I understand people don't like this kind of OCR stuff for privacy reasons, but selecting text from images is probably the most useful feature added to iOS in the last ~5 years for me.
Modelling isn't the slow part. If one is copying a drawing and have exact dimensions its pretty straightforward in most software even if the software is bloated.
IMO, please continue buying records, but don’t buy tickets to shows you can’t attend. I can’t speak for live music, but in SF there is/was an issue of club nights selling out, but having low attendance due to people buying tickets as an “option”. This is a problem because it screws up venues planning for bar sales as a revenue source and deterring last minute buyers/door sales (who may either be heads or punters) who see a sold out show online.
I have some friends on the east coast of Canada playing in a indie band. They have experienced this many times, that the venue is sold out but then only 15-20 people show up. Supposedly a lot of these places have people buying annual access packages to support the venue, but don't end up going.
They have now started touring in Europe instead. Many cities with short distances, and people actually show up for the show. Much more rewarding to play with actuall audience.
> but in SF there is/was an issue of club nights selling out, but having low attendance due to people buying tickets as an “option”.
As a bar/restaurant owner who sometimes host electronic parties, that sucks and does mess up a lot. But as a dance party attender, that sounds like a good thing, the parties tend to have way too high attendance, and if there is no space for people to actually move around and dance, I don't really know what the point of it even is anymore.
Affording tickets is already a first-world problem; I have no idea what level this is when not attending has some knock-on impact or attendance hurts another person's experience. Maybe y'all should plan to stay home and make a donation to the food bank...
I've used a Dell Precision 5530 professionally and got a 5570 refurb this year from ebay for ~$800. The fit and finish of the Precision 5000 series is great as far as I'm concerned, though I'm happy the camera is back on top of the screen and would appreciate a 10 key. The work model I used for 3 years and basically the only issue I had was on the Windows side with sleep states (waking up from sleep while commuting). I rarely work long off ac power, but <40% is always kind of a danger zone, especially when doing intensive tasks like CAD modeling. Again, worked connected to Dell workstation dock 90% of the time, so ports are not an issue, but the state of unpowered usbc dongles/micro-docks with hdmi/usba/usbc/++ makes stationary use a non-issue. I also had a 2016 XPS13 I only stopped using as a primary due to lack of ram expansion.
The hard part with 3d part creation isn’t the graphical interface or language, it’s actually describing and translating part requirements to a manufacturable design, weighing material, weight, fit, geometric, and cost tradeoffs. Openscad, opencascade, etc have been around for a long time and have specs for describing features in a way that llm should be able to handle, but if all the part constraints were available it’s far faster to make accurately in Solidworks.
This is my experience too. I took a course a long time ago in design for manufacturing, and it became abundantly clear that just because you can conceive of an idea doesn't mean that you can build it. That requires a lot more work and technical know-how that isn't always put into books or other "training data".
In MCAD, “parametric” does not mean a high level part or feature is driven by editable parameters or procedurally generated features. Parametric refers to the underlying storage format representing part features in a parametric way rather than as a mesh. Mesh formats like stl cannot represent a circle by its position and radius, while a parametric format like step can. This distinction is more akin to raster (bmp) vs vector (svg) graphics. Both can be generated procedurally by “parameters”, but only with svg can sub-features be faithfully extracted or transformed.
I have some understanding of "parametric" vs "mesh". I looked it up when I saw so many people going on about it.
Maybe it is the export or something. I run the 3D toolbox and often models are not manifold.
I see things like two circles in slightly different positions but both are connected in different ways to the surrounding "single" instance model. Things like this mean you end up with "infinitely small volumes". There is no fully enclosed "volume" and so mathematically there is "nothing to 3D print".
As a model this makes no sense to do, and so it irks me.
But clearly the slicer software doesn't care or autocorrects and people make their 3D print happen just fine.
>Mesh formats like stl cannot represent a circle by its position and radius, while a parametric format like step can.
This is where I think the Geometry nodes can help. A node (function) can be used to represent the circle with inputs and outputs set or changed as required.[0]
I have not fully explored this space though and so my "hopes and dreams" may well be as useful as thoughts and prayers...
The problem with FreeCAD and every other free/open source MCAD project of note is the Open Cascade kernel they are built on. While Open Cascade is fairly mature, it has dealbreaker issues in a few key areas: fillets cannot consume connected faces and may fail for a number of other reasons, cylindrical and spherical faces require seams which often cause issues with boolean operations, and shapes like helixes are also often troublesome.
It would probably fall somewhere between "substantial architectural overhaul" and "partial rewrite" because it’d require redesigning the topological representation to eliminate seam edges.
Some of these issues are long standing and really hard to solve. Someone could probably defend an entire PhD thesis on “redesigning the topological representation to eliminate seam edges” without making much practical progress
It’s not about seams in 2d but 3d curved surfaces.
OpenCascade’s kernel forces you to deal with periodicity in topology (the shape structure), while Parasolid handles it in geometry (the math). A cylinder is mathematically continuous because there's no actual "seam" where it starts and ends. But in OpenCascade there’s a seam from 0 to 2π and this seam edge becomes a real topological entity that every algorithm has to deal with.
In Parasolid the cylinder is periodic so when you query a point at U=2.1π, the kernel just knows that's equivalent to U=0.1π. The periodicity is a property of the surface math, not the shape structure. It’s not using polygons/edges/vertexes but a system of equations to calculate the surfaces.
This is why boolean ops fail so often in FreeCAD: it’s asking the kernel to intersect with an artificial edge that shouldn't exist. The seam creates edge cases in intersection calculations, makes filleting near seams a nightmare, and complicates things. Parasolid's implicit handling requires smarter surface evaluation code upfront, but then everything else just works.
Originally open-source, but since taken back in-house. As I understand, which should not be construed as an accurate accounting, Sandia wants to flesh out the basics further before (potentially) open-sourcing it again.
I don't get the gripe. AirTrain gets you to A,E,J,Z, and LIRR, all of which get you to "Manhattan" or a significant number of intermediate destinations in about an hour. LGA is far worse.
Having to take AirTrain beyond the terminals at all is annoying. LIRR should just go to JFK directly. AirTrain is slow as molasses, and the fact that it costs money is absurd. It works and I'm glad it exists, but it's nothing like e.g. the Paris RER connecting CDG.
You generally never want to take A/E/J/Z because they're sooo much slower than LIRR, unless you live along them.
Bart from SFO to downtown SF is about $11 due to a surcharge and the combined fare AirTrain + subway is also about $11.50. LIRR is a bit more expensive. The Paris RER is €13. I don’t see how the fare is objectionable.
I personally appreciate the subway connections exist. Taking LIRR would require a subway transfer to most destinations anyway.
You're comparing apples and oranges. The LIRR already is the train ticket. I'm complaining about the fact you have to pay two fares. Using two different systems.
And like I said, you don't want to take the subway unless you live along its route, it's so much slower.
If you need to pay for the construction cost of the AirTrain, it should just be funded as part of the airport generally, because that's what it is. Charging for it is as silly as if you charged to take the AirTrain between terminals.
