monotremata
@monotremata@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Hot take: 3D printing toys kinda sucks 5 days ago:
Thanks! I haven’t actually published these pieces yet. (Well, the slide-glide cyclide thing was published by someone else, but I think it was later taken down–there may be plans for the original mathematician to sell them?) The puzzle box is just a little too kluged together to really publish; I modified a lot of things after the fact to get it together, and I’m not comfortable publishing it in that state, but I also don’t really want to put in the work to finish it. The kaleidoscope would actually be okay, but it’s limited–it’s a bit tricky to actually cut the mirrors, and it really only works to reflect things right up against it. I want to design an adapter for it that will hold an acrylic sphere (which you can get inexpensively from China) so that you can use it to look at scenes as well. But I haven’t actually gotten around to that yet either. I’ll give some thought to publishing it as-is, though.
- Comment on Hot take: 3D printing toys kinda sucks 5 days ago:
I dunno. I agree with this to some extent for sure–I don’t print a lot of the meme models that are everywhere on 3d printing forums. But there are toys that would not exist without 3d printing that I think are pretty great.
I designed a kaleidoscope that reflects things not to tile a plane, but instead to tile the surface of a disdyakis triacontahedron: imgur.com/gallery/i-made-kaleidoscope-P4atHey I had to cut the mirrors from acrylic by hand, but the templates for them and the shell that holds them in place are all 3d printed. And that thing is a pretty great toy.
This thing: imgur.com/…/make-of-cyclidial-iris-by-vergo-henry…
is a math sculpture that I didn’t design, just printed, but it’s completely beautiful, and it’s had real staying power as both a toy and a decoration. It sits out on our coffee table all the time, but my niece plays with it every time she’s over here.
And this puzzle box I designed: imgur.com/…/i-made-puzzle-box-nieces-birthday-U1q…
was a big hit with her too. I’m not sure if she’ll continue to play with it long-term, but based on my own tendencies as a kid, I think she might end up investigating the mechanisms involved for some time to come.
Things that you could buy at the store you’re generally better off buying at the store. But there are things it’s not economical to mass produce, and it never used to be possible to design and make your own toys. Both ideosyncratic toys and bespoke toys are pretty great uses of 3d printing in my opinion.
- Comment on Up to half of the earth's population doesn't have an inner monologue, up to half of the earth has never had a shower thought 2 weeks ago:
Really! I find that fascinating.
When I try to think of a tune (often because I haven’t recalled the lyrics yet and am still trying to identify the song), I am just listening to the song in my head, trying to think of the notes and instrumentation of the next bit.
When I try to throw something–I said basketball because I figured it would be more relatable, but the sport I actually played was Ultimate (Frisbee, but that’s a trademark, so the sport is just Ultimate)–I’m picturing the path of the disc, how it will arc on the wind, the precise angle, how to roll it off my fingers, how long it will be in the air and how far to lead the runner. It’s a struggle to even come up with words for it now. It all feels visceral.
It’s hard for me to imagine using words for those kinds of things because words are so vague and general. Words deal with categories we impose on the world, rather than the world as it is. Like, I learned to juggle as a teenager; I could never do that if I had to use words to think about every way to maneuver my arms and how the balls would land and so forth. I just have to reach where the ball is going to be, and throw where my hand is going to be. When I first learned Mills’ Mess, I got it mixed up a bit (because I was learning from a VHS tape), and I had an extra throw in there. It took me quite a while to figure out how I mixed it up, and how to do it without that extra throw. But it was a spatial puzzle. I wouldn’t even know how to convey the issue in detail without just doing it.
I dunno. I shouldn’t be surprised that people’s inner lives are very different, but this particular point confounds me a bit.
- Comment on Up to half of the earth's population doesn't have an inner monologue, up to half of the earth has never had a shower thought 2 weeks ago:
When you’re thinking about how to throw a basketball to get it through a hoop, do you use words for that?
When you are thinking of the tune to a particular song, is that in words?
I think a lot of people overestimate the role of words in thinking. There’s a lot of non-verbal thought.
- Comment on Moire/Vernier Radius Gauge 3 weeks ago:
Not as far as I know. Practically speaking there are several disadvantages–the slots limit the light on the markings, parallax effects can mess with the reading, it requires two full surfaces sliding against each other which increases friction, etc. Plus with a regular vernier scale you can see both sides of a line, which could give you a better sense of how they line up (“vernier acuity”). But in a case like this, where precision isn’t a top priority and ease of use might outrank it, I think there’s an argument to be made for it.
- Comment on Moire/Vernier Radius Gauge 3 weeks ago:
I wouldn’t have caught that the gallery link was wrong if you hadn’t mentioned not knowing how the tool was used, so thank you as well!
- Comment on Moire/Vernier Radius Gauge 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, it’s definitely not the most precise thing. It’s good to around ±1mm. I tried to measure 1.75mm filament with it, and it just reads 1, not even between 1 and 2, so for critical measurements the physical matches are definitely better.
And yeah, here the vernier effect is not giving very high precision; it’s just giving a way to space the marks out enough to be printable, but indicate movements that are as small as a printed line.
- Comment on Moire/Vernier Radius Gauge 3 weeks ago:
Vernier calipers are absolutely ingenious, and it’s a shame that more people don’t know how to use them.
- Comment on Moire/Vernier Radius Gauge 3 weeks ago:
Sorry, just realized I also had the wrong link for the gallery that included photos of the tool in use! I edited the post, but here’s the corrected version of that: imgur.com/…/moire-vernier-radius-gauge-design-3d-…
- Comment on Moire/Vernier Radius Gauge 3 weeks ago:
Sorry all! I meant to post a video of the moire/vernier effect in action, which is the most eye-catching part of the whole project, as the main image for the post, but it didn’t upload. And now when I try to edit in a link, or post a link to it in the comments, it’s telling me “blocked URL.” But there’s a link on the printables page, and the version with the older version is in the imgur gallery which is linked.
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to 3dprinting@lemmy.world | 13 comments
- Comment on I don’t want to live here (USA) anymore 5 weeks ago:
Precisely that. cnn.com/…/dhs-vetting-immigrant-reality-tv-show
- Comment on We don't have 1 month ago:
By that logic conception only occurs when you’re two weeks pregnant. That’s an extremely silly way to count it. (Not saying you’re wrong, just that it’s frustrating.)
- Comment on In North Korea, your phone secretly takes screenshots every 5 minutes for government surveillance 1 month ago:
Seriously. This is exactly what people object to about Windows Recall. In its re-released version at least it’s opt-in for now, but it’s still eerily close to this.
- Comment on So close! 1 month ago:
So, in defense of this, the corned beef in question usually has a pretty complex seasoning profile. It’ll have a big packet with peppercorns, cloves, bay leaves, dill, mustard seed, coriander, and a few other things. (Sometimes mace or nutmeg? It varies with the seller.) The “corned” in the name comes from all the spices (it’s “corn” like in peppercorn). And at the table it’s often also served with mustard or Worcestershire sauce, which brings a whole additional suite of spices, as well as pickled beets. So it’s not as flavorless as that description makes it sound. But it’s true that the corned beef does contribute a salty, savory note, especially to the cabbage.
It is legitimately a very mild, comfort food kind of dish. Vindaloo this isn’t. And we like that too! This just fits a different kind of mood.
I guess I just think it’s hilarious how much of an anti-advertisement the name is. Like, it’s so emphatically not going to appear on the menu of any fancy gastropub. Caramelized pear and arugula flatbread with candied walnuts and gorgonzola? Nope. Boiled dinner. Deal with it.
- Comment on So close! 1 month ago:
My brother-in-law considers it frankly offensive that there’s an actual thing called “New England boiled dinner.” My sister and I love it, but he can’t get past the name.
- Comment on If AI was going to advance exponentially I'd of expected it to take off by now. 1 month ago:
They’re not saying that slow growth is definitely evidence it’s exponential. They’re saying that slow growth doesn’t prove that it isn’t exponential, which seemed to be what you were saying.
It’s always hard to identify exponential growth in its early stages.
- Comment on do you think freewill truly exists? 1 month ago:
This exactly. “Do you think free will exists” could, in fact, be small talk, if neither of you is particularly interested in the topic.
- Comment on Trump says a 25% tariff "must be paid by Apple" on iPhones not made in the US, says he told Tim Cook long ago that iPhones sold in the US must be made in the US 1 month ago:
Good news on the latter front, actually: tomshardware.com/…/tsmc-expands-investments-in-th…
- Comment on 'End of 10' to Windows 10 Users: The Environment Wants You to Use Linux 2 months ago:
I guess I sort of agree? It’s a bit tricky to get it set up, for sure. Even just installing windows is probably beyond the average user, and this has a few more quirks and gotchas than normal.
E.g., in IoT LTSC 11 (which is what I’m actually currently using), when you connect a controller, it’ll bring up an error message about not having a handler for ms-gamebar, and fixing that calls for regedit. (One it’s fixed, though, it stays fixed.) It also got itself into a bit of a weird state during the initial installation where it wanted me to log in with a kind of account I don’t have, and while I was able to bypass that, I don’t think I did it in quite the right way, and it broke something in the install and I had to do an in-place repair install to fix it before it would install certain updates successfully. It was also failing to download the in-place repair install, so I had to look up how to do it manually using the install DVD I’d burned previously. But that fixed it, and it’s been fine since.
So, yeah, it’s got pitfalls and quirks and glitches. That’s also been my experience with other Windows installs, though, so it didn’t seem all that different in general.
But once you get those initial hurdles sorted out, it’s really just like normal Windows. Better, even, since it doesn’t have all the cruft built into it, like Cortana, Teams, OneDrive, start menu ads, nag screens about upgrading to 11, the Microsoft Store, etc. (Though you can add most of those if you really want them.) My aging parents aren’t willing to upgrade to 11 because they’re afraid too many things will have changed, and I’m thinking I’ll probably switch them to 10 IoT LTSC instead. I’ll just have to be careful to make sure everything they want to do works before I leave them to it. It still gets monthly security updates and everything.
- Comment on 'End of 10' to Windows 10 Users: The Environment Wants You to Use Linux 2 months ago:
Unless you switch to IoT LTSC, which will continue to get security updates until 2032. It’s kinda bullshit that they’re still making the security patches and then just refusing to give them to consumer 10 users.
- Comment on What is your favorite indie game? 2 months ago:
Sticking only to ones I haven’t seen mentioned:
- Tandis : geometry puzzler
- Gateways : a 2d portal-style puzzler
- Elliot Quest : pixel adventure
- Phoenotopia Awakening : also a pixel adventure, had trouble with the final boss but the rest is great
- Wuppo : flash-animation-style comedy adventure
- Alba : sweet game about a girl who loves wildlife
- Salt and Sanctuary : 2d soulslike
- Legend of Grimrock : tile-based first person dungeon crawler (“dungeon master” spiritual successor)
- A Short Hike (really short but amazing exploration game)
Ones I have seen mentioned but can’t bear not to mention:
- TIS-100 : the finest of the Zachlikes; a programming puzzle game
- Crosscode : 2d adventure with incredibly fine-tuned combat and puzzles
- Outer Wilds : fantastic time-loop puzzle
- FTL : space adventure “one more run!” game
- Slay the Spire : deck-drafting “one more run!” game
- Comment on What is your favorite indie game? 2 months ago:
I’m pretty excited about the upcoming “Free Stars: Children of Infinity.” I backed them on Kickstarter.
- Comment on What is your favorite indie game? 2 months ago:
I liked Horace okay at first, but it definitely gets bastard hard in a hurry.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
Alright, how about the fact that the TFR in the US has been below replacement since the 1970’s, then. (It got close to 2.1 during the 2010s and then dropped again, and is currently around 1.6-1.7.) Is that relevant enough for you? Antinatalism is just as toxic as pronatalism these days. I swear, neither side is willing to actually look at facts.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
The US population in 1980 was around 226 million, and in 2020 it was around 330 million. That’s an increase of about 50%. By comparison, the GDP in 1980 was about $2.75 trillion; in 2020 it was over $20 trillion, an increase of more than 600%.
The problem isn’t that we’re spreading out the same amount of money over too many people. It’s that we’re making much, much more money, but concentrating it in the hands of a tiny number of people and letting everyone else scramble for scraps.
- Comment on Bethesda Gifts Everybody in the Skyblivion Team a Copy of Oblivion Remastered 2 months ago:
Does it really? That’s batshit.
- Comment on In heat 2 months ago:
Honestly this isn’t really all that accurate. Like, a common example when introducing the Word2Vec mapping is that if you take the vector for “king” and add the vector for “woman,” the closest vector matching the resultant is “queen.” So there are elements of “meaning” being captured there. The Deep Learning networks can capture a lot more abstraction than that, and the Attention mechanism introduced by the Transformer model greatly increased the ability of these models to interpret context clues.
You’re right that it’s easy to make the mistake of overestimating the level of understanding behind the writing. That’s absolutely something that happens. But saying “it has nothing to do with the meaning” is going a bit far. There is semantic processing happening, it’s just less sophisticated than the form of the writing could lead you to assume.
- Comment on Dear Big Tech, Stop Shoving AI Into Operating Systems 3 months ago:
The “specific program” I have trouble with is Autodesk Fusion (formerly Fusion 360). There are projects that try to run it through Wine, but there’s a specific function that isn’t implemented in Wine right now that Fusion relies on as part of its authentication service, so it won’t log you in correctly, at least on the default Mint install. I think at least one of the relevant functions is currently in the Wine beta, so it may work again in a bit–I did manage to get it working briefly at one point, but I somehow screwed it up again subsequently. (I may just have forgotten how I launched it…I think I have two versions installed at this point, the Flatpak and the Snap install.) But even when it worked it was slow and janky in a much more severe way than when it runs natively on Windows.
The “specific program” my dad is interested in is Hesuvi, a piece of headphone virtualization software that also does equalization and crossover. At some point I identified a program I though would work on Linux as an alternative, but I would want to test that before committing to switching his computer over from Windows, and I haven’t got around to that yet. Other than that he mostly uses Zoom, and I think I tested that and it worked okay in Mint, though my memory is a little weak on that too.
I dunno. Basically everyone has their own little patterns they use with their computers, and switching to Linux requires changes to those patterns. It’s an adaptation. That’s not to say it’s not worth it–for a ton of people it probably is. But I’m not sure my aging parents can do it, and thanks to Fusion, I’m not sure I can do it either, because I just don’t have a good replacement.
The other option I’m looking into is Windows IoT LTSC. That omits a LOT of the problematic bullshit.
I’ll figure something out before the end of support, anyway.
- Comment on Are PC handhelds like Steam Deck really competitors for Switch 2? 3 months ago:
Yeah. I’m 100% who Nintendo is trying to lure with this launch, and honestly I’m a little ticked off about it–I’ve really wanted Metroid Prime 4 for a long time, but now it’s coming out and I have to choose between playing an inferior version or shelling out over $500 to play the good version. ($450 for the system, $80 for the game, and compatible SD cards in sizes larger than the internal storage of the new system don’t even exist yet.) So I’m inclined to wait, and see if there are enough good games to justify the Switch 2 purchase eventually, but they’re going to count that as poor initial sales for Prime 4. It might kill the franchise. Replaying some of my switch titles with upgraded performance might have been enough to motivate me to make the move, but they’re also going to charge extra for that. That’s…not great. Nickle-and-diming on top of a much more expensive system with even more expensive games is just ugly.
It definitely has me thinking about getting a PC handheld instead. A lot of what I was picturing was second-screen gaming while watching TV or YouTube, and the Deck is definitely a competitor in that space. There are a bunch of people saying that “oh, the reason you buy a Nintendo system is to play Nintendo exclusives,” which, yeah, that is a selling point, but for the original switch, just being a portable system that played modern games was also a selling point. That second factor is absolutely going up against the Deck, and frankly losing, because Steam has everything. Switch 2 has to go all in on the exclusives, and that’s a much tougher sell, especially since they don’t have the gold mine of good games nobody had played that they had from the Wii U to pad the release schedule.
Maybe they’ll amaze me, but I see them being very unhappy with the revenue from this console in a couple of years, and casting about for stupid shit to blame. And I think they’re gonna blame Metroid. It’s not Metroid, guys. Metroid is great. It’s the pricing.