u_tamtam @ u_tamtam @programming.dev

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454

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2 yr. ago

I don't want to be this guy, but if you are willing to fork that much, perhaps you could consider donating some to FreeCAD? See it as an investment: in the end you would get a better version of a software that you truly own 🙂

I won't say that FreeCAD has a good UX, but it helps a lot NOT to look at it as a CAD software, but as a collection of specialized engineering tools, organized into workspaces, haphazardly put together.

First thing you need to know is which workspace you'll need, and FreeCAD does a terrible job at explaining you that (the concept of workspaces isn't self explanatory) AND describing what each and every one of them does. Some of which should just be disabled by default because of how fringe, unpolished or unreliable they are.

Once you've got that part cleared, you can learn the primitives and the jargon (what's a body, solid, part, mesh, element, …), not great, but fair. Then, you have to learn, for every workbench, what their workflow is (e.g. create a body, create a sketch, apply transformations ; Create an analysis, define material, define loads, add a mesh, add solver, add equations, run solver, add results, tweak the pipeline so it renders, show results), and yep, FreeCAD won't hold your hand for any of that, you'll have to wear your explorer hat and navigate from frustration to incomprehension until it accidentally works.

But then, if you can get over that, you'll end-up with a tool that's more powerful and versatile than anything else, including dandy commercial offerings. It still blows my mind that nowadays anyone in their garage can do for free what not so long ago would require a full engineering curriculum and corporate sponsorship to acquire licenses. My hope is that FreeCAD would gain the same kind of visibility that Blender enjoys, with sufficient funds for a small dev team and a great product manager.

Yup, in the end the best slicer is the one you know best and get stuff done with :)

I use the original, prusaslicer. Orcaslicer does a good job of packaging and releasing bambulab's fork but I'm not yet convinced that their UI is a net win, it's super glitchy at times (at least on Linux), depends on closed-source Bambu features (network plugin), has features missing (fix model only available on windows) and is easy to fault (you can easily let it do stupid things because of combination of options developers didn't foresee). That said, it's compelling prusaslicer to give its UX some polish and to backport some advanced features, so this competition is good and no option is inferior or feels like you are missing out in practice.

I don't use it for.. reasons, but I suspect orcaslicer has picked up a lot of what made superslicer special, and is actively maintained.

I can't pretend to know the future, but if you read between the lines and the justifications provided, this isn't really about AGPL per se, but about Element brokering AGPL exceptions. Practically we can expect all kinds of forks with opencore options that might enshittify the user experience in different ways, and further solidification of Element's single-handed control over Matrix (which had been a prime concern for many years). Matrix is by the day closer to the closed-source centralized silos it was first pretending to oppose.

Meanwhile, we see no comparable progress in western countries

lies and lies, see above.

You do realize that you’re lying about something that’s well documented right?

so we are back to your difficulty with keeping track of one thread, I see.
Your initial assertion was that no comparable progress is being made in western countries to divert from fossil fuels. None of your links proves this. A single counter-argument suffices to prove you wrong, though but I give you several: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-electricity-source-stacked?country=OWID_WRL~CHN~IND~USA~JPN~DEU~GBR~BRA~FRA~CAN~SWE~ZAF~AUS

If you can't digest the fact that China's current grid is everything but clean, I see no point in continuing the discussion. Also, it could be that you have another blindspot by conflating "electricity production" and "energy consumption" (FYI, China performs even worse there).

US is facilitating fossil fuel consumption by creating policies that encourage fossil fuel extraction. What you’re doing here is just sophistry to avoid acknowledging this fact.

What you are doing here is pretend that the US, a non-OPEC country, single handedly governs the worldwide oil and gas supply and demand. Which is the most ridiculous assertion in your opinion?

Thing is that China has demonstrated a continued long term commitment to cutting out fossil fuels,

I mean, the whole world is committed, out of necessity: we have passed peak conventional oil a decade+ ago (unconventional should be about now, shale is what's setting the US as the largest exporter), and every nation is securing its own energy sovereignty. The trend to renewable is global, wasn't started by China, China being the world's largest electricity producer gets to install lots of it in absolute numbers, but is still way behind developed nations in terms of relative to electricity produced.

Meanwhile, we see no comparable progress in western countries

lies and lies, see above.

Also, important to note that per capita emissions in China are already lower than most western countries, and much lower than US.

Yes, we already touched ground on that, per capita, China isn't doing fantastic, and isn't trending in the right direction (i.e. its emissions are increasing).

You are off-topic, OP's talking about the share of fossil in energy production.

Or you are misguided (and have been for a while), because the accounting of CO₂ emissions is done where it is consumed. The US being an O&G exporter incurs production, refining and transportation emissions counted on their territory, but the rest is counted in the importing country's.

China’s emissions have entered structural decline

We've yet to see it materialize in numbers (fingers crossed). So far we are mostly observing a significant decrease in economic activity, which China has made a habit to compensate with large scale infrastructure projects and dumping (e.g. steel), which are inherently large GHG emitters, irrespective of how much renewable electricity is produced.

Also, China seems very far from reaching the inflexion point where domestic consumption-based emissions stabilize: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption-co2-emissions . This graph also answers how much CO₂ outsourcing actually happens here (i.e. territorial emissions minus consumption-related emissions), which isn't much at all.

That's… not true? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-electricity-fossil-nuclear-renewables?facet=none&country=CHN~USA

So if we put aside the fact that some amount of GHG must be emitted to lift a country out of poverty, you are saying that you would put blame on lobbyists rather than on corrupt politicians? ...

Interesting. Were the apps/features installed comparable between the OC and NC instances? I can't even find an "email" equivalent app for owncloud from their marketplace.
I don't want to sound like I'm coming in defence of NC, but I'd be curious to find an as factual as possible comparison between "bare-bones NC" vs "bare-bones OC".

Matrix problems become unmanageable at scale, but the effects of the underlying complexity can be felt long before: https://telegra.ph/why-not-matrix-08-07

If you read between the lines, Matrix 2 is practically about handing the client state over to the server (what they refer to as "sliding sync"). Realistically, this is an admission that the protocol is too complex to be handled efficiently on the user's devices. I'm not saying there are not clear benefits (and new trade-offs) to the approach, just that in the grand scheme of things the complexity is shifted elsewhere (and admins foot a larger bill).

Yup, like pretty much everyone else :) https://nlnet.nl/project/XMPP-MLS/

Please, don't recommend pidgin, it's a security hellhole, and a pretty terrible XMPP client at that. If you want something with a similar vibe, check-out https://dino.im/ or https://gajim.org/ if you are more on the "power-user" side of things :)

I assessed XMPP vs Matrix about 8 years ago, and strikingly, the basis on which it didn't make the cut still applies today. Here's what I responded to a sibling post: https://programming.dev/comment/5408356

In short, Matrix dug themselves into a complexity pit with an inadequate protocol, survived for a while on venture capital money (upscaling servers and marketing at all cost), all of it dried up, and now they are in financial trouble. Matrix won't disappear overnight, but is definitely losing the means to run the managed instances and the client/server ecosystem.

Neither XMPP nor Matrix will ever become “the next WhatsApp”: the current internet has seen too much consolidation for the tech majors to permit it (and open and federated protocols can’t compete, do not have the marketing budget nor the platforms to promote their software, but I salute the EU’s Market Act attempt to shake-up the status quo).

But that doesn’t really matter IMO. What (I believe) is important in the grand scheme of things is that such protocols remain alive, maintained and secure, so that:

• small-scale instances can flourish and contribute to a more resilient/efficient internet (think of family-/district-level providers ; this is the kind of service I personally offer: family members and friends at large appreciate that the messages and data that we exchange aren’t shared over some cloud or facebook server for no good reason)
• IM identities can persist over time: if you are a business or an individual, you may want to look into having a stable/lasting contact address, that will survive the inevitable collapse of facebook/whatsapp/instagram/… If you are old enough, your current email address probably existed before facebook. Why not your IM address?

And yes, I hear you, this is rather niche, but what got me there (and on XMPP in particular) is having been long-enough on the internet to become tired of the never-ending cycle of migrations from service to service. More and more people will have a similar experience as time goes, so this niche will only grow :)