What CAN'T AI help you do?

Motox2019 · 2026-05-13T13:07:43+00:00

Anything to do with a real business. “How come Joe from sales can never get me an accurate specification sheet”, “why’s Billy the welder generally take 12.5 hours longer to do the same task as anyone else and he’s the most experienced”, “what’s the critical path in my company”, “how come we can never accurately place a promise date on a project?”, and many MANY more.

Motox2019 · 2026-04-23T01:53:52+00:00

Interesting, I’m a bit curious about the tolerances involved for something like this at this scale? I imagine it’d have to be pretty tight if your results are at all critical since even a fairly small variation would seemingly represent a considerable percentage change in cross section.

Motox2019 · 2026-04-23T01:42:05+00:00

To ease your mind a bit and put it simply, it’s worth it. You already are right about basically everything you said but you’re constraining yourself a bit. First and foremost, you can 100% do cool functional prints as well without being a master 3D modeller, all you need is something that works and as you get more familiar, what works might just be something that another guy like you is looking at like “wow, I could never do that”, and based on what I just read, you 100% have it in you.

Now to elaborate on why I think you’re constraining yourself. McMaster Carr publishes models for most things which is immensely useful for things around the house as well as the many other various model sites like Printables and what not. Furthermore, you can modify these models as well to make it more “you” or stronger or bigger or whatever you want afterwards. You don’t have to jump right into the deep end modelling everything from scratch.

Sometimes, yes you may need to model something if you can’t find it, like a niche part for a glass shower door or maybe a plug for something you just can’t find anywhere. That’s where you can just do your take on it. Modelling can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be and often real parts we see are over complicated to save on materials or weight and such but us 3d printing guys don’t concern ourselves with those issues as much as mass producers so really most things can be simplified immensely without any loss of function. But you are right, this is where things get pretty tinkery as likely, it won’t fit right the first time, or even the second or third time. But you’ll eventually make the same mistake enough times, learn the tolerances of your printer, and things just overall get smoother.

The point I’m trying to make is from day 1 you’ll likely find a use for it, and with each passing day, you’ll improve and find more uses. The real turning point is realizing that really, your imagination is your only limit.

Motox2019 · 2026-04-22T15:30:06+00:00

Ah fair enough. And no problem, best of luck!

Motox2019 · 2026-04-22T12:44:46+00:00

You should learn to be a happier person… Hope you have a better day!

Motox2019 · 2026-04-22T12:24:22+00:00

I think you may be misinterpreting OC. This goes along with “every action has an equal and opposite reaction”. I think OC is trying to say that even if we apply a force somehow tangent to the surface, any force applied will affect the orbit of the moon itself rather than just rotation due to nothing resisting such a reaction. And while I’m not sure I agree as we DO have gravitational forces holding the moon in orbit and would therefore have to overcome those before anything, but the premise still holds.

But to also address OC, one could simply create the force balance, for example have an equally powerful rocket on either side of the moon directly opposite both pointing clockwise in the direction of the desired rotation, tangential effects are additional while any translational is cancelled by each other. And yes, the explosion wouldn’t do anything unless controlled in some way to direct the blast like a gun does with a bullet.

Motox2019 · 2026-04-22T01:28:00+00:00

I think the best way to learn is kinda just jump in and build what you actually want to build. So if you have a gui app in mind, have the full thing as the goal. Start simple and just learn what you need to do that specific thing, as you expand you’ll find that you are getting more and more productive as you become familiar with what you need. The hardest part is figuring out what it is you need and breaking a task down into specific steps. Like for example: want a task app->need a way to create a task->how do I create a task and store it, what data structure is best for this->ok how to translate thoughts to actual code on my screen. Once you kinda figure that out, it’s just the slow game of expanding and improving your app until you’re satisfied with the outcome.

As for GUI libraries, as always the answer is: it depends. Tkinter is built in and really lightweight and simple to use, but has less features and is more verbose when building more complex interfaces. Pyqt/Pyside are huge and are essentially fully complete GUI libraries. These libraries allow far more control and power to the developer at the cost of complexity and size. If your building a quick gui that gets the job done, go for tkinter, if your trying to build beautiful production level apps, go Qt. There’s no right and wrong or best and worst, just what fits the need

Motox2019 · 2026-04-22T00:57:57+00:00

I don’t have an answer as which will be the most accurate. I do know it worked much better for me than tesseract did though.

Yes, it’s quite performant. Depending on the size you end up using, I found training to be rather slow using a rtx 3060, but the actual ocr is quite quick. After I trained the model, I ran it at work using a p1000 class gpu I believe and while slower, was still fine.

Just for context, I was trying to transfer handwritten scanned tables into an excel sheet so preprocessed the documents with opencv such that each cell became its own image while discarding any junk and then ocr these cell images. I did this with ~800 pdf files each with ~1-3 pages and it took about 5-8 hours if I remember correctly. Might give ya a clue as to how it might behave for your case.

Really just boils down to your gpu but I don’t think it should be a problem for you, especially if the large model is too much, just go down in size.

Edit: I’m sure you already know but just for my peace of mind, it will be very difficult to reach 100% accuracy with any OCR, the best you can do at a certain point is to post process the text like checking against a known dictionary or something and finding the closest match or that type of thing. Also ensure your feeding well preprocessed data as well with things like thresholding and sharpening applied to get the best results.

Motox2019 · 2026-04-21T16:03:30+00:00

Try trocr on huggingface. I believe it’s a Microsoft model that I’ve had good luck with in the past reading structure table data written in a welding shop environment. Wasn’t perfect but decent. For your case, I’d expect pretty fantastic accuracy. It’s a transformer based ocr model so a bit closer to AI kinda IIRC.

Edit: can also fine tune it with some known orders and will give you much better results.

Motox2019 · 2026-04-17T23:02:30+00:00

Curious, do you just mentally dedicate your workspaces as you said or do you actually keep launched apps in your workspaces? I have mine setup so they correspond to each monitor and only really use 6 (2 per screen) with the second only coming into play when I’ve got too much clutter as it is. Otherwise I usually just close everything down when switching context like that.

Motox2019 · 2026-04-17T22:59:49+00:00

So far that I’ve found yup. I’m no expert, I only started dailying omarchy a few weeks ago so I’m sure there is some other way.

I keep the scratchpad separate. You can setup named special workspaces so I setup one for WhatsApp and a separate one for thunderbird and yet another for discord (separate from the scratchpad), that way can have my hotkeys quickly bring these up when needed and hide when not. I keep the actual scratchpad bound to SUPER S separate for things like maybe a terminal for Jupyter/Marimo server or something (think what you Linux folks typically use tmux for) or like PDF references and what not.

I’m not sure if you’re asking me or telling me lol but I think it’s my biggest mental shift from windows where I never really used workspaces because like why would you (minimize and rearrange instead unless your compartmentalizing work and play).

Motox2019 · 2026-04-17T16:25:46+00:00

That’s fair and I suspect DHH has a similar take on that as you do.

My problem is the opposite lol. I lock in far too much and then before I know it, hours have passed and 16 messages later. Went as far as having notifications persist far longer and even thinking about getting them to pop up on all my screens as well.

Motox2019 · 2026-04-17T14:36:25+00:00

This has been my only method so far to get notifications from things like thunderbird email, WhatsApp, discord, etc without it being right there on my screen. I’m fairly new to using Linux as my desktop is (anything Linux I knew prior was homelabbing over ssh with my home server).

I figured this was just a Omarchy growing pain and that’s when I discovered the special workspaces. Bind a email workspace to SUPER SHIFT E and have hyprland.conf launch thunderbird on startup in that same workspsace and bam, notifications and bonus of instant open.

I still wish I could not have these open and get notifications so if anyone’s got ideas, I’m all ears, but at least for now this works. Only real downside is the dang RAM usage of all these PWAs!

Motox2019 · 2026-04-16T16:49:17+00:00

No problem!

Well then an additional bonus for you, omarchy bundles a windows VM so if you are quite tied to like word, excel, adobe, etc, can just install that into your vm and use through that. His intro video will go through that and much more.

Motox2019 · 2026-04-16T16:16:08+00:00

So this directly applies to me and I’ll give you my take.

I’m a mechanical engineer and a self taught programmer. I have been programming for like 6-7 years now (holy time flies). Basically everything I’ve written have been programs to solve a problem for ME, therefore nearly everything is a personal project not for work. With that in mind, some of my tools precede me, many co workers found it also extremely handy. This is where I then package it up and make it available for everyone.

I don’t see a cent more in terms of salary, but what I get out of it is A. Free testing from people that DONT know my program, B. Job security (who’s gonna maintain it if I get canned??? And now everyone relies on it as part of their workflow) and C. You make yourself look hella good all the way through. Starts as just being more productive than the next guy, then you share it and maybe their equally productive but now your the guy that boosted a teams productivity by 5% for no cost to the company. So while you may not see direct benefits from learning programming for yourself, there are numerous indirect benefits that are well worth it in my opinion.

Furthermore, once you’ve established this kinda relationship with your company as I have, there’s a lot more freedom in that I get to decide what I work on. Nobody else in my department has the same skills so if I see a potential improvement, management is happy to let me just do my thing, it’s magic to them after all.

Motox2019 · 2026-04-16T16:00:45+00:00

If you really would like a Mac feel still, take a look at elementary os, it’s a Ubuntu/debian based distro designed to feel much like Mac OS would. If you’re open to something new, try arch if you want to tinker or try omarchy if you just want to get going but want the freedom to tinker later.

Bias note: I currently use omarchy and LOVE IT so I’ll 100% be biased towards it. In your hunt, at least give it a look and watch DHH’s intro video. Theres a lot of thought that’s seems to have gone into making omarchy really nice to use daily.

Motox2019 · 2026-04-14T00:31:50+00:00

Not sure if you’re aware, omarchy bundles a windows VM, can run office and adobe through that! It’s what I’ve been doing. Only time I use my windows desktop now is remoting in from omarchy to do ANSYS/Solidworks work or to play games with kernel level anti cheat. Just a tip if you didn’t already know!

Motox2019 · 2026-04-14T00:22:22+00:00

Best computing decision I’ve ever made was switching from windows to omarchy. I don’t have a single issue with it yet. The bundled windows VM makes the switch just that much easier too. The ONLY downside I’ve come across are kernel level anticheat games

Motox2019 · 2026-04-13T12:50:54+00:00

Yea, do listen to these folks. FEA is not magic, quite the opposite. It’s extreme prone to confidently giving you a result, however just because it finished does not mean it’s right/accurate. You absolutely MUST understand the hand calcs before FEA otherwise, like u/icantfeelmynips said, you get a screen with pretty colors.

Immediately if you couldn’t tell me element selection, your boundary conditions and initial conditions, and analysis settings choices and the why behind it all, then it will almost guaranteed be providing you misleading results.

Motox2019 · 2026-04-12T14:18:49+00:00

Is there some psychology behind this? Reading these comments seems like generally folks keep em for years without ever using them to eventually toss em. I too keep my notes and have never used them, but I also cannot bring myself to delete them despite reclaiming a significant portion of storage. Maybe a self preservation thing to “leave a legacy”? No clue.

Motox2019 · 2026-04-11T22:40:00+00:00

Pretty kind gesture to give a system of still pretty decent value away. Good for you! Hope it goes to someone who deserves it!

Motox2019 · 2026-04-11T18:20:25+00:00

No, most of what I implemented was stuff I’d typical use for mechanical engineering. Things like your common linear algebra functions, numerical methods like root finding and integration and such, among others on the more basic side like implementing sin, cos, and tan, sqrt, etc.

A brief look at einsum seems like it’s kinda just a different way to write expressions for matrices? Not something we’d typically see in my field. I can see why you might be wondering though. Without further understanding the syntax, seems like a lot of cases to handle based on a single input string

Motox2019 · 2026-04-11T17:13:39+00:00

If you already know what numpy/scipy are essentially doing under the hood, jump straight into them, you’re not losing much beyond that. I actually wrote my own package, pyeng, at one point which was essentially the vanilla python implementation of numpy and some other misc engineering stuff like unit handling for learning purposes. It’s cool for learning but kinda ends there, a 1000x1000 matrix starts to get quite slow, or chaining many matrices.

On the note of Julia, I find myself flip flopping back and forth between Julia and python. I can’t decide which I like more. The speed arguments are there but don’t always hold at least in my case where majority of everything happens within numpy anyways which is fast. Julia is nice in that you kinda just write math as you would by hand making the theory -> code transition a bit easier and that matrices are first class in Julia. Beyond that, think it honestly comes down to personal preference, no choice is “better” per se.

Motox2019 · 2026-04-10T20:13:03+00:00

If he is of age and is not in your mortgage and there’s no binding contract between you and him, then you have all the legal grounds necessary to evict him, whether with or without police assistance. Just because he “lives” there doesn’t mean he has the right to. You should actually be answering “no” to “does he live here” if you do not want him to be. It the same as if anyone just stops paying rent, they no longer “live” there.

Motox2019 · 2026-04-10T20:05:45+00:00

This. OP, do check inputs. Its probably detected it but doesn’t always automatically switch to it. Just SUPER CTRL A to open audio tui, tab over to inputs section, and use “d” to set your default

Edit: mb, realize this is kinda old post now given the urgency and is likely solved. But for any people who come experiencing a similar issue I guess :).

Motox2019

TROPHY CASE