the other the fact that it is wholly declarative is exasperating.

People make such amazing things in OpenSCAD (like Edgar Kech’s scalable large format field camera) but I do not have the tenacity to keep up with all the maths, or keep consistently avoiding coplanar issues in the preview.

FreeCAD’s (well, OpenCascade’s) issues with fillets and chamfers appear to be most acute with a subset of your third point: sometimes adding one involves the new feature fully consuming another edge. This is unsolved in OCC and it’s why sometimes even infinitesimally changing the depth of the fillet or chamfer is enough to stop an edge being destroyed.

I have no science to back this up, mind you. But I struggle to recall details of these images (I also believe I have a limited form of aphantasia so it could just be my flawend noggin)

But I will take your point ;-)

It reads like projection of some other feelings or unstated interests.

Which is not to say that Ondsel 2024.2 is a bad way to experience those things, or that the Ondsel Lens (cloud collaboration suite) is not interesting, because it surely is.

It’s just to say it is only much more user-friendly if you’re not already using the 0.22 dev releases (that are considered to be generally as stable as 0.21 and are in wide use)

(I upvoted you for the rest: I too am waiting for the TNP mitigations before I recommend it to less technically-focussed people)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40430893

- Realthunder’s branch contains unique, forked changes that will cause file incompatibility with core freecad if you use them unknowingly

- Core freecad is ahead in many, many ways and improving quickly

- the Realthunder branch is likely a dead end

The TNP mitigation from the Realthunder branch is very close to being enabled in 0.22, and the feature freeze for 1.0 is weeks away. 1.0 is currently targeted for early August.

My feeling is that it would be much better to learn what the topological naming problem is, and how it can be worked around, and then use Ondsel 2024.2 or a 0.22 weekly release until the TNP mitigation is mainstream. (It’s likely to be in 0.22 very soon indeed)

My thinking is straightforward: there are and will be more tutorials and more support for this route, and learning about how to mitigate TNP is not wasted info: it will teach you useful skills for making generally robust designs, TNP or not.

Among others, Mango Jelly Solutions has a recent video about TNP, and Brodie Fairhall’s video on the topic is worth seeing.

The shapebinder technique near the end of this video is amazing!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yp6cIMA7LsI

And there's another clever technique using variant links (which you can take a bit further with BaseFeatures):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9C_ahIVKOI

It's funny. People describe FreeCAD as maddening or sadistic, and for sure there are elements of the workflow that are frustrating (I'd be happy if I could do the five things I use the Draft workbench for without ever having to open it), but at the same time, it's so liberating and enthralling once you get your head into its way of thinking.

For me it's like QGIS or Inkscape: it's mindblowing that this tool is available to me for free. The trivial things I've been able to do have really changed my life (and I don't mean to overstate that -- these are things I never thought I'd learn and the impacts on my creativity have been striking).

If there is a middle ground I'd like to think it involves not smashing through regulations that protect individual businesspeople (like cabbies) who have learned a difficult job.

Thank you for all of your work -- I am away from my CAD projects at the moment but I will be digging properly into 2024.2 as soon as I can.