• 12 Posts
  • 525 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
cake
Cake day: February 15th, 2024

help-circle

  • IMHO, the APIpocalypse resulted in too many communities that died on the vine and discouraged their creators and few visitors. Funneling that energy into fewer, more general communities to build up views and conversations strikes me as a a necessary forerunner to a massive “Cambrian Explosion” type of thing. Subreddits, for the most part, naturally evolved because there was already a critical mass of users interested in the topic, not because the sub existed first and attracted the users. What would you think about a different approach to collect various subreddits and file them under healthier lemmy communities that are not one-for-one, but still relevant?

    Sub : Community

    • askreddit : asklemmy
    • amitheasshole : asklemmy
    • explainlikeimfive : asklemmy
    • gaming : gaming
    • pcmasterrace : gaming
    • minecraft : gaming
    • etc, etc.



  • I think the guide I did at !cad@lemmy.world is still in pretty decent shape.

    I actually settled on Alibre Design. Permanent license at half the cost of a year of OnShape for a slightly dated but very capable parametric modeler, and the free trial made Parametric modeling click for me in a way FreeCAD didn’t. It comes with a renderer of a similar class, though I haven’t tried that yet. Changing colors of parts has been enough for my needs.

    FreeCAD has apparently fixed the topological naming issue, one of the big things that was keeping them so far behind the commercial suites. It’s already in the weekly builds, along with several other enhancements pioneered in the Realthunder fork, including UI enhancements and a default Assembly workbench. Version 1 is going to come out in the late summer or early fall, I think. Ondsel is FreeCAD but they have some venture funding to pay developers to work on the main project and to bolt-on an optional paid PDM system (download from their GitHub and you don’t have to sign up for anything). I had some crashing issues on both Windows and Linux when trying to import DXF files into either flavor, and as you say, there’s still that learning curve, but I can get a part done in it now if I need to.

    SolveSpace can do some nice things and will teach you good techniques.

    I had the same issues as you with OnShape, particularly since their free licensing is very weird, and in the worst case it implies that while YOU must use your designs non-commercially, no one else is similarly bound. It’s sloppy legal drafting, and that annoys the little black kernel of lawyerness still sunk down in my heart. Fusion has become the poster child for free feature erosion and price hikes.

    BricsCAD Shape is a basically an AutoCAD clone warped and twisted to act like SketchUp, and it works on Linux. It’s meant to be the tease to get people into their full-suite ecosystem, but I couldn’t find any legal limitations on the free version.

    Depending on what it is you’re scanning, the people mentioning Blender may have a good point.

    Shapr3D at $300/year might also be a good option.

    Finally, for your particular workflow, Plasticity at $150 permanent license may hit the exact sweet spot. Definitely try their free trial. Some of the other programs I tried are also interesting.










  • This is a weird power grab from the court. Chevron already allows that the courts can decide what Congressional intent it. The deference to agencies only comes once they determine the law is ambiguous. In a different world, where we had expert courts full of engineers and analysts, this might even produce better results than the current system, but we do not, and Judges opining on technical fields are probably the only thing worse than engineers opining on the use of language, LOL.

    I suppose if Trump wins and guts the career professionals in the executive branch and replaces them with partisan hacks at every level, we could end up glad this ruling happened, but agencies already had to act with a certain respect for internal rules and “reasonableness”. What’s more likely is that this SCOTUS will make sure it passes the final word on every significant regulatory question that arises in the next 20 years, and somehow magically the status quo that was being abused will become the law, even when it has only the thinnest threads of non-technical justification. Or worse, everything is now up for re-litigation and nobody knows WTF anything will mean anymore.




  • This is very specifically how Oklahoma’s AG sold their case against the religious charter school.

    [Oklahoma AG Gentner Drummond] said allowing a school like St. Isidore would open the door for state-funded schools to teach other religious beliefs, such as Sharia law or Satanism.

    “While I understand that the Governor and other politicians are disappointed with this outcome, I hope that the people of Oklahoma can rejoice that they will not be compelled to fund radical religious schools that violate their faith,” Drummond said.


  • I wish the Dems had felt more confident in 2020, or that Kamala Harris had proven to be a more vibrant personality able to take the reins in 2024. I wish the Overton window in the US were farther to the left. But that’s not the fight in front of us; we are where we are.

    I don’t think anybody denies that Biden is in physical and a sort of general mental decline. He’s old AF. I tend to think “turning it on” just takes a lot out of him and maybe requires a couple of days of R&R which you don’t normally get as president, but I would hardly be surprised if they give him a little chemical helper sometimes. If taking a stimulant just makes you feisty and articulate and able to pop off a solid State of the Union speech then, again, that just speaks to your being old. Someone who literally doesn’t know what they’re doing will be the same idiot, but higher energy…

    You know, like Trump.


  • You need to read it in the context of the other strips. Normally, someone in the first panel defies Everett’s sense of decorum and general decent behavior (e.g. describing a way they took advantage of another person, or being unecessarily), and in the second panel Everett cartoonishly attacks them in a fit of righteous rage. It’s all meant to be a wish fulfillment for someone struggling with the stresses of “modern” urban living. I feel like Larry David would probably have been a fan if he were around during its run, if that helps; just imagine the Seinfeld gang if they looked and acted like Kingpin from the Marvel stuff. I think the audience is invited to sympathize with Everett’s sensibilities and to laugh at the catharsis of someone actually indulging their rage.

    This one subverts the trope. It invites the audience to suppose the beggar will be destroyed, especially with the foreshadowing. However, simply existing and hoping for a little generosity does not violate Everett’s personal code, so going against the perceived rational choice, he listens to his better angels, leaves a coin, and moves on. I can almost imagine the cartoonist starting to become a little troubled at how sincerely people, possibly total assholes, professed to admire Everett and so wanted to turn things around a bit.