PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]

Hexbear’s resident machinist, absentee mastodon landlord, jack of all trades

Talk to me about astronomy, photography, electronics, ham radio, programming, the means of production, and how we might expropriate them.>

  • 48 Posts
  • 974 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2020

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  • They must have expected a reprisal. The resistance strategy of “boiling the frog” deliberately makes the status quo for Israel untenable. If Israel is forced to choose between conceding to the resistance, breathing through a pillow, or terrorism, it is going to choose terrorism every single time.

    Everything about Israel’s behavior is predictable. They will take any opportunity to assassinate their enemies. They will kill as many civilians as possible in these assassinations. Nothing about their modus operandi has changed in decades. They have been projecting their intent to do this for months. People might not have been prepared for it to happen at this specific moment, but there is nothing unexpected about it.







  • Would be very cool if FreeCAD and LibreCAD became much more mainstream

    IMO, it already has. Not world-domination status, but a great deal of progress has been made compared to 5/10 years ago, and growing. Largely driven by the introduction of affordable 3D printers. As the general problem of 3D modeling is increasingly solved, development of various processes in the Path workbench will likely drive increased small-scale industrial use, in a market which is currently dominated by LUDICROUSLY expensive packages like MasterCAM and Esprit.

    In industry, its use is very marginal, but this is not necessarily a fault of FreeCAD. I know engineers who still use Pro/Engineer (even though we have seats available both in SolidWorks and Creo Parametric). People will use what they are familiar with. A lot of these people will never switch. Not to mention, any engineering work already done in one CAD system will likely be married to that CAD system for its entire product lifecycle. New CAD packages work their way in on the margins, either by providing a very niche / specific workflow where others fall short, or in solving problems the company isn’t willing to pay a license for. FreeCAD adoption is going to be driven mainly by new blood entering into the industry, and this will only become apparent as new product lines are developed.

    As a CNC programmer, I use FreeCAD professionally whenever I can get away with it. I get to practice using it at home, producing models for my 3D printer. I am very familiar with its geometric constraint solver, whereas it is always a fight when I need to use Creo for one reason or another (and I have scrapped large parts because of “soft constraint” shenanigans). For me, FreeCAD is usually the fastest, most reliable option.

    But I am a niche. I am the only person in the shop who uses FreeCAD. I am also the only person in the shop who edits G-Code in Emacs. For the engineers working directly with clients, they need to use whatever CAD systems the clients provide models in. While STEP files are the industry standard compatible format, they lack important contextual information like tolerances (not that many commercial packages incorporate this, but models usually need to be adjusted to the tolerance mean before entering the CAM pipeline). For the work I do, modeling individual components, one-off fixtures, and gages, or even producing prints to send to the toolroom for manual machining, FreeCAD is in a pretty good place. I can export either IGES or STEP, import it in a CAM program, and create toolpaths. For work on complex assemblies, FreeCAD has only embraced an official assembly workflow with this release, and it remains to be seen how this goes. For CAM work, a lot of legwork has been done on 3 axis milling, but in practice there are many processes (4/5 axis milling, turning, swiss screw, grinding, sinker/wire edm, water jet, laser cutting/welding/engraving, FDM/Resin 3D printing, etc.) and many more CNC controllers out there (Fanuc, Mitsubishi, Haas, Citizen, GF, etc.) which need to be nailed down.




  • This proposal has tangential clauses.

    If you are citing a twitter post as news please include not just the twitter.com in your links but also any other Twitter mirror that doesn’t require an account. […] or archive them as you would any other reactionary source usin

    I am against this as a requirement, but I have utmost respect for the posters who do it, and try to do it myself when I’m not out on a smoke break with like two minutes left. I’d prefer a paywall/accountwall link over no news. It is a sliding scale though. I probably will not view anything on instagram or facebook. The worse the platform, the more compelling the news must be to justify posting it.

    Twitter screenshots still need to be sourced or they will be removed

    100%. Anybody can whip up a fake tweet in two seconds. Tweets (posts in general on any platform) can be taken down, revised, corrected, or simply fake. Screenshot as a convenience is one thing, but it needs a source. It isn’t real unless I can send it PIGPOOPBALLS.






  • Zelensky is in a similar situation to Netenyahu. Domestically, he is not particularly popular to begin with, and the second the war is over, he is done. With the end of active combat comes the relaxation of martial law. Relaxation of military censorship, the return of electoral politics. People will begin to reflect on the losses they have been forced to endure. In the face of defeat, they will question how many additional hundreds of thousands of lives it was worth sacrificing to avoid an earlier settlement. Meanwhile, anything short of delivering Moscow on a silver platter will make him persona non grata to the Banderites. And their fascists now have years of combat experience, unlike the typical American chud who can’t even bag a deer.



  • Rybar on today’s events on the Lebanon-Israel border, extremely pessimistic

    I don’t read Rybar regularly (pretty much just when people repost it here), but I recall the same thing after the ground invasion of Gaza. Extremely pessimistic maps demonstrating the IOF bisecting and choking off sections of the strip. But these maps truly failed to capture the situation. Resistance fighters would regularly pop up out of the ground, or out of the rubble in areas the IOF “controlled” and pull off ambushes. Neighborhoods the IOF had “cleared” would be full of militants weeks later.

    The situation in Gaza in particular was very three-dimensional, and I think Rybar’s perspective suffers from the same problems as Seymour Hersh covering this conflict, where they have good intelligence, sources, and a fundamental understanding of one situation, but due to a variety of factors, those sources and analytical tools don’t measure up when applied elsewhere.

    I expect anybody just taking news reports and painting a map to spell doom. As far as I know, this is the contingency plan for an invasion, after all. To draw the IOF into southern Lebanon and engage them on their own territory, where they are prepared and dug in. If you paint a map of that, it’s going to look like a crushing defeat. It is going to look like the IOF is gaining a lot of territory. It is going to look like they are actually approaching their objective of establishing a “buffer region” inside of Lebanon. The question is, what will it cost them? Will the IOF be able to effectively clear it? Or will they end up in the same situation as Gaza? Another Pyrrhic victory where they blow the place to hell, kill an untold number of civilians in their tantrum, but do not come one step closer to controlling it.