So FreeCAD can also do programming. I did like OpenSCAD, especially minkowski sum. Downside though is it works on meshes not curves.

Woha! a tech firm overstated their position on privacy and spied on users! I guess it is a day ending in 'y'

People's expectation have shifted a lot too. Having a cookout with another family be it in your own back yard or at the park on one of those nice grills the park service dutifully spends our tax dollars maintaining but (sadly) I hardly see family use much these days.

It works for all ages depending on the people involved you might need to add $6 bottle of wine, or $3 beach ball or package of water guns; but all told you can still have pretty nice little party for 6-8 people for $60 between you.

A lot of it is people just don't want too, and yeah maybe because they think they'd rather stream another movie. I don't know.

Maybe...

However the previous generation certainly could have a novel in their back pocket, a magazine, a comic book, flipped the radio on, etc. It is not like Apple invented personal entertainment in 2007.

Something IS different about they way interact with smart phone and related technologies. Centuries, of anthropological study says humans are social animals. It is hard just go whoops they must have all been wrong, turns out we just did not have good enough portable video games and mobiles, and people just spent time together because they hadn't anything better to do!

Obviously the only answer is we will have to do the science somehow ultimately. Still I find a hypothesis that we just did not have something more stimulating than talking to uncle Marty about old dodge pickup grandad "forced" him to drive in high-school is the reason we did not previously tend to all retire to our own corner as readily.

It sure seems like we are getting 'something' out of these connected devices that meeting or making us feel our needs are being meet.

I haven't made poor choices though. I have happy healthy child, and a great life thank you very much. I think I'd pretty much do it all over again save for a stock trade or 10.

That said people like you are making that harder for everyone else to achieve. Why, I don't know; you're addicted porn, you own Alphabet stock, who knows.

Nobody is forcing you to do shit, we are talking about regulating what are in fact dangerous products; like we do everything else. The simple truth is this, if you think it is reasonably to say you have to be say 18 to buy a box the .380 rounds or a bottle of Rye, then it is equally reasonable to say we should be will to make device manufactures keep the likes of youtube under the black covers.

Have you tried it?

Parenting in a world where kids face unlimited temptation to consume things that you believe are harmful to them paired with near instance access all over the damn place is pretty hard.

In ever previous era, with every previous vice society has agreed to put at least some barriers in front of children and to do so in a mostly if not perfect way. Most 8 year olds cannot simply go get a case a beer anytime they want, and if they do there is ample opportunity for parents to find out about. You know if your two young child is running with inappropriate people and you either do something or don't.

Same thing with other things like smoking, hazardous materials, etc. The book shop won't let your kid into the adults only section...
but here is the important but, you CAN still let your child take their bicycle and pocket money and go to the c-store, bookstore, etc and get some candy and comics/pokemon cards etc. They can go an interface with the world in a safe way.

Now try this online... At best you get parental controls on the platform, which may or may not reflect what YOU the parent feels is or is not fit for your child, but rather what someone at Meta decided was fine. Things like youtube-kids, ok but nothing stops them from just watching as a guest. Sure you can lock down their phone, but you have control over the library PC, their friend bobby's tablet, etc. Thanks to 'privacy and security' which we all know is really just about DRM you can't implement your own parental controls without entirely breaking the web and apps, and smart devices.

You are left with accepting mega corps get to put whatever they want in front of your kids eyes, infantalizing them entirely and/or never letting them touch anything electronic without your shoulder surfing.

The status quo is an should be treated as unacceptable. The privacy and expression concerns should be the problems to solve rather than reasons to toss our hands up. Anyone just saying 'parent harder' should should get busted in the teeth!

It's not about CMYK though - that's an even smaller gamut than RGB.

That depends on the RGB colourspace surely? But also...

For a photo editing program, you need a color space that is as large or larger than human vision.

Well you only need a gamut as large as the best device you are intending to display the image on.

Yeah like I said a small number of people really into photos need this.

Editing photos directly in RGB is the equivalent of a video production company (back in analog days) creating and editing videos exclusively on VHS tape. There's information loss every time you make a generation copy.

No, you don't generation loss in the same way. You may get loss entering the colourspace, IF any pixels saturate in either direction (i.e. are not representable in the new gamut), but you won't get any loss within the colourspace from the colourspace itself simply by doing stuff there. You might get quantization loss, of course, so you may well want more bits to avoid those accumulating.

But also my point stands: almost no one knows about that stuff, and based on the quality of stuff I see around and about a lot of professional stuff barely exceeds what you can do in MS Paint.

I am not sure I agree. Strong typing prevents a lot of errors in large complex projects. It adds a lot of complexity to small and simple projections.

I still think Visual Basic was and IS just fine. The problem is that people tried to use it not for the simple intake forms, business calculators / quoting tools, "scripting" on top of ISV built COM enabled apps, it was designed to be and tried to do stuff like make Enterprise scale server applications with it, and usually it was people with previous experience consisting of writing those little calculator and intake form apps and little else.

This idea is purely another example of 'this time it will be different' its bogus and would not play out anything like the way you think it would. Actually it would probably bring down that Empire (which is what I think you really hope for).

Go look at the history of Soviet healthcare. Sure there was a time it was envy of the world but it did not stay that way, because Socialism and Workers Unions turn everything they touch into shit.. Let me give you the really short version. You might end up with a paid for MD to stand over you but you're still going to die because he won't have access to diagnostic tools needed to treat you let a lone a sterile syringe to use.

The SSR managed to do things like mass vaccination (mind you they had to important everything from capitalist economies to do it) but the standards of care and the technical capability absolutely stagnated at 1950s levels. At best you could hope a government run system to trap us where we are at. You will never see cure for cancer, never see type-1 diabetes solved, and so on... If that is what you want for your fellow citizens - well DAMN YOU

I don't think it is really about the backlash so much as the value of the AI is going to replace soooo many people narrative has played out.

Amodei, Altman, et al needed massive amount of capital to buy a compute hardware by the ton as well as the facilities to house it and the power to run it. Jensen Huang can only funnel so much of NVIDIAs own money to its customers to buy its own products without the markets crying foul, turned out they could push that much further than I would have initially expected but still limits exist (at least in theory). So to make it possible for everyone to keep doubling down, they needed a story growth story like never before to keep soaking up all those investment dollars.

The reality is starting to overcome the rumor, with Ford bringing back engineers, Microsoft having to back pedal on CoPilot features, the PC market not exploding because of people wanting by new machines that are AI ready.

Now that the idea every business is going to be able to drip 30% of work force and/or the compute resources can be rented or capitalized cheaper even if they could is getting harder push, they have been pivoting to AI is so dangerous... Defense contractors, the DOD directly, and F500 financial engineering space have stupid amounts of money and can be relied upon to spend it out fear the other guy might show up the party with fancier toys. Those guys actually have more concrete applications for this tech any way. - At least something better than hey lets provide an agent to help you navigate our product offerings but rather than deliver a consistent experience with Dialog Flow or similar for 15 years ago, we use and LLM that will cost 10x to run and occasionally fail in spectacularly embarrassing ways..

A lot of Linux devs apparently think people want to work with native RGB pixels.

I think a small number of photo weenies think a lot of people are smashing it with advanced photo editing.

My personal observation is that this is not the case. The amount of professional (as in someone paid for it) signage and stuff that is utterly shit is frankly shocking. I'm talking about fucking weird contrast/colour correction, actual stretches (so round things aren't round), mucked up resolution so you can literally see nice chunky pixels, mismatched colours and so on and so forth.

Frankly I think that outside a rarefied segment of the very high end most people are not doing anything remotely advanced. I doubt they'd know CMYK if it ran up and bit them on the leg.

I don't have much by the way of current points of comparison, since I've only used FreeCAD recently. It's horribly easy to kind of mess up a model in a way it's hard to unpick. But I remember the beep of death from Pro/E and similar shenanigans from SolidWorks a number of years ago. I have noticed Rhino can do some really cool stuff but at the expense of not being parametric.

FreeCAD as of today feels way way easier to script properly than the big boys did back in the day. Plus runs on Linux (which is a huge advantage for me). I'm not trying to build a nuclear submarine or anything anyway.

Counter argument is that is does happen and its intentional to the point it becomes an actual practical barrier to fighting wars. Without economic integration what would US-Sino relations look like, probably at lot more like US-USSR between 1946-90.

It's not free. Someone has to pay for it. If you're saying the government will build it and then give the electricity away for free, where do you think the government got the money to build it?

So basically like roads then. Providing a free-at-point-of-use thing to make the country work.

This is as bad as Europeans crowing about "free" healthcare or higher education. It's not free.

It's free at point of use. Everyone except complete and utter morons know what that means especially as the NHS budget is the #1 most popular news item.

If the US and Europe were doing even half as much as China is to reduce emissions, the world would be in a much, much better place.

France already did, remember?

It's Germany that's the laggard here.