• 47 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: February 15th, 2024

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  • I was using a 2012 “vintage” minitower PC that originally came with Win7 as a crappy little plex/local FTP/Minecraft server, and I had been wanting to try MacOS after not seeing it for a while, so I got a Mac Mini with an M2 in it, and while I’ve hardly stressed it, it seems really nice. It’s small and completely silent, and if I did want to use it more, Apple has certainly tried to keep their walled garden pretty and well-organized.




  • 7-11 theoretically already has it for their app; you scan with your phone and pay with Apple or Google Pay. The only thing is that you’re supposed to sort of wave the completed transaction at the cashier as you go, but the only reason you’d really need to use portable self-checkout is if the cashier is busy, and when they’re busy they don’t want you breaking in line or to stop what they’re doing to see that you’re showing them a plausibly legitimate checkout screen.

    In a completely, utterly, definitely unrelated story, I got accused of shoplifting by a 7-11 cashier the other day.


  • I hadn’t actually looked up any numbers on the RAM shortage. Less than a year ago I got 2 8GB sticks of no-name PC3200 DDR4 for less than $25. I didn’t even really need it for my use-case, but it was so cheap that “why not” felt like a perfectly viable reason to upgrade to 32GB total. Six years ago I got the original two-pack of 8GB sticks for $75. Now that same amount of old-ass DDR4 would be $90-$100. Jeezus. No upgrades for me for a while.


  • It’s basically hickory. Cuts nice, but hell on tools. This batch of lumber was supposed to be for a desk, my great move into proper (if simple) furniture. Instead, I killed a set of jointer blades trying to set it up, jacked up something when trying to set the new ones, and sold off most of the boards with the tools. I have since moved onto an insert-head jointer, but frankly my shop has been missing me lately.






  • 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.


  • wjrii@lemmy.worldto3DPrinting@lemmy.worldLinux Slicer
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    1 month ago

    This is my experience. I do CAD in Windows, but Orcaslicer only works properly in Linux. On Windows, it tends to crash when I tell it to generate gcode for anything but the smallest prints.

    Just as well, really. It reminds me to reboot, so I haven’t tried to fix it.




  • wjrii@lemmy.worldtoTech@programming.dev*Permanently Deleted*
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    2 months ago

    I guess even a broken fascist clock is correct twice a day. I almost imagine the last career lawyer in Austin desperately trying to figure out how to cram culture war bullshit into an actual legitimate consumer issue (the secret ingredient is… xenophobia!)…

    …or somebody just told Kenny boy that the TV knows what porn he watched last night.


  • 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.



  • wjrii@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    2 months ago

    “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.