254 karma · joined November 21, 2024
But sure, if you don’t care that a human isn’t involved in doing it. Personally it’s not negotiable to me and I think more people believe this than you might expect.
Some really do function like unions: groups of artists sharing the functional/procedural/admin burden that comes with keeping their publishing as Saint Francis of Zappa advocated, or paying someone who cares (perhaps a small indie record shop owner) to do that for them as a side gig.
Some are little more than asset classes for private equity at this point.
And yet it is different, because of the production scale involved. Own brands are actually hard work, especially own brand food, which has to be reverse-engineered at some expense. Own brand food provides price discrimination and usually does not particularly impact the sales of the headline brands.
Netflix’s own content, presumably, pays a large number of creative people’s wages and is of a quality. It is often scratching a creative itch that major studios won’t risk.
Music and music tech, on the other hand, is such that if your audience doesn’t care, it’s quite easy to churn out songs —- one person who particularly hated human culture could write half a dozen fully produced songs in a day.
> If Spotify does this, and a majority of people do not care, do not notice, and keep using Spotify until label-owned music is totally irrelevant, I think it would be more interesting if the musicians who are put out of work by this consider why their high quality music lost out to such mass produced "garbage"...
I do wish this particularly nihilistic new form of argument was considered to be toxic itself.
But to answer the point: many outstanding, culturally significant musicians have small fan bases for their personal work. They know they do. That is in the nature of diverse culture. They rely on complex chains of discovery systems —- word of mouth, eclectic radio, old style auteur playlists, live gigs, to find their people, and they often support that by writing songs for major musicians who love their work and who want to do one song they wrote.
It is not their failure at all if the system that is supposed to deliver some of that discovery starts cynically acting against them. While every musician wants a hit and many will dedicate at least some time in their lives to exploring what is necessary to write a hig record, “You should have had more mass market appeal” is not universal creative guidance.
It is not that listeners have no choice in music services. Musicians have no choice but to engage with Spotify. If it is secretly working against all musicians simultaneously at the most basic level —- drowning them out with slop that is deliberately inserted into playlists to water down everyone’s incomes —- then how is it you are more interested in the way musicians are somehow failing, when nothing they do can stop it?
Honestly I am terrified for culture that so many people in the tech world seem to be so aggressively jealous of creativity that they are taking the "anti-anti-slop" stance (to borrow a phrase from politics used for the "yeah well all this criticism validates the choice I am not in any way saying I am making" argument).
I'm a pretty happy FreeCAD guy, actually -- my issues are not FreeCAD but learning design -- but I will be trying it too.
(Gets even better in 1.1, too -- and there are new changes coming to the core datums)
I personally don't think overall UX is the biggest problem, if you're prepared to learn it. I've used much worse software than this, and I think a lot of people are just moaning that it isn't "immediate" or "easy". I particularly don't understand criticism of it from the OpenSCAD direction: that's often just misinformed whining from people who hate GUIs and don't believe they can offer anything over text.
Since the new Assembly workbench and the TNP mitigations were added I think it's on pretty solid footing; you can do many things more easily in Part Design now than before, based on geometry edges rather than sketch edges.
One thing I would suggest is using the tab bar workbench selector rather than the dropdown: for some reason that makes the whole thing so much more fluid.
The biggest problem is still, ultimately, robustness.
Just wanted to respond to the idea that the intrigue, such as there is, around Robert Maxwell’s death is logically connected to the intrigue around Ghislaine.
The central disease of QAnon/BritAnon thinking is the belief in omniconspiracy, when it’s entirely normal for notable people to be connected by only a handful of degrees of separation, just like everyone else is.
Every now and then the omniconspiracy touches on something a bit unusual —- this, or a dead staffer, say —- and uses mere proximity to establish a connection that doesn’t exist, and then uses that connection to magnify and anchor the conspiracy.
Yes, that's possibly 100 middle-aged men you could urge into battle!
There were always workarounds that made it possible to do what you say: you could offset your sketches from base planes rather than attach them to generated geometry, and otherwise avoid using generated geometry by making use of parametrics.
Once you knew how it wasn't particularly onerous. For a couple of years of 0.20 and 0.21 I had no TNP-related breakage because of this.
(There could be some problems with assemblies that were a bit more challenging.)
However, this is now essentially a solved problem in 1.0. There's a high level of mitigation in a stable face-naming algorithm that keeps track of the changes OCC creates. There are still edge cases being reported, but the implementation works well. I've stopped worrying about applying the normal base-planes technique.
(There are still edge cases of TNP in other CAD packages, even those built on Parasolid, because it's a research-grade problem; once you think about it in depth, it can never be "solved". It can only be mitigated to the point where the package usually does what you would expect.)
You can now sketch on faces, edit dependencies, make Pads and sweeps from solid geometry edges as well as sketch edges, refer to generated geometry in sketches, and see the subsequent features stay where they should be.
So this "main problem with FreeCAD" is essentially in the past, as it has been for a long time in the RealThunder branch where the mitigations were originally developed.
Another "main problem" -- the lack of a core Assembly workbench -- is also addressed.
The final "main problem" of FreeCAD, IMO, is that OCC's implementations of fillet, chamfer and thickness are less capable than other modern CAD systems; there are limitations regarding thick fillets on thin edges, essentially. It might be possible to get these improved upstream, or it might not be, but there are other ways to get fillets into your design (such as adding them in the sketches, where arguably any "functional" fillet should be anyway).
Nonsense.
Funnily enough we wonder this about the USA and its drain-circling obsession with giving power -- and now grotesque, performative preemptive obeisance -- to Donald Trump.
Did I? You're projecting.
I voted for a third party. And that third party candidate got elected. In one of the formerly safest Tory seats in the country. Because we wanted change and we are aware of the trends of our own local politics.
New parties have no chance because first time MPs -- of all parties -- have no chance. It's rare to get selected on your first try, or to get a winnable seat on your first try. Across all parties. Because it's a process that requires practice and proper infrastructure -- competent agents, competent support, competent canvassing.
So a new party will have to find exceptional candidates, or media-addicted fame chasers, or defectors who rarely get elected because defection is frowned upon, to get anywhere in its first general election campaign. By that measure, Reform did exceptionally well.
Everyone's vote gets counted. Everyone's vote has equal weight. The system, again, elects local representatives as its method of operation. If you want a local representative of your chosen party, find someone who is locally electable to run for that party. Or run yourself.
This is a little difficult to prove. From the Parkland libels, sure. From the rest of the culture he promotes? Are you so sure?
Whenever Americans lecture us on our culture of preferring safety we tend to just count back the number of days to your last school shooting. Be aware you're on ZERO right now. A teenage girl! At a Christian school. And consider that there are other perspectives on how bad that is. Because you collectively don't seem that bothered.
There are pretty significant changes to the "fit" of the UI, better preference panels, but there are also significant improvements to UI and tooling in Sketcher, the TNP mitigations mean attaching sketches to surfaces is broadly as safe as it is in other CAD packages, you can directly extrude edge selections in Part Design, there is support (not enabled by default) for multiple separate solids in single bodies in Part Design, pretty major changes in the CAM workbench and architecture workbenches etc.
Most significantly in a workflow sense there's a new core Assembly workbench; combined with the TNP mitigations that is an enormous change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Dj3p1nCmrE
It's very much not just "under the hood".
Still more things to fix -- lots of stuff has already changed in the 1.1-dev weekly builds.
Ghislaine met Jeffrey Epstein the year Robert fell off the Lady Ghislaine. She did so because she was in NY schmoozing socialites because Sir Bob had bought a paper -- NY Post was it?
Robert Maxwell was a strange, multi-faceted bloke, a sort of chaotic-neutral crook and spy, and yet he really most likely just fell off his boat after having a heart attack, because he was a very large (by 90s standards) and very unhealthy old-looking man who didn't listen to advice about diet, exercise, health and risk, and was stressed out by being in unprecedented debt. He would not have committed suicide; not his style.
There's no big story to link the two, apart from the fact that Ghislaine wouldn't have been there at all mingling in the high-end social scene in early 90s New York if she weren't the daughter of a media baron who had just bought a paper.
If anyone did "whack" Robert Maxwell it had nothing to do with Epstein, who was at the beginning of his career as a blackmailer, grifter, influence broker and deviant. It's not even clear they met.
It would have had more to do with all the people Maxwell upset in his long, storied life as a potential triple-agent, spy, fraudster and bully.
Don't patronise me. I'm fully aware of all of these things.
But it doesn't actually change who we vote for. If you want Reform to have more MPs, they have to have locally electable MPs. Because we vote for MPs.
If you change the system in any way that means people get candidates that parties choose on some proportional basis, you break this crucial link with the local area. We vote, locally, and we choose a person who is best for us. Time and time again this has proved to be valuable and to have generally selected quite good candidates and very good parliamentarians.
As soon as you have any other system than, locally, "I choose this person to be my representative", important things break, IMO.
But, again, this only upsets right-wingers now because they are on the losing side of it. Hasn't bothered them in the slightest before.
The idea that parliament has shifted "hard to the left", as you said earlier, is absolutely delusional, given the Centrist Dad government we now have.
But again, in case it is not clangingly obvious yet: we don't vote for parties to control government. We don't vote for party leaders. We vote for constituency MPs, and if there are enough of them who can agree to form a government, that is what they do. Political parties are not, particularly, even essential to the process. They just speed it up.
A big chunk of why we have a Labour government this time round is Tory constituencies deciding to tactically vote Lib Dem because a Labour candidate would be less likely to gain a majority, after all. One has to assume that the people who did that meant to do it.
> The electorate lurched from the Conservatives farther right, and the result of that was a centrist government.
I dispute this concept; it's a convenient hopeful fiction being sold by hucksters and grifters. You only have to look, for example, at polls saying a majority of Leave voters would now support closer ties with Europe to resolve problems caused by Brexit. What happened is simple: people chose to have a functional government, which neither the Tories of 2024 or Reform could possibly offer. Reform is probably a generation or more away from being able to do that, and who knows if the Tories can reassemble around something mainstream before then.
It's a series of (balanced) regional votes for elected representatives from equal-sized constituencies who are supposed to be responsive to that region.
Suddenly this is a massive problem for tories because it's red-faced angry right-wingers on the losing side. Whenever it contributed significantly to a tory win, it has not been a problem.
If you look at what actually happened you will see that, repeatedly, right-wing candidates lost out on a constituency-by-constituency level because the Conservatives were largely incumbents who had built up enough very personal bad reputation to be booted out, or inexperienced first-time candidates who are very rarely elected anyway and were parachuted at the last minute into seats where grandees were retiring, and the Reform candidates were a gaggle of weirdos, randoms, odd-bods, extremists and idiots who were lining up to stand for election for a party that had such a thin platform it ultimately resolves to "oooh we don' t like them", where "them" varied a little region by region but usually meant foreigners.
(And, of course, they split part of the vote between them.)
For example, you cannot write a routine that says "get me the edges of this object generated by this other routine, and apply a 1mm fillet to them all". Because while the code manipulates geometry, the result is not geometry. The result is a 3D approximated picture of the geometry rendered in another form of geometry.
To do anything like operate on result vertexes or edges you have to replicate the result geometry, by hand, in data structures in the code.
So it is not just fillets as an operation that are missing. It is any notion of being able to access the edges that you would wish to fillet.
This is why I think OpenSCAD does not "aid design" in the CAD sense. It does nothing but compile your wishes into a mesh. The most basic notion of "aiding design" ought to be exposing the result geometry of one operation so it can be used as the variable input for another.
Is it good for quickly understanding basic geometry or displaying the results of formulae? Yeah. Undeniably so.
I don't know why it particularly needs to be the freely available thing that corners "easy to use", when Tinkercad does that admirably.
With a good introduction, you can get into it and really work on your own designs in a tool nobody can take away from you or nickel-and-dime out of your hands by varying the free offer. You can run it on all of your own hardware forever. And you will actually learn core things about CAD.
The community is good. There's an absolutely amazing number of good free tutorials now; the problem of bad tutorial material is a receding issue. I have not seen anything for Fusion 360 that even comes close to being as transparent, up-front, broadly educational, clickbait-free and informative as the Mango Jelly Solutions tutorials for FreeCAD.
I do consider it a lifestyle choice, still. But then so many creative things are open-ended, freely available/documented challenges, rather than easy. Many rich experiences do not have an easy entry point with early success.
I am a mostly very happy FreeCAD user. It is something that costs me no money but has allowed me to make tools unique to me that have changed my creative life forever.
All the same I'm about to pick up the Solidworks for Makers plan for a year, because I think it's always learning a thing from multiple different perspectives. I don't particularly expect to be swayed, but I do have future plans that involve being a bit more knowledgeable about the other packages. Solidworks is where I am going to start.
This is undeniably true at the youtube content level.
But at the printer level I think consumers will crash into this far less if buying the latest. Creality’s three new Ender 3 V3 models are all low-tinkering models, even the cheapest. So are the Anycubics. Sovol’s latest machines like the SV06 Ace manage to be both fully open source and also highly tuned out of the box.
As much as I admire the build quality of (most of) the Bambu Lab machines, in real terms what they have actually achieved is making the closed source, closed build, hard to upgrade and repair, RFID-chipped-consumables printer acceptable to the market. They even almost succeeded in making printing dependent on the cloud, until their little distributed industrial accident happened.