https://youtube.com/shorts/UO_whAN302s

I bought Alibre Design, as it was a less oppressive situation license-wise, but these days I find I’m using it less than I might simply because I prefer staying in Linux for literally anything else. It was a bit pricy, but at least it was a perpetual license. I am hearing that while they don’t intend to support Linux, they’re moving away from some of the libraries that have prevented Proton from working.

The rest are varying degrees of oppressive lock-in and feature erosion. PTC/OnShape in particular has a huge “Fuck-You” attitude towards anybody who wants to consider throwing a design up on Etsy or selling a few trinkets without paying out the ass for a professional-grade subscription, and being the only fully mature web-based tool, it’s the only one that works properly in Linux.

Every single major commercial 3D CAD suite is still better than FreeCAD. FreeCAD is not the unusable beast it used to be, in fact it’s very much better, but it has technical debt and structural limitations that just keep it worse.

Very little has been tested yet, but the general thinking is that there’s probably no longer any generation cap, except for babies born since the new change went into effect a couple of weeks ago. The real trick is in proving it. From what I have read, the Canadian bureaucracy that processes these has usually asked for primary documentation, so actual birth certificates or centrally maintained religious records, and only once those have been exhaustively searched and the relevant local offices throw up their hands (via an official “we tried” letter) will they consider things like census forms and border-crossing logs.

“I’m telling you Molotov cocktails work. Any time I had a problem I threw a Molotov cocktail and Boom! Right away, I had a different problem.”

I believe it’s a dedicated parking garage, which admittedly only helps a little.

Yup, but it also might be lightly photoshopped. The Street View has a window right where the portajohn is sitting that looks pretty permanent, but this pic or the street view could be old.

Ain’t no torque on a Dremel. Gotta find the hammer drill.

There’s also a very real problem of Lucas not really caring to get the best out of them, and for the younger actors it’s disastrous. Natalie Portman is generally a bit better at picking solid projects than elevating them (IMHO), but she’s every bit as bad as the Anakins in the prequels. Only the veterans who could draw on prior experience, and especially the British-trained theater actors, could work with the abstractions of the set and chew the scenery convincingly without a lot of helpful guidance.

On ANH, George was still a young Turk in naturalistic New Hollywood, and anyway he had exactly one mainstream success under his belt, so people could push back; there’s also the sometimes exaggerated but very real contributions of the editing team picking good takes and splicing them together in a way that feels right, certainly in the moment. On ESB he did his best work by going with scriptwriters and a veteran director who’d done a dozen films. Even on ROTJ, the non-guild director was a guy who’d done a lot of intimate character work on British TV, and if the plot was straining under its weight, you still got solid line readings and some convincing emotion.

Valerian. Recast both leads if you can, but in a pinch just DeHaan. Give Valerian himself a single iota of charisma and the movie ends up a slight but interesting lark instead of a slog.

There’s a line I’ve heard a couple times that if you swapped the pairs from Valerian and Passengers, both movies end up better, if maybe not quite “good.”

“Language models don’t apply to us because this is not a language problem,” Nesterenko explained. “If you ask it to actually create a blueprint, it has no training data for that. It has no context for that…” Instead, Quilter built what Nesterenko describes as a “game” where the AI agent makes sequential decisions — place this component here, route this trace there — and receives feedback based on whether the resulting design satisfies electromagnetic, thermal, and manufacturing constraints… The approach mirrors DeepMind’s progression with its Go-playing systems.

This is kind of interesting and cool, and it’s not a hallucinating LLM. I’ve designed a couple of simple circuit boards, and running traces can be sort of zen, but it is tedious and would be maddening as a job, so I can only imagine what the process must be like on complex projects from scratch. Definitely some hype levels coming from the company that give me pause, but it seems like an actual useful task for a machine learning algorithm.

And both are delicious.

Thank you. That looks plausible and should keep the mental wolves at bay, LOL.

Okay, somebody here has to know of have better image searching skills than I do. What is the Visor prop? It’s clearly not a spray-painted hair clip like (the inspiration for) Geordi’s, but it doesn’t look bespoke, more like some sort of removable support rib from… something. Grrr.

I think there’s something about the parasitic nature of it, taking over an otherwise healthy ear of corn. We tend to think of our edible fungi as growing out of the dirt like a plant, or a fallen tree, or at worst sort of calmy sitting on top of whatever it is using for its own food. THe fact that this has invaded kernels makes them very bad corn kernels and triggers something instinctive. Corn smut is one of those “the first person to try this was in a bad spot” kind of foods.

Legitimate? Basically none. Illegitimate? First, lazily fixing a fuckup on putting up strings of Christmas lights where you can’t daisy chain them properly, with bonus points for the likeliehood of needing to break off the grounding pin. Second, injecting power from a generator into a single circuit of your house if the power is out.

In one sense, you could argue conductors are conductors and if you think through every eventuality you can mitigate risk, but on the other, if you find you’re in a situation where one of these seems useful, you are not the type of person thinks through every eventuality.

Cue the James Joyce letters in 3… 2… 1… ({}).

I have it on good authority that the Starbucks protein coffee gives you the double-shits.

A lot of things are possible when you have a population that is deeply socialized to believe completely in the cause, and/or has few viable economic options, and/or is literally compelled to do the work. We also have a lot of survivorship bias as the we only see the stuff that was done so well as to stand the test of time. In the early days of Egyptology for example, they would sometimes realize (or learn from the locals because the locals knew best) that the big heap of rubble over there in the desert was actually a pyramid where somebody half-assed it with mud bricks instead of the giant limestone slabs from Giza.

Or, you think you lost one and get the second, but the original was tucked into some zippered sub-pouch all along.