I used OpenSCAD to create a map of Manhattan. It shows the live location of subway trains. It was surprisingly easy, I struggled a lot with OnShape and Fusion360 trying to do this because there were too many polygons.
I found that starting with an SVG and extruding from there is perfect in OpenSCAD, but I’m sure I’m underutilizing it a lot.
Cool project, but just how many polygons are you talking about? Also, my guess is you did meshes, instead of breps- they are far more efficient in my experience.
The largest mesh I worked with in Fusion 360 is a digital elevation map of California, it has 2.8M vertices and 5.6M faces and it's still possible to get things done (like making a CAM to carve a 2 foot x 2 foot map with reasonable details).
I haven't used OpenSCAD much beyond combining primitives. Truthfully these organic shapes are more of a use-case for 3D modelling software like Blender rather than CAD, but I'd be keen to hear if you end up giving OpenSCAD a go.
My Bambu A1 mini has been reliable despite the challenging geometry; pretty sure your P2S will work just as well if not better. Good luck!
I was able to take the image of the star-shaped graph from OP, fed it to claude and used this for the prompt:
"figure out a good formula or equation for this graph and use it to create the lampshade in openscad. use the graph as the bottom for a lampshade, and taper it all up to center point. leave a hole at the top big enough for a lightbulb fixture to pass through." It did a surprisingly good job of generating the OpenSCAD, STL, and preview renders in-browsers.
Aside from Fusion360, is there a Free (or FOSS) cad package that uses breps and is scriptable?
Fusion360 is just stupid fast at perforations and sophisticated modeling constructions via its python API. I use it because it works well, but I'd be happier if I didn't have to maintain that Autodesk dependency...
FreeCAD via AstoCAD (https://www.astocad.com/ - 4€/month) is quite more user friendly too, compared to the vanilla experience, for those who want to do CAD sometimes and forget things between uses. It's made by FreeCAD contributors who push things upstream too.
I see it as a donation to developer who work on FreeCAD, not a "subscription service", just a different way of funding FOSS.
I'd agree that FreeCAD's UI isn't horrible, but it is a lot to take in at a first glance, and for people who don't use it frequently. If I was using it daily, I'd probably prefer FreeCAD as-is too, better feature density and everything at a glance.
Yes. Claude is surprisingly capable in this area, maybe because the shapes are so simple. Using a slicer in vase mode should make it print quickly too.
For this case, I'm not exaggerating when I say you would probably have an easier time generating the meshes yourself in python and something like the trimesh library to load the vertices into.
Immigration is absolutely a part of this deal. Interestingly, EU official communications and western media barely mention this, but the Indian government's official communication tout a "new framework for mobility" that will "open up new opportunities in the European Union for Indian students, workers, and professionals." [1]
The quote is “Alongside this ambitious FTA, we are also creating a new framework for mobility. This will open up new opportunities in the European Union for Indian students, workers, and professionals.”
I read it as he is working on a separate deal besides the aforementioned FTA.
As the immigration is governed by the member states themselves and not by the EU, I don't see how it can be "a part of this deal". Which is probably why the media don't mention this. There is nothing to mention.
> look to send them abroad to prevent domestic unrest
Great, now other countries can import and share that domestic social unrest from the oversupply of frustrated reproductive age celibate males, all in the name of making GDP number go up. Lovely.
Surely using hindsight of documented history and well researched human behavior science, we can't already predict this will lead to a rise in political far right extremism, and everyone will be shocked as if it will suddenly come out of nowhere, and then the local males will exclusively be to blame for it, leading to further frustration, radicalisation and disenfranchisement. Surely this is not EXACTLY what's gonna happen.
India gets a metric fuckload of money back in remittances every year. Debatable if that's actually worth the brain drain, but then there's also the angle of having your young people learn from the rest of the world and return with new skills. I lean more towards the remittances though.
I have seen a lot of smart people in thrall of ideologies that could be used to manipulate them left and right at will. Meanwhile, true morons tend to be unpredictably chaotic.
Who would pay them? Conference organizers are already unpaid and undestaffed, and most conferences aren't profitable.
I think rejections shouldn't be automatic. Sometimes there are just typos. Sometimes authors don't understand BibTeX. This needs to be done in a way that reduces the workload for reviewers.
One way of doing this would be for GPTZero to annotate each paper during the review step. If reviewers could review a version of each paper with yellow-highlighted "likely-hallucinated" references in the bibliography, then they'd bring it up in their review and they'd know to be on their guard for other probably LLM-isms. If there's only a couple likely typos in the references, then reviewers could understand that, and if they care about it, they'd bring it up in their reviews and the author would have the usual opportunity to rebut.
I don't know if GPTZero is willing to provide this service "for free" to the academic community, but if they are, it's probably worth bringing up at the next PAMI-TC meeting for CVPR.
Most publication venues already pay for a plagiarism detection service, it seems it would be trivial to add it on as a cost. Especially given APCs for journals are several thousand dollars, what's a few dollars more per paper.
And the Mojave solar concentrator is being shut down, from what I've heard.
The article here starts with:
Last year China installed more than half of all wind and solar added globally. In May alone, it added enough renewable energy to power Poland, installing solar panels at a rate of roughly 100 every second.
The concentrated solar plant is getting shut down because it's failing to compete with the massive rollout of photovoltaic panels. We've made solar so cheap that the old ways of gathering it are becoming redundant, which, no matter how incredibly cool it was to see a second sun rise over the horizon on the way to Vegas, is a good sign.
The California Public Utilities Commission moved last month to prevent the shutdown of the Ivanpah solar concentrator. They cite data centers, grid reliability, and the state's clean energy goals as reasons to keep it online.
The pics show renewable energy integrated with other activity (e.g. sheep grazing among solar panels); integrated into urban environments (on every rooftop and streets) and contrasted against ancient Chinese culture (e.g. temples). I think this makes the imagery substantially different from the alternative-offered US RE installations.
We’re doing better than they are. Our new power generation is about 90% renewable, theirs is 70.
The difference is just scale, China has 3x our population but very many of them had little or even no electricity available so they’re playing catch up. Americans are functionally all served by the power grid already. So of course they’re building more of it as an absolute number.
But I’d also bet they built more coal plants last year than the entire world built in a decade.
Last year, PRC new generation is functionally >100% renewable (as in over 100%), new advanced coal plants serve as cleaner coal peakers not base load. New renewables now displaces existing coal (new trend last year) - nameplate coal is up due to new plants, but actual utilization of coal down in absolute terms.
Meanwhile what doesn't get captured in accounting is US increasing fossil exports (crude, lng etc), and PRC exporting renewables. Assuming 25 year lifecycle, PRC exports solar last year displaces ~5 years worth of US fossil exports in barrels of crude equivalent (400 GW of solar = 14000TWh electricity, or 8B barrels of oil, i.e. 22m barrels per day). TLDR PRC is reducing absolute fossil use, MASSIVELY increasing global renewable use. US is simply increasing net fossil use, much of it hidden from domestic balance sheets because it's exported globally.
Anecdote: I had a friend in SF. He and I would hang out once in a while, and I always looked forward to these hangouts (we'd meet up for coffee, or go for a walk, hang out at Dolores Park, etc.). He is gay, I'm not. His perspective on things was often quite different than mine and I found that interesting. I got married, he stayed single. Even after marriage we would still hang out (though not as often as before). Then we had a child, which sucked all spare time out of my life; but even then we hung out once in a while. Then one winter there was cold/flu/COVID going around. We planned on hanging out and I unfortunately bailed on him at the last moment. This happened 2 more times. Then that bout of illnesses passed and I reached out to him to hang out again. But this time he seemed cold and distant. So I dropped it. And I didn't see him again for almost 3 years.
Then one day I ran into him while walking through Dolores Park. He didn't see me, but I hesitated and still hollered out at him, for old times' sake. He responded and walked over. We chatted a little, I gave him a parting hug and we agreed to hang out again.
A couple of weeks later we managed to hang out again. What I gathered from our meeting was that he had been miffed at what he thought was me blowing him off; and I, when I felt he was cold and distant, had misread his grief at losing his cat. We both misread each other and wasted 3 years.
Moral of the story that I took away from it was: be more forgiving. Friendships are worth the extra effort.
In the past, whenever I felt lonely and hopeless, I jumped into helping others: volunteering, helping an old neighbor garden, help someone move, etc. Helping people gave me a short-term purpose, which eventually let me ride out the low phase of life. YMMV, of course.
I have noticed that doing the sign leads to some good conversations in which I've helped someone in a small way, and that gave me a nice little dopamine boost. It's also led to about half a dozen genuine friendships over the past few months. I wonder if that's the answer, a sort of meta-solution: organizing this thing I'm doing into something that other people in the same situation can do, as a way of meeting people and getting outside their comfort zone. Like setting up a chess table in public if chess is your thing. But no, there are already public chess tables, and they'd have already done that. I don't know, just thinking out loud.
This is my go-to strategy as well. When I feel irrepressible bits of loneliness or depression, I just make some food and go out and start handing out to the needy.
Or go for a walk and find people that need a hand. People moving, lifting things, carrying things. Small little acts of being useful and helpful for a moment help.
The feeling will creep back in eventually, but at least for that time I was out and about, it's not.
