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wpm

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Making 5 hours ago

Does a machinist who uses CNC qualify as a machinist?

Yes. The CNC doesn't act on its own.

If I ask the CNC "make me a widget", am I a machinist?

Blender 5.2 LTS 1 day ago

Perhaps, if the object I do care about crafting requires that process. I'd rather just learn the process I need when I need it, not waste my time doing a bunch of nebulous "this might be useful later" or conceptual stuff. Blender is an immensely flexible and well-featured tool. If I'm using it for 2D animation, making models for 3D Printing, or video editing, being able to make a donut is quite frankly, useless.

The donut tutorial is fine, but it is an error to believe it is appropriate or useful for everyone. Probably best for people who have more vague goals like "i want to be good at blender" and not "I have this very specific thing in my head that I want to make and none of the free models out there are close enough."

On a desktop or laptop computer, most trackpads have an immediate response curve. I am using one now, an Apple Wireless Trackpad. A very large amount of engineering effort over decades of time and millions of lifetime hours went into making it behave that way over a common wireless medium. I scroll a little bit, it scrolls a little bit, immediately, I scroll a lot, it scrolls a lot, immediately, and if I flick my finger from the bottom to the top and let go, it behaves as if I swiped a page of paper on my desk in the same fashion, with inertia taking over, proportional to how fast I flicked.

There is therefore an intrinsic physical link between the actions of my fingers, and the motion on the web page. My finger moves, and an immediate, proportional response is observed. This is an utterly base level of how most humans interact with the world. It is why using a mouse or trackpad came quite easy to many people (and why some can flick a mouse in a shooter, turn a precise 274.9 degrees, move up 14.2 degrees, and click on the head of an enemy player in fractions of a second with pinpoint accuracy). It is also why even a toddler can use a touchscreen; direct manipulation is inherently understandable to even a baby.

When I am turning in a screw by hand with a screwdriver, the feeling of the screws threads through the handle into my fingers, the immediate force feedback, the observable, feelable progress of the screw in or out of its screwhole, forms this same interface. Where human and tool meet, latency and unexpected behavior, especially if divorced from the input force, are undesirable qualities of a tool.

Scroll jacking is to a trackpad or a fine scroll wheel as turning a screwdriver handle by twisting a bungee cord is to using a screwdriver. It unhooks the immediate, direct feedback from the motion of my hand; its jarring, unpleasant, frustrating. On this page, I immediately put two fingers on the trackpad and moved them less than a centimeter, and didnt let go, and the entire screen cycled its view, as if I pressed a button "move to next item". Except I didn't (and why would I want that in the first place???), I just moved my fingers less than a centimeter. Nothing in the real world moves like that except for things less than a centimeter away from falling out of balance. And it feels the same. Precarious. A common human reaction to things moving out of proportion to our body is nausea!

I think a better question is, can you give an example of "why/how" this solves any actual problem someone would have had scrolling this website had it not used scroll snapping? Would the top comment have been "Boy I wish this site had used scroll snapping, it would have been more well done and enjoyable that way"?

ECC and DDR5 2 days ago

Depending on your server's CPU sockets, reseating the CPU might help if they were ever swapped before (esp if you got the server used). I have a marginally bad RAM slot on one of my Supermicro X11 boards because my dumb ass dropped the CPU into the socket and bent a few pins. I bent them back, but you can only do so much and the furthest RAM slot won't work without throwing errors daily if I run it at 2400MHz.

Blender 5.2 LTS 3 days ago

Maybe this'll get me torched but one of the more useful things I've had an LLM do is generate a little tutorial for Blender. Though I'm coming in with zero 3D modeling experience, and the tutorial was for the basics, what I got (and this was with a local quantized Qwen, I'm sure the big boys would've done a better job) was fairly workable.

My issue was yes, it's always a YouTube video, and also always for shit I didn't want to do. I don't want to make a donut. I don't want to model a coffee cup, I want to make something else.

It was full of little errors here and there (the human crafted ones are too because the Blender UI changes so often), but since it had gotten me started and "in" the UI I could usually figure it out myself or use a search engine to find what I was looking for.

Portability is dead now anyways. Something can have "sh" but all you can depend on are sh semantics and built ins. The whole point of a shell script is to compose a larger workflow out of the command line tools preinstalled on a system. I can't guarantee a sh script written on macOS is going to work on FreeBSD or Linux anyways, so there's zero reason to limit myself to sh.

I wish I could have submitted this entire thread as an exhibit to every commenter in the "Mac Pro Discontinued" thread from a few months ago telling me "jUsT uSe tHuNDeRbOLT!"

My shell is configured to show me previews of commands that match from my history. Depending on how long ago I typed the cat command, it might be "cat -> tab -> return"

The store is uniform across geography, in the sense that it doesn't move and a system within the store is capable of calculating the taxes. If there was a simple flat "10% sales tax" on every single item in a store, the store could simply print price tags with that included. Marketing materials posted in the store could have the advertised price slapped on a sticker by the store too.

The issue is really that taxes in most places are not uniform in application, not necessarily just because of geography, but also all of the specific carve outs and exceptions and so on that America tends to have, e.g., SNAP and WIC often don't pay sales tax. So its actually hard to know what someone is going to pay without communicating with them personally beforehand.

Yes, and if you analyze the finished metal and put in the work to reverse engineer it, fine, have at it. That's not even theft. If Apple really wanted to keep it completely secret forever, they can't sell it, so thats the risk they accept.

But thats very different than scheming to steal actual property, which these files are.

Does it matter? The one person who takes responsibility for what occurs in a huge organization like Xbox is the person driving the ship. What's done is done. She is responsibile for the layoffs, whether they were made necessary by her or not. She is responsible for choosing to fire the idTech Director of Engine Tech. She owns all of it, because that is literally her job as CEO. Boo hoo her predecessor made terrible decisions too.

Because she is literally the head of Xbox and signed off on this plan

Being a woman doesn't make her not responsible despite being the ultimate decision maker in the division, nor should it shield her from criticism.