exasperaited

Have you read the WML 1.x spec? Let alone WML 2.x which never really happened. It had much more interesting scope than Gemini does.

Gemini is not a good or sensible design. It's reactionary more than it is informed.

We will be able to say that AGI has arrived when the AI hands it back and says "no".

Yeah — don't attribute to resistance what can adequately be explained by idiocy.

You mean the layers that were, in fact, just side effects of scanning the (non-authoritative) short form certificate?

Oh dear.

WML/WAP got a bad rap I think, largely because of the way it was developed and imposed/introduced.

But it was not insane, and it represented a clarity of thought that then went missing for decades. Several things that were in WML are quite reminiscent of interactions designed in web components today.

This is a curious sort of hazy modern mirror image of the world of Sinclair computers, that embedded their BASIC parsing in the keyboard driver — that is to say, it essentially wasn't possible to type a syntactically incorrect BASIC program.

> It's a fact that guns curb certain kinds of crime.

It's not.

OK. There isn't any arguing with anyone who doesn't have a problem with the idea that someone else's right not to be murdered is less important than their unlimited gun ownership rights, which is the only conclusion I can draw from what you are saying. So I will leave you to the hell of your own making, I guess.

Othering gun fetishists.

By the time the opportunity arises to actually do anything about it, a whole load of "conservatives" will be furiously denying that they ever were. In some cases to tribunals and commissions.

Nobody should give the slightest respect or deference to those ideals if invoked by anyone who supported the Republican party after "very fine people on both sides". There is nothing "conservative" about 99% of people who claim the label, and there's nothing moral about their position.

They can either organise with the gun fetishists or take the opportunity to separate from them. But there's no reason to suggest that conservatism in its true form has anything to do with looney gun fetishists who pose with guns in Christmas cards.

All of this can be done without changing the fundamental right to bear or own guns.

I don't underestimate 90s computing; I remember it? It sounds like you only remember the very tail end of it.

And I am, to be clear, talking about the RP2350's hypothetical successor, which is where I think Eben Upton will see his beloved Archimedes suitably emulated.

But FWIW, the current RP2350's PSRAM implementation can be up to two thirds as fast as RAM transfer was in a Mac IIfx — up to 40MB/sec — so the RP2350 can already emulate System 7 Macs with 4 megs of RAM.

https://adafruit-playground.com/u/jepler/pages/mac-emulator-...

Right. O'Leary is an antihero at best and a villain at worst.

"thankfully"

> the most gun crimes occur in Democrat-run gun-grabber areas

The most full stop, yes. But that's not surprising, is it? Since densely populated places disproportionately vote blue.

But not the most per capita:

https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116676/documents/...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ariannajohnson/2023/04/28/red-s...

> Why not compare America against all countries instead of just Western ones?

Oh indeed, but what I am referring to is the "knife crime in London" comparator that right-wing gun groups use. Knife crime in London is not as bad as knife crime in any comparable US city. It's about 40% as bad as New York and only 10% as bad as Dallas.

Polarization is the point. It is time to reclaim the idea that gun ownership is at best an unfortunate necessity and gun fandom is creepy shit.

> immigration policy has given rise to rape gangs in England […] Should these peaceful people not have guns to defend themselves from these barbarians?

I don't think you understand the nature of the "rape gang" problem —- what it actually refers to, how it works, and why arming a populace wouldn't do a thing to stop it.

Because the USA has this exact same problem (low-level organised crime gangs sexually exploiting naïve, broke or drug-addicted young teenagers in deprived settings) and gun ownership didn't fix it.

The "rape gangs" are not some roving crime phenomenon that turns up at your door and can be dissuaded by waving a gun.

So yes. Not only do we not extrajudicially shoot rapists because vigilante violence doesn't do anything useful, arming a whole population would not stop this problem in deprived environments in cities. It hasn't in yours.

America has dramatically worse rates of knife crime than the western countries it likes to point at though. Doesn't that undermine your argument?

You don't need to ban them, though. Isn't that the actual lesson at the end of _Bowling For Columbine_? That Canada has a huge number of guns and isn't so fucked up?

What you need to do is undermine the culture of machismo and trollishness around guns:

Start with "anyone who poses with guns in their family Christmas photo is to be treated as if they will use them on your family or their own kids without a moment's hesitation for their own gain".

(Like, if you get a Christmas card from a family with guns in their photo, why would you consider that anything other than a threatening communication? It clearly is.)

Move on to "anyone who has more usable guns than they can hold in their hands is probably a broken person and maybe you should consider keeping your distance".

Move on to "anyone who owns a bump stock is insane or compensating for a tiny penis", and "anyone who doesn't keep their guns in a gun safe is not safe to be around at all".

Move on to "open carry does not mean ostentatious carry". Start thinking about whether open carry is, in fact, a necessary conclusion of the right to bear arms.

Move on to fucking investigating NRA corruption properly. Don't just point it out.

Move on to humiliating politicians who take gun lobby money. Don't just point it out as if it's some form of conflict of interest or a sign they won't be serious about gun crime. Laugh at them. Call them spineless cowards. Humiliate them for their craven foolishness.

Aim for a process that preserves the right to bear arms but makes gun nuts seem as untrustworthy and dangerous as it turns out they so often are.

And if you are a gun owner and you believe guns should be treated with caution and respect, and you know someone who doesn't, tell them in no uncertain terms, and if you ever see them get violent, tell the police of your concerns.

Make gun obsession weird again.

Or they don't get burned but they do get shipped across the ocean to be processed, and then shipped back… that's the commercial way

Seems possible. A bit of a google suggests that the process in that case would involve glycerin to replace the water content. So it could be that.

Ficus produces natural latex. The entire plant or leaf isn't latex!

What is left from this process in the fake leaf is a mixture of latex sap and processed lignin, I think. It's certainly not only latex.

Indeed. Also very nearly always true with "fake" skeleton leaves used for crafting.

A small percentage (usually enlarged designs of particular shapes) are made with sophisticated latex presses, but most are chemically-stripped and treated real leaves (Ficus and suchlike) because it's simply easier to make them in bulk.

I was amazed by this at first — I bought some for a photography project simply assuming that their flexible, slightly springy nature meant they were artifically-made latex. But no: ficus leaves automatically processed in baking soda, essentially. The latex ones aren't even cheaper.

Well this is true, but it is STL files that people send around everywhere and publish in the 3D printing world, especially.

People will reasonably choose not to publish their original designs but can only publish STL because of OpenSCAD, Blender and because of the free tier of commercial CAD.

And having the OpenSCAD source doesn't help that much; you can modify it but you are still stuck with STL. OK so FreeCAD can reinterpret some — not all — OpenSCAD operations in a bRep context. But it's not a great way to work; it doesn't really help much with interchange.

I absolutely have had to modify STL files for people because that is the only interchange format the designer made available to them, or even could make available because they used the wrong tool for the job (like Fusion's free tier). At this point there are many STL-folk-song designs out there, CC-NC, with bad geometry, non-centred exports, etc.

Thankfully there are ways, in core FreeCAD and in a third party workbench (MeshRemodel), to more easily extract and reconstruct some key geometry from a mesh, such that parametric modifications can be made. (Whereas with OpenSCAD you're basically stuck with cut-out-and-roughly-refill).

It's me being picky about the meaning of the word "aided".

CAD is software to help people make complex things without having to do complex geometry/trig/general maths.

OpenSCAD doesn't really "aid" you much with this. It's a 2D/3D shape generator with boolean operations, but because it doesn't let you do constraint operations on 2D geometry, and it doesn't let you do further operations on the fundamental geometry (faces, edges, vertices) of the generated 3D solids either, it never liberates you from most of the difficult work.

I'm not even sure how much it aids you with "design": it doesn't support chamfers or fillets, it offers no tools for adding drafts or making truly uniform thicknesses. And it only generates meshes.

OpenSCAD is useful. I'm not saying it's not. But it is useful mostly for drawing strongly geometric or mathematically-derived solids and producing a mesh from it.

I am pleased MeshCAM exists, I am pretty sure I will end up using it!

But I think we agree that mesh formats don't make good engineering interchange outside additive manufacturing.

Personally I think they often make a bad format even in additive manufacturing. They are the right format for medical/dental, and yes, slicers make internal STL-ish mesh representations of STEP etc. before slicing, but they are much harder to modify precisely than STEP.

I didn’t like Dune3D; its interface is clumsy even if the 3D constraints thing is interesting.

(Which is not to say that I am not pleased to see more open source CAD packages taking different approaches. Dune3D is interesting, Blobfish's Cadseer is very interesting to a coder I'd have thought, and SALOME has obvious value)

The one small tweak I would suggest for FreeCAD is to use the tab bar workbench selector rather than the dropdown version. It’s such a small change but it helps flow between things in a way that feels like the various functions are more closely integrated. That, combined with custom panels if you want them, makes it more fluid.

(I am not making any particular claims for FreeCAD's usability; I do though think it is much better and much more learnable than the average HN perspective of it, which seems to often come across more as TUI-exceptionalism or "but I don't wannnnnaaa learn a guuuuuuuiiii". GUI CAD isn't intrinsically some inferior, imprecise, unformalised thing.)

I am not disqualifying it because it’s code-CAD. (I think it’s a bad language design but that is a total aside)

CadQuery, Build123D, Featurescript etc. all have something OpenSCAD does not have: they all have facilities to operate on generated geometry such as edges, faces and vertices. So they have generalisable operations, and they can output pure geometry representations as STEP/IGES. Featurescript presumably also allows access to sketch constraints. (Build123D is beginning to add those I think.)

These are the things I think are necessary to “aid” design, because they are the things that begin to abstract away the mathematics. OpenSCAD never does. So it “aids” design little more than any pixel graphics library aids 3D software developers.

And it does not, in fact, create precise 3D models! It produces mesh representations of them. So it cannot, by definition, produce a precise representation of a cylinder, sphere, cone or curve.

The 3D models from OpenSCAD are not highly manufacturable at all, except with additive production techniques. STLs do not make good inputs for a CNC (nobody will tell you that is good engineering practice).

The main thing it cannot ever offer is the ability to further process its own generated geometry. It has no concept of edges, vertices or faces in 3D so you cannot do operations on them, which means no generalised operations like fillets or chamfers, only specific implementations for specific shapes.

This difference is profound, is the point I am getting at.

It also lacks any concept of constraints or constraint solving in 2D sketches, which makes some quite simple shapes extremely difficult to make without advanced maths.

So in both cases you never get away from the maths, and the maths complexity increases as your design complexity increases. You can see this reflected in the complexity of any large OpenSCAD codebase and in the number of functions in any large utility library.

CAD software should aid design. That’s its entire purpose. OpenSCAD just lets you plot 3D shapes and do some very limited operations to combine them.

I use a mac trackpad too. In “Gesture” mode now.

That mode works OK on touchscreens, in the sense that any app with tiny buttons to click does. I have tried using a tablet with a pen but it is a heavily modal UI so it feels a little bit like old fashioned light pen territory, as much CAD does. Not like an iPad app; they need designing differently.

Quite a lot of progress on macOS FreeCAD crashes because they changed an exception handling strategy for exceptions outside the Qt loop, if I remember right. Some crashing in 1.1RC that is being fixed. In general it crashes a whole lot less than it did in 0.20, say. But if you can reproduce them, definitely report them.