No, I honestly just started here, and started playing around with the example, and then started turning that into what I wanted and googling when I needed to: https://ochafik.com/openscad2/
masterspace
joined 1 year ago
For 3D Modelling / Printing, if you have even a little bit of programming / scripting ability, OpenSCAD is amazing.
It's basically just a small scripting language for generating 3D objects and performing 3D modelling operations and its so handy to be able to store important info as precise variables, and create new objects and cuts and stuff just with for loops and if statements.
I use the web version a lot of the time, and while it could use a little work, it's pretty amazing.
I'm not as hardcore as most, I run windows as my main OS, but I do love my LG Gram 17" laptop from ~3-4 years ago.
It's powerful enough for general use, webdev, and very light 3D modelling, and it is insanely light and portable. I have a 14" MacBook at work and the gram is lighter than it, thinner, not that much bigger, and far more durable.
Great keyboard and trackpad, giant screen (I wish it was brighter but this is the version from 3-4 years ago), and surprisingly solid Bluetooth, microphone, thunderbolt etc.
Lmao, no.
Go work a job in a different industry before thinking you have it so tough.
Programmers make more money, have more vacation and free time, and consequently typically have stabler lives, than literally every single other professional industry.
Yeah man, me too.
I went to school for electrical engineering, my first job was at an architecture firm designing the electrical stuff for buildings (including making all the electrical drawings for bank branches so we had some professional crossover 😋), and I ended up teaching myself software to automate a bunch of our designs and processes. I was literally directly making building design and construction more efficient ..... Buuuut.... The arch industry pays poorly and I realized they was no way of ever owning a house at the pace I was going so I left for software and doubled my salary in like 2 years. I went from senior electrical engineer to intermediate software engineer and saw a 50% increase.... All in a country experiencing a massive potentially existential housing crisis, and the industry pay disparity directly incentivized me to stop working on it and go work doing mostly bullshit software work.
The software industry is grossly overpaid for how hard we work and for how critical our relative contributions are to society, though even in the software industry the pay is incredibly distorted. Orders of magnitude more money goes to random social media bullshit and VC startups that go nowhere than to mission critical teams doing stuff like maintaining security and access control software.
I'm so torn on this meme because on the one hand I have the same gut reaction of "yeah, but youll die if you don't do jack shit in the woods, you kind of have to be useful to live".
But then I think about our society ...... the billions of dollars going to rich people who do nothing, the millions of people who work in jobs that are useless, or the millions who work jobs that actively harm society, and in that context, the amount and type of work does seem like bullshit. It's not like going into your marketing firm 5/7 days of your life means a farmer gets to work less. People like to comfort themselves with vain thoughts like 'we all just gotta do our partfor the system to work', but that's objectively not true. Lots of parts of our system are objectively bullshit and are excised completely through new laws and legislation and society keeps working fine, in some cases much better.
Our current tech dystopia has many facets and factors that went into creating it.
Jobs' quest to simplify computing (great), unfortunately came along with a maniacal god complex and demand for control that led to Apple creating a monopolistic vertically integrated walled garden that stifles innovation and avoids competition. It's the model that Google has increasingly pursued and is a part of why tech innovation has stalled out these days.
Oh yeah, you simultaneously live everywhere in Canada at the same time? How much time do you spend with Canadian-Caribbean people?
Canada? The British slang at least wouldn't be that out of place here
This is basically what No Man's Sky did. When Bethesda took their crappy RPG engine and mocked up interplanetary travel using loading screens and then started writing quests and storylines, NMS focused on building a very good engine that allowed you to go from surface to air to space to interplanet / stellar while mostly ignoring the rest of gameplay and storytelling.
And not to be too hard on No Man's Sky given the resource differential, but ultimately all it is is one really rock solid system thats not quite a full game surrounded by a lot of hollow feeling stuff to kinda flesh it out on paper. Ultimately Starfield has way sharper hooks almost immediately simpy because while it has a relatively crappy engine and at time frustrating amounts of loading screens and limitations, they spent more time writing content and dialogue that makes the universe feel actually alive and rich, and polishing each individual system until it's fun.
I think The Outer Worlds is also worth comparing to as Obsidian is even farther down the same route as Bethesda imho, making a much smaller universe that feels even less free than Starfield but having even better writing and I would argue it's possibly the best game of the three though I have to withhold my judgement on Starfield until I atleast finish the main quests.
Answer: there'd be far less software in the world, it would all be more archaic and less useful, and our phones and laptops would just sit at 2% utilization most of the time.
There's an opportunity cost to everything, including fussing over whether that value can be stored as an int instead of a double to save 8 bits of space. High level languages let developers express their feature and business logic faster, with fewer bugs, and much lower ongoing maintenance costs.