exasperaited

Palantir and Anduril both have an altogether creepy fixation on the UK.

I hope Trump lives a long enough and cognitively healthy enough life to witness his own utter humiliating failures, which are inevitable. His coalition is collapsing, his wealthy backers will run away because they have no principles.

Corporate Trumpism itself may never die, though; it is ironic that someone so malevolent, reactive, instinctive and disordered might be the harbinger of that smooth, sleek, white marble, stainless steel and brightly coloured leather sofa corporate governance future that Rollerball promised us.

[flagged]

Obama performed notably better by any standardised measure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_app...

This, of course, grinds the incumbent's gears more than anything else.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it performs adequately in this context —- isn’t the manufacturer a VOIP device maker?

The reality is that they spam the market with a large number of products with little consistency, poor (if labyrinthine) documentation, random google drive links for firmware etc., and there are the same issues with hardware support.

I dunno, maybe the situation there is better than it was. But the broad picture is the same: better hardware but you are basically on your own.

How are we still in a world where there are breathless, hand-waving blog posts written about the theoretical potential of super-fast SBCs for which the manufacturer shows fuck all interest in competent OS support?

Yet again, OrangePi crank out half-baked products and tech enthusiasts who quite understandably lack the deep knowledge to do more than follow others' instructions on how to compile stuff talk about it as if their specifications actually matter.

Yet again the HN discourse will likely gather around stuff like "why not just use an N1x0" and side quests about how the Raspberry Pi Foundation has abandoned its principles / is just a cynical Broadcom psyop / is "lagging behind" in hardware.

This stuff can be done better and the geek world should be done excusing OrangePi producing hardware abandonware time after time. Stop buying this crap and maybe they will finally start focussing on doing more than shipping support for one or two old kernels and last year's OS while kicking vague commitments about future support just far enough down the road that they can release another board first.

Please stop falling for it :-/

ETA: I think what grinds my gears the most is that OrangePi, BananaPi etc., are largely free-riding off the Linux community while producing products that only "beat" the market-defining manufacturers (Raspberry Pi, BeagleBoard) because they treat software support as an uncosted externality.

This kind of "build it and they will use it" logic works well for microcontrollers, where a manufacturer can reasonably expect to produce a chip with a couple of tech demos, a spec sheet and a limited C SDK and people will find uses for it.

But for "near-desktop class" SBCs it is not much better than misrepresentation. Consequently these things are e-waste in a way that even the global desk drawer population of the Raspberry Pi does not reach.

And yet they are graded on a curve and never live up to their potential.

I believe I know an immune-compromised adult who was taking anti-parasitics for more than two years due to workplace (care context) reinfections. I say “believe” because these are two things people talk about in coded, careful ways. It might be a little more common than polite conversation ever really reveals.

For example if you know anyone who raised early concerns about antivaxxers causing short supply of ivermectin formulations for human use during the pandemic. More or less anyone who knew what ivermectin was at that point in time was either a farmer, a vetinarian, a doctor… or a patient with a condition.

I am no expert but my take on this is:

FreeCAD is obviously not a commercial grade CAD package, but it’s not because it is weak conceptually: it’s not dissimilar to Solidworks, Onshape or Fusion. It’s weak in terms of UI flow and its CAD kernel is flawed in some ways (as you probably already know: fillets, chamfers, drafts, thicknesses/shells).

I don’t believe there is so much to learn to get from FreeCAD to one of those packages, at least where core concepts are concerned, so I carry on with what I am doing.

But on the other hand I think one learns a concept best from multiple perspectives, and all of them, essentially, have a free, student or cheap (e.g. Solidworks For Makers) tier, so probably the answer for us is to do some learning in one or two of those alongside.

There is a good video on YouTube by Deltahedra where he does a Solidworks certification exam using FreeCAD, incidentally.

I am unconcerned about it being downvoted. If it makes people defensive enough to downvote it, it did its job, and maybe through attrition it, with other people’s disgusted rage, will contribute to educating the sociopathic Valley tech industry that things are going badly wrong.

One more seemingly futile fist punched at the wall that traps us in the world that unfettered tech industry greed has made for us. Might take millions of us to make an impression but we will.

FWIW I am British and “fuck all of these people” is something you might expect even the most balanced, refined British person to say, because we’re less afraid of language or the poetry of some of our older, more colourful words, and because there is no more elegantly robust way to put it.

The gun comparison comes up a lot. It especially seemed to come up when AI people argued that ChatGPT was not responsible for sycophanting depressed people to death or into psychosis.

It is a core libertarian defence and it is going to come up a lot: people will conflate the ideas of technological progress and scientific progress and say “our tech is neutral, it is how people use it” when, for example, the one thing a sycophantic AI is not is “neutral”.

This Hacker News Commenter Made A Devastating Perfect Reply To Simon Willison

Honestly… fuck all of these people. Why would you do this?

Again and again this stuff proves not to be AI but clever spam generation.

AWoT: Artificial Wastes of Time.

Don't do this to yourself. Find a proper job.

But I found out that making something more complex forces you to invent your own layout system.

The problem is exactly that, yes. If you want a simple shape and maybe to stick a thread on it (one of the first things I printed) then OpenSCAD has the basics and there are really interesting libraries.

But if you get into something complex, you end up building your own scheme and then constantly gardening it. The complexity never gets truly abstracted away because you can never truly work in a higher order way.

FreeCAD is a long way from perfect, but what it is, that you need, is a space where you can reason about geometry in a way that lets you learn. And if you want code-CAD, you can do it with python macros, or limited bits of OpenSCAD in that workbench, or you can use CadQuery/Build123D and generate STEP files for some of it, and then build on those.

I would still say I don't know CAD anywhere near as well as I'd like to. But I know where to start, I've learned the terminology, and I am able to think in CAD in a way I never expected to.

Indeed.

No courses on the 3D printing side really — I think I did go through one of the Prusa ones after getting enough free "meters" on Printables but I don't remember it telling me much I hadn't already learned. There is a blog post that has been posted here before that really covers almost everything important about design for 3D printing:

https://blog.rahix.de/design-for-3d-printing/

I really just ADHD'd the hell out of it, I suspect [0], and absorbed everything I read. I was in financial difficulty and things were expensive so it took me a couple of years to get me from "I'd like a 3D printer" to "this 3D printer is affordable but viable and even if I never learn design there are plenty of tools I can make with it that will save me money".

In that time I read everything I could about what I'd need to learn, convinced myself that I was not so clumsy and inept I couldn't maintain a printer. These days printers don't need so much mechanical knowledge to get started.

On the CAD side of things, I learned a bit of OpenSCAD, found it basically helpful to make one simple thing but also frustrating and disappointing, joined really useful non-public Facebook groups where people were working on similar things, decided to get properly into FreeCAD, and dug in with the Mango Jelly Solutions videos on Youtube (which actually are now organised into a course structure, but weren't really then).

The thing that motivated me mostly was having simple real things I wanted to make for a project I was working on (though my brain being what it is, I still haven't got round to that exact project...)

If you have a need for a thing you would like, and you're able to break it down into simpler projects, particularly if they are things you might find useful along the way, it's not very difficult to find the motivation to learn these two things.

The positive feedback loop is so strong, and 3D printing is such a concrete way to learn CAD and design because you get to hold your design so quickly: I designed this thing in CAD, I printed this thing, wow it works but I could improve this, I need to learn this new thing in CAD, I printed it, it works but… etc.

Pretty soon you find yourself staring at some real world object on your desk and modelling it in CAD for fun.

The really interesting thing is when you begin to understand that the design of things is fundamentally influenced by the tooling used to make them. When you grasp how 3D printing and injection moulding differ, for example, and start designing your own items with respect to the strengths and weaknesses of 3D printing, rather than just to look like an existing plastic part which was moulded, then you're really getting there.

[0] hilariously I am still not formally diagnosed. Though I'm pretty sure I could be diagnosed just based on these two comments.

I want to, no, need to improve my ability to focus on the task at hand.

This. My control of my focus has been reduced to the point of disability at times (seriously worrying, when in middle age)

Other than that near-universal constant, I want to try being a bit of a jack of many trades this year

But this, honestly, is at odds with it. It will be difficult to do these two things at once (source: trust me bro, but no really do trust me).

Rather I would suggest a strategy, if you want to learn lots of things: ask yourself, what small set of goals are all those things in service of? What could you gain if they all pointed mostly in one direction, and how will you keep a slow, low-level, long term focus on that direction?

(I am writing this comment to myself, as you can probably tell.)

I must develop (re-develop) planning skills, because my management of time is poor and my management of my direction in life non-existent. I have a broad set of underdeveloped talents that point to me being able to do a lot more stuff for more people if I wasted less time and just steered them in a couple of directions that will have slow-growing benefits.

Apart from progressing some life challenges, what I would like to do is design one complete physical prototype every two months, to move my brain away from everyday web development and towards something that helps people again.

I have CAD and 3D printing skills, I am learning what I would need to get work CNC milled, I have just enough awareness of embedded computing possibilities and I have a couple of interests that can be used to drive product ideas forward or at least provide a personal context for learning.

Probably photography, initially; I have already made some things and used them for my own photography work, and I have ideas for more. The goal would be Tindie-type sales or at least to get tools into the hands of like-minded friends.

I have spent the last year really developing my "CAD thinking" and now it is time to just make things, completely enough that they could be sold at a sort of boutique scale.

This is… an insane argument. But just the idea that Bill Barr gives a shit what liberals think makes me laugh.

It wasn't his actual birth certificate! It was the short form!

You miss my point. This is a list of people engaging in something flat-out corrupt. The ballroom is an inherently corrupt project.

It will prove to be simple corruption.

Regardless of personal anecdata, the data shows Brexit support was highly stratified by social class, income, and education.

This is just not really true at all. The push for Brexit itself clearly came from the super-wealthy; it could not have happened without them. It is as if you haven't paid attention at all to who was behind it and why.

Good of them to make a list themselves, isn't it? It'll be useful in the future.

The best anyone can offer is scaremongering about neonazis which are not a threat anywhere in the western world.

Did you write this with a straight face? Are you foolish, or are you arguing in bad faith?

There are neo-nazi sympathisers in the current US government. Paul Ingrassia, Kash Patel.

https://www.npr.org/2025/05/14/nx-s1-5387299/trump-white-hou...

I mean really.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/20/trump-nomine...

https://capitalandmain.com/the-white-supremacist-house-extre...

Even the Brexiteer politicians themselves were obviously none too concerned about popular opinion, as Brexit was obviously in part driven by immigration fears, which they did less than nothing about

Eh? People in the official Vote Leave campaign stoked those fears over literally THIRTY YEARS and were happy to leave the unofficial Leave.EU campaign to explicitly stoke them with racist campaigning.

I don't know where you get the idea that the Leave campaigns were complacent about racisms and bigotry and xenophobia; they excused it or amplified it at every turn (while lying about everything else)

The seriousness of immigration problems remains a black-hearted fucking fabrication drummed up by every single right wing newspaper in this country over the entirety of my life.

I don't think you really know what you are talking about because, for example:

Remain had nearly unanimous elite support.

This just isn't true. I know some people who move in pretty elite circles, City circles, Oxbridge, and I can tell you that Brexit had at least lukewarm support and in some circles (those who don't know or don't care that Boris is a habitual liar) rabid support.

Remain absolutely knew what it was up against.

So you haven't read his Wikipedia page then, and you are too young, I guess, to remember Iran-Contra. You apparently don't even remember how Barr got the job from Trump.

Instead of curing the disease you're treating the symptoms.

Banning criminals and neonazis who act against our nation's interests is a simple matter of sovereignty and I hope we continue to do it despite your and JD Vance's opinions; it's a right the nation reserves.

No amount of bad speech can make people extremist on its own.

This is pie-in-the-sky fantasy. It's just not true at all.

The tiniest, most meaningless, most temporary grievance can be exploited by demagogues and everyone knows it. Including the American president.

Bannon is a convicted criminal money-launderer and fraudster; we ban such people all the time (and so do other countries). But he's also agitating against UK interests (and interfered in our politics before).

Musk has literally called for violence on our streets; we ban people who do that too. We should consider banning foreigners who appear to be funding political activity here.

Vance is actively acting against the interests of the UK and EU (actively agitating against political union) in a way that benefits our adversaries, and he lionises neo-nazis.

A general atmosphere that we sometimes ban white nationalists and neo-nazis when they actively provoke violence or hatred or illegally interfere in our politics to destabilise the country?

Oh no, I'm sorry if this is upsetting or surprising to anyone!

Seriously: Vance will be persona non grata when this is over. The list of countries that should ban him is longer than the one I made (Germany should, for example). The list of countries he won't risk visiting is probably longer still. But then I think he won't risk leaving the USA at all after this is all over. And nor should he.

And as others have observed, Musk has actively attempted to foment violence in the UK; people get banned from other countries (including the USA) for that all the time.

A library is something you call. A framework is some kind of application scaffolding that normally calls you.

I think I broadly agree with this. In essence, libraries don't impose an application-level life cycle. Frameworks, generally, do.

The rest of the article, I don't know….

The most successful, long-running app I maintain has a mini-framework that allowed me to assemble what I need piecemeal rather than relying on any off-the-shelf framework that would have been obsoleted several times over in the seventeen-year lifespan of this code.

I guess about one in three things I do in it require me to dip into my framework code to look at it, but this is mostly to remember how it works! About one in five things have required me to make a small progressive change.

Twice in its lifetime a core component has been swapped out (mailer and database library).

And twice in its lifetime, because it is beginning to converge on a general web framework, I have considered porting the code out of it and into a general framework, which might make it easier to hand over. One day, I suspect, something will break compatibility in a way that makes that the sensible route, but the code works, fast, has a pretty obvious set of abstractions, and there are implicit examples of everything it can do in everything it already does.

Almost all articles like this start out with "here is a thing I claim is a generalised problem that I am sure you should not do", that is a well-meaning but false generalisation, and is then caveated to the point where no new point is being made.

Underneath they are always: don't write bad code. If you do, learn from it.

If I'd followed the advice of this article when I started this project, I would by now have rewritten the entire thing more than once, for little gain.

Much more concise and much more sensible: consider whether your additional levels of abstraction have value.

But do mini frameworks have value? Sure they do, especially if there is setup and teardown that every function needs to do.

He has functionally neutered Congress. It is almost completely meaningless and it is operating without an independent Speaker.

I think he could succeed in principle re: Mount Rushmore, to be honest. I think eventually people will cave in and agree to do it, and then they will just pray to cholesterol that they can wait it out.

The day will come when we ban Steve Bannon, Elon Musk and JD Vance from the UK, and I think for the first two at least, the day is getting closer.

(I personally expect Vance to be banned from the UK - along with Denmark and Greenland - as soon as he is no longer VP. But then I suspect his days of international travel will end then more generally.)

But since diplomacy requires proportionality, maybe we start with Bannon, or Nick Fuentes, or Andrew Auernheimer. (They really should be banned from travel here like Matthew Heimbach, Richard Spencer, Don Black and Mark Weber already are.)

Had exactly did Barr and Co. accomplish in terms of moving forward the agenda people voted for? These guys were so eager to win accolades from liberals they couldn’t even pick the lowest hanging fruit.

Are you talking about the same Bill Barr? "Eager to win accolades from liberals" is a hilariously Trump-after-he-fired-someone thing to say.

Have you read his Wikipedia page? Do you know who he actually is?