fsloth

Having the companies building the data centers respect laws is more important.

This isn’t about trees. This is about not following the environmental regulation.

To put in contrast this is something for which a private citizen could get into a lot of hot water.

So it’s about can a large corporation act as they like or do they need to follow the laws just like everyone else.

If they had followed the law, the trees would not be an issue.

No.

It was about making an environmental assesment before starting on the clearing.

Which is mandated by law.

Now the environmental impact cannot be assessed.

This is making the entire country quite angry.

Thanks, appreciate the market research insights and thoughtfull feedback!

The UX tips are really helpfull.

The market research is really interesting. It’s really fun to see how market preferences are so against the grain of my personal aesthetics :)

” 1. Teach is amazing”

Thank you so much! Maybe I managed to innovate something in this quite well trodden genre :)

Thanks!

I would appreciate if you could try again.

I added a WebGL2 rendering backend.

Thanks for your feedback!

Can you please test again?

I added WebGL2 backend as separate binary selected during page loading if browser does not support WebGPU.

I left out WebGL rendering backend to shave off few megabytes but might have jumped the gun on WebGPU support.

The better choice clearly was offering both :)

Would you mind sharing which browser you use?

(WebGPU is getting really nice support finally - https://caniuse.com/webgpu - not _full_ coverage yet but getting quite prominent)

“WebGPU … isn’t needed”

Yes! That’s why the headline says “overdesigned”:)

It’s designed as a universal native app. So browser here really is just a platform for deployment.

The design is for a an application that is a single download and few megabytes in size that runs the same on desktops natively (after compilation) and in the browser. Rust ecosystem is getting _really_ nice for that.

So it’s Egui with WebGPU backend.

So if the requirement is ”an universal app” it’s nicer alternative than using Electron but Tauri might have been a more reasonable choice if I didn’t want to leave the door open more for more options on rendering backend on desktop.

Sort of same lineage in thinking as Flash, Java apps (circa 2000 :) ) etc. Or something like Ghostty.

The downside is that it does not use native GUI for much which means it’s closer to a game than ”professional” desktop app.

”If WebGPU works …”

It’s ”almost” fully supported: https://caniuse.com/webgpu

Edit: There is now also WebGL2 backend

Sure - when discussing C of all languages this expression felt shallower than usual though.

If you are really enthusiastic you can write _obsfuscated_ C. And people can kind of agree what that is when they see it.

But _idiomatic_ ? Good luck defining what that is.

The term has sort of stuck in Python and there it's purpose is a bit more clear. There is this _object_ way of doing things, there is this _expression_ way of doing things etc and the interaction patterns work really nicely.

But you can't really use that expression in other languages which lack the same level of institutional design without sounding very much out of touch.

”This can result in several different implementations of a function that differ only by type — often, the more idiomatic C approach would be to use macros or void * arguments.”

”Idiomatic” - is a ridiculous tautology I wish people discussing languages would stop using.

The only non-idiomatic code written seriosly is that which the compiler/interpreter does not understand.

Claiming universal superiority of style is shallow and thoughtless.

Intentional obfuscation is a different thing.

Getting a dubious stream is far less risky than running a dubious binary. But maybe people would not care supporting bot networks and other maladies.

This is false analogue. Comparing SWE to pianist and using desktop as the similar element is false. Desktop to SWE is like … how the concert pianist arrives at the concert venue. You want the pianist to arrive on time but you really don’t care about their mode of transportation.

Besides it’s good to take things slow when face to face with people.

Yes! Best book ever on how a high technology startup operates. If you are wondering how to create an "internal startup" - that's your guide. It's a people system - so you need to find the people!

"that work does not exist unless an engineer invents it."

This is so strange. To my mind the only purpose companies hire engineers is to support business. The staff engineer should not need a project manager to tell what is interesting for business aspects - even though the goals are likely mostly technical.

I do realize this does not hold up always. But to me if you can't provide some reasoning for your work in business metrics you are participating in an academic exercise.

Well, US did not really have that to start with (Kaiser &co learned fast). So it’s not about having something and losing it as much as bootstrapping and discarding.

For processes that are scalable, well known and industrial, profit motive actually does provide results.

The question is more of are there bottlenecks of skill and maybe secret sauce (eg something like ASML).

” that’s too mathy” I’m not really sure there is any remedy to the fact computer graphics is based on math.

I suck at math myself so can relate. But actually the math you need to learn to be effective at graphics is mostly about understanding _a very small subset_ of a bunch of concepts (such as how 2x2, 3x3 and 4x4 matrices work) and one is set for life,

so I think it’s good to give the formal mathemathical explanation and then Gilbert Strang what it all means.

One just needs to pick any book on computer graphics written in the past 40 years or so.

But camera transform is so unintuitive it really helps if the student tries to work it out for themselves why it works.

For me it’s really weird anyone would write code and _not_ start from reading all of introductory computer graphics literature because it’s so awesome but I realize I’m the outlier here.

Porting has never been hard. Just follow the platform guidelines. Make sane architecture. Done.

I mean _it's just work_. You don't need to invent anything. Just do the work.

What _is_ hard is when people run after silver bullets to avoid all this work.

Because people who don't understand software decide it would be cheaper to implement something only once. Or someone who does not really understand what they are doing insists that same C++ code runs automatically on all platforms.

AI has given the software engineers permit from the beancounters to do the sane thing.

Good software development orgs _have always_ done proper per platform ports.

Also - there is nothing wrong in supporting only one platform as such!

There is no ”easy” porting.

Once this is accepted the rest becomes easier as you are not wasting time trying to find a silver bullet.

I mean it’s then ”just normal work”.

” If you write your app using win32, you won’t be able to port is very easily.”

This is wrong way around.

If you don’t support the platform your app runs on using the native api:s to the hilt your port is just bad.

If you actually want to support multiple platforms _you actually need to support_ them from the ground up.

This is speaking industrially and businesswise. A professional software business always has per-platform implementation resources. Or they have just one platform. Or they pretend they are multiplatform and then _everybody_ _daily_ fights with the problems this causes.

Obviously those elements that can be portable should be. It’s like Einsteins simplicity maxim - your codebase should be as portable as can be but not more.

” It’s even worse for CUDA…”

No these are just the business and market constraints. If this does not make sense for your offering then don’t use it. This feels like false FOMO - CUDA is not a silver bullet but it might be a specific solution to a specific problem.

The CPU on most machines is quite proprietary. I don’t understand this faux purity dogma.

Practical computing is not and never has been an abstract pure concept. It’s about making machines built by corporations to do usefull things at scale.

There is no ”non proprietary” computing unless you make your own stack.

"no STEP/IGES/BRep output"

SketchUp does not really have that either if you are expecting something else than triangles. Since sketchup has polygons you could argue they are brep but even then only accidentally.

Architecture works with a bit different ruleset than mechanical cad.

" if you want something that can be manufactured that's not good enough"

People design all sort of buildable things in SketchUp and it's just about dragging polygons around.

You _may_ need accurate surface if you run your model to CAM.

But to this day lot of manufacturing is still done via drawings and there the only thing that matters is that can you draw some type of lines and attach clear dimensions to them. So the shapes don't necessarily need to be accurate for all flows since they are more like topological hints to the person reading the drawing rather than accurate replica of the thing to manufacture.

AdaShape, a non-complicated 3D modeler for 3D printable shapes (desktop).

I just released a new version with lots of new modeling tools: https://adashape.com/blog/alpha-0-2-0/

As a highlight the lofting tool is pretty fun complement as it allows combining multiple drawings in an intuitive way to define a certain category of complex 3D surfaces without too much effort (https://adashape.com/manual/adashape/en/shp-loft/).

I've been chipping away at manual as well - and found it was a really good idea to write my changelogs in product voice as I can more or less recycle that copy text into the manual verbatim https://adashape.com/manual/adashape/en/

(Previously featured on HN in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47638498 )

This is a bit strange article.

If you enjoy doing a thing in specific way, nobody is going to take that away.

Chess is a great example. More players than ever, perfectly obsolete if you compare yourself to a computer, but that does not hurt.

If the AI takes your livelihood - that hurts. But I did not read this to be a complaint on that.

"has AI broken that stranglehold?"

Whatever AI is, it _is_ a huge democratizing influence in all fields.

The dog is even more on the nose. The shadow shape is almost the same despite the dog getting quite a lot of volume around it's original body parts.

Not all people can!

If you want to discuss a matter, it would be nice to spell out your point of view.

How is the person supposed to know your opposing point of view if you don't tell it?

Oh! So were sheep just for meat back then?

Sinners was very cool but I'm surprised to find it as Hugo winner.

Yeah configuring whitelabel products for customer’s brand should be right in LLM:s ballpark.