i tried “apples” and got lots of nuts-and-bolts models?

edit: looks like the data is trained from machinery parts. impressive regardless, but i’d add that to the lander

I tried "DHO804" (a popular oscilloscope that has printable accessories), got all screws.

Ok too niche, except that's exactly the use-case as I see it so if that's too niche then what good is it? Whatever call it pre-alpha poc and move on...

Tried "grommet", got all finger rings. Closer but not close enough to be useful. It wasn't a mix of ringular-shaped objects including grommets, and grommets aren't only round either. None of the rings were even slightly grommet shaped, purely tori and belts, some with add-ons and cut-outs.

Perhaps it needs a couple orders of magnitude more input samples before it becomes useful. And by "useful" I do mean even just as a proof of concept, because I don't see any concept proven here.

There's a pretty big bias for mechanical engineering components in the dataset- very few organic forms. It's one of the limitations we call out in the dataset card.

There are a few though! Try "dog" or "cookie cutter" for example.

It's CAD. Is there a legitimate reason to use that to engineer a dog? Doesn't make sense to me.

A dog form is highly useful for a robot.

Even purely artistic uses need parametric models of organic things though. Games, other non-game modelling, 3d printing.

Both games and general modelling needs parametric versions of basically everything in the model. If you're trying to design and evaluate some cattle processing facility, you'll want a lot of randomly varied cow models.

But I bet the biggest use is games and movies. You don't model every dog from scratch, you take the parametric dog model and move the sliders to get all the different dogs in your commercial or show or game.

The initial ABC dataset is from public Onshape files -- clearly some people had a reason to design a dog model parametrically!

id guess for 3d printing.

not the best tool for the job of making something organically shaped, but maybe they also wanted to run some aerodynamics tests on it?

It's CAD. Doesn't make sense to engineer an apple...

Fruit picking is a thing. You may want to 3D print some everlasting apples for tests.

I've just now done exactly this. Model something (not an apple) not because I want to print it, but because I need to import it into CAD to check clearances etc. around it. I can abolsutely imagine modelling different sized apples if I was building an apple sorting machine.

I do this all the time when working with stuff that is either perishable or expensive. I just print a 3D model of it and use that as a stand in for the real thing until I have it working.

CAD is a 3D modeling tool.

its not the only one, and other tools are better suited for something like an apple. you can still post-process it to get it right sized for a printer

Oh come on, a nice 3D model of parametric apples in OpenSCAD would be so neat to have.

I think an apple would not be stored in a CAD format like IGES or STEP but rather in OBJ, USD, FBX etc.

I.e. it would not be in dataset because the use cases for 3D apples are outside of typical use cases where people resort to CAD software.

i imagine it’s probably something to do with the massive scope creep recently, especially with AI and the Markdown features - they’ve tried to fit some of WordPad’s rich text features following its removal

> Ordinary people are not thinking about Israel

roughly 47 percent of a recent US survey think supporting Israel is in the national interest of the United States, while 41 percent disagree. only 12 percent didn't offer an opinion. that's quite a lot of potential customers you're detracting when making a stupid political statement, especially taking a photo with a leader whom 49% of people "have an unfavorable opinion" of

source: https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3932

or to a nitter instance, where you can actually read responses without signing in:

https://xcancel.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622 or https://nitter.net/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622

my four-core VPS running a Git server has higher uptime than GitHub at this point

(although admittedly less load and redundancy)

Does redundancy even matter if the end result is still poorer uptime?

Exactly! Also operating "at scale" is only impressive if you can do it with comparable speed and uptime, it doesn't mean much if every page takes seconds to load and it falls over multiple times a day lol

for context, this game was first built in 2019 by R74N. it looks like neal.fun has taken over maintaining/hosting its web version, while the Steam version continues development

https://sandboxels.r74n.com/new-home

side note, i absolutely love Infisical’s self-hosted offering. it’s really easy to get set up with and aside from a few minor problems with their Universal Auth, i had it working in production in just a few days. it’s made secret management a lot easier, especially across different environments!

i’m aware that there are limits on the free plan, but as a single user i haven’t hit any crazy restrictions

Really glad to hear that! What problems did you have with Universal Auth?

upon remembering, it was actually just Token Auth - for some reason, when i created a machine identity in my parent organization, tbe CLI would always return a 403 for any project ID, regardless of whether i gave the identity the adequate permissions.

i got around it by just generating an identity for each project, which was probably a better idea anyway for granularity

i wonder what consumer data they even have to train? they explicitly disclaim using customers’ internet data:

> As a Starlink customer, you may share information with third parties (for example, when you send an email or communicate with a third-party website). In this context, we are not sharing personal information; you are using our Services to share data, and we are merely connecting you to the Internet.

edit: reading this again, i may have misinterpreted this as “we don’t share this data” instead of “this isn’t considered us sharing data”. although in Section 1 they say they only collect diagnostic data in relation to customers’ connection speed/duration etc

precisely this. it sort of put me off an otherwise excellent article

interesting. last i tried firebase, its querying was sorely lacking so i ended up just self hosting a Postgres DB - i could see myself using this in future though for quick side-projects.

oh and the full text search was abysmal if i remember correctly. any updates on that?