Also have not read the article, but I would presume it’s his same old tripe about how no company can ever succeed without his “wisdom” and “leadership”.

The only thing this bill seems to affect are apps. It has no provision for websites, meaning kids would still have unlimited access to adult content. If a kid wants to get around browser checks, all they have to do is either install an older browser that doesn’t use the OS verification, or find a plug-in that fakes it (and of course those will immediately come out).

Even worse, if the OS requires ALL software to acknowledge the age verification checks, what do you think that means? Everyone in Colorado is required to immediately spend thousands to buy all new versions of every program they use? And what happens to the software that is no longer updated? If you’re lucky, you can buy something completely different and spend months rebuilding all your old information into the new system? Sounds wonderful.

Where did you get this from? Sounds like more of the crap from DOGE where Musk had no clue how computers work so he just assumed that everyone listed in SSI was getting automatically paid.

It definitely help for re-world modeling, getting things figured out in advance. In the Spring of 2024 I decided to finally build a utility trailer I’ve been thinking about for years, and I modeled the whole thing in OpenScad down to the wiring and generating material lists (and yes, we got it built and have been using it through this past Summer). The fact that you can’t incrementally update variables makes some tasks stupidly difficult requiring a lot of needless redundancy, but I do like being able to write stuff out as code.

Maybe some day I’ll try Build123 or something else, but most of my projects are things where I just need to whip out a quick model, so I don’t want to deal with learning a whole new system at the same time. Case in point – yesterday I picked up a keyboard fro the thrift store but realized it was missing one of the folding feet (this one has two different sized stacked feet that fold out from each other). Half an hour later I’m making my first print, and another 15 minutes I’m ready to test the second foot piece. And I could have done it faster if I didn’t spend so much time capturing the details of the original feet. Point is, it’s hard to change when most of your needs are quickly covered with the existing software.

I’ve been using openscad to create a dual-filament direct drive print head for my Ender 3. Got the whole thing printed but I have to run a couple more wires up the cable harness to control the new servo and read the filament runout sensor.

How to live forever. Oh wait…

If they weren’t on X and were reading reality-based information, they would already know the entire world hates Trump’s politics, and I certainly don’t blame anyone for hating the entire US in general. Too many people here will gladly hate an entire country even when they had no say in choosing their leaders, so it’s only fitting to see that attitude thrown back at us.

On the other hand, the exposure that all these Trump-supporting “influencers” are foreign bot accounts is hilarious, and I love that MAGA is finally being shown exactly who they’ve been listening to.

Nope, programming is like a black hole – once you’ve entered the event horizon it’s too late and you’ll never escape.

What do you mean by “traditional cad designers” and why is that important? I’m not really sure why that is something that should matter to me?

Aww man, I knew it was only a matter of time before someone was going to “force” me to learn python. Thanks for the link, I’ll take a look at this after dinner.

Another consideration… If you are a programmer type then OpenSCAD is a language-based program. I’ve been using it heavily for the past week designing a dual-filament extruder for my Ender 3, and last year I designed and built a utility trailer. As with anything it has its quirks, but I’m much more comfortable writing code and I always found the other GUI-oriented programs to be unintuitive.

Meh there was nothing important about him and no reason for anyone to care. On the other hand, there was another school shooting in Evergreen, Colorado, at nearly the same time, and THAT is what everyone should be focusing on. Of course the cantaloupe in charge still hasn’t said a word about THAT because he couldn’t make that tragedy about himself.

Don’t forget that managers think the same thing – if it’s free then it is somehow an inferior product but if you pay for something then that automatically makes it better. This applies forward as well… the more they pay for something, the “better” it must be.

For example… Cybertruck.

From my perspective, open-source products are greatly superior because you have the entire community of users and engineers working on a known issue, rather than a few paid engineers who may not even use the product. Even more importantly, the community will solve problems that a corporation has decided aren’t worth the effort or are “obsolete”.

At one time I worked for IBM, supporting a nationwide company. There was a top guy who (like in the above story) thought he was hot shit. I think he was something like the CFO, but his ineptitude was recognized and he was pushed out. This company allowed people to move to a lower position, and he always thought he knew more about computers than everyone else, so he took the position of CTO.

One day I got a call from him, ranting that Outlook wouldn’t open and these computers were hopelessly broken. The normal procedure was to remote connect into the caller’s computer to directly fix any problems, but he decided he was smarter than the tech support people, and refused to allow me to access his machine. Fortunately I had direct contact with the on-site tech guy, who knew what he would be facing and went to the CTO’s office.

When he got back a couple minutes later, I asked him what the issue was. “Outlook was already open, it was just minimized to the task bar.”

I still think rear signaling could be improved dramatically by using a wide third-brake light to show the intensity of braking.

For example – I have seen some aftermarket turn signals which are bars the width of the vehicle, and show a “moving” signal starting in the center and then progressing towards the outer edge of the vehicle.

So now take that idea for brake. When you barely have your foot on the brake pedal, it would light a couple lights in the center of your brake signal. Press a little harder and now it’s lighting up 1/4 of the lights from the center towards the outside edge of the vehicle. And when you’re pressing the brake pedal to the floor, all of the lights are lit up from the center to the outside edges of the vehicle. The harder you press on the pedal, the more lights are illuminated.

Now you have an immediate indication of just how hard the person in front of you is braking. With the normal on/off brake signals, you don’t know what’s happening until moments later as you determine how fast you are approaching that car. They could be casually slowing, or they could be locking up their wheels for an accident in front of them.

Ah that’s good. Disk space isn’t an issue here, I have around 105TB of storage, but my desktop is an older machine with only 24GB of memory so being lightweight is somewhat of a requirement.

Agreed on Debian stable. Long ago I tried running servers under Ubuntu… that was all fine until the morning I woke up to find all of the servers offline because a security update had destroyed the network card drivers. Debian has been rock-solid for me for years and buying “commercial support” basically means paying someone else to do google searches for you.

I don’t know if I’ve ever tried flatpaks, I thought they basically had the same problems as snaps?

I’m not sure about other distros, I’ve just heard a lot of complaints about snaps under Ubuntu. Cura was the snap I tried on my system that constantly crashed until I found a .deb package. Now it runs perfectly fine without sucking up a ton of system memory. Thunderbird is managed directly by debian, and firefox-esr is provided by a Mozilla repo so they all get installed directly instead of through 3rd-party software (although I think I tried upgrading Firefox to a snap version once and it was equally unstable). Now I just avoid anything that doesn’t have a direct installer.

That’s a good point… if you can’t read messages and discussions without a login, then it’s not really facilitating public notification.

That’s what I was thinking too… If they’re running Ubuntu then they’re probably installing packages through snaps, and that’s always been the worst experience for me. Those apps lag down my whole system, crash or lock up, and generally are unusable. I run Debian but have run into apps that wanted me to use a snap install. One package I managed to find a direct installer that is rock-solid in comparison to the snap version, and the rest of the programs I abandoned.

Firefox (since it was mentioned) is one of those things I believe Ubuntu installs as a snap, despite there being a perfectly usable .deb package. I applaud the effort behind snap and others to make a universal installation system, but it is so not there yet and shouldn’t be the default of any distro.