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King Charles III said his thoughts and prayers were with the family of the young victim, and he saluted the courage of emergency workers, Buckingham Palace said.

“King Charles III” still sounds so weird to me. The last story I ran across with his name in it was about either Ireland or Scotland, I can’t remember which, and it took me longer than I care to admit to realize it wasn’t some sly Jacobite comment.

I’m kinda sad to see it enshittify, for gamers and for those who find it fits their actual collaboration use case, but I also really hate the number forum-format communities that Discord has displaced or prevented from coalescing. Discoverability on Discord is terrible, as is having help available long term, as well as older advice and other content that helps newbies get the culture of a community. Even where the functionality exists, the general “real time” transitory feel of it reduces the quality of content and encourages people to be dicks, since it will all scroll by or be forgotten (if streaming) in a few moments anyway.

Horses for courses, and my old-ass X-ennial self thinks Discord has been pressed into service on a lot of courses where it’s terrible.

This all feels a lot like any low- or mid-range CAD suite that gets acquired by Autodesk, Siemens, or PTC. Promise enough to avoid a revolt, but start eroding with the next release.

The educational licensing for lock-in is also par for the course. It can be done well (Rhino 3D is legendary for letting small-shop designers use their cheap edu license forever, even commercially), but generally it’s just there to maintain the supply of baby drafters and get subscriptions from employers.

First, war is always a tragedy. Always. It is to be avoided until the reasonably plausible alternative is worse for human suffering. People who ignore this are asses (not saying you are one of them).

Second, as long as it stays conventional and China stays on the sidelines, then yes of course NATO destroys the Russian military, or at least keeps it hemmed into existing Russian territory. That’s been true for 30 years.

Third, those are VERY big ‘ifs’.

Yes, but it’s a little unusual that one orca was hunting alone, and the shark was a large juvenile. The scientists think that the ecological mess that has resulted in the killer whales pushing out all but the boldest teenager great white sharks could mean that the sharks are going somewhere else, possibly where humans fish or swim or where the local wildlife is not ready for the sharks.

Wake me when they REALLY get back to their roots.

Girl on the right probably killed a Spanish swordsmith back in the day.

When you’re trying to get into DPs, the outside can be slippery and the screw part can be tight! Very dangerous for the workplace.

I thought I had NSFW turned off… 🤣

Most unrealistic part of the movie, and by god I’m including TIME TRAVEL, is that Scotty would be both dismissive of and insanely good at keyboarding text entry and use of a 1980s computer. Either he’d be pissed off because because there was no way to use this antique, or he’d be delighted at the chance to use his historical reenactment skills.

Ahh, got it. Never got very deep into Westworld.

Unexpected Shakespeare. Nice.

And yummy.

Pigeon sweat.

I mostly agree, but I’m sure the Chinese don’t mind seeing what happens when the West is faced with an ambivalent-to-hostile nuclear power, with deep commercial ties, going to war to press questionable territorial claims.

The sense I get is that it is more lazy than anything. The verbiage feels like the fact that designs were public documents was tacked on last minute to satisfy some desire for market segmentation or to create a parts and design library to draw traffic. It would make sense that the company hosting the software would not want the headache of being unable to use your stuff commercially or even of parsing what they could use, since in some sense they always are using everything commercially. Refusing the to thread the needle with their verbiage, though, has left a situation where the Terms of Use say clearly that (1) a design is Content, (2) a free user’s Content is a public document, (3) a free user cannot use their own public documents for commercial use, and (3) a free user grants EVERY OTHER USER a license to sell their public documents.

1. “End Users’ files, designs, models… (collectively, “Content”).”
2. “All documents created by a Free Plan User, and all Content contained therein, is made public and therefore considered a Public Document.”
3. “If you intend to use the Service outside a trial context to create and/or edit intellectual property for commercial purposes (including but not limited to developing designs that are intended to be commercialized and/or used in support of a commercial business), then you agree to upgrade to a paid subscription to the Service.”
4. “For any Public Document owned by a Free Plan User… Customer grants a worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license to any End User or third party accessing the Public Document to use the intellectual property contained in Customer’s Public Document without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Document, and to permit persons to whom the Document is made available to do the same.”

The only possible wrinkle is that the ToU distinguish between a “Customer” and an “End User,” so maybe you the customer can grant you the End User the same commercial rights that Joe the slightly shady CNC machinist in Peoria has when he downloads your widget to fabricate and sell. Something tells me that PTC’s license compliance folks don’t interpret things that way, though.

The issue with FreeCAD is that all the workarounds (so far) are manual. Other apps may well be doing similar things, but they’re doing them behind the scenes and the user doesn’t have to (for instance) specifically set up a datum plane offset at the exact same distance as the face you want to sketch on and either manage it by hand or use an integrated spreadsheet to set up and reference variables.

I like what I see coming out of FreeCAD these days, but stuff like that is… umm, a lot.

The dirty secret of FreeCAD is that most drawings that look okay will extrude even if unconstrained. You just lose the ability to leverage the history tree and the model will be as brittle as any direct modeler’s.

FreeCAD is on its way, it’s attracting a little more money and attention, and I’m using it more and more, but I often still feel like I’m fighting it.

If you are comfortable with all your models being available for download and some wonky Terms of Use that may let random internet people profit off your designs but not you, then OnShape in a full-screen browser feels about as good as F360 does. I guess you could also pay for it, but despite finding it pretty nice, I am iffy about paying Solid Edge prices for something browser based. I understand SolidWorks has slapped together a browser version as well, but nobody likes it.

Linux wise, there’s just not much outside FreeCAD and SolveSpace. BricsCAD is an okay evolution of AutoCAD, and VariCAD is a less good one.

I may have done a longer writeup than anybody needed the other day.

“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”

As a white cis hetero American male, trying to have a little empathy is literally the least I can do.

I think it’s a nice enough idea, and I hope it sets a reasonable baseline for what enthusiast and workstation laptops will be as the entabletification of the mainstream computing device continues, but right now it’s sort of a solution waiting for its problem. Economically, it doesn’t make much sense for one person to buy one. In an actuarial sense, it’s almost certainly better to buy something you like that’s less modular, and replace it if it breaks or stops being useful for your intended tasks. Of course if no one who wishes them well buys their computers, they won’t last long enough to be relevant.

Strictly speaking, just standardizing and providing the physical specifications ends up making their dongles more like headers on a desktop motherboard, potentially a commodity piece that anyone could replicate. Their other modular components seem to have a similar idea. It all seems elegant enough, and ready to “backscale” into a distributed niche industry if the big companies stop making powerful proprietary machines at the scale that keeps them cheap. As it stands, they sort of ARE de facto proprietary, but I guess the idea is that there will be enough enthusiasts, hardware hackers, and evangelists paying a sizeable, but not crippling, premium to keep them afloat and gain the mindshare to become a new standard (and hopefully halo brand) when people need to build laptops like they build towers now.