On this basis it’s difficult to beat Tinkercad, frankly.
254 karma · joined November 21, 2024
OpenSCAD was a useful stepping stone for me, from programming to 3D. But I've been doing my own designs in FreeCAD for two and a half years or so.
I just think the typical groundswell of HN support for OpenSCAD is a bit misguided; it sort of relies on near-wilfully ignoring what GUI CAD -- even FreeCAD -- can do for one's designs.
Yes, it's good for simple geometry, and some more advanced mathematical geometry. But it boxes you in pretty quickly because you cannot easily compose geometry based on the outputs of previous operations.
If so he did that in 2001, whereas Kubrick died in 1999.
A parametric CAD package starts off with some variables, makes 2D representations of them that can be solved by a constraint solver, extends those 2D representations into a third dimension parametrically, connects 2D representations to earlier generated geometry etc.
If you change an early parametric variable, it ripples through the design because the design is a directed graph (indeed, CAD designers often run into situations where they have tried to do things which would create a cycle in a graph -- use the dimensions of a subsequent part in an earlier part, which the CAD package cannot solve).
Most of the core calculations involved are functional in this regard -- for example a 2D sketch to a 3D extrusion, a 2D sketch to a sweep along a path.
But Blender is a mesh manipulation environment. Ideal for designing 3D models to go in virtual environments. Not awful for 3D models that are only going to a 3D printer, but fundamentally not the right tool for CAD for general manufacturing, because it cannot natively produce STEP-type geometry.
Simple parts, yes. Geometry and trigonometry demos? Yes. Actual computer-aided design... no not really.
The Spreadsheet module is awesome (particularly configuration tables, which I used even in one of my first serious designs) but I still don't really know why my model has to recalculate because I changed the background colour in a cell. That seems to me to be unnecessarily deep integration.
I think CadQuery/Build123D are fine tools with much better abstractions than OpenSCAD. The latter is not, IMO, really a CAD tool at all; at no point does the Computer Aid the Design, in the CAD sense, whereas you can argue that the various OpenCascade code-CAD environments can at least expose generated geometry to code.
But the post is right: parametric GUI CAD is pretty much a visual analogue of functional programming. Once you get your head around the ways sketches or their equivalents can map onto existing geometry, a lot of the ways programmers think are very applicable to CAD.
You're basically working with a directed graph, which means you can do things like drive designs from parameter sets, or spreadsheets, and e.g. in FreeCA drive some variables from configuration tables (rows in a spreadsheet with different parameter sets) so you can make variations of objects.
As much as I think code-CAD has uses, especially perhaps for analysing and post-processing STEP files for download customisers, at this point someone with parametric CAD requirements should at least try a GUI CAD package like FreeCAD or any of the free/low-cost tiers of the commercial packages. FreeCAD can do OpenSCAD, and has a (verbose) Python layer, so it's accessible to code CAD.
The tools may initially be a little frustrating for programmers used to writing code, athough IMO less frustrating than the many quirks and significant limitations of OpenSCAD. But CAD methodology is logical and scaleable, and with a little learning you will be able to do things much more quickly and much less repetitively than OpenSCAD, which admittedly is a counterintuitive claim to a programmer.
I think programmers tend to think that GUI CAD must be to code-CAD what visual programming tools are to text IDEs: unnecessary fuss keeping you from the truth. But it's really not like that.
I don't believe Kubrick had particular problems with the British Board of Film Censors.
The BBFC never censored A Clockwork Orange, for example. They passed it without cuts, though they had seen a pre-print of the first completed half of the movie as was the custom, and had been concerned that it might not get certification. The censor commended the final movie.
Kubrick personally pulled it from distribution in the UK, after they had passed it and it had a limited release.
https://www.bbfc.co.uk/education/case-studies/clockwork-oran...
The BBFC do not and did not edit films. They are not a government body. They did once call themselves censors (the words of the acronym changed in the 80s), but the point of the BBFC was that the film industry was censoring its own work proactively, and maintaining their own certifications, to avoid government doing it. Similar to what the MPA(A) did.
They still sometimes suggest edits that would keep a film within a particular certification.
In the case of Eyes Wide Shut, it wasn't the BBFC that made any decisions to edit and cut that film; Warner Bros themselves did, based on the US classification they were aiming for.
> Kubrick died within a week of the film release, perhaps he knew too much, perhaps not.
Or perhaps, after a stressful filming, editing and production schedule, a 70 year old man had a heart attack in his sleep.
I'm more than half a century old, an internet geek since a few years before the conventional "dawn of the web" and AFAIK there is no recording of my voice on the internet.
Added to which, controlled samples like this with a good range of syllables will always be more helpful, won't they?
This is not the reason you're seeing this on the BBC, which feels no pressure from advertisers and is not owned by a food or drug company.
Communities should probably cautiously welcome VC funding for well-integrated community members solving hard, core problems with correctly-licensed contributions back to the community, as long as that effort doesn't divert community engineering focus away from long-term community goals and towards the startup's goals in non-beneficial way.
They should be more cynical about things that don't happen this way, but then they can keep doing their own thing anyway.
Ondsel found the money for two major core technical problems to be addressed in FreeCAD, and seems to have had a pretty positive impact on release-oriented thinking in general. They then folded. It is a loss, but essentially none of the work was lost.
Frankly I am not sure if the "written in Rust" element here is culturally beneficial in the long term or not; I don't know enough about Python or really anything about Rust.
'In the podcast, Dr Seyfried also suggested radiotherapy and chemotherapy only improved patients' lifespan by one-to-two months, comparing modern cancer treatments to "medieval cures".'
Which is quite obviously horseshit.
The subset of people for whom such a title would be "clickbait" is so small and well-informed that they ought not to be falling for clickbait.
Everyone else understands that since it is impossible to build a sun, it must be a clever metaphor or some other intriguing novelty.
They sell the same thing -- perceived (and let's say for fairness potentially actual) control over health and nutrition -- to different market segments.
Wellness itself is always the thing being sold.
[...]
> He is also an investor in Huel, a meal replacement company - and Zoe, which sells a personalised nutrition programme involving the use of blood sugar monitors.
> "He has financial stakes in health and wellness companies. And once you have financial interests, you have then the further interest in focusing on health and nutrition," says Ms Simmons.
It's a GenAI subculture signifier. Utterly tiresome; HN and the tech web is riddled with it.
Pretty sure the literature makes it clear he's a fan of show tunes. So it's down to your conscience and moral backbone as to whether this is better or worse.
Like the arcade game, LLM safety whack-a-mole only ends when you are exhausted. It's kind of glorious, really.
I just saw an incredible Facebook reel of a voice actor, Shelby Young, saying the same thing in a striking range of theatrical voices, and I still wonder. How much of her true vocal fingerprint is unavoidably there?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyNnyeu_kPU
(As a fan of old movies, "Vintage" was particularly impressive to me -- she is impersonating not just voices but also the choice of tonality those actors made in light of recording technology)