I sometimes help out at a hobby vineyard of 0.7 hectare; weeding in the row is a lot of manual labour. Your platform seems like a good fit. I like tinkering and robotics, what kind of price point are you aiming for?
2,807 karma · joined October 26, 2016
Fillets and chamfers are a good example. They seem simple but are geometrically non-trivial, and OCC will fail on cases that Parasolid handles without complaint. You can push either kernel to its limits if you try hard enough, but OCC hits that ceiling much sooner. So any CAD tool built on top of it inherits that ceiling too.
This time everything just installed, and Claude Code turned out to be pretty good. Designing with code is sometimes more work upfront, but iteration is so much better. You get proper abstractions: functions, encapsulation, loops. You can drop in a SAT solver to optimize part placement or grab data from an excel sheet. No more clicking through a GUI that crashes and loses your session. I've spent time with Fusion, SolidWorks, NX, OnShape, FreeCAD, and Rhino, and each has its merits, but none of them can benefit from the LLM revolution the way a code-first tool can.
I asked Claude Code to generate a set of Lego bricks in various sizes, apply a nice color palette, and pack them optimally into a grid. It needed some steering, but all in all I was impressed
Not a single port forwarded, I just set my router up as peer node.
These trucs signal that the driver does not care about other people, environment, climate, etc. Because they are dangerous, obnoxious and polluting. And instead of calling these things trucks, I think Kindercrusher is a perfectly apt description.
It is not a solution for everyone, but redoing all my electricity hook-up, getting a whole-house battery and a three phase backup option would easily cost 20k. And it would cost a tonne of space, cause all this battery and inverter stuff needs to be close to the main connection (where I don't have space). The solution I chose was only 1200 for a 2kWh battery with built in inverter for 4 panels. And the battery is actually portable, I could technically use it for camping. Output is limited to 1200W AC from battery, or 2000W AC when there is enough solar input. To me spending 1200 Euro to have some electricity in case of WW III (or some significant sabotage) felt worthwhile
For the case of PET bottles, recycling is possible if:
- products are made from a single sort of plastic with the intent of recycling - can be collected as a dedicated waste stream - are not contaminated in a way that is not easily cleaned - there are rules and regulations to offset the added costs
As all these conditions have to be met, one might as well use reusable bottles instead of recycling altogether, like we do with glass beer bottles. But then why were plastics used in the first place, as there is then hardly any advantage?
Of course theoretically perfectly clean and pure singly type plastic can be recycled, but that is something very different from post-consumer waste
> Whatever replaces Parasolid and friends, should be treated like the Linux kernel.
So much this! But the undertaking is so daunting, how do we get there? A capable, OSS CAD kernel would provide so much value to the world. I whish e.g. the EU could just "nationalise" such important, crucial software and redistribute it openly. Or that through some Chinese effort a newer and better kernel just lands out of nowhere and disrupt the field, like with DeepSeek.
The world has benefitted so immensely from Linux being freely available, has anyone even tried to put a price on the benefit to humanity? Imagine being stuck in a world where on big corporations can have proper OS-es, and everyone else is stuck with some anaemic locked down kernel...
But the chances you will personally be adverse affected by anthropogenic climate change in your lifetime is pretty damn high. Humanity will survive, but many humans will die in horrible conditions
So then I just start a new "conversation" and ask which graph algorithm applies to my problem and instead of a naive solution I am pointed to an optimised algorithm and a usable library that implements it.
How do you combine a (full time?) teaching job with building such a tool? It feels way more than some hobby project. Congrats on the release!
I asked it to generate slides on a topic I know something about, and in my native language. On the one hand, the result is pretty mediocre, but on the other hand it is truly amazing that one can whip up a presentation on any topic, in any language, in a matter of minutes. I didn't review the result carefully, but already on first glance there was a wrong image, and some pretty ugly use of language. So the quality is below what i would expect. But as a starting point, I can imagine this is a huge time saver for a teacher if they want to discuss a topic spontaneously, and only have 20 minutes to prepare.
Even before the rise of AI I see lots of low effort lesson materials being used, where math questions are algorithmically generated by uninspired programmers. Or multiple choice questions where technically multiple answers are correct, but only is accepted. And there is no room for discussing why one option does or does not apply, just a simple right/wrong and next question. So even though ai generated content might be of so-so quality, unfortunately an interactive session with chapgpt is probably much more educational than the ("pre-AI") crap that is sometimes used today