freeCAD had a critical issue in topological naming (they are working on a fix as we speak and it's going to be out "soon"), and it's hideously clunky. Basically, when you resize a sketch and that causes more faces to be created it makes all your other stuff go crazy.
You can also use realthunders branch which fixes the naming issue as well.
Mangos videos teach you a bit how to think reasonably though freecads infuriating errors, too. The guy is worth a watch if you want to start using the best open source tool.
freeCAD sucks, until you learn it, and then it works alright. Learn to use data planes instead of sketch on face and the topo naming isn't even an issue anymore.
I am still a relative novice but: you don't really need to use datum planes at all to avoid TNP through sketch placement.
Each sketch can be placed independently anyway (offset from its attachment), and you can place them parametrically. So if you want the sketch on the top surface of another pad you can simply set the attachment position with e.g. <<Pad>>.Length referring to that object. Or by using a named reference from another sketch, or whatever.
Local co-ordinate systems can be useful, and sometimes I have added planes attached to those, because setting up attachment in truly arbitrary places is fiddly, but I almost never use datum planes.
TNP isn't usually triggered by resizing a sketch, unless the resizing causes some topology to change -- an edge being added in the edge list before a critical one is what will break attachment. For example if resizing one sketch in a body causes an earlier-numbered edge of a face you're attaching to, to disappear, that will do it, I think.
So generally TNP is something you don't always have to worry about, if you plan your design; sometimes you can attach to faces without concerns.
This isn't actually truly unique to FreeCAD. All CAD kernels have to solve this problem somehow; it's just that they are usually really narrow edge cases rather than big ugly obvious ones!
For me the bigger problem with FreeCAD (that won't go away quickly) is fillets and chamfers. OpenCascade can't allow a chamfer to consume other edges so you often run into difficulties where you have to tweak some measurement by a fraction of a millimetre so it doesn't.
I am getting around that by considering carefully which chamfers are merely presentational and which are effectively structural. The structural chamfers I may solve in some other way -- within the sketch, or with a subtractive operation, or whatever.
I agree with the recommendation for the Mango Jelly videos, and if you're on Facebook, the main FreeCAD group can be useful (Mr Mango Jelly hangs out there).
Datum planes are usually unnecessary; cluttering up a design with a plane per sketch is certainly the wrong way to go about it.
You can place each sketch with the same tools you place a datum plane -- by editing the attachment and attachment position. (You just can't do it at the point of creating the sketch in the same way as you can when creating a plane).
You can then use expressions in those positions, including e.g. the width/depth/length of other objects (using the length of another Pad would be one very common scenario). Or you can use values from a Spreadsheet.
And TNP won't always bite you anyway. It's possibly better to learn how to fix attachment issues than clutter up your design with datum planes.
Learning how to place sketches in arbitrary space is so core to FreeCAD that it's probably worth going through the pain on this.
Datum planes do have uses -- like when you want to attach large numbers of sketches to a single plane, or when you want to model some arbitrary plane without using physical geometry. They are also useful for e.g. cutting holes up to a face (because the plane can substitute for a face)
They are also helpful, I find, when I am using an LCS for some feature.
But quite often you see people trying to work around TNP with a datum plane, only to attach that plane to the same object that will have the TNP.
This tutorial on attachment may help you (it's a bit involved)
If Ukraine fights off Russia, then the chances of Russia invading a NATO country would fall to almost zero. It would also substantially reduce the chances that China invades Taiwan. Those would both be very expensive to the US. Much cheaper just to give Ukraine weapons.
Those are the upsides, what are the downsides if Ukraine still loses, or gets split up like Korea, anyways?
Is the net balance in favour of supplying weapons? This is the type of analysis I've not seen done yet across thousands of articles, essays, blog posts, etc...
Even if Ukraine ultimately loses some of their sovereign territory, supplying them with weapons is a cheap way to degrade Russian military capabilities with no risk to US forces or our NATO treaty allies. What we have spent on military aid to Ukraine is a tiny fraction of our overall military budget so for the USA there is really no downside. Regardless of who loses, we still win. Some people may be uncomfortable with putting it in such stark amoral terms but that is the geopolitical reality of how such decisions are made.
I assume you mean downsides geopolitically, because the financial costs are sunk either way.
There are several losing states (complete annexation, split like Korea). However, there are only two main ways Ukraine can lose. The world can stop sending free weapons or even with free weapons Ukraine is defeated.
It's hard for me to think of any way that "the west stops sending weapons" is not more likely to result in Russian or Chinese aggression. Is China more emboldened by "US arms without US military personnel lost a war" or "the US can be counted on to lose interest in any conflict over 2 years"?
So it doesn't matter what the downsides are[0]. It seems like no matter what, the US is better off helping Ukraine.
[0] Unless Putin pushes the big red button. But that topic has been written about extensively.
It seems possible for the Russian decision makers to be so angered that they will want to take revenge, to spend their built up political/technological/social/cultural capital to intentionally weaken the US, EU, etc.
Nuclear weapons are practically an all-or-nothing proposition, but nowadays there a lot of other ways to deliver some intermediate amount of 'revenge'.
And it's a lot easier to destroy then create, as the war has shown, I estimate the asymmetry is easily 100 to 1. That is to say $1 of novichok, or whatever nasty means, can easily cause $100 worth of damage, and the combined economic size difference isn't even 20 to 1.
Because if we don't, Russia will show the world that might makes right. And China will take Taiwan, etc.
Like peace in society, international peace exists because aggressive elements make an economic calculation, and stay calm. Once that math changes you get riots and wars.
Like when the US gave stingers to the Afghani, we don't support Ukraine for moral reasons (perhaps partly) but mainly because it's in our interest.
To be fair, might absolutely does make right in international politics still. The only reason we are even talking about Ukraine is that the Russian 3-day invasion totally failed and open up the opportunity for the west to sanction them and support Ukraine.
It weren't for that fact, the ability for countries like Germany to trade oil with Russia still would have totally overridden any possibility of sanctions.
And the West very frequently does not get involved in areas where terrible things are happening so long as those areas aren't really in their interests.
Which doesn't justify Russia in any form shape or way. Personally, because it's individuals we aren't involved in international politics and we are still perfectly valid in criticizing Russia for being hilariously evil.
And because in the world of might makes right, Russia is also losing.
So it doesn't really matter. Any Russian who tries to make this argument might be correct in calling out hypocrisy, but their weak and stagnant nation lacks the might to make the right.
Ukraine got invaded by a foreign power that is committing war crimes, taking territory that isn't theirs and repeatedly threatening other neighboring countries.
We should have given them this support when Russia took crimea, but didn't. The least we can do now is follow through on our agreement.
(Plus all of the other reasons in this thread -- there are fantastic reasons for the western nations to support Ukraine's defense separate from those I'm referring to here)
> 1. Respect the signatory's independence and sovereignty in the existing borders.[7]
> 2. Refrain from the threat or the use of force against the signatory.
> 3. Refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by the signatory of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind.
> 4. Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to the signatory if they "should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used".
> 5. Refrain from the use of nuclear arms against the signatory.
> 6. Consult with one another if questions arise regarding those commitments.[8][9]
IMO, the war crimes thing, unless very egregious, is not a very good argument. Because if there is a war, there will be war crimes, and wartime-legal actions that are as bad as war crimes, too. Basically, you start a war, you awaken the monster, and everything that happens is your responsibility. A "small" amount of war crimes is par for the course. The US did it, too!
> Basically, you start a war, you awaken the monster, and everything that happens is your responsibility.
Correct, Russia invaded Ukraine and committed war crimes. Thus why Russia can be penalized for those war crimes as a country, even though the crimes were committed by individual soldiers.
> if there is a war, there will be war crimes
And if you have a city, people will commit crimes too. Should we not punish those either?
> IMO, the war crimes thing, unless very egregious, is not a very good argument. Because if there is a war, there will be war crimes, and wartime-legal actions that are as bad as war crimes, too. Basically, you start a war, you awaken the monster, and everything that happens is your responsibility. A "small" amount of war crimes is par for the course. The US did it, too!
I don't know I think the scales of rape and torture of civilians by Russia in Ukraine is pretty egregious.
The Russians have interests in holding a security border around themselves which extends to about a dozen American allies and trading partners Russia extends their security border to those allies and trading partners, they will almost certainly stop being so.
The Russian plans don't stop at Ukraine, they extended to Moldova, Poland, and lots of other nations.
Is it viable for them to do that in the long term? You never know. Right now it seems clear that the answer is no, they can barely take Ukraine so how are they going to handle Poland and the other countries when they've already expended their economic tools that could have done so?
But it's generally in our better interest so make sure that they are as incapable as possible of expanding those borders.
We would be fools to allow them to expand those security borders because it means losing those allies and a huge amount of trade and resources that come with them.
They are either in our circle, or they are in Russia's. Russia treats these countries as former colonies, so as long as they are given freedom of choice they're going to ally themselves strongly with the west.
For the relatively low price of funding Ukraine we slow down Russia's advance at worst, and we totally halt it at best. If we manage to totally halt Russian advances and equip Ukraine to be competitors for Russia, we've now got a country that has just survived a war with Russia sitting on their borders armed to the teeth and angry at them.
They are literally fighting the war for us, without risking nuclear conflict. Why shouldn't we be interested in this tragedy?
> You always have to take responsibility for your actions, and Ukrainians pay for these now.
We aren't defending Ukraine because we are nice people, or defending them because we quite like the consequences of Ukraine's decision, and we're more than happy to support and ensure that those consequences are as minimal as possible, while ensuring the consequences of Russia's decision are as high as possible.
Because Ukraine is a democratic state/western ally being invaded by it's much bigger and meaner neighbor and will cease to exist if we do not help them defend themselves.
We don't have to give them to Ukraine, but doing so generally furthers our interests.
> On 20 March 2022, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced a ban on 11 political parties for ties with Russia: Opposition Platform — For Life, Party of Shariy, Nashi, Opposition Bloc, Left Opposition, Union of Leftists, Derzhava, Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, Socialist Party of Ukraine, Socialists Party and Volodymyr Saldo Bloc.
Given history - one such party helped Russia take Crimea in 2014, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Unity - that seems reasonably prudent in the pursuit of still being able to be a proper democracy in the future.
But if the people vote for a party, should they not be allowed to be in power? I mean that is the definition of democracy, right? The people in Donbas, Crimea, etc. voted for many of these claimed pro Russian parties.
No, during a war and martial law, it’s best not to let enemy sympathizers run your government. No one gets free elections if Russia annexes you.
Democracy isn’t a suicide pact; you don’t have to let Hitlers take power in a crisis. Ukrainian law provides for martial law, and their Supreme Court upheld the bans. That’s democracy functioning too.
Curious, it appears it’s not as prevalent as I would expected - to see an obvious injustice and cruel atrocity being committed - and feel satisfaction seeing that the victim is getting assistance.
You don't have to, but I would regard it as prudent: so that the USA - and many other countries - don't become like, or part of, Russia.
Think of Ukraine as being somewhat similar to Vietnam.
If Ukraine falls, then Taiwan is fucked, North Korea will fuck Japan and just plain say goidbye to Europe (socialist bastards that we are).
Domino theory was false in the Vietnam War. "Contagion" didn't spread further than Laos and Cambodia, and the Vietnamese themselves deposed the Khmer Rouge in favor of moderates due to the latter's extremism and massacres.
It's certainly a consequence of interest rates going up. In the words of buffet, Reddit has no pants.
They should have improved their platform and lock useful features behind a paywall, like video and image hosting. They could have made money on their core appeal - hosting communities for people.
Instead, they've bloated their site into an adware riddled clusterfuck, ignored useful features that people actually wanted, and just turned into a hilariously useless company in general, making their site worse with every change instead of better.
We desperately need regulation that kills the network effect that feeds these companies, because it's clear their users aren't the priority.
Yes, it actually works. That's what matters at the end of the day.
But no, eventually you're going to have to fine tune on something that has a larger context or training a brand new model with the position embeddings semi randomized so that it learns to generalize in the first place instead of needing hacks like this to function.
But training a model costs millions and millions of dollars, so we're going to have to wait until some very generous group decides to do all that training and then release that model open source.
Or releases the model file for a paid charge fee, I'd pay like $200 for a good one.
This is so exciting because contacts length has been a problem with these models for so long and it's awesome to see open source finally cracking that egg.
I need another GPU.
edit:
I'm actually a little bit skeptical of this. Yes it's dynamically scaling which is great when you have a model that's not fine tuned, but I think it's not going to work out too well when you try fine tune a model on a target that's moving like that. I'd rather one that stay static so that perplexity is always increasing up to the max rather than doing much those graph shows where it gets worse over time.
That said I don't really know what I'm talking about so maybe it'll be better regardless.
Yeah, there's a research paper idea sitting there for someone who wants to run the numbers on some more ablation tests and see if there are any unwanted side effects. Though if it gets the claimed performance on non-finetuned data, you may not need to fine tune it in the first place.
There's a symbiotic relationship between the open source community and the academic research here: the broader community can explore a ton of different improvements, at a much more rapid speed than either the academic research (slower because it has additional objectives) or closed-source (because the lack of sharing means that a lot of low-hanging fruit gets overlooked). Academic research can build the bigger, more experimental projects that create new capabilities. Research can also do the testing and research that the broader dev community doesn't have the time and resources for, giving us a better idea of what parts actually work best and why it works. It can be very valuable to have a paper that tells us something everybody knows, because you can verify the common assumptions empirically and give us numbers that tell us things like how well it works.
I expect to see a lot more discoveries that bounce back and forth between the audiences, because both groups benefit in different ways.
Iron is one of the most abundant elements on earth, but also we aren't going to be burning it like we do fuels now. Instead we would produce pure iron using green power and oxidize it back to it's natural state for energy in a cycle.
Imagine loading an iron rod into your car, driving for a while, and then when you get into the gas station you dump a pile of rust off and buy a fresh iron bar.
* Kids playing with iron filings sounds a lot safer than kids playing with gasoline. "Don't leave your magnets in the fuel tank; it clogs up the lines!"
* The gasoline party scene in Zoolander would need to be reconsidered.
They submitted a paper to congress talking about how they should regulate AI.
HN is not wrong about the fact that there were trying to push regulation in the United States that would help their business. It just turns out the European laws will actually hurt their business.
A big truck is more deadly to smaller vehicles and we shouldn't make it unsafe to drive a regular sized car instead of one of these monstrously large trucks.
You could regulate things like requiring stop gates on trucks like semi trucks have though, which would at least help.
I just really want to see a detailed study or article that really focuses on the details of pickup safety versus other cars, with empirical data about the different factors, how and why they differ, and ways of mitigating them. Seems like an important input for regulators. There's a lot of anti-car handwaving in discussions like this that would be good to cut through (for everybody involved).
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWuyJLVUNtc0UszswD0oD...
freeCAD had a critical issue in topological naming (they are working on a fix as we speak and it's going to be out "soon"), and it's hideously clunky. Basically, when you resize a sketch and that causes more faces to be created it makes all your other stuff go crazy.
You can also use realthunders branch which fixes the naming issue as well.
Mangos videos teach you a bit how to think reasonably though freecads infuriating errors, too. The guy is worth a watch if you want to start using the best open source tool.
freeCAD sucks, until you learn it, and then it works alright. Learn to use data planes instead of sketch on face and the topo naming isn't even an issue anymore.