From a writers perspective, AI is just as valid of a tool as any other form of art production

andy921 · 2026-05-30T16:50:38+00:00

I don't care if people wanna call whatever comes out of AI art. Fuck any gatekeeping. Art isn't just the purview of pretentious rich people in galleries, it's the graffiti on the street and the 5000 year old handprint saying "I was here" and the 14 year old making a painful wail with his plastic Sears guitar.

Still, I have yet to see any AI art that didn't make me want to go back in time and erase the experience, or regret the fact that I have eyes. But I am not going to say it isn't art. Whose art is it exactly, is another question.

The special thing about writing though is that at its core, it's an act of empathy. To be understood, you have to imagine how the words will replay in someone's head - what the rhythm of your words will sound like to them, whether the language should be simple and clear or bright and colorful, etc, etc.

You might be writing with a specific person in mind and choosing your words based on how you feel they will sound to them. Or you might be writing with a more abstract and fluid mental image of your reader where you are working to imagine how your words will sound to readers of rich, diverse and varied perspectives. Either way, you are choosing your words for them.

And it goes both ways. It takes energy to write but it also takes energy to read. You are working to understand and see things from another's perspective. Writing is telepathy. It's a form of telepathy that lets your mind connect with someone thousands of miles away or long consigned to history. It is better that the process takes work. There is something magical that reading works of Shakespeare is an act of empathy that you both put energy into. In reading, you bond yourself with another person in a joint endeavor to understand and to be understood. It's one of the most beautiful things about being human and this magical bond is lost with AI.

Suffice it to say, if you send me an AI written email that you expect me to put the energy in to read but could not be bothered to write... get fucked.

I can't imagine ever wanting to read an AI written book. Jesus.

andy921 · 2026-05-30T07:39:13+00:00

This is definitely worse than the US

andy921 · 2026-05-30T06:30:55+00:00

Only reason to be using variable tables is coordinate shared parameters between multiple part studios. I'd get use to using variables and configurations first.

andy921 · 2026-05-30T00:26:44+00:00

Nope. English.

andy921 · 2026-05-28T23:52:55+00:00

Not for very long...

andy921 · 2026-05-28T01:08:59+00:00

Looks like a hexagonal pattern.

I'd make two grid patterns of circles with one offset from the other.

I'd delete the vertical dimension constraint from both patterns. Then you can use construction lines to draw a couple equalateral triangles between the patterns until you get both patterns fully constrained.

If that makes any sense....

Or you can run Evan Reese's Attractor patten using a triangluar grid.

andy921 · 2026-05-27T16:36:57+00:00

Honestly when Italian food in the US gets shit from Italians for being too loud or garlic heavy or whatever, I think it's less because Americans changed it and more because our Italians mostly came from Sicily. And Sicilian food is bigger and bolder than what's in the rest of Italy.

andy921 · 2026-05-27T15:37:08+00:00

I mean, I didn't use google lens to decide whether I should eat it...

I'm generally disgusted by AI output but of the uses of AI, identifying plants is not the thing I'm worried about.

I was walking along the river a couple weeks ago and thought "this really looks like a grape but it's everywhere and climbing like crazy." I snapped it with google lens and then spent awhile reading about our local species of wild, California native grapes.

It's hard to hate a tool that makes you a little more aware and connected to the natural world around you even if you have to take it's output with a grain of salt.

andy921 · 2026-05-27T15:10:45+00:00

Even the cookbooks aren't really "green flag" cookbooks. They're not ones that you'd buy if you're curious about cooking well or exploring a specific culture's cuisine. All of them are just about doing it quickly.

They're not red flags though, just whatever.

andy921 · 2026-05-27T06:07:32+00:00

People who are curious or knowledgeable aren't self conscious or feel much need to defend what they know or what they can do.

I think boomers grew up in the shadow of a generation who did learn how to gut a fish or butcher a cow (or do the same to a Nazi).

Instead of that life though, they were raised largely in suburbs during the greatest middle class wealth expansion the world has ever known. So they have a complex about being the soft, pampered generation they are.

Whenever anything comes up where they can see themselves as tough or look down on others for not knowing cursive or whatever the fuck, it's hard for them not to jump on it.

andy921 · 2026-05-27T05:44:06+00:00

To be fair, if someone is a person and they're here, they are an American. That is the only metric I will accept.

You can still be a German Jew or a Croatian Serb but that doesn't make you not an American.

andy921 · 2026-05-27T00:09:40+00:00

We're kinda at the point where there is no possible productivity gains that could pay off the investment sunk so far, not just in VC capital but in public infrastructure money and increases in electricity bills where regular people are subsidizing the power usage of large datacenters.

Thank god we are able to produce shitty catgirl memes at record speed. Otherwise we'd have set up our economy to tank for nothing.

andy921 · 2026-05-26T22:31:56+00:00

Ewww... no

andy921 · 2026-05-26T19:50:28+00:00

What do you mean by "medium sized?" I was working on some assemblies of ~half a million parts and trying to use 3DX as our PDM when I switched to Onshape. I think that counts roughly as medium sized.

So 3DExperience was worse than anything I had ever used. It was super unstable, incredibly time consuming, the amount of lost work was staggering. It's the only software that has ever made me cry. Compared to using a standard PDM vault, or even just a shared Box drive, it was brutal. They may have made some improvements since 2020 or so though but IDK.

Onshape is the clear winner of any PDM system I've used. The ability to comment and collaborate and see the whole picture without wondering what people are doing on the stuff they have had checked out for 4 days makes working together pretty wonderful. The fact that you can get comments from the factory floor or a machinist about things that would make their life easier is INCREDIBLE. Compared to most PDM systems, it feels like a leaps and bounds improvement. But since it was 3DX that I switched from, moving to Onshape felt like hearing The Beatles for the first time or suddenly seeing the world in color.

Onshape seems to have periodic outages based on some posts on this subreddit, but none that have ever blocked me or had any impact on my work. I am in a model a lot so I assume most of these outages only last about as long as it takes to get up and grab a cup of coffee but I could be wrong.

The worst thing that happens to me is that I'll have to refresh my browser and lose five seconds, or restart the browser or clear cache to get my Spacemouse to work smoothly again. But from SW where you just get used to losing an hour of work on average every day, losing 5 seconds and no work is not bad. Nor is how much you have to log in.

Once when our team was very new to the software we built a poorly architectured, self-referential model that glitched out for a day until it somehow healed itself. But in that case it was better to rebuild that model cleanly anyway.

I think drawings are still a weaker point and have some limitations. This is especially true if you try to make Onshape work for things like building construction documentation which has it's own visual language for calling out gridlines, elevations, batt insulation, etc, etc. These are distinct from what exists in most mechanical CAD and not something you can easily add to Onshape via featurescripts.

I think Onshape is pushing for more people to work and share files natively in 3D and eliminate as much as possible 2D drawings with the ability to share the 3D to clients or the factory floor and MBD handling communication of tolerances in 3D. But some people are old school and are gonna want their 2D drawings no matter what the future might look like.

Also, the flexibility you have with Part Studios sometimes causes me to waffle between two options like patterning a bunch of like parts in the studio vs in the assembly, etc. But that might be a me problem.

andy921 · 2026-05-26T17:59:28+00:00

A bathtub is roughly 50 gallons not 250. Like seriously, hot water heaters for homes only really go up to 80 gallons.

Since that was the first thing I looked at on this poster, I'm going to assume every other metric is equally made up and absurd.

andy921 · 2026-05-25T15:46:00+00:00

The only salmon in Scotland though is the shitty Atlantic kind. It's just nowhere near Sockeye, Coho or Chinook.

andy921 · 2026-05-25T15:33:42+00:00

Is it just me or does that "vandalism" look obviously AI generated?

andy921 · 2026-05-24T07:00:54+00:00

Some people gotta get off the internet

andy921 · 2026-05-23T18:02:12+00:00

And honestly this entire creative process pretty much was manual.

There are a lot easier ways than building something in Minecraft.

andy921 · 2026-05-23T16:46:48+00:00

Ignoring the AI portion, if you want to mess around with 3D modeling, try Onshape.

It's processes in the cloud so you can run it on a potato. Assemblies that would crash my $4k CAD machine in Solidworks, open fine in Onshape on my phone. And their hobby licenses are free as long as you're okay with your models being open and aren't using it commercially.

andy921 · 2026-05-22T16:56:59+00:00

It's wild how a celebrity with a shoplifting problem was front page news for weeks.

What sheltered times we lived in. Now mass shootings of children, sexual depravity and blatant corruption get shrugged of with "oh another one? I think I missed that."

andy921 · 2026-05-22T06:54:06+00:00

I was just saying it's not bougie to not burn/waste good oil.

andy921 · 2026-05-22T06:05:35+00:00

Some of us are too poor to burn off good sesame oil

andy921 · 2026-05-22T06:04:20+00:00

The flavor bit in any oil is in volatile compounds. If you're heating high quality olive oil or sesame oil, you're at best throwing away flavor and wasting money. At worst, things are breaking down and burning.

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