keepcarrot

Hey, I've just finished my diploma of mech eng and them and my new workplace use largely solidworks. Solidworks might have the most annoying subscription service integration I've ever seen, but also I've clicked with its interface.

Any guides or tips for switching over?

It does often seem to be correlated to reactionary conspiracy sentiments. There is the "non-white people could not have possibly stacked rocks this big!" thing

I guess also flat earth?

My partner has a big butt and has asked to see it. I cannot find it. Several others have asked to see it also.

It is manga, full of text, and the main character gets more unhinged and full of energy as the comic goes on.

Random notes: boobs are hereditary or bought

Butts are the product of labour.

Was around a guy who literally never said anything that wasn't making fun of someone, complaining about someone, or direct work stuff (we were pulling up star pickets). Just kinda toxic to be around. He seemed to enjoy himself though.

Inasmuch as I disagree with XR, I disagree with this meme more.

I saw a conversation here where someone thought homophobia wasn't that bad in the 90s.

I had someone else say they didn't remember any anti-Japanese racism in Australia in the 90s. I being on the receiving end of it would remember it pretty strongly, but to forget it entirely?

Just really poor memory

(History? I guess this is history subbear. Given how much people seem to misinterpret events happening now, what does that say about writing of events at the tim?)

(based on my further thoughts from someone's comment a while ago)

Things get described as over-engineered, which definitely means something but there doesn't seem to be good consensus on what. I think there are multiple definitions and context tends to be used to work it out.

I think this comes up in military engineering a lot because:

• the end-users of any product (say, the soldiers shooting the guns and driving the humvees) have much less say about the products they are using to the people procuring them, and are quite distant from said people. Often, it is cheaper to train soldiers to attempt to handle the weirdness of a product instead of replacing the product.
• the production runs are a lot smaller
• the iterative process for military equipment has a much longer cycle
• the ability of a segment of the military to go with a different product (e.g. if you command a tank platoon, you can't decide that you're going to go with the Challenger 2 instead of the Abrams, let alone a T-90), which means there is less incentive to compete directly with rivals offering similar products. I realise that we're socialists here, but there is at least some motivation for Ford to offer a similar product to Toyota and that helps iteratively improve both products to some extent. Hence this post going in "guns". All these tanks, AA missiles, guns etc. don't have their designs pared down in the same way the Toyota Hilux has been (though one can see such long term iterative designs have some over-engineerings creep in)

However, I've seen it used to describe bridges, small plastic gadgets, all sorts of things. So what are the different over-engineerings? Note that none of these really describe an overallocation of engineering time, or effort directly. There is such a thing as a bad engineer.

Over-engineering 1: This product has very complex systems in it which are either unnecessarily hard to manufacture, hard to use, or hard to maintain.

So, this definition is the one we think of when we think of German (or Swiss) Engineering. With military equipment, this is definitely true during the Nazi era, but things like the HK G11 or the Swiss PE-57's ejector. The late war Nazi tanks had some of these for specific components but also had other problems. I could imagine something like the F-35 also suffering from this.

This can actually happen for a number of reasons. One can imagine management, without true understanding of the systems, makes a request (or demand) for a mechanical solution to a problem that has appeared in testing, usage, or even imagined. The problem may be simple to define, but quite complex to solve. The engineers may have been given enough time to solve a problem, but not enough time to iteratively pare down to make it easier to manufacture, use, or make it more reliable (this can happen with either new features or initial features).

Engineers can do this to themselves if they get particularly excited about solving a particular problem and not much interest in iteratively testing and updating their solution, but historically a lot of these have come from management (up to and including literally Hitler).

The design is feature complete but has had insufficient time allocated to testing a design (from production to actually hooning around in a park).

Over-engineering 2: Feature Creep and related things

So this one causes the first one a lot, but I think the nature of design in large organisations tends towards this. Features tend to be added but rarely taken away.

Thus, you might wind up with a hatch that requires not much strength to open, easy to operate, thickly armoured, pretty cheap, and traps the crew if it's under 20 degrees and a little bit dusty. The energy to say "maybe we could just have a spring loaded hatch with a lock on the inside instead of this thing" has to maintain itself through multiple layers of bureaucracy, people without the authority to make the change and so on. And each person responsible for that communication has to maintain that energy until it gets to someone who does have that authority. And the connecting links may actually be pretty attached to a particular design.

This results in products having lots of little clever mechanisms on it that may be better replaced with training or simpler devices that take a huge amount money to produce, are unreliable, have low endurance, and so on. I'm sure we could all think of a thousand examples.

Over-engineering 3: Arbitrarily high safety factor.

Again, this is likely the result of not enough engineering time allocated, so crude shorthands wind up being used. You don't know the minimum thickness of steel for a bridge to support a 10 tonne truck going over this particular ravine, but you do know that this ridiculously large amount thickness of steel with supporting trusses will hold up a 10 tonne truck and you kinda want to go home tonight.

This can also result from using standardised parts; the gap between a part that will fail and the next part up might be quite large, so you wind up with an absurd amount of material holding what might otherwise be a light cheap thing together.

In military tech, we often see up-armouring without any corresponding improvements to the chassis, suspension etc. even though it could hypothetically be done for pretty cheap (but not as cheap as not addressing it, up front), or even weight reductions in other parts of the vehicle.

Anyway, those were the ones I have been mulling over.

So, a while ago I was in a community theater and we put on plays that would break even largely. Our biggest costs were theater rent, followed by specialist hires (a worker with safety training that did our ropes and high powered electrical stuff). We charged pretty cheap tickets in the context of theater, which given the majority of our actors, costuming and props labour etc. was volunteer.

It got me thinking about games. I realise there is an intense dislike of DLC, particularly AAA companies doing day 1 DLC, but even longer term DLC that could not have been made on the budget of the original game and released like a year later or whatever.

The idea was having a platform for, say, RPG systems that's well coded, slick, bla bla bla, and comes with a few base stories, but after that the majority of development after that is done by something similar to the theater group but indie artists, writers etc. and you buy into a long form RPG (or, idk, subscribe on patreon or whatever). Every month (or whatever), some sub-team releases a new part of their adventure or a new system with a new adventure, and you can keep playing with what characters you had before (if that's what's happening).

Things like the Adventurer's Guild (or whatever the D&D one is, where you register and play each adventure bit once alongside thousands of other players) are a thing, this would wind up be something similar but system agnostic and more tech oriented.

IRL, every time a community theater wants to do a show, they don't rebuild the theater and stuff. It's not "wholly original".

I'd also want the writers/artists to be more connected to their community, hypothetically.

The system would have to have very non-coder friendly tools for writers to pull together systems and make maps and stuff. Dialogue trees may be a bridge too far.

Just got this email from one of the event ticketing place some of my friends use

I've seen it pop up in quite a few threads, sometimes in jest (or sort of in-jest), but I think it comes up enough to talk about seriously, both from an individual behaviour standpoint and a broader activism/socialism/whatever standpoint.

This is also coming from someone that sees themselves as very extroverted (but also autistic and socially anxious, so pretty poor at getting my social needs met), so maybe this whole idea is way off base.

There's two narratives here for discussion in this thread:

• I struggle with pushing myself to be social, and I am afraid this makes me a poor activist. At some point or another advocating for socialism will rely on socialists to talk to non-socialists in spaces and circumstances that are not comfortable.
• Socialism, on some level, involves a society with more time and space to socialise. What will this look like for a severe introvert? Will there be room for a person to buy a plot of land in the hills and live separate from society forever? Will I have to go to Commissar DanceClass's Dance Class?

And two sentiments that should be discussed with those narratives re: other people:

• Introvert, socially anxious, autistic etc. There are people they get along with and comfortable social situations, but for a variety of reasons need a break regularly
• "I just hate people"

This whole post was a thought I had when reading the second people-hater. My initial thought was that this was an internal pathologisation of people based on the society we live in. If the only people you encounter day to day are ladder climbing suburbanites whose main interests are competitively assessing lawn heights and promotions, you're probably going to "hate people". However, this may not be the case for all people who claim this of themselves. Maybe they hate other people on the road, people in queues for groceries etc. I just find it hard to believe that someone who genuinely hates all people would hop on to a forum (an entirely social activity) and spend any amount of time there. Nonetheless, it probably happens.

But, I figured that the topic had enough range and nuance to turn into its own thread instead of responding directly, and saw someone else post the introvert activism thing.

One of the things I thought of was the social battery and how it's often expended on work and commuting. If your main social energy is spent at work/commuting, I feel like it's very possible that one might come away with a dim view of any social activity (incl. organising) and your ability to participate in it, especially if you'd largely done it since school (another cutthroat highly hierarchical social setting).

(how is commuting social? You're in a constant negotiation with other drivers to avoid bumping your 2 ton $20k machines into each other, with a wide variety of levels of aggression, empathy, engagement etc. It's not words, but there is a communication there that can be very draining)