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

help-circle

  • I suppose there’s an element of preference as well. If !myinterest@instance exists and is limping along with 80 subscribers and a post once a month, is that less discouraging? Maybe 300 subs and a post every other day is adequate? At the risk of scope creep, maybe the answer lies in more data and options to account for the preferences of those new to the Fediverse. I concede I don’t have answers though, and I’m obviously putting less work into it than you are.

    Fight the good fight, friend. I need more posts about old TV shows and niche hobbies, so we just need more decent people, however they arrive. :-)



  • 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.



  • LED joysticks that can select from over 16 million color options. This might not be practical, considering only about 25 different color settings would have been sufficient.

    So the RGB leds come with 256 levels of brightness for each color. Don’t worry, article-writer, the company wasted zero extra effort on this “feature.”

    I consider getting one of these things every once in a while, but then I remember that I’ve pulled my hacked PSP out of the drawer like three times in the last ten years, and I shrug and move on. It’s generally more fun for me to plug a USB controller into my computer for retrogaming.


  • 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 actually watched the trailer, and this one looks… okay? It is trying to mash up Fast & Furious with Elf, and it could work, I guess. I would likely smile at the high-concept nonsense while sitting in a Doctor’s waiting room.

    At $250M budget, though that’s gonna be a tough one. The pre-COVID rule of thumb was double to the budget with ticket sales to break even in the sense of “powers that be will be content and no one’s career gets derailed.” I have my doubts this is a half-billion-dollar movie.


  • 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.