• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • I like LibreCAD, but it’s a little too simple sometimes. I miss the power of AutoCAD, but I don’t miss its price.

    Three things I want are

    • being able to assign heights to objects and do 3D stuff
    • being able to assign labels to objects (instead of circle3761 I’d like to call it ‘fountain’ or something)
    • splines are really finicky, and you can’t do things like a fillet on more complex objects

    It took a couple of days to get used to and probably a week of use before I was 100% comfortable, but I find that it meets most of my needs now.






  • It wasn’t always followed on Reddit, but downvoting there was supposed to be for comments that don’t contribute to the conversation.

    Here the guidance is looser – the docs don’t address comments, but do say to “upvote posts that you like.”

    I’ve tried contributing to some conversations and sometimes present a different viewpoint in the interest of thought exchange, but this often results in massive downvotes because people disagree. I’m not going to waste my energy contributing to a community that ends up burying my posts because we have different opinions.

    That’s true on Reddit to, so I’m kind of being tangential to the original question. I guess what I’m saying is that some people might feel like I do and won’t engage in any community, be it Reddit or Lemmy, if it’s just going to be an echo chamber.





  • I’ve been doing this for 30+ years and it seems like the push lately has been towards oversimplification on the user side, but at the cost of resources and hidden complexity on the backend.

    As an Assembly Language programmer I’m used to programming with consideration towards resource consumption. Did using that extra register just cause a couple of extra PUSH and POP commands in the loop? What’s the overhead on that?

    But now some people just throw in a JavaScript framework for a single feature and don’t even worry about how it works or the overhead as long as the frontend looks right.

    The same is true with computing. We’re abstracting containers inside of VMs on top of base operating systems which is adding so much more resource utilization to the mix (what’s the carbon footprint on that?) with an extremely complex but hidden backend. Everything’s great until you have to figure out why you’re suddenly losing packets that pass through a virtualized router to linuxbridge or OVS to a Kubernetes pod inside a virtual machine. And if one of those processes fails along the way, BOOM! it’s all gone. But that’s OK; we’ll just tear it down and rebuild it.

    I get it. I understand the draw, and I see the benefits. IaC is awesome, and the speed with which things can be done is amazing. My concern is that I’ve seen a lot of people using these things who don’t know what’s going on under the hood, so they often make assumptions or mistakes that lead to surprises later.

    I’m not sure what the answer is other than to understand what you’re doing at every step of the way, and always try to choose the simplest route (but future-proofed).






  • I’m thinking about it from the perspective of an artist or creator under existing copyright law. You can’t just take someone’s work and republish it.

    It’s not allowed with books, it’s not allowed with music, and it’s not even allowed with public sculpture. If a sculpture shows up in a movie scene, they need the artist’s permission and may have to pay a licensing fee.

    Why should the creation of text on the internet have lesser protections?

    But copyright law is deeply rooted in damages, and if advertising revenue is lost that’s a very real example.

    And I have recourse; I used it. I used current law (DMCA) to remove over 1,000,000 pages because it was my legal right to remove infringing content. If it had been legal, they wouldn’t have had to remove it.




  • It’s user-driven. Nothing would get archived in this case. And what if the content changes but the page remains up? What then? Fairly sure this is why Wikipedia uses archives.

    That’s a good point.

    Pretty sure mainstream ad blockers won’t block a custom in-house banner. And if it has no tracking, then it doesn’t matter whether it’s on Archive or not, you’re getting paid the same, no?

    Some of them do block those kinds of ads – I’ve tried it out with a few. If it’s at archive.org I lose the ability to report back to the sponsor that their ad was viewed ‘n’ times (unless, ironically, if I put a tracker in). It also means that if sponsorship changes, the main drivers of traffic like Wikipedia may not see that. It makes getting new sponsors more difficult because they want something timely for seasonal ads. Imagine sponsoring a page, but Wikipedia only links to the archived one. Your ad for gardening tools isn’t reflected by one of the larger drivers of traffic until December, and nobody wants to buy gardening tools in December.

    Yes, I could submit pages to archive.org as sponsorship changes if this model continues.

    It was a much bigger deal when we used Google ads a decade ago, but we stopped in early 2018 because tracking was getting out of hand.

    If I was submitting pages myself I’d be all for it because I could control when it happened. But there have times when I’ve edited a page and totally screwed it up, and archive.org just happened to grab it at that moment when the formatting was all weird or the wrong picture was loaded. I usually fix the page and forget about it until I see it on archive.org later.

    I asked for pages like that to be removed, but archive.org was unresponsive until I used a DMCA takedown notice.