Well like, the actual smart dimension tool was nice, thanks for finally joining us in the 21st century. An actual assembly workbench, even if it is a bit jank, we finally got that out the door. My understanding is a big reason that was able to go through was some old blood departed. And I think that’s a story that FOSS can tell over and over again, someone likes the code they wrote the way they wrote it for sentimental reasons even if it has the UX of a yeast infection.

It has been my experience that major improvements to the UX of open source projects comes when someone who has been there the whole time leaves and new blood replaces them, often someone with commercial interest. FreeCAD got a major bump when Ondsel came in, for example. Ondsel didn’t have a viable business model, “We’ll take the crappy FOSS joke CAD app and sell cloud services for it” which I really hope didn’t get them a single customer, and I’m really happy some of their money was deprived of them improving FreeCAD.

It’s open source, so the name has to be a diaper fire. It’s an acronym, it stands for Kool Desktop Environment Non LInear Video Editor.

Everyone I’ve heard pronounce it out loud says “kayden lyve.”

Yes, that’s a built-in feature called proxy video. It makes lower resolution copies of the video files, you edit with them, it’s a big load off your machine (and easier on RAM), you can render a low quality version from the proxy files for you or someone else on your team to preview for any last minute changes, then you can render out the entire thing from the original high res files.

Well we’ll sick Tantacrul on it once he’s done with Audacity, MuseScore, GIMP and FreeCAD.

Entice? I thought it was fascinate.

It’s more like the RC Cola version of iPadOS but your main idea holds up.

Can’t; I dumped Windows 8 for Linux.

“Politics are genuinely fun and everyone wants to see them all the time, and the people who say they don’t want to see it like it even more, they just wish they were seeing different politics.” -hbomberguy

I saw a video a few weeks back of a woman cleaning out layers of “decent quality insulated cups” from her cupboard, several each of a decade’s worth of fads. Those are going in landfills en masse before the 21st century is out.

Oh there’s gonna be Gen Alpha or Gen Beta kids filling dumpsters with Stanley cups, anime figurines, gundam models and retro consoles in the 2060s. “Why did my grandmother think this was cool?”

My grandmother’s house. I have two sewing machines, a 6-place dining set, fine china to serve 8, two sewing machines, several rickety old pillar tables and candle stands, a cabinet full of random glassware, a drawer full of ratty, yellowed old doilies my father “remembers from when I was a kid.” At least three unassworthy antique rocking chairs that are too delicate to serve a purpose…So much shit my father wants, but won’t move into his own heavily cluttered house.

Shape shifting tables are actually quite common! There are quite a few types:

• Tilt Top Chair-tables. Hinged closed, it’s a table about the size of a poker table. Hinged open, it’s an armchair, with the tabletop forming the back.
• Drop-leaf tables. I’ve seen these in several shapes but the typical pattern is a long, thin rectangular table with hinged panels that can be folded up to extend the top. They can be folded to as little as 18 inches wide and stowed against a wall, you can open the free side with it still against the wall to seat a few people, or you can slide it away from the wall, open both leaves and have a full size table. Stowage of side chairs is a separate issue. The shakers were fond of drop-leaf tables, and made some truly huge ones that could seat a dozen people or more when unfolded, but would stow very efficiently.
• Extending tables. My dining room table is one of MANY examples, you’ll find them all over the United States because it’s objectively the worst of the lot: The long apron rails aren’t continuous but attached by a slide mechanism. The tabletop is split in half, so you get two table halves that can slide relative to each other. A gap can be opened wide enough to admit one or two lift-out sections to make the table longer. My dining room table can collapse to seat 4 around a (mostly) round table or extended to seat 6. All the additional hardware plus the two extra apron rails necessary make the table heavier than it should be, the slides never work right and if you prefer to have it collapsed, where do you stow the leaves? I guess with the two side chairs you nearly never use.

My understanding is there are several related things at play:

1. The jello effect. So, once upon a time, serving gelatin was reserved for the wealthy because making gelatin from scratch means rendering animal bones. You’ve got to be rich enough to pay servants/own slaves enough to do that for you. Then after WWII, there was suddenly a mass-produced easy to use product on the shelf called Jell-O. So in the 50’s and 60’s you saw an explosion in popularity of jello molds because serving gelatin was, to quote a Redditor I once read, “an impressive feat of housewifery.” Fancy dishes were similar; prior to WWII, fine decorated porcelain dishes were expensive, after WWII there were factories churning them out, and now Gladys from Topeka could have a floral print gilded gravy boat.
2. Fancy dishes, and housewares in general, were marketed HARD to young women. Macy’s popularized the wedding registry, supermarkets started offering catalogs…it was common for young women to receive a portion of a china set for most of her adolescent gift-receiving occasions; Christmases, birthdays, high school graduation…this was the era of the hope chest, an entire industry sprang up for manufacturing pieces of furniture designed for young women to squirrel away a physical dowry in. You just weren’t a proper middle class lady unless you could come up with a fancy set of dishes to serve a Christmas dinner worthy of a Norman Rockwell painting on.

So these damn dishes that can’t be machine washed were manufactured in the quadrillions; Gramma got really protective over them, she was taught to value them from a very young age, and they’re delicate, easily broken, her particular set hasn’t been manufactured since the Truman administration so in a way they’re irreplaceable, and they must be hand-washed. So only a few Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners, “special occasions” were served on them, and then by the 80’s gramma got sick of washing them, boomer dad “remembers that from when he was a kid” and thus they’re more sacred than God, God’s brother Jod and God’s nephew Zhod. To a boomer, there is no occasion special enough to break out gramma’s china, it’d be like eating dinner off of the original copy of the Declaration of Independence. Unthinkable.

Millennials, who eat a lot of meals out of paper and plastic takeout containers, have no attachment to those damn dishes and haul them to thrift stores by the truckload.

which is why I have a wood shop.

Oh yeah none of it matters, gramma’s china is mass manufactured catalog crap.

Loss is a meme about miscarriage in the same way that Press F To Pay Respects is a meme about dead and wounded soldiers.

Loss, as an episode of Ctrl-Alt-Del, was like running a sweeps week episode of General Hospital in the middle of a Jackass marathon. The audience of Jackass fans you’ve attracted are going to phone in to ask just what the cunting heck you think you’re doing.

I’m drunk and belligerent to not give a shit about pointless pedentry, but to finally assert that…it doesn’t fucking matter. Back when actual humans still liked Google, back before we forgot they technically changed their name to Alphabet, back when their motto was “do no harm,” they started interviewing engineers with clever brain teaser puzzles. Because at the time, Google was out “Think Differentlying” Apple. Web 2.0 was all the rage, connecting shit together in ways we didn’t know we shouldn’t was in vogue, so it made sense for them to ask software engineers about the traveling salesman dilemma and shit like that. Because they were designing things like Google Maps, and they needed people who could solve “find a route from all addresses in the United States to all other addresses in the United States on consumer-grade hardware.”

But “Someone who needs an ordinary LAMP stack for their completely unoriginal eCommerce website” Inc. decided to start interviewing IT guys the same way because it made them look hip, and as a result Elon Musk spent a quarter term as Chief Superpower Fucker Upper.

That’s kind of my point. Google started that nonsense of making job interviews into lateral thinking puzzles, then all managers latched onto that to make themselves look hip.

I want to see competence and practical problem solving skills.