J253

The full blown 3D CAD programs _do_ have easily definable dimensions and a constraint solver for drawing sketches. The problem is that in these softwares, it’s typically assumed those sketches are going to be used to make a 3D part. So you’ll extrude the sketch along a line or sweep the sketch around an axis or something to create a 3D part. Consequently, what you can do artistically with the sketch ends there.*

I’m not looking for that 3D aspect of the software. Once I have the sketch dimensioned and constrained, I want to start doing artistic stuff with it like changing the line style or color, adding a gradient fill, adding text inside it—-stuff you’d use Inkscape and the like to do. But Inkscape doesn’t have the constraint solver or easy to use dimensioning tool.

*To be fair, you could probably export the line after fully defining it in CAD and import it into Inkscape, but that’s not much fun.

I completely agree with this! I used Solidworks heavily for years and am so accustomed to drawing some lines, adding some constraints and dimensions with custom hot keys and boom I have my drawing nice neat and tidy exactly as I need it in no time.

These days I don’t do any 3D modeling but I’ll need to jump into Inkscape every now and then to do some graphic design or 2D UI mockup type stuff and I wish I could easily replicate the Solidworks drawing workflow.

I’ve found that I can get pretty close to the workflow I’m looking for in FreeCAD, but then I don’t have any of the artistic stuff I need. And obviously Inkscape has all the artistic stuff, but building a drawing with constraints and dimensions isn’t possible...or certainly not easy at least.

I love the fact that a field like topology, with all its underlying mathematical complexity, also has a such a beautiful visual aspect to it.

Does anyone know if people try to tackle topology problems from the visual side? Before computers I imagine it wasn’t really considered. But say one is curious about a particular geometry, any researchers just whip it up in software and start contorting things to see what happens?

Beautiful visualization, by the way. Very cool use of Idyll. Watching the sphere evert reminded me of trying to solve those complex wooden burr puzzles.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Burr_puzzle

Love the idea. I assume the prediction about when to reorder is more sophisticated than just coffee_weight < X, so how well does it deal with highly variable coffee usage? For example, randomly throughout the week my wife wants coffee as well so I’ll make a double batch...but there’s no rhyme or reason to her coffee cravings.

Can anyone speculate as to why the NSA decided to release this? Have they released any OSS in the past?

It’d be a nice “feature” to be able to disable recommendations after watching a video. When a video ends, it just ends. If I want to watch something else, I have to explicitly search for it.

I know it’s the exact opposite of a good monitization scheme but it’d be a good step in putting the power back back in the hands of the user or parent of the user.

> My two cents is to try and compete against yourself

This. With social media so ubiquitous it's hard _not_ to compare yourself to others. I, personally, find internal motivation so much more of a driving force than external motivation. As long as I do better than I did last time, I'll be happy.

For example, if I can improve my 1600 meter run time by 5 seconds, that's a great success for me. And if I'm able to consistently see improvement over time, I'm successful. On the other hand, If I compare my 7m5s 1600m time to my neighbor's 5m30s time I feel terrible. And depending on personality type, seeing such a stark difference between where you currently are and where someone else is, it might deter them from even trying to get better. "I'll never get down to 5m30s, so why should I bother running at all?"

I'm not saying _all_ external comparisons are bad but I think it's important to know when to compare yourself to yourself (to ensure daily incremental progress is being achieved) and when to look up and see where you are relative to others (to see how your incremental progress is summing up in the big picture).

I can’t speak to any of the philosophical content, but the design and layout of poster itself is absolutely beautiful, in my opinion.

It has the feel of a 16th-century world map with a modern twist.

Smartphones are so refined these days that upgrading yearly or even every two years just doesn’t seem worth it to me if I’m paying full retail price for it.

However, if the carrier companies still offered subsidized phones I’d be more than happy to upgrade for the subsidized price. It wasn’t until NEXT and all the similar “pay the full price over N months” plans came along that I stopped upgrading regularly.

Seems like the burden of not upgrading has fallen back on the smartphone manufacturer, no? If I’m paying full price I’m either going to buy less often or look for a cheaper option.

Gandi is my go to alternative.

https://www.gandi.net/en

Cool idea I guess. I didn’t even expect to find any sort of easter eggs in this show. But feels to me like a contrived effort to be like Mr. Robot.

Personally, I didn’t enjoy the choose your own adventure format. I thought choosing dead ends that forced repeating storyline to be tedious. I also felt the “send him a Netflix sign” thing was too overtly obvious.

I also didn’t get the objective of choosing. Was it to try and get the highest game rating? Was it to try and help him with his psychological issues?

Seems like an interesting idea but not what I’m looking for as a Netflix user.

I love Mermaid! Here’s a live editor that’s really handy:

https://mermaidjs.github.io/mermaid-live-editor/

This is what I do too. Biggest complaint is the lack of official apps for mobile devices. I’ve used MiniKeePass in the past but am hesitant because there doesn’t seem to be much active development and I don’t see the source code anywhere.

Do you access kbdx files on mobile devices? If so, what do you use?

Anyone have any experience applying this to the generation of time series data?

It's easy enough to generate random time series data but this looks like a promising way to generate interesting signals with prescribed shapes or features while still being "random".

Agreed. And I definitely make no claims about this being earth-shattering "data science". I just happened spend a few hours over the weekend making some plots and commenting about what I saw with some Python tools.

I'll also state that I am neither a data scientist nor a statistician. I'm a Python application engineer with a background in mechanical engineering, so that might help set the context a bit more.

Thanks for the link! That's a great resource and write up about the statistical heaping effect. I'll include that in a post update.

Thanks. And I agree with Bokeh being overkill for this. My original intention was to make it fully interactive but I hit some snags on keeping the interactivity through Pelican SSG so I just kept 'em static.