Learn FreeCAD. Getting trapped in commercial software and having to abandon years and years worth of project files isn't a mistake I'm making twice. Fusion seems attractive, but look at how they treat their shit tier users.
While this is a good idea in theory, one needs quite a lot of patience to deal with its bugs and kernel limitations. It has definitely become much better since 1.0, but the inability to put chamfers and fillets wherever is extremely annoying — whether the features compute is order-dependent and they routinely conflict with each other for unclear reasons.
So, maybe it’s not a bad idea to start with a free version of something more ergonomic, just to avoid getting too discouraged.
> Then it ticked past the sixty-second mark, making it longer than the others that week. The shaking intensified.
That last sentence struck a chord. It's crazy being in the most violent event of your life, and then it gets more intense, like it dropped a gear and floored it.
10/10 would recommend experiencing a massive quake, if it were not for the small matter of widespread destruction in your city. Of course several months and 10000 aftershocks later, they're not as much fun.
AFAICT ChatGPT is mostly useless and can't be trusted to answer questions accurately. So no, mostly all search engines. To be honesty I'm surprised anybody uses it for anything other than trivial uses.
Are you using a paid version? Do you use web-search? And have you tried alternatives like Claude?
I've mostly switched to using Claude these days, with MCPs for websearch and fetching specific remote or local files. It answers questions generally very accurately (from the source documents it identifies) and includes citations.
I've found that people that haven't really tried the latest models, and just rely on whatever knowledge is in the model training are really missing out on the potential power. GPT4o+ and equivalent models really changed the game. And using tools to do a search, or pull in your code, or run a db query or whatever enables them to either synthesize information or generate context relevant material. Not perfect for everything, but much better than a year ago, or what people are doing with the free systems.
It's an interesting business model to give a version that everyone says is awful to people just trying it out, and locking the actually useful version behind a paywall, so anyone who doesn't want to immediately give money gets a bad experience...
Search engines aren't accurate either, they show you 10,000+ pages for your search query. You probably weren't looking for 10,000 answers. The problem is, they can't read your mind. ChatGPT can show you results you want, just like search engines can, you just may have to tweak your query.
The last thing I searched for was about the lady who sunk the New Zealand Naval vessel. It told me she was a captain in the United States Navy. I said that was absolutely not true and it told me of course you are correct, she is from the Australian Navy, and nothing I could say could convince it otherwise.
If it can't manage one small fact on something that was covered quite a bit in the previous month, then it is worse than useless. At the very least it should say I don't know. It reminds me of that one guy we all know that does nothing but make stuff up when talking about stuff outside of their wheel house. Never backs down, never learns anything, and ultimately dumped from the relationship.
I'm pretty old now; if I knew who made that decision and that they were coming to my country, I'd flip a coin on the risk of prison time for punching them unconscious.
I do it every day, so I see it from your perspective.
I'm willing to bet there are kids who do not though. Given how many crazy colours my IDE shows everything in, I could definitely believe there are people that go, 'Why bother, aren't those private members blue anyway?', or some such similar train of thought.
Of course if your IDE is little more than notepad, then such things are still important. For me, that's the Arduino IDE. I have to admit I really like writing micro controller code in it, it's a bit like writing code 30 years ago (both the good and bad parts).
It loaded for me, but here's a description for future readers.
The first image is the of the original IBM PC's power supply (or a clone) wherein there's a nice, clunky red switch directly on the power supply.
The second image is of a later AT style power supply where the switch was moved to the front of the chassis/facade. To facilitate this, it runs a pair of wires carrying mains power to the front of the case, which the switch (usually clunky, due to the current) physically toggles mains power into the motherboard.
IBM's own AT used the same style with the switch on the PSU itself (that image I posted is for one), and I have an unbranded AT clone (486 era) with the same style. That "AT with separate mains switch" style was probably an interim design that was used for tower cases before ATX showed up.
