TootSweet

Totally valid. And I tend to think CC BY-NC-SA is probably used more commonly than CC BY-SA. And I’d imagine folks tend to see that NC option and wonder why anyone would ever want to not do that. (I can certainly see why people would be like “Great. That’s all permissive licenses need: more Capitalism /s.”) Just to explain why I don’t usually use the NC (and please don’t take this as shade by any means):

When Linksys took a bunch of GPL’d code (including the Linux kernel), compiled it, stuck it on hardware, and sold that hardware to end users, they violated the terms of the GPL. The GPL has no non-commercial license terms, but it does require that the source code (or at least a written offer of source code) be conveyed along with any compiled versions – including compiled versions on devices sold. Copyright owners for some of that GPL’d code were able to go to Linksys and force them to release the source code of much of what was running on the devices, which enabled the creation of the first versions of OpenWRT (As well as off-shoots like DD-WRT and such).

Something similar is going on in the courts now with regard to smart TVs. With luck, we’ll have open source software distros for TVs similar to what OpenWRT is to routers.

If the GPL had forbidden commercial use, we wouldn’t have the cheap routers that an ordinary consumer could run OpenWRT on that we do. (And cheap devices and greater availability means more people engaging in the community, submitting PRs, and otherwise contributing and enjoying the freedoms afforded.) In short, commercial use can be a feature in service to end-user freedom. It’s not always strictly a bad thing for permissively-licensed works.

So, that explains why I almost always go for GPL licenses when writing software, but of course that doesn’t speak to 3D models.

With regard to 3D models, I’m just hoping that by allowing commercial use, it ends up raising some amount of awareness about things like Creative Commons and intellectual property reform in general. If I ever found someone was selling my models, as long as they give me attribution and inform recipients of the license, I’d feel good that at least a few normie non-nerds would have a chance of being exposed to the whole idea of Creative Commons and intellectual property reform in general.

Again, no shade. Just thought it might be germane.

I don’t sell anything.

Good on you. In the realm of 3D printing, if I were to start a business based on 3D printing stuff, I wouldn’t feel bad about, say, commissions for printing something the client found elsewhere on demand or commissions for designing a model. (I suppose theoretically a “3d printer repair service” would be something I’d be ok with charging for as well.) But I definitely couldn’t feel good about selling models or prints (as opposed to selling my labor and potentially a little bit for raw materials and wear/tear on my printer) that I’d previously designed/printed. I think probably one of my conditions for model design commissions would be that I could publish the model under a CC BY-SA license.

“Information wants to be free.” Something I deeply believe.

Poop where?

If it just makes spaghetti randomly somewhere not on the build plate, a) it’ll leave quite a mess that would need cleaned up and b) it can end up where it shouldn’t be. In a belt gear or incorporated into the print in a way that sticks out and looks bad or stuck to the hot end in a big gob that causes it to not extrude right and blob up in the print or some such.

I suppose, depending on the other print settings, it might make sense use purged plastic to make up infill. That said, I don’t have any direct experience with multiple extrusion, so maybe that is a thing. Maybe slicers already do that to some extent but infill doesn’t typically take enough filament to fully purge and the tower is still necessary.

All that said, I don’t think just making spaghetti would work out very well.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

Over time, I’ve come to hate doing things in the “productivity-via-point-and-click-adventure” model. I very much think the use cases where the mouse is actually necessary are way slimmer than people really think.

If FreeCAD and similar tools take the approach of the “potter” paradigm where you connect your brain to the medium via your fingers as directly as possible even if the medium is digital/virtual (like most of the CAD programs out there), OpenSCAD is more of a “dark factory” paradigm where you externalize a piece of your mind/expertise into a program that encodes all of your expertise and the program acts on the medium on your behalf. (And in the case of OpenSCAD, the program is kindof “made of the same thing as the medium itself.")

In the “potter” paradigm:

• You end up with a finished product, but devoid of any accounting of the decisions which went into making the finished product.
• Your metaphysical “finger prints” make it into the end product. The tiniest twitch of a finger is reflected in the final product, even if it’s an unconscious motion.
• Altering earlier steps that came earlier in the process isn’t as easy. Think of a painter layering paints to capture the subtle tones of human skin and then deciding that four layers down they wish they’d done something different. To fix it, they’d have to cover part of the image and redo all the steps manually. (And yes, undo chains attempt mitigate this somewhat, but imperfectly since reapplying later steps isn’t necessarily perfect.)
• Excessive precision isn’t typically possible.
• Making another, similar asset is a manual process that can’t reuse the steps/expertise that went into building previous ones cleanly.
• There’s no time spent after finishing your work where the computer has to work/chug to produce the finished product.
• Parameterized builds are less natural.
• For digital assets, almost always involves using a pointing device.

In the “dark factory” paradigm:

• You end up not just with a finished product, but also a program that gives much more insight into how the product was built and what decisions were made in the process of constructing it.
• Only conscious decisions go into the final product.
• Altering earlier steps can be done much more cleanly and later steps can be written in such a way that they “automatically” inherit properties introduced by changes in earlier steps.
• Perfection(ism?) by default. The perfect may be at risk of becoming the enemy of the good.
• Later, similar assets can reuse the logic from earlier assets where there are similarities.
• You might spend some time waiting for your program to finish running before your asset is ready.
• Parameterization is like breathing. It’s arguably easier than not parameterizing.
• Requires no mouse or pointing device. Just a text editor.

And mind you, a lot of programs try to kindof live somewhere in the middle. Being extremely mouse-driven while still supporting parameterization. Or doing sophisticated things with

I’m not trying to advocate against the “potter” paradigm. There are benefits and drawbacks to both. And I can’t bash just doing what works for you. But a) the “potter” paradigm doesn’t work for me very well at all and the “dark factory” paradigm does and b) I very much believe that the “dark factory” paradigm is so underserved as to be nearly non-existent. I know of OpenSCAD (and ImplicitCAD and a few others in the CAD space) and Graphviz and a few others that were suggested to me in this comment tree. And CodeComic which I personally wrote. And I’m working on another such DSL for making 3D models/assets for games and 3D animations. (Think “art” rather than “engineering”. FreeCAD is to OpenSCAD as Blender is to what I’m building. Yes I’m planning to Open Source it in the near-ish future.) But there’s so little in that realm.

So, as you can imagine I really love OpenSCAD. I’d be very surprised to find myself using anything else for CAD in the future that wasn’t a DSL.

P.S. Maybe I should start a blog. Heh.

“You?” As in me? I’m confused.

Ah. Ok. I did watch it at double speed, so I guess I can’t really argue.

What was wrong with the video exactly?

Of course! Just figure out how to get the potato into superposition for long enough to run the algorithm first. The rest is the easy part.

Anything can run on anything with enough effort and ingenuity.

My most played game is probably The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. No idea in terms of how many hours. But I played it, then hundred-percented it (yes I found all the Korok seeds), then the DLC came out and I played that, then I started over in master mode, then I replayed it with mods, then I replayed it with cheats, then I speedran it for like a year.