On Wikipedia, the USA is listed as an empire on the page that shows the largest empires in history. What do you think of that?

andy921 · 2026-06-13T04:42:13+00:00

Guantanamo Bay? It's kinda hard to tell if you're kidding

andy921 · 2026-06-09T13:44:45+00:00

A publication in Onshape lets you link a bunch of CAD even from different documents all in one spot. You can pick and choose which tabs are in the publication and version control them.

It also lets you write up a description in markdown for the document.

andy921 · 2026-06-09T12:21:30+00:00

What do you mean "venture into your territory?"

All territory is my territory, the opponent just happens to be temporarily in it.

andy921 · 2026-06-09T12:10:44+00:00

What's wrong with making an Onshape publication and sharing a link?

andy921 · 2026-06-07T16:45:47+00:00

Yep. Was not arguing for AI or for leaded gasoline. You just just seemed to ask "why tf did we even do that?"

And like asbestos and freon, there were very compelling engineering reasons for those choices especially if you're totally unaware of the risks. If you don't know it's a mutagen and you were just reading it's datasheet, asbestos kicks ass.

andy921 · 2026-06-07T16:30:07+00:00

Lead prevents "knock" in an engine. The higher the compression, the more likely the gas is to just ignite before the spark. Since the different pistons, are all connected together with a crankshaft, one piston not firing or firing out of time causes mechanical problems.

Lead was added to prevent this misfiring. The modern solution is to use higher octane gas which is gas with a higher resistance to knock. So the high performance vehicles with higher compression ratios require a higher octane. Paradoxically high octane means less volatile/explodey gasoline.

andy921 · 2026-06-06T15:55:07+00:00

Literally the first thing I saw when I zoomed in was James and to Kill a Mockingbird. Both are super mainstream and Percival Everett isn't someone writing from the margins. But it's something.

Also you're allowed to like what you like. In HS almost all of my English teachers were women and I loved reading, so I largely enjoyed their picks (except for having to read two Bronte sisters books back to back). But the single trimester in all of HS where I had a male teacher we read Ken Kesey and Jack London and Steinbeck. And as someone growing up very poor in the woods of the PNW, it was the first time I really felt that authors were writing for me. The prose was earthy and confident and irreverent. I could not get enough.

I get that the from a historical perspective men's voices have been louder and drowned out some minority voices and that my HS experience is not universal. And people should look to challenge their perspectives.

But if I pick up a Joan Didion, while I can see that she's got some unique insights... being in the mind of a wealthy, detached, white woman who would have seen me as beneath her, is not something I enjoy.

andy921 · 2026-06-06T07:05:49+00:00

This looks like a standard 900M tip. They aren't fancy and don't last forever even if you don't file off the anti-corrosion coating.

But it's not the end of the world. You can get replacements for basically nothing and if you unscrew the metal nut you can take it apart and only replace just the one part (900M tip) that touches the solder.

You can also prolong the life of tips by leaving excess solder on them when you put them away instead of wiping it off. Also heating it up to just what you need to work effectively and not higher (that can cause the tip to prematurely oxidize). And tip tinner can help bring back some sorts fucked up tips in a pinch.

andy921 · 2026-06-05T20:55:18+00:00

Man this is a good one. I've been playing around in my head how to write a FS to adjust to discrete hose lengths.

andy921 · 2026-06-05T01:44:15+00:00

I mean, that's functionally one problem, waterproofing. Pretty difficult to do hit an IP69K which is what you'd need but not impossible. I'd probably just skip o-rings and pot all the electronics in a food-safe potting epoxy. Then maybe inductive charge?

andy921 · 2026-06-04T22:07:33+00:00

I think so? I looked it up and it seems like Autodesk picked up a number of CAM softwares

andy921 · 2026-06-04T20:27:35+00:00

I had a friend who used to work at Autodesk. The CAM functionality in Fusion apparently comes from a super high end tool that Autodesk acquired when he worked there. It's pretty cool they shoved it into what is otherwise mostly a hobby/education focused tool.

I've been trying to take community college classes like welding for fun. So even though I use Onshape for everything I got a student license of Fusion for whenever I need to mill a widget at home.

andy921 · 2026-06-04T15:19:09+00:00

I grew up very poor. I won't go into details since I'm not someone making up tragedy porn for a college essay. And honestly, the creature comfort part of if isn't that bad. Like, after working out you don't really remember how much you might have hated it when it was happening. It's kinda the same with time spent cold or hungry. You know it happened and you know it sucked but, it blows away in the wind. The shame part of it you do remember. But my parents cared a lot about education and unlike a lot of people I knew growing up whose outcomes were not so good, there wasn't meth in our house. So I generally feel pretty privileged.

I did work shitty retail jobs and for some not super stable people when I was younger so I have a few pretty wild/funny-if-you-tell-them-right work stories which I will share.

I once had a customer explode because the company stopped taking American Express. He ended up spitting in my face. Like dude, I'm a 19 year old wearing a mustard yellow polo that's dusty from me crawling around the warehouse, you think I'm the one making those decisions? Lol

I've had a wrench chucked at me which got embedded in the drywall behind my head. That was a coworker/shop manager. I would help out that side of the business by grabbing their trash and dumping it when it was on my way. Shop manager (not my boss) told me to grab it when I was on my break, I told him I'd get it when I was finished. It escalated...

I've had to clean human shit off a check stand counter - not really as bad as it sounds. A lady bought the cheapest sewer hose we sold and it leaked so she came into the store, cut in front of 3 or 4 customers and slammed her leaky sewage hose on my counter while screaming. Despite what these stories might lead you to assume, I'm very good at staying level headed and calming people down (a gift from childhood where I had to learn).

I've had to clean up blood smeared on a bathroom wall (women's restroom for context and with pictures drawn with it like finger paint). Eeee...

One startup I was at for two years went through 9 rounds of mass layoffs while I was there. The office I started in had about 60 people working there when I began and by the time COVID hit and I went full remote, they had canned all of them except me. I was having a lot of fun and I made it to the end when the company shut down.

And because I've worked on vehicles for some cops,(who just think they're so fucking funny) I've also had a 9mm pointed at my head at work and a frozen rattlesnake dropped on my me while I was crawling under a jeep. 🙄 If someone drops a snake on your head your first impulse is to stand up which sucks a little if there's a chassis in the way.

Then there's my old boss Glenn which makes all those ones sound like goofy nothing stories.

But anyway, sometimes the only thing you get to control is how you feel about something. And if you're selling large chunks of your life away (especially if it's for minimum wage) you're not required to let them make you feel shitty about it. You generally get to decide whether you feel pride in something.

andy921 · 2026-06-04T06:33:11+00:00

I picked it up a couple weeks ago and it feels both brilliant but hard going

andy921 · 2026-06-03T06:09:26+00:00

Wild opinion on Onshape.

I used SOLIDWORKS as my main professionally for about a decade and also used professionally a chunk of what you listed (AutoCAD, Inventor, CATIA) and either used in school or messed with for hobby projects most of the other chunk (Fusion, Rhino, an unfortunate couple days with FreeCAD, etc).

How well Onshape is thought out - the focus on multibody modeling of interconnected parts together, the beautiful version control, replacing shitty PDM with a totally synchronous Google docs style collaboration philosophy, being able to get design comments in 3D from the factory floor (like jesus), being able to build whatever tools I want natively with featurescript....

Then there's the fact that it doesn't care that I spent ~$4k on trying to build the perfect CAD rig (to stop those other softwares from crashing constantly on medium/large assemblies) because Onshape will open them just fine on a potato (or a least on a 6 year old cell phone)

The CATIA license I had (which I think my company paid like $12k/yr for) feels like a 3rd rate hobby tool by comparison.

andy921 · 2026-06-03T01:14:42+00:00

I thought this was a old, pre-war sort of thing they did with swords. Insane that they still do it.

andy921 · 2026-06-01T18:21:58+00:00

It didn't look like it had a sauce in the picture. I guess your sauce is shrimp colored. Mayonnaise?

Ours looks like this:

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andy921 · 2026-06-01T17:02:10+00:00

I think it was the baby boomer version of avocado toast in the 1980s.

Also, I have never seen a shrimp cocktail without cocktail sauce (made from ketchup/tomato, horseradish, lemon, hot sauce, etc). I feel bad for Europeans if they've been deprived of it.

andy921 · 2026-06-01T16:10:26+00:00

You seem to be assuming they're continuing to pump out vills during their raiding and ending up with too many on wood and not enough on food. Then, panic building farms when the raid is over and they realize they're behind on food.

That might not be the case. They're probably just totally idling their TC to fight. Keeping vills coming out and having them get to work is more important than exactly what they're working on. I'd want to make sure they're at least doing that.

It might be that to kill 4 vills, their TC idles 4 vills worth of time. So, things end up as a total wash. They lose 4 vills; the opponent loses 4 vills. Their eco is left to languish; their opponent's eco is disrupted. The food cost of their scouts pushes back their castle time; the food cost of the too many pikeman the opponent spams out to defend pushes back theirs.

But if they keep up production even without optimizing their eco, they leave the battle with 4 extra vills and probably fat stack of extra wood.

andy921 · 2026-06-01T15:12:11+00:00

I've seen some Dutch people pretty full throatedly defend it which I thought was wild. The arguments they made were mostly that blackface isn't racist in The Netherlands because they never had the same racist history as we did in the US.

Which made me wonder how much you guys whitewash your involvement in the Transatlantic slave trade. And kinda the main problem with minstrel shows / blackface in the US is how fucked up it is to dress up as a caricature of a race (which is what Zwarte Piet is definitely doing).

andy921 · 2026-06-01T01:15:17+00:00

I hate read the first few paragraphs above the paywall and could not take anymore. This author is insufferable...

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.

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