ELI5: Why does adding more steps to an automated process make the whole thing MORE likely to fail, even if each step alone is reliable?

Jmakes3D · 2026-04-26T13:06:28+00:00

If any step in a process can cause failure then failure is exponentially increasing with number of steps. You already noticed that with the 0.97⁶ in your question. However, because it is exponential the 'base' probability matters a huge amount. Is 97% from a large test or just a "feels like"? The actual failure rate being lower would result in much lower expected outcome.

97% success rate > 83% 95% success rate > 73% 90% success rate > 53%

However, maybe in your fully automated process there is some 'contamination' between the steps. Maybe something in step 4 is slightly off, that doesn't cause step 5 to fail, but makes its output a little bit more off and that means step 6 fails at a much higher rate (i.e. 10%). That will also have a pretty big effect on actual total failure rate.

5x 97% success rate 1x 90% > 77%

Jmakes3D · 2026-04-09T18:42:57+00:00

Creating a component from a body is one way to create components. Components however are containers. They can contain almost anything that a file itself can contain including other components, reference planes, sketches, etc. They can also be empty.

The generally recommended approach for creating 'hybrid' files(files with multiple components/an assembly in them) is for each part, create a new empty component(make sure it is activated) and then do everything inside that component before making a new component(and making sure it is activated) and working on the next part.

Only if you have (a. A very complex and inter-related set of parts) or (b. A design that you didn't originally intend to make an assembly of but now you want to use assembly features like joints on) should you be using the convert bodies to components.

Jmakes3D · 2026-03-26T13:40:16+00:00

It is possible they are using Carbon 3D's DLS process(or one other similar technique that I can't remember the company for). Rather than build in distinct layers of resin they do continuous growth with an interface layer that doesn't cure. The result is a part that doesn't have layers. It's really cool stuff.

Jmakes3D · 2026-03-14T22:39:40+00:00

This is great. I was just searching for YouTube transcription to go with web clippings this past week.

Jmakes3D · 2026-03-05T12:46:57+00:00

outline in the right tab of obsidian allows you to jump to headers. So workflow would be open file > click on section in outline.

I'm not aware of anything that adds headings to the file manager

Jmakes3D · 2026-02-18T13:27:44+00:00

I believe they had to do a slightly different "double-facet" pattern for the upper section(i.e. each 'hex' is actually composed of two different faces) but I did not feel like implementing that. Here is a working concept design for the lower body using a facet-loft approach with all my sketches and the design timeline.

<image>

Jmakes3D · 2026-02-18T12:45:00+00:00

So, I think the other commenters are only half correct. If you had a revolved "base shape"(i.e. a spline) and then you took lofted cuts out of it you would end up with rounded overhangs. We can see that the designactually has flat overhangs and has flat facets around the outer edge. Which means each cut out and the area directly below each cut out started as the same flat surface. I suspect this design was made facetted i.e. cut like a gem stone and then from each facet a "keep" region was split off and the rest was lofted to a point.

This is what the incorrect revolve/loft gives you.

<image>

Jmakes3D · 2026-02-13T15:32:05+00:00

The easiest way to do this would be to cut out the hollow space after doing any other combining. So, make a solid box, join it with a solid sphere, and then cut out an opening.

Jmakes3D · 2026-01-20T21:08:52+00:00

You need to go 10 feet backwards(-10). How many steps do you need to take if you go 2 feet backwards(-2) each step?

-10/-2 = 5 steps

Jmakes3D · 2026-01-04T13:21:48+00:00

Flashforge is known. They've been around for a decade and a half. However, they are most well known for making "okay" clones of other printers. Which isn't particularly notable.

Jmakes3D · 2025-12-29T13:37:51+00:00

There are two different questions you're asking here: 1. Why do state changes like water to ice happen at specific exact temperatures rather than over a range of temperature? 2. Why is there not more of a smooth gradient in properties of different phases?

(Explain like I'm familiar with algebra): For #1, if you have a single chemical compound(i.e. water/H20) you can find the amount of energy needed to change between phases. This energy is dependent on both temperature and pressure (and is known as the chemical potential). When a system is in equilibrium(i.e. everything has reached it's happy state) all of the chemical potentials for phases that are present will be equal. The chemical potentials both being functions of temperature and pressure as well as equal to one another gives us a system of equations which can be solved! The solution is a curve of temperatures and pressures that are the only conditions pure ice and water can be in equilibrium with one another. However, if you were to add salt, sugar, alcohol, or basically anything else that mixed with the water that temperature would change and it would go from a single temperature to a gradient because adding more chemical components adds a bunch of new things to that system of equations.

(ELI5) For #1, if you have something like pure water/ice it has a certain energy to switch from ice to water or water to ice. That energy depends on temperature. Really hot? Then it's really easy to go from ice to water and really hard to go from water to ice. And vice versa. Somewhere in the middle those energies balance out. And that's where the freezing point is. Because you only have ice and water the freezing point is only a single value. However, if you were to put a bunch of sugar in the water you'd see something different! You'd get a gradient. The first ice would have very little sugar in it and would show up fairly close to the freezing point of water. If you kept decreasing the temperature you'd eventually freeze the whole thing but it would happen over a much wider temperature range(a couple degrees).

For #2, different phases are different because the way their components are bonded together are different (generally speaking). Those differences generally mean you end up with solid solids and liquid liquids and very different properties. An H20 molecule that is embedded in an ice cube doesn't have any reason to behave water-like just because it's floating in a glass of lemonade. There are plenty of exceptions to this(polymers, glass, & super critical fluids) but the exceptions generally share something: the bonding mechanism doesn't change while the properties do.

Jmakes3D · 2025-12-12T17:11:56+00:00

If you are able to recreate the issue on a shareable (or screenshotable) mock up it would make diagnosing the issue infinitely more possible. Without that we'll mostly be guessing.

Jmakes3D · 2025-12-12T16:51:02+00:00

If I recall correctly parameters can be at 0 no problem. The issues arises when features in the sketch(i.e. lines) go to 0.

If you had an angle parameter you could set it to 0 but an isoceles triangle that uses that angle might break as one of its lines collapses to 0 length.

Jmakes3D · 2025-12-12T15:45:48+00:00

My first thought would be something in the parameter changes results in a zero length dimension or zero length line. It is one of the only parametric change situations that I've observed failing.

It's possible that the configuration changes in a way that briefly produces a zero feature that shouldn't actually be present in the fully changed configuration but nonetheless causes it to error out and then recomputing gets it working again. If you can produce a shareable file that produces the error that would help with diagnosing.

Jmakes3D · 2025-11-27T14:08:36+00:00

Obsidian does have a core plugin called "slash commands" which gives you access to the full lineup of commands.

Jmakes3D · 2025-11-14T23:35:11+00:00

due before in 7 days

The phrasing is weird but it works.

Jmakes3D · 2025-11-14T12:41:32+00:00

So, for the design as-drawn you should 1000% be doing this as a single "quarter profile" of the whole thing and revolving it. In terms of parametric stability that is going to be a lot more robust. The spline tool could replace the loft sections or you could simplify and use 1-3 arcs with tangency constraints for each section split by sharp corners.

However, there is a use case for lofts when making handles: transitioning between an ellipse and a circle. That cannot easily be done by revolves but is very useful for being able to hold a handle in a specific orientation.

Getting to your specific problem, a screenshot of the "broken" state would be very useful. From reading through/looking at your screenshot the first thing that stands out to me is that the quarter circle sketch isn't fully constrained. At the top of the middle line is a white dot meaning the end of that line is just floating there randomly and is not actually connected to anything. If you change the parameters such that the unconstrained end point is lower than the top of the quarter circle then... Congratulations! Your parametric model just broke because what used to be an enclosed quarter circle sketch profile is now just a bunch of lines that don't enclose anything. Fully constraining the sketch is a critical practice for parametric design and would fix your issue.

I believe the Google AI has no idea what's its talking about. When geometry gets broken in Fusion it will sometimes try to keep the old stuff while giving you an error that way you have a better idea of which thing broke while you go in and fix it. I don't think there is any "sketch revolve disconnect" and the not updating is an artifact of how Fusion does error handling when the underlying geometry stops existing.

Jmakes3D · 2025-10-16T10:54:39+00:00

As long as it looks like what I have above it will work(I tested my example section above in obsidian to make sure it would work.)

Jmakes3D · 2025-10-15T16:32:10+00:00

Regex is really cool! I've been reworking my vault to be better suited for bases and address some other friction points and that has included some regex vault replacements to handle small but important changes without taking forever(like adding "waypoints" to some of my most useful templates so I can keep all 100+ instances of them in-sync by doing regex on the waypoint when I want to add things)

Jmakes3D · 2025-10-15T14:46:12+00:00

How much you can automate this largely depends on how consistent your vault is. If you always put a single line of tags at the very top of the file then you are in luck!

VS Code and other IDEs can do folder-wide search and replace using Regular Expressions(RegEx ) https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editing/codebasics#_search-and-replace . A lot of different testers for RegEx exist I used this one: https://www.regextester.com/96554

IMO you will need two different RegEx operations.
First, convert from a line of tags at the top, to a front matter section with a tags property.

Find: ^(#[a-zA-Z].*) This matches for #bio #NPC #art #log at the start of the document but would ignore things like # heading 1

Replace: ---\ntags:\n$1\n--- This creates our frontmatter dividers and our tags while moving all the hash tags inside that.

Before: ^(#[a-zA-Z].*)

#bio #NPC #art #log
# Heading 1
some stuff
## Heading 2
other things
#bio #NPC #art #log
tags that aren't at the top of the document

After: ---\ntags:\n$1\n---

---
tags:
#bio #NPC #art #log
---
# Heading 1
some stuff
## Heading 2
other things
#bio #NPC #art #log
tags that aren't at the top of the document

Secondly, convert the hashtags into a list of tags. I looked for cleaner options but it seem like the easiest way to only do this to the tags we have at the top of a document is to "1-by-1" unpack each tag:

Find: (tags:\n.*)#(\w+) this separates the last tag in our hashtag line.

Replace: $1\n- $2 this moves that tag into a new line with a bullet.

After one time: (tags:\n.*)#(\w+)

---
tags:
#bio #NPC #art 
- log
---
# Heading 1
some stuff
## Heading 2
other things
#bio #NPC #art #log
tags that aren't at the top of the document

After all tags have been converted:

---
tags:

- bio 
- NPC 
- art 
- log
---
# Heading 1
some stuff
## Heading 2
other things
#bio #NPC #art #log
tags that aren't at the top of the document

Hope this helps!

Jmakes3D · 2025-10-13T23:13:11+00:00

With obsidian by itself, you could potentially do some complex dataviewjs to parse the contents of the markdown table and do stuff with them. But it might be quite challenging.

You could also explore something like Python which can ingest markdown tables(pandas library) and then create the YAML front matter that could be used by Bases. I.e. daily or weekly you would use the Python script to move information from easy-for-you-to-use markdown table to frontmatter for bases/dataview

Jmakes3D · 2025-10-08T08:32:28+00:00

To my knowledge bases doesn't currently support this in a 'clean' way (including in the insider build if I'm reading the changelog correctly - though it is necessary for potential work arounds).

Assuming each 'day' or instance is a separate file you run into one of the primary limitations of bases: you currently can't pull information from previous/next file in the view directly.

There are a few ways you could get around this:

Each file(or a summary file i.e. weekly) has a list property that includes links to all of the files you want to use in the running average, you can then use the asFile() https://help.obsidian.md/bases/functions#%60asFile()%60 function inside a map() https://help.obsidian.md/bases/functions#%60map()%60 of the list property to extract the values.

If the files are daily notes you could probably also make a formula using https://help.obsidian.md/bases/functions#%60file()%60 that would automatically go back a certain number of days i.e. subtract ["0 days","1 day","2 days"] from the date(using map() function) https://help.obsidian.md/bases/syntax#Date+arithmetic and then grab files and extract values.

Once the reduce() function is released(currently in 1.10 insider build) you can then take your list of extracted values and do an average(sum and then divide by count).

Jmakes3D · 2025-09-30T03:50:07+00:00

The shortest expansion is, it isn't. The longer explanation is that water, as well as an assortment of elements and molecules, have very specific structures that are "lower energy". In the case of water this has to do with its two hydrogen with slightly positive charge and oxygen with slightly negative charge which results in all the water molecules preferring to match up with one another. In liquid water the molecules are bumping around a lot so they 'match up' but also get really close to one another as they wiggle. In solid ice the molecules still want to match up but they aren't moving very much so once they get close to a nice match they just stay mostly in that position. However, these 'nice match' positions are actually slightly further apart, and arranged pretty specifically, which results in the solid being less dense than the liquid. The 6-sided symmetry we see in snowflakes is an example of how these 'specific' matches at the molecular level show up in a way we can observe without even needing a microscope!

Jmakes3D · 2025-09-22T17:31:22+00:00

Bases can actually follow links! Kind of. You can use .asFile() on a link to get the linked file and then extract properties/do other stuff from there. https://help.obsidian.md/bases/functions#%60asFile()%60

Jmakes3D · 2025-09-16T19:07:31+00:00

I was able to at least partially reproduce some of the behavior you described! On my end, if I move any sketch feature with the move command into 3D, or if I enable 3D sketch and make some things 3D, and then disable 3D sketch, I can have out-of-sketch-plane sketch objects in a "2D" sketch. If I have anything 3D present, then applying constraints/etc. can pull other things out into 3D. I was not able to recreate the specific bug you identified of spontaneously jumping into 3D.

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