Where I work in software development, we were about to undertake writing a pretty large application from scratch. Mostly, the company was a Java plus Spring shop with a few exceptions. One team wrote almost exclusively Python, for instance. But as far as I knew, there wasn't any specific policy requiring the use of any particular language.

So as a team, we pushed to write our new project in Python. It was originally my idea, but my team got on board with it pretty quickly. Plus there was precedent for Python projects and Python was definitely appropriate for our use case.

The managers took it up the chain. The chain hemmed and hawed for months, but eventually made a more official policy that we had to use Java (and Spring).

That's interesting. I'd be a little concerned that widespread use of that might create more legal issues for Archive.org that wouldn't be problems if it never caught on much. On that basis, I'd probably not use it.

But I'd imagine ideological opposition to such a thing wouldn't be enough to keep it from catching on either.

Good call. "Let's burn all blockchains in a fire" is actually a great idea.

It depends on your specific case, of course. That 0.4mm is indeed a good rule of thumb. But also, assuming you're dealing with FFF-printed parts, generally if the two parts slide together along the layer lines, it'll feel just a little looser than if they slide together perpendicular to layer lines. That's just due to the ribbed texture inherent to FFF printing. Though printing at smaller layer heights will reduce that effect and also make the parts fit just a little looser over all.

Aside from that, probably the best advice I can give is:

1. Measure/calibrate for dimensional accuracy. [Here]'s a random article on the topic that looks pretty good to me.
2. Prototype. Print once, if it doesn't fit right, adjust the model(s) and print again. Filament is pretty cheap, really. Also, depending on your situation, you might benefit from doing quick test prints just to see how well it fits. If the whole print is going to take 8 hours but by spending 30 minutes printing just part of the final product you can prove you've got the dimensions right, it's probably worth it to do the 30 minute print.
3. Use elasticity to your advantage. Make latches or attachments that snap into place. That's useful whether the parts are meant to go together once and never come apart or connect and disconnect repeatedly. Another use for elasticity is if you need two arms of one piece to friction-grip another rectangulat piece, angle the arms inward just a degree or two. One word of caution, though. It can be really easy to overestimate the flexibility of PLA. I've ended up once or twice with some pretty hard to open latches.

Step 1: Print a photo of your dad.

Step 2: Hold it up to the camera.

Step 3: Play Resident Evil 7.

The factory grows.

The correct answer to every suggestion that contains the word "blockchain" is "that's a terrible fucking idea."

Look, I right-clicked $1.2 million.

(Full disclosure, it took a little more than right-clicking to download that image. OpenSea apparently purposefully makes it hard to download images. Not terribly hard, though. Only took me a couple of minutes to figure out.)

"I"

"could"

"stop"

"any"

"time"

"I"

"want."

Did you really say that with a straight face? I thought that was just what people said to mock people who were clearly addicted.

I don't think the lemmy.ml admins have been coy about it.

If you go to the lemmy.ml home page, at the bottom of the right column is a list of admins.

The first admin's profile banner is a picture of Mao. And the second's profile pic is a photo of Fidel Castro. The other two don't have profile pics that are explicitly authoritarian communist and I haven't had the patience to look through a whole lot of their posts or anything.

Just a couple of Reddit threads (via libreddit.hu) on the topic: one and two. Unfortunately what they link do doesn't appear to be in the wayback machine as far as I've been able to tell.

Cigarettes aren't good for you and it sounds like you're not ready to hear this, but you are addicted.

The world needs more things like Skibidi Toilet. It's reminescent of a brand of bizarre internet humor I thought had permanently died out long ago.

We might be able to answer the question better if you named the "other platforms" you're referring to. It doesn't seem like an unusual amount compared to, for instance, how much communist/transgender content Reddit had back when Reddit wasn't as evil as it is now. (Who knows what Reddit's like now. I haven't been back since the two-day boycott over the API pricing.)

All that said, some of the communist content here is tankies. (That is, authoritarian communists who spout CCP or other authoritarian communist regimes' propaganda.) Some of the Lemmy instances (like latte.isnot.coffe and lemmy.ml) are run by tankies.

That said, a lot of the communist content here is grass-roots anarcho-communist advocacy by people like me who ideologically lean that way.

I will admit I've never used them. I'm not keen on providing my email address to huxters for purposes of signing up and they won't accept a disposable email address. At least not one I've been able to find.

I'll be honest, though. Running into someone extolling the benefits of LLM's, I wonder if they have ulterior motives. A lot of the cryptobros are now jumping ship from the blockchain bandwagon to the AI bandwagon. (Because the blockchain bubble has partially burst now and the AI bubble is still going strong.)

With cryptocurrencies or NFT's, anyone telling you it was the best thing ever was always misrepresenting their own gains and telling lies about the capabilities of blockchain. Maybe they were themselves deluded, but the ultimate motivation to extoll the benefits of blockchain was not actual benefits, but rather that the extoller was invested. If they could be convinging enough and their audience believed them and invested, the value of the extoller's investment would go up.

Now, LLM's are known to hallucinate. And very confidently and convincingly. None of the content of what LLM's produce can be trusted for factual accuracy. LLM's as a technology are just not suitable for producing factual output and will always be inferior to platforms like StackOverflow or... what Reddit used to be.

So, what you've claimed GhatGPT has helped you with: Software development, language aquisition, and learning how to use software (Excel specifically). I really hope you're not just copying programs out of ChatGPT and using those programs at work without auditing them first. If you have the skills to vet code, then what do you need ChatGPT for? And would plain-old Google not do a better job? And for learning Excel as well?

And as others have said, I wouldn't trust any language learning I got from ChatGPT.

Just imagine what it could do in the hands of innumerable virtuous and malicious individuals.

So, when Beanie Babies were at the height of their economic bubble, people were robbing stores and engaging in fist fights to get them. I very much believe that the hype around AI lately is causing a lot of terrible things. Big companies are publicly announcing they're "replacing jobs" with AI. I think some of those cases are just big corporations finding dumb ways to put positive PR spins on "we're laying off a lot of people" without actually intending to replace them with AI. I think some big businesses are actually swept up in the hype and think "replacing people with AI" is actually going to work out for them. Maybe some companies are somewhere in the middle: laying people off with the intention of getting them back on a part-time contracting basis for lower pay as "editors" of content output by ChatGPT. But really they'll be doing the same job, just less efficiently and for lower pay.

Again, look at the effect Beanie Babies had on the world. And that proved to have been a worthless nothing burger all along. The effects the AI hype is having on the world is no proof that it's anything other than worthless lie-generating machines.

2023 was the year Mississippi declared war on New Mexico.

I love OpenSCAD. I use it very frequently to make designs for home 3D printing.

Trusted computing is back in a new form. :\

LLM's are worthless and I'm skeptical they'll ever be otherwise. I think for a program that works roughly like ChatGPT from a user's perspective to ever achieve usefulness would require a whole different algorithm.

Yeah, that seems bonkers, but it's how npm works. I don't always code in JS, but if I do: a) its code that's going to run in a browser and b) I never ever use any JS dependencies aside from browser builtins. It's about the only way to opt out of the dependency nightmare that is "modern web dev".

Ok, I lied a little bit. In my job, I sometimes do JS work on projects with Grunt, Bower, Backbone, jQuery and a gorillion other dependencies. But when I have full autonomy over a codebase like with my side projects, my style is as above.

To qualify that even more, even in my side projects, I often use minifiers, but not ones written in JS or pulled in via NPM.

Of course, that probably doesn't help much when you have need of functionality that would be much less trivial to make yourself. Again at my job, we use JsBarcode to generate images of barcodes. That would be a royal pain to implement from scratch. If I needed that functionality in a side project, I'd probably just bite the bullet and pull it in from Bower with 30 other bulky dependencies. (Or more likely just refrain from taking on that particular side project. Or possibly generate barcodes server-side.)