I work in CV and a lot of labs I’ve worked with use consumer cards for workstations. If you don’t need the full 40+GB of VRAM you save a ton of money compared to the datacenter or workstation cards. A 4090 is approximately $1600 compared to $5000+ for an equivalently performing L40 (though with half the VRAM, obviously). The x090 series cards may be overpriced for gaming but they’re actually excellent in terms of bang per buck in comparison to the alternatives for DL tasks.

AI has certainly produced revenue streams. Don’t forget AI is not just generative AI. The computer vision in high end digital cameras is all deep learning based and gets people to buy the latest cameras, for an example.

Yeah there’s a good chance you’re right. Maybe something to do with memory management as well.

Long term I’ll probably end up switching back to Darktable. I used it before and honestly it is quite good, but I currently have a free license for CC from my university and the AI denoise features in LR are pretty nice compared to the classical profiled denoise from Darktable. It does also help that the drivers for my SD card reader are less finicky on Windows so it’s easier for me to quickly copy over images from my camera on there instead of Linux. Hopefully that also gets better over time!

Fair enough! I think it’s more common for games to do that, but sometimes I had trouble with software on Windows that used virtualization elements themself. I probably just didn’t properly configure HyperV settings, but I know nested virtualization can be tricky.

For me it’s also because I’m on a laptop, and my Windows VM relies on me passing through an external GPU over TB3 but my laptops’ dedicated GPU has no connection to a display, so it would be tricky to try and do GPU passthrough on the VM if I were on the go. I like being able to boot Windows on the go to edit photos in Lightroom, for example, but otherwise I’d prefer to run the Linux host and use the Windows VM only as needed.

I’m a fan of dual booting AND using a passthrough VM. It’s easiest to set up if your machine has two NVMe slots and you put each OS on its own drive. This way you can pass the Windows NVMe through to the VM directly.

The advantage of this configuration is that you get the convenience of not needing to reboot to run some Windows specific software, but if you need to run software that doesn’t play nice with virtualization (maybe a program has too large a performance hit with virtualization, or software you want to run doesn’t support virtualized systems, like some anticheat-enabled games), you can always reboot to your same Windows installation directly.

One of the big changes in my opinion is the addition of a “Smart Dimension” tool where the system interprets and previews the constraint that you want to apply instead of requiring you to pick the specific constraint ahead of time(almost identical to SOLIDWORKS), and the ability to add constraints such as length while drawing out shapes (like Autodesk Inventor, probably also Fusion but I haven’t used that). It makes the sketcher workflow more like other CAD programs and requires a little less manual work with constraints.

Hmm, that actually sounds like a bug. I haven’t seen that on my end (once I set the locations of options in my toolbars they stay there, even after restarts). You may want to report that on their issue tracker. Sorry that you’re having a rough experience!

Last I tried it, there was no fix. Their latest update on the website says:

The work on the toponaming problem is an ongoing project, and we are very grateful to the FreeCAD community for contributing a lot to that effort. But it’s not complete yet, there will be much more to say when it’s largely done. So let’s focus on the other three.

So I take it they haven’t implemented a fix. They previously said they were going to work with the FreeCAD team on mainlining a toponaming fix, using realthunder’s work as a proof of concept, but said fix has not landed in mainline FreeCAD yet. I believe that’s the major feature they’re looking to implement for FreeCAD 1.0.

Definitely excited for Ondsel though! Hopefully that fix can be integrated quickly.

IMO the bigger problem with FreeCAD is the topological naming problem. It’s very easy to get frustrated because your model broke due to a change you made in an earlier feature.

The UI isn’t amazing though, and that unfortunately happens quite a bit with open source software. Hopefully it’ll go the way of Blender and KiCAD with an eventual major release that overhauls the UI.

Ondel has a nicer user interface, but I personally use and recommend realthunder’s LinkStable branch of FreeCAD. Mainline FreeCAD (and by extension, Ondsel) suffer from the topological naming problem, which can be especially jarring to users coming from proprietary CAD software. realthunder put a lot of work into a solution that handles the problem pretty well, so I’m using his fork until toponaming gets mainlined.

Yeah I think Lemmy would actually work pretty reasonably. It reminds me of how lots of software and projects have Reddit communities. I agree that being able to share 1 account over many services, and especially not having to pay for infrastructure is something that drives discord use over forum-based platforms.

Personally, I’d prefer that projects use forums for community discussions rather than realtime chat platforms like Discord or Matrix. I think the bigger problem of projects using Discord is not that it’s closed source, but rather that it makes it difficult to search (since no indexing by search engines) and the format deprioritizes having discussion on a topic over a long period of time. Since Matrix is also intended for chat, it has these same issues (though at least you can preview a room without making an account).

As of right now VLC also doesn’t properly support Wayland, but MPV does. It’s a great piece of software!

Agree on the sentiment about VLC though, having an open source project demonstrate what is possible and stand the test of time definitely paves the way for future work and improvements.

Right, as someone in the field I do try to remind people of this. AI isn’t defined as this sentient general intelligence (frankly its definition is super vague), even if that’s what people colloquially think of when they hear the term. The popular definition of AI is much closer to AGI, as you mentioned.

I haven’t used all of the assembly workbenches but I’ve found Assembly3 to be pretty robust to design changes if you use realthunder’s Link Stable fork of FreeCAD. I wouldn’t be surprised if all of the assembly workbenches would benefit from toponaming fixes, though I don’t know how they all work.

BLDC and AC servos maintain full torque at stop too, and have about 2-3× the torque of a stepper of similar size.

Huh, this is true about BLDCs as well? I remember seeing in a video that BLDCs tend to have very poor torque output when stopped and especially when at low speeds (due to very low efficiency requiring too high currents for drivers to supply), whereas AC motors have a pretty much flat torque curve until they get fairly fast. I’d be interested to know if this is true.