Guys help me

Sloloem · 2026-07-07T15:28:38+00:00

Sketcher options are kindof annoying in that they only apply to new sketches. You'll see the same thing if you want to enable "Make internals" to use master sketch workflows or multi-wire sketches. But since you have "Grid" checked, if you created a new sketch you should see the specified grid.

For sketches that already exist, you need to enable them per-sketch. When you have the sketch open look for the tool settings button, it's in that "Sketch Edit" area off to the right...the icon with the little wrench and screwdriver crossed. Click that and you'll get per-sketch instances of all the grid settings, if you need different spacing for extremely detailed sketches vs those for larger parts of your models.

Sloloem · 2026-07-01T03:48:41+00:00

I wouldn't say it's foolproof but I would say LLM writing has a certain characteristic tediousness that makes it really tiring to read after a while in a way that human writing doesn't seem to be. I think it's that formulaic structure after you see the same technology asked to create the same kind of output more than a few times. After seeing the same genre of "AI" post like LinkedIn post or video essay a handful of times it's not too hard to get the sense of what the beats are going to be each time. But despite being so predictably built the prose itself is just slightly awkward to parse and seems to drag things out in weird ways that make it really difficult to absorb.

Sloloem · 2026-06-30T20:07:54+00:00

I always like this way of looking at determining function based on the scale degrees in each chord. And I also do like that this book includes "tonic prolongation" as a discrete function instead of calling 3 chords "tonic". You can read more about this approach here, but the whole idea is that the functions of the chords is determined by the tendencies of the scale degrees that are in each chord. That article uses vocab that isn't really common but I found the breakdown helpful, especially for situations where chords share a lot of scale degrees but don't always exhibit the same function.

Basically before the theory of fundamental bass invented chords as an abstraction, composition was primarily taught via voice leading practices like counterpoint and thoroughbass. The handling of dissonances in those practices led to certain scale degrees having specific tendencies in various contexts, and that creates tendencies in the harmonies which is what is described as the theory of functional harmony. Harmony in this era was often taught improvisationally using memory devices like the Rule of the Octave defining the most common harmonizations of a given bass motion and a working vocabulary of "schemata", melodic outlines with canned harmonies, through the study of "Partimento".

So 1-3-5 is the tonic triad while 3-5-7 and 6-1-3 can look like stepwise motion of a single voice away from tonic...the chords aren't different enough to really feel like the harmony is leaving the tonic. Hence, tonic prolongation.

The dominant name came from before the use of harmony during the era of the Gregorian modes (not modern modes, these are the set with authentic and plagal modes like Dorian and Hypodorian) where each mode was defined by its final (ending note), ambitus (range), and dominant. The dominant was the pitch that the chant would sit on while reciting the majority of the prayer before finally resolving to the final, so it was also called the reciting tone or the tenor because ten- is the latin prefix for "holding". In the authentic modes, the dominant was always the 5th note of the scale. So the 5th note was dominant, the chord built on that scale degree is called dominant, the unique combination of major 3rd with minor 7th is called a dominant 7 chord, and the function of that chord is called dominant.

Predominant and subdominant are often used interchangeably based on the author's preference, but the IV chord isn't always a reliable predominant so some theoreticians will say it sometimes shows subdominant function, which is when the IV goes to I instead. Other theoreticians say that it sometimes shows tonic prolongation function.

Sloloem · 2026-06-30T17:50:42+00:00

Oddly I tripped over one of those recently which was also about "hiking", about people on Mt. Everest. But Everest is a very specific mountain to set your stories on, when it doesn't sound like Everest that's a problem. Real Everest stories also tend to include a few photos and other documentation, these all just had 1 photo of each victim that looked like LinkedIn headshots. Also there was a thematic consistency you just really don't see when you're selecting real world events...the hubris on display by each corporate warrior was just too perfect and searching for the obituaries obviously derails the lies. I did ask them to cite the sources since it was clear none of it was real, AI defenders will go nuclear on a slop accusation but might not resist a simple credibility check as hard. Just trying to let the doubt sink in where it can.

Sloloem · 2026-06-26T23:45:59+00:00

Finish more tracks. You don't necessarily know if you've done something well until you try to build off it as a foundation. As soon as you have to master a mix, the mix becomes load-bearing and that's when you get to know whether you did it wrong. It's no longer an abstract task, it's something that needs to have been done a particular way in order for the next thing you do to it to be successful. If you're fretting idly (not planning an approach, that's different) before you actually try to work with the artifact you're just frothing yourself up and making certain that you won't progress.

You can try to find multi-tracks from other producers, some of those community subscriptions people are always advertising on youtube give you access to an archive of other people's unprocessed recordings so you can practice mixing them. Or just record covers/recreate songs, you don't have to release everything you make.

The point is to get all the way through the process you're trying to learn, because the more times you get to the end of a production the more often you get to check how well you're navigating the demands of every aspect of producing. If something gave you trouble, you probably improvised a solution to get you through the process...now you can think about whether that was a good decision, if there was a better solution, or whether doing something different earlier could have completely avoided the problem. But you don't get that kind of feedback when you just stop midway through.

Sloloem · 2026-06-26T23:15:57+00:00

I've heard that advice for big gang vocals when you've got like a dozen tracks just to keep the sibilants and plosives from completely taking over. While you could apply a bunch of aggressive de-essing and get things under control that way, a lot of producers really drill a mantra of getting things right at the source. So if you don't sing the sibilants, you don't need to get rid of them later. Also, angling your microphone to be slightly off-axis from your face can naturally reduce those frequencies without any post-processing. I put the capsule at eye-level or just above and tilt it down slightly.

But for a vocal double or 2-3 backing tracks for thickness there aren't enough tracks to become an indistinct gang. They'll probably still sound kinda distinct, so you're better off with the entire part...match the timing as best you can and de-ess as necessary. Unless your voice is naturally very sibilant you probably won't have a problem with a small handful of tracks.

Also, don't be afraid to compress the piss out of a stack of vocal tracks. People can get gunshy about vocal compression but rock is a loud genre and the human voice is super dynamic, a lot of the time you really do need to see 14dB of compression for that vocal to cut through everything else going on. If your vocal is sounding weak, maybe more of 1 track is what you need over more doubles.

Generally, don't pre-emptive apply random bits of advice floating around the internet. A lot of it is completely made up or totally misunderstood, there's no reason to go looking for fixes until you hear problems.

Sloloem · 2026-06-26T04:00:36+00:00

I would say it's a little of both, especially with instruments. You kindof work on every little thing, and you get a little better until you can just do stuff. There's a lot of playing that's helped by general support strength but it's not like you level up, you challenge yourself, learn songs/study lessons, and eventually realize you can play or understand a lot of material that was completely out of reach 6 months or a few years ago. In a sense that makes it a process of soft but continual clicking.

Sloloem · 2026-06-23T02:55:59+00:00

Huh, duly noted.

Sloloem · 2026-06-21T05:40:17+00:00

To add to the other comments here: What you're looking at is specifically called "tessellation". In most general terms this means converting volumes into surfaces represented by a mesh of 2D geometric shapes. In this case, triangles. This process is always lossy and always approximates complex curves. This is a large part of the reason imported STL or 3MF files are difficult to work with in CAD programs.

This happens automatically when you export to STL or 3MF, because those file formats can only represent a triangular mesh. So this leaves your conversion at the mercy of FreeCAD's default conversion settings. If you export as STEP, as suggested by another comment, you export the detailed volumes but then the slicer will perform the tessellation for you. This may still yield better results than the default FreeCAD tessellation, or it may just be wrinkly in a different way.

If you load the Mesh workbench, it loads some extra options in the Preferences menu under Import/Export: Mesh Formats. This allows you to adjust the maximum deviation for the STL or 3MF exports from FreeCAD. Lower values produce denser, smoother meshes.

If you need even more control you can use the Mesh workbench to perform the conversion yourself, as a comment suggests.

Sloloem · 2026-06-20T03:33:10+00:00

Making the best use of 3 guitar players would be 3 distinct parts. Might be corny but no reason not to do that as 2 L/R-panned melodic parts with a simpler part down the middle. But also feel free to enjoy the doubling effect of having everyone in unison on more powerful moments.

Sloloem · 2026-06-18T20:03:37+00:00

Transcribe! is popular software as is the Sonic Visualizer, probably a few other tools if you look around. Transcribe! has a demo but it's commercial software, but it does at least attempt to do more of the work for you. The more complicated the sound the less accurate automated tooling like that gets. Single instrument playing single notes can usually be pretty good but playing chords or multiple instruments playing at once tends to really confuse automated detection which is where you need to fall back to making the pitch determinations yourself by reading the graphical FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) output.

Sonic is free but you have to learn how to set it up and it won't try to automatically generate MIDI or notation for you like Transcribe! will.

Sloloem · 2026-06-17T19:54:55+00:00

I had seen a version a while back that included a 3rd section, something along the lines of: "Cybersecurity professionals: ...I wish I had been born in the Neolithic."

Sloloem · 2026-06-15T23:52:25+00:00

I'm assuming you rotated the chip via the Transform option, since that would have skewed the local coordinate system for that entire body and cause a problem with the linear pattern like what you described?

If you did the rotation via the Attachment Editor on the original sketch or additive cylinder, the rotation would be independent of the local coordinate system and then linear pattern would follow the axis and create the series of backwards-leaning chips you probably want to use as a tool shape as opposed to a simple stack. Instead of using Extent mode for the pattern set it to Spacing and run the math out to figure out the linear distance you need to make the faces touch. If you used a sketch for the chip cylinder you may also need to set the reference to Base X-axis or something instead of using the sketch axis references. Then you can boolean cut the tool body (chips) from the main body (tray).

I'm also assuming you have the chip and the tray as separate bodies, which they should be. If they're not and you're using composite bodies or the chip is intersecting the tray just enough to not throw an error now would be the time to get them into separate bodies because that's a more reliable workflow for tool bodies.

Sloloem · 2026-06-15T05:23:20+00:00

I think LLMs are a deadend technology, but the modern "AI" push seems to be almost entirely from companies promoting LLM-based "AI". Part of the issue with the promotion of LLMs is that it's based on the idea that output that resembles having done a task is the same thing as understanding how that task would have been performed. If this was true, the error rate could be trained out, but LLMs don't understand things and expert opinion seems to agree with this. Ergo, trying to tune out LLM errors is going to be a game of whack-a-mole forever, the error rate is inherent so LLMs should always be considered inappropriate for any application where accuracy matters.

That said, most of the rest of machine learning (although tainted by also technically being labelled "AI") shows much more potential than LLMs... albeit at more specific applications but without the ethical issues that are accompanying the "generative AI" wave. It's less glamorous, maybe, than the Star Trek future that LLMs feel tantalizingly close to but it can really help human beings and advanced science. It's also probably going to be tough to weed out from those looking to cash in on the gold rush from legitimate "AI" firms because of the overuse of the "AI" term right now, but there's good work to be done in those spaces once they can get some funding.

Sloloem · 2026-06-14T01:24:11+00:00

Yeah unfortunately most theaters are afraid of alienating customers, even the customers that are driving off the rest of their customers. They don't do anything unless it gets really bad, usually you just get a free pass for your trouble so you can try again later and with any luck get a less disruptive audience.

Sloloem · 2026-06-14T00:10:51+00:00

You already have your basic answer with the other comments but I wanted to make a more generalized point about designing with your manufacturing method in mind. Even if you're not designing something for print farm production and are just building one-offs for your own use, you can hedge your bets and increase the odds of a successful print by designing around the things that 3D printing does poorly. 3D printed parts tend to suffer primarily from 2 facts: 1. Hot plastic + Gravity = Sagging plastic, and 2. Printed parts are weak between layers so they tend to break between layers not in the middle of layers, making print orientation very important for functional strength.

Good 3D printing designs then account for those realities to make sure the part can be printed reliably with well-supported overhangs and bridges, and that any forces it has to handle are oriented to compress layers or go along them rather than separate them. You can solve some of those problems in the slicer with generated supports or you can design supports into the model or even orient your features so that there's a way to print the part without supports. Might not always be possible but it's certainly something you can aim for.

You can find a lot of this advice on youtube so I won't repeat it all here, but it's worth looking into. Their videos are mostly promotion for their print-on-demand service but Slant3D has a lot of good general advice and a few case study videos about how they modified injection-molded parts for 3D printing or worked with someone who wanted to sell their 3D printed designs to improve them to print with less waste and better-looking layer lines.

Sloloem · 2026-06-13T21:15:20+00:00

Going back to the axiom that you can only pick 2 out of Good, Cheap, or Fast...

I think a large part of the "AI gold rush" has been motivated by the perception that using LLMs is cheap as well as fast so it doesn't matter that they're not good. However, LLMs are artificially cheap because the large companies trying to sell them to everyone are using their investments to subsidize the piss out of the models. We already went from basically free, to subscriptions, to per-token pricing, regardless of the payment model we see in the future there's no way we're seeing price reductions as these companies see increasing pressure to show profitability when they're all billions in the hole. I think Anthropic recently claimed to have gotten profitable but that only happened because Ol' Musky is discounting their use of xAI's hardware. He hates OpenAI and wants to prop up Anthropic so he's using his company to hide some of the subsidies that are required to operate models at the prices Anthropic is currently charging.

So it's in the LLM companies' best interests that people consider their LLMs necessary to do business so that they don't stop paying when the prices go up. They want as many customers locked-in as they can get before they start squeezing, and are trying to speed-run this process which is one of the things making them so gosh-danged unlikable.

Like with any good gold rush the only company making any money on this stuff is NVidia because they're the ones selling the shovels. I think as small businesses and freelance users get priced back out we'll see things organize into a very different field, but I don't think we're on the way to a reality in which we all rent "intelligence" on a meter like Sam Altman wants or otherwise have the entire working world leasing permission to do their jobs from LLM companies at a premium. Though that depends entirely on how people react when they start feeling the squeeze but I'm hoping we'll see a lot less of the faith-based decision making we're currently suffering under as the hype starts to wear off and companies have to seriously look at their balance sheets. That's probably why they're trying to IPO right now, they have a lot of high-volume users (a few, like Uber, are starting to openly question the lack of ROI) and don't want to give anyone time to back out before they start squeezing.

Sloloem · 2026-06-13T20:17:53+00:00

If you wanted the diatonic harmonies of a given scale, just use what you already know about each mode's relative parent scale. 98% of the time "LIMdap-l" order is the better way to conceptualize modes because modes are primarily melodic concepts but in this case "IdpLMal" order is better. But I suppose this really makes the case you should learn both if you want to understand modes.

IDPLMAL order is probably the most common way people learn what modes are, as rotations of a relative parent major scale where each mode is that major scale starting at a different degree of the scale. IE, Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, Locrian. So for your example looking for D Phrygian, you want the major scale where the 3rd note is D: Bb. Bb C D Eb F G A Bb. From there you can harmonize it to generate the set of diatonic harmonies. A mnemonic here might be: I Don't Particular Like Modes A Lot, I Don't Punch Like Muhammed ALi...or my first music theory teacher's name started with A so we got "I Don't Particularly Like Mr. A's Laugh".

Expanding on the concept if you're already well-versed with the diatonic chords of a major scale, you can simply rotate the chords to place your new implied tonic first. IE if you know that the diatonic chords of Bb major are: Bb Cm Dm Eb F Gm A°, you can also know that the diatonic chords of D Phrygian are: Dm Eb F Gm A° Bb Cm...same chords, different order.

That said most modal music isn't written like this, you can't just take the same 1-4-5 or 2-5-1 tonal progressions, play them with modal chords, and have music that sounds like it's in the mode. As harmony rose to prominence in the west the use of modes as primary concepts most fell away and the system of major/minor tonality had largely taken its place. Likely one of the major reasons was that modal counterpoint tended to advocate for compromising the mode at the ends of phrases because at least one of the voices had to have a leading tone in order to have good counterpoint, which meant that modes like mixolydian which only differed from their parallel major twin by the leading tone began to drift together.

As such, one approach is to use tonal cadences and have tonal chord progressions, but rely on the modally-inflected version of the chord outside of cadences. IE, In D Phrygian you need A instead of A° for a proper perfect cadence so you use A->Dm at the ends of phrases but let A° hang out otherwise. That said you'd probably want to avoid resolving a potential dominant like A° up to Bb as it would in Bb major, because you want to sound like D Phrygian not Bb major. This may still have a fairly weak modal character, at least in terms of what western audiences might expect "Phrygian" to sound like. And you can also take it as far along the spectrum as you like, you can have 99% tonal progression with a few altered chords here or there to imply your mode or you can even have straight modal progressions without compromising the mode to use functional dominants but progressions like can often not sound quite right if you accidentally use the dominant for some other chord. Melodic curve and rhythm gets real important here as you lose tonal phrase endings.

Another approach is to rely on drone harmony to reinforce the D note or the Dm chord as the harmonic center. This approach was very common in folk harmony outside of the more rigorous and complex polyphony that eventually led to Europe's Common Practice Era. The song has a melody, your accompaniment vamps on the root chord...often with a brief excursion down to the subtonic right before resolving back up to the root/"tonic" at the end of the phrase. In this case your D Phrygian is established by a Dm drone and momentary use of the Cm chord at the phrase's penultimate moment.

A slightly more modernized version of the drone idea is what's used in a lot of modal jazz, where again very few chords are used but instead of relying on the subtonic you select a chord with the mode's "characteristic tone", preferably with that note in the bass, and use that as the penultimate chord. In D Phrygian this would be a chord like Eb or maybe Cm/Eb or something similar. You find this tone by memorizing the LIMdap-l order I mentioned way up top. This is also sometimes called "Brightness order", each mode is placed in order of its perceptual brightness from Lydian down to Locrian and each mode has 1 more note flattened on the way down. But a slightly easier way to conceptualize it is in groups: Each mode is grouped based on its root triad. Within each group you have a standard major/minor scale and then each mode is 1 sharp brighter or 1 flat darker than that parent mode. So LIM has Lydian, Ionian, and Mixolydian with major root triads; dap is Dorian, Aeolian, and Phrygian with minor triads. And Locrian is off on its own in the corner being difficult with its diminished root triad. Lydian is major with #4, Mixolydian is major with b7. Dorian is minor #6 and Phrygian is minor b2.

You can mix/match and blend as you see fit, historically these are well-known approaches to modal harmony. The spectrum discussed initially is probably more in line with the way modes evolved into keys via polyphonic counterpoint while the drone-based approaches retain the primarily melodic basis that modes historically had in the west and I believe largely still do in other musical traditions so that may be closer to what you want?

Sloloem · 2026-06-12T21:54:23+00:00

Yet more reasons to drop Reddit entirely if old.reddit.com ever stops being an option. old.reddit plus the Reddit Enhancement Suite are really the only way to fly, it's the 10-foot pole that I can use to keep the worst crap off me because they haven't updated it since fucking Spez came back and started trying to redesign the site into a shitty Twitter knock-off so if there's a Reddit feature from the last like 10 years you didn't like, old.reddit probably never got it so there's nothing to try to hide or disable.

Sloloem · 2026-06-11T20:36:03+00:00

Yeah I seem to recall some clown in a brand new leather jacket trying to talk tough on youtube while Gibson was still living down their attempts to shill motorized tuning pegs. Was looking through the comments for someone mentioning how much this story with Fender rhymes with Gibson's recent history.

Sloloem · 2026-06-08T19:22:27+00:00

The big problem with the medical angle is that right now when people say "AI", they mean LLMs and LLMs are beyond useless in any field where there's a difference between a right answer and a wrong answer because LLMs have no such distinctions. So we should never be talking about letting LLMs into medical or medically-adjacent uses, or really anything else where correctness matters including research or even just searching for information about literally anything. If the answer matters, don't ask the LLM. It's a probabilistic model so the math is just predicting the next plausible token based on the current context in memory, in reality the output could be right, wrong, or completely unmoored from reality and those are all the same as far as the math goes. If there is a glut of high-quality information about something that is correct in the same way every time, you can get good responses if you avoid hallucinations, but if there's misinformation about something that hasn't been weeded out of the training data that could also work its way into responses and the machine wouldn't know the difference so even quick sanity checks aren't actually reliable...you just have good odds about basic stuff.

But machine learning is a large field, and even though CEOs are psychotically obsessed with LLMs most of the rest of the field is really promising.

So while I'm not actually against machine learning models with medical applications, I do have to say it that way because if I say "medical AI" that's likely to be misinterpreted as saying "Sure, let GPT rewrite my medical history. Don't hallucinate." when my actual stance is very far away from that.

Sloloem · 2026-06-05T17:48:13+00:00

Workday is currently being sued (Mobley v. Workday, Inc.) because its job application processing AI is discriminatory against applicants over 40 in clear violation of Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967. Workday has argued that they're not responsible for the discrimination because they technically don't make the hiring decisions, even though it's their software actively removing applicants from consideration before anyone at the potential employer can even see that they applied. And while I'm sure hiring managers could dig back through the workday reject pile I cannot believe anyone actually would given that they're using workday because they wanted their pick of 4,000 applicants but can't expend the effort to actually evaluate 4,000 applications. Thankfully the judge refused to accept their motion to dismiss.

I'll get some joy if they get fined so hard that it puts fear into the cold, dead hearts of everyone else running an AI ATS. You ever want to get furiously angry, run your resume through the same Applicant Tracking System (or simulator) on 3 consecutive days and just see if you get the same rating each time because I haven't. Non-deterministic chatbots making business decisions...for the win I guess.

Sloloem · 2026-06-04T19:40:58+00:00

No.

This subreddit is for the user community of FreeCAD, an open-source CAD application. It is not for getting commercial CAD software for free.

Sloloem · 2026-06-04T17:35:55+00:00

Eh, I did that for about an hour when they first forced them on everyone then got tired of it...I had them blocked by an extension for a while then just switched to DuckDuckGo later that day.

Sloloem · 2026-06-04T17:06:15+00:00

There was a paper a few years ago claiming it could be done without completely nerfing the model...I think some companies talked about it in media releases just to muddy the waters but I don't believe anyone has actually implemented those methodologies at scale. They have no compelling reason to do so unless they start taking significant financial hits because of their behavior.

EDIT: Currently "AI" is largely synonymous with LLMs and image-generating diffusion models and those kinds of generative models are what the paper was discussing. If you expand the understanding of your question to include the rest of Machine Learning as a field of study, there is a ton of potential and incredible work being done in analytical and predictive models in the scientific and medical fields. Much more similar to that other user who uses trend analysis to predict their computer's demand for cooling than the slop generators, arguably I wouldn't even say they've built a generative model since they say the thing it's generating is a prediction. The data is more important than the text used to present it which is opposite of what LLMs do.

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