archomrade [he/him]

  • 4 Posts
  • 141 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • This one surprised me, too.

    I had a nasty habit of waiting until the evening to do my papers in college, because that was when it was acceptable to have some wine or whiskey while I wrote. But it was amazing just how much easier it was to stay on task after having a drink, and during finals - or after college when i was on deadline - i would alternate between liters of coffee in the morning and several drinks in the evening.

    Now that I’m medicated both coffee and alcohol are just occasional indulgences… well, alcohol is at least. But I didn’t expect it to help curb my impulsive consumption habits like it has- it’s been a game-changer.


  • I imagine both Libre and Free are open-sourced and easily modifiable? I haven’t looked into it, but if it’s anything like Rhino there should be a standard way of writing custom plugins that should close the gap on some of those - at least the object naming would be easy.

    I’ll look into them though, thanks! BIM software is such a pain in the ass to work with and one of the most expensive design software I know of, I think open sourced projects would be amazing for BIM if they took off like FreeCAD did


  • I work as an architectural designer but I’ve never really been allowed to use anything other than Revit for BIM workflows. Our consultants basically only use Revit or Autodesk products, so our hands are kind of tied for projects where we need to collaborate.

    My boss uses Vectorworks for our small projects that don’t need BIM, I might suggest we switch to Libre or FreeCAD so that we all have access without needed another VW license. Do you enjoy using LibreCAD?



  • The more we electrify our cars, the less feasible this is.

    Decoding and sending messages to mechanical systems over the CANBUS is one thing (still difficult, but possible), but taking control over system software is another. In the us, consumers are supposed to have the right to repair their personal vehicles, but a lot of that law was established back when you could do work on a vehicle without having access to digitally protected copyright. We might have a right to repair, but that’s starting to clash against their copyrights over their IP and software controls.

    And that’s not even getting into their eagerness to utilize subscription models - would a court side with a consumer if they decided they wanted to circumvent DRM controls over subscription-controlled car features (a car that they own outright)? It’s unclear to me that right to repair or consumer protections have been written in a way to accommodate those conflicts… Especially when cars are subject to far higher safety regulations than computers - a manufacturer could argue that they need to prevent consumers from tampering with their software systems for their own safety.

    If you still own a ‘dumb’ car without one of these systems, it’s really not a bad idea to hold onto them for as long as possible. You can always upgrade them if you want to - some people have even replaced ICE transmissions with electric ones. But once you own one of these cars with software-controlled systems, it’s far harder to strip them out. Especially once they start requiring cellular connection to operate or function (or require connections to privately-owned satellite constellations…)


  • Downloaders can be prosecuted.

    They wouldn’t go after the users, just the domains and the host servers. Similar to shutting down TPB or other tracker site, they’d go after the site host. True enough, there wouldn’t necessarily be risk to users of those sites, but if they escalated things enough (like if an authoritarian got elected and was so motivated…) they could start taking more severe punitive action. Who knows, they could amend the regulation to go after the users if they wanted - it’s a dangerous precedent either way. Especially when the intent is to ‘protect children’, there’s no limit to how far they might take it in the future.

    Blocked servers are inaccessible to adults, too, which raises freedom of information issues.

    I’m not familiar with Australian law but I don’t think this really applies. Most countries with internet censorship laws don’t have any guaranteed right to uncensored information. At least in the US, they don’t have ‘censorship’ per se, but they do sometimes ‘block’ an offending site by seizing domains/servers/equipment, and they can force search engines de-list them if the offense is severe enough. If the server is beyond their reach, they can prosecute or sanction the person hosting the site to pressure them into compliance. I can imagine a social media site who refuses to age verify and that hosts pornographic content (cough cough lemmy cough cough) be pursued like a CSAM site.

    Large scale piracy is illegal pretty much everywhere, meaning that the industry can go after the operators and get the servers offline. Not so here.

    That doesn’t mean they can’t throw their weight around and bully self-hosters/small-time hobbyists and scare them into compliance. Any western country enacting a law like this could pressure their western trade partners to comply with enforcement efforts. And anyway it isn’t necessarily about the practicality of enforcing the law, so much as giving prosecutors a long leash to make a lot of noise and scare small-time hobbyists out of hosting non compliant sites. Most people can’t afford the headache, even if it isn’t enforceable where they live.