769 karma · joined July 29, 2025
The little-known Configuration Tables aspect of Spreadsheets is absolutely worth using, though, and has no equivalent in the VarSets scheme at this point. Once you get that set up it is great fun.
But OpenSCAD isn't really parametric CAD. It's a programming language; it's parametric for that reason. But it's not really CAD, at another level, in the sense that it does nothing to "aid" your design work. It has no interim abstraction for generated geometry; everything must be explicitly described.
FreeCAD, though, is profoundly parametric, through and through, and really always has been. Indeed the parametric aspects are the main thing that made it workable before the TNP mitigations were added. It is not a limited CAD package, by any means. It's just a somewhat unfriendly one with a CAD kernel that has some limitations. Really it's almost better understood as a 3D IDE with some workflow affordances.
If you are stuck trying to get your head into how FreeCAD works, there are now three really good ways on Youtube: the Mango Jelly Solutions videos are incredible, the Shawn Hymnel/Digikey FreeCAD and 3D Printing course is good, and there are great recent videos by Deltahedra.
But what you will be able to make with it, once you get your head into it, is night and day different to what is possible with OpenSCAD. Because your parametric work in FreeCAD (or other CAD packages) can operate on the geometry of the result of previous operations.
Give it a try in the New Year with FreeCAD 1.1 when it is released.
If you want another stepping stone from OpenSCAD to FreeCAD or any other package, I really recommend you look at CadQuery/Build123D. This will give you a similar coding approach but it will introduce you to operations on the true faces, edges and vertexes of the output of other operations.
(FWIW I would not say that Sketchup is not high end, either. It's not to my tastes but it is quite powerful)
It is a useful tool for programmatically describing either very simple or heavily geometric objects. For everything else it's the wrong tool.
I don't really see why that code is better, more logical, more readable or more robust than the equivalent quite trivial parametrics in more or less any GUI CAD program, and I think the geek discourse is really harmed by people who don't understand the value of the things that OpenSCAD can't ever offer.
The RP2350 is an awesome device but hypothetically it feels like the next one is where things will really kick off, because there likely won’t be a 90s computer it can’t emulate, and it feels clear from what Eben Upton says that retrocomputing, historical device education and simple 90s-style computing environments are part of the picture, and that absolutely dirt-cheap simplified modern “home computer” environments on these devices could have value to them.
It doesn't even take many things to do this — the knock-on support of a bug in a driver that no-one wants to fix, a package that you like that prevents you from upgrading your host OS, web browser developers abandoning something about your GUI (how long before they drop X?) etc.
In the Linux world, the age of your machine is a limit with a blurry edge, but it's still there.
It has been published as an open specification.
Whether it is a standard isn't for them to declare.
And this would be an entirely clickbait-free, fact-based summary of what they are doing.
It's not far off fraud as a service. This activity could get people prosecuted in EU countries and the UK.
The fact that I cannot tell if you mean this satirically or not (though I want to believe you do!) is alarming to me.
Perhaps it is my/our geek bias that we habitually do, and we are therefore excusing some of this without intending to? It is worth pondering.
I find either of these more ethical but it is worth noting that any non-expiring, roll-over credit scheme is going to kill you. All you need is one or two months where you’re focussed on infrastructure instead of fresh content and you will find users get out of the habit of using it up, which can end up with you effectively in debt to your users, who will expect more value the longer they wait.
“non-credible” anonymous sources: that’s in the eye of the beholder, I guess. It is in any government’s interest to downplay the authority of any off-the-record leak source, but political parties that rail the hardest against anonymous sources generally have more to hide, and generally those stories prove substantively true in the long run.
It is still rare for any newspaper to predicate a story on a single uncorroborated anonymous source.
If you have examples it would be interesting.
I use an iPad with a keyboard when I need this kind of “writing room” thing, but I know someone who uses an ancient electronic typewriter.
FWIW when my disorganisation is catastrophic, I go out for a walk, leave my phone at home if I can, sit on a bench, and try to organise my life in one side of A4. And then if there’s a task that I can start by writing, I do it there, with a pen.
It's about the only thing about my job I still do like.
The difference is that it is schema-first, so you are describing your API at a level that largely replaces backend-for-frontend stuff. If it's the only interface to your data you have a lot less code to write, and it interfaces beautifully with the query builder.
I tend not to use it in unsecured contexts and I don't know if I would bother with GraphQL more generally, though WP-GraphQL has its advantages.
I think this has been something people have had an instinct about forever, and the only reason I had to threaten to quit was because of a misunderstanding of the level of data safety involved; put simply it was not common knowledge that socket connections could be snooped and that targeting a popular service would be easy for a malicious person to do. (This was before SSL was efficient or easy to manage, and in the days when only payment screens were encrypted).
Once the message was across, everyone's objectives were aligned again.
Health information is deeply private because disease is entangled with shame/weakness/vulnerability/taboo/intimacy.
Wow, was that a shark just then?
There were still valid practical and technical objections for many (indeed, there still is at least one technical objection against digital), the philosophical objections are still as valid as they were (and if you ask me digital has not come close to delivering on its promise to be less environmentally harmful).
But every working press photographer knew they would switch when there were full-frame sensors that were in range of budget planning that shot without quality compromise at the ISO speed they needed or when the organisations they worked for completed their own digital transition. Every working fashion photographer knew that viable cameras already existed.
ETA: Did it disrupt the wider industry? Obviously. Devastatingly. For photographers? It lowered the barrier to entry and the amount they could charge. But any working photographer had encountered that at least once (autofocus SLRs did the same thing, minilabs did the same thing, E6 did it, etc. etc.) and in many ways it was a simple enabling technology because their workflows were also shifting towards digital so it was just the arrival of a DDD workflow at some level.
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Putting aside that aside, I am really not convinced your comparison isn't a category error, but it is definitely an interesting one for a couple of reasons I need to think about for a lot longer.
Not least that digital photography triggered a wave of early retirements and career switches, that I think the same thing is coming in the IT industry, and that I think those retirements will be much more damaging. AI has so radically toxified the industry that it is beginning to drive people with experience and a decade or more of working life away. I consider my own tech retirement to have already happened (I am a freelancer and I am still working, but I have psychologically retired, and very early; I plan to live out my working life somewhere else, and help people resisting AI to continue to resist it)
You still wouldn't necessarily want a life insurance company to know stuff they haven't formally asked to know, you still have health information that could be used to blackmail you or whose reveal would be humiliating or upsetting.
From what I gather, at book-reading speeds, newer e-ink displays may never wear out in a human lifetime.
But at usable computer display speeds I rather suspect many of these panels have a lifetime one might measure in months.