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Aside from the cloud bits I think the most notable way they are different at the moment is that they have their new configuration variable sets functionality, which maybe core FreeCAD hasn't agreed on yet (it's also not finished I believe).

Ondsel are seemingly using that to integrate with recalculation of designs in the cloud compute facility (think Thingiverse customiser but a bit less basic).

I eagerly anticipate that in mainstream FreeCAD, because none of the alternatives are great -- e.g. Spreadsheet is simultaneously cool, powerful and utterly exasperating once it's well-integrated. I am sure we will see it.

No, it's not, not really -- because the UX work going into Ondsel is going into mainstream FreeCAD (if it didn't originate there, and a lot of recent work did).

I am sure Ondsel will vary somewhat in UX over time (because they will be somewhat ahead of what they upstream) and because a few things may be unavailable for open-source licensing.

But most of what has changed in terms of UX is already in 0.22-dev. For example OpenTheme will work (don't know if it is included by default), the "glass" tree overlay from RealThunder is there, the overlay panels, the sketcher improvements, the new integrated Assembly workbench etc.

Ondsel is a commercial distribution of FreeCAD with a cloud-based engineering suite integrated -- file sharing, cloud compute (for parametric recalculations and STEP export) etc.

Here is how they describe themselves -- in some useful detail:

https://ondsel.com/handbook/About/about_ondsel/

Outstanding writing that is clear and convincing.

I am a mostly (and increasingly) happy FreeCAD user (though I agree with your framing) but OMG I am happy for you, and I will try to get involved when I can.

Best of luck.

Well it is insane, of course. But it’s also a straw man argument.

> It is incredibly disheartening to see celebrities from traditional media expressing open disdain for the century's most revolutionary piece of technology.

Even though it threatens their livelihoods and is parasitic off their work?

It's not disheartening at all: it's positive.

> Johansson was foolish to turn this down. This all sounds like she realized the mistake, regretted it, then sent her legal team to pursue this frivolous cease and desist out of spite.

This all sounds like absurd wishful thinking.

I'm happy other people can see what has been obvious to me from day one.

It's not just schadenfreude (which I admit is unattractive, if beguiling.)

It also gives me hope that ordinary people are beginning to get to grips with the idea that they don't have to accept or be excited for new technologies just because they are new technologies, and that the people bringing new technologies don't have to be good people just because they are capable people. Seemingly smart people can be intellectually and morally lazy.

I have no obligation as a techie person to be excited about AI, or to be default-positive about the "leading firm", or to give the benefit of the doubt, or anything like that. There's no moral rule that one should be positive about new technology until it's proved bad. This is a classic tech industry false belief.

OK so the fall is not happening as quickly as Juicero. But it's a start.

What's your case for why should I not be happy?

I'm not gloating. I'm just enjoying the spectacle.

I also don't profess surprise at who OpenAI have turned out to be. Rather I am surprised that other people are surprised.

It's not a heel turn, except in their wider cultural fortunes. It has been obvious to me from literally day one that everything to do with DALL-E and ChatGPT and onwards is bad for culture. There has never been anything other than creepy, dystopian, Black Mirror overtones.

But the valley falls for hucksters every time. And it's often the same hucksters.

> Emotional intelligence /true empathy cannot be learned or acquired, at least IMHO.

I think you are right in general here in this comment but I am not sure if you are right on this bit.

Peterson might be slightly overstating the number of sociopaths (others put it at more like one in thirty).

Those people have to fake it (if they can be bothered; it doesn't seem to hold people back from the highest office if they don't)

The vast majority of people with noticeably low empathy, though, simply haven't ever been taught how to nurture that small seed of empathy, how to use it to see the world, how to feel the reciprocal benefits of others doing the same. How to breathe it in and out, basically. It's there, like a latent ability to sing or draw or be a parent, it's just that we're not good at nurturing it specifically.

Schools teach "teamwork" instead, which is a lite form of empathy (particularly when there is an opposing team to "other")

I was never a team player, but I have learned to grow my own empathy over the years from a rather shaky sense of it as a child.

Update: these terms were in place for only three days; they no longer seek to sell your likeness.

But then they'd only have to have done it once.

I don't know.

But quite a lot of people understand the difference, at a visceral level, between a painting made by an individual amateur artist and a painting made for selling at one of those Fine Art chains, or the difference between something rough and charming and a painting you might have seen in the 90s while trying to locate the loo in a UK branch of McDonalds.

People's instinctive artistic "literacy" is often surprising.

> Tradeoffs.

Yep. You don't get out of it without learning some materials science...

Right. I mean that is the thing, I guess. For people who just want to get some stuff done in a way that makes sense, TinkerCAD is about as low-friction as it gets.

It's also arguably better at hacking on STLs than a bunch of higher-end CAD packages; it feels like that's been a focus of their efforts.

Personally what I'd really like to see alongside it is a sort of Scratch-blocks-based OpenSCAD/Build123D type thing -- this may already exist?

I have come to be a big fan of small steel dowel pins, though I do wonder about them ultimately loosening in PLA as a result of (causing) cold flow.

For me it's not the online-only or closed nature of the thing, so much as the fact the canvas isn't high-DPI, which I find unreasonably maddening (I am unreasonably snobbish in this regard).

And the grid-oriented working method isn't ideal for me, though I confess I've not gone back to look at TinkerCAD much since learning OpenSCAD and FreeCAD; it may be that a better-informed visit would show me where I was judging it too hardly.

But it is amazing what people do with it, and while I have my issues with AutoCAD, it's clear that TinkerCAD is a truly liberating tool for an enormous number of people, and my criticisms may be getting into gift-horse-examination territory.

Right. And a lunchbox would have to be close to the worst-case scenario for an item where 3D printing would actually be used.

This is a well-worn topic, but FDM has many potential issues that make food-safe printing significantly challenging.

It is alas not enough to use a food-safe filament; you need a food-safe extruder drive and nozzle, and almost certainly will need print post-processing to make the printed item physically food-safe.

The issue with a lunchbox is acute because it has potential contact with individual items of food for hours at a time, on a regular basis. It's the perfect setup for bacterial growth in the layer lines -- close to the worst-case scenario.

There would be ways to mitigate that (liners etc.) but arguably even a food-safe filament would need considerable vapour smoothing or coating.

Hard TPUs up at the Shore 75D range would be tough enough for the job but they would scuff up while cleaning, and are resistant to coatings etc.

(Side note being that 75D TPU is quite capricious to print.)

Indeed. It looks to me like the export here is probably ThreeJS STLExporter? It is known for creating non-watertight models, unfortunately.

PrusaSlicer seems to do an adequate job tidying these up automatically.

I think it's not particularly uncommon for STLs exported from common CAD packagers to have some of these issues, though this is a lot.

Super-nice otherwise though -- a neat design. And in general I think client-side tools like this have a lot of potential. Three.js opens up potential for doing task-focussed things without using OpenSCAD on a server or a full emscripten build of OCC (like Cascade Studio does)

100% this.

It’s shocking to me how people cannot see this.

The only surprise here is that they didn’t think she’d push back. That is what completes the multilayered cosmic and dramatic irony of this whole vignette. Honestly feels like Shakespeare or Arthur Miller might have written it.

> I do like that many people have learned to recognize the writing style and visual aesthetic, and are rejecting it.

This is the thing that gives me hope -- inquisitive people who have no idea how ChatGPT does what it does can point out ChatGPT-generated text. It's more difficult with GAN-generated images but in the creative community I am part of, some people are very literate about this already.

It pains me to say it, but I really think it pays dividends to consider the very obvious possibility that the people who are doing this are in general just not socially well-adjusted.

Everything about OpenAI speaks of people who do not put great value on shared human connections, no?

Hey, I like that artist. I am going to train a computer to produce nearly identical work as if by them so I can have as many as I like, to meet my own wishes.

Why is it surprising that it didn't really cross their mind that a virtual girlfriend is not a good look?

This is not an organisation that has the feelings of people central to its mission. It's almost definitionally the opposite.

> Same reason people got into NFTs.

Same people who got into NFTs.

It also gave you cab drivers who don't earn enough to be able to replace their vehicles.

You can cheer on "forces" like Uber all you like but I would prefer it if progress happened without criminal deception:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/10/uber-files-leak...

I don't see how anyone can read this and think the uber app is a net positive.

> I have yet to meet anyone who felt any kind of emotion from generated art, except for "wow, it's cool that AI can make this".

Have you ever observed how difficult it is to _remember_ AI generated pictures?

I can think of only one AI-generated art thing that has stuck with me, and it's because of the enormous amount of effort the guy using it went to generating really genuinely creepy fake photos to go with a plausible but fake story (about a lost expedition in the early era of photography).

I thought at the time, OK, maybe people will do creative things with it. Maybe I am wrong.

Except that months on I can't remember any specific detail of any of the photos in enough detail to visualise it. Only the emotion and the feel, which could have been evoked by that talented person entirely without Stable Diffusion.

There is something about AI generated photos, in particular, that confounds my ability to remember the image (as a photographer)

I may be incredibly shallow but personally I am experiencing feelings of joy and validation.

Every time I tried to suggest that maybe, LLMs and GAN tools don't make creativity easier but lazier and emptier or that this technology area is parasitic off human culture, every time an OpenAI junkie told me, "hey, perhaps humans aren't much different from LLMs", or someone said artists are derivative too and don't really deserve any more protections or are "gatekeeping art"...

... my anger at the time is vindicated every time these greedy, cynical wretches that the US tech industry has raced to anoint are taken down a peg because of their own very obvious greed and expedience.

I am loving this.

I may also be shallow in feeling a measure of glee that Microsoft is racing forward to shoehorn this utter toxicity into every corner of their product range, just in time for their customers to fully understand how it reeks of contempt for them.

I often wonder why tech people think so positively about companies they idolise who are Uber-ing their way through regulations. Where do they think it stops?

Why would people not want laws? The answer is so they can do the things that the laws prevent.

This is POSIWID territory [0]. "The purpose of a system is what it does". Not what it repeatedly fails to live up to.

What was the primary investment purpose of Uber? Not any of the things it will forever fail to turn a profit at. It was to destroy regulations preventing companies like Uber doing what they do. That is what it succeeded at.

The purpose of OpenAI is to minimise and denigrate the idea of individual human contributions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

OpenAI: it's like Uber for not respecting common decency.

Not only that, they might secure a seed round.

It will be called “In Conclusion Day”.

The traditional concept of generative music was that it was different each time and varied/developed/evolved while playing.

So it's generative in the way "generative design" is, but not oriented towards optimising for a goal, if that makes sense.

I don't know about Ableton loops but I've met some drummers like this but they are usually not all that popular. So I am guessing that is not what GarageBand is aiming at, in quite the same way. ;-)

Though perhaps that is generative in the sense of optimising towards a goal; I've not used it.

Eno's work was initially done with the Koan and I think he ended up in a sort of symbiotic relationship with the developers. It was a big deal for a while in computer music magazines in the 90s.