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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It will prove to be simple corruption.

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.