I've been just getting started on this with Astra. Astra is one-shotting good 3D models from photographs for me. I was unable to get Sol to do this, even after multiple rounds.
It's not a small change, it's from "not useful" to "pretty good"
Right but there is no meaningful specification failure mode in creative CAD, is there? I mean, yes, image to CAD for a little miniature, I can buy that it is OK. Fun, even, especially when your use is sort of transitory.
But this article is talking about functional parts. A functional part exists because of its spec, usually fails because of some combination of its material, manufacture, and spec. And the spec is chosen with that in mind.
Even working from a text description of a part is error prone because language is imprecise and interpretable. I just don't understand why AI people want to race past actual proper sensible solutions to a problem just to automate generating from text.
People don't have time (or even mental capability / even more time) to learn CAD but they have a task at hand which they want done. If AI can generate a part which is "good enough" for the user at a cost that the user considers reasonable (I.e. zero) then AI gets used. If a part fails thats rarely a concern because these parts are just 3d printed and likely cost single digit cents in filament. User can always print a new one.
Right, but the thing that I think sort of militates against this scenario is this:
If a non-CAD person imagines a part that they need, the chances are very high indeed that either it isn't what they need, can't be made robustly or sensibly, or if it is, it already exists in some meaningful way that can be adapted, because one of tens of millions of other people already wanted it.
This scenario — needing something very specific that can be described only in words and nobody else has ever needed before — is almost imaginary. Most stuff just isn't like that.
Now… if someone were to design an AI CAD package that could remix objects that exist and combine them, perhaps with a GUI tool that allowed a user to identify attachment points, maybe that would be interesting. But a lot of that has been solved in non-AI GUIs already.
Text-to-CAD just isn't as good an idea as it seems. You are not going to be able to magic up some novel invention from a text description without a significant amount of domain knowledge of the words needed to describe a part, and that domain knowledge usually comes from learning CAD!
(Bit like getting a coding agent to write really good code)
And simple parts, sorry, just don't need much CAD skill. Get a CAD package on a free plan, learn enough to make your thing. You will get so much more out of that and it will be easier to make changes. It'll probably have standard tools for adding threads, even.
Even image-to-CAD for a functional part requires a significant amount of understanding of what to photograph and from which angles, etc.
Dude, coat hanger joint is broken. The free chatgpt gives openscat file I can just paste and convert to stl. I didn't even measure the diameter of the pipe, apparently those are standard. In 10 minutes I have a new 3d printed part to fix my coat hanger. No CAD UI app subscriptions, not reading CAD books or whatever. That's real life. Rest is in your mind.
For OpenSCAD, AI models from about GPT4.5 onwards have been able to build and combine shape primitives pretty well, but that was never immensely useful.
Just last week I had Gemini 3.8 Flash and Antigravity take an existing STL of a part and swap out a piece of it with another design (fan shrouds on a computer case front plate). In the process it created exploded parts diagrams from the STL, created 2D renders from each axis (for its own visual re-ingestion, presumably, since I neither asked for or needed them), projected measurements, and then it implemented my design swap request. Which it didn't do with SCAD, it wrote a Python program and directly manipulated the STL geometries. It went perfectly. A week before that I had GLM 5.3 and Hermes take one model that was intended to fit into a part from another designer's part and change it; I didn't really like the interior part's design so I gave both STL files to Hermes and asked for a new interior part design that could be printed with vase mode to speed it up. It did and the new part is better than the human-designed part I grabbed off the internet.
I had another task mid week where I needed a case for something but didn't have the dimensions, so I just had Gemini do deep research lookup for dimensions and to then spit out a case STL for me. It was boring but functional and a good enough starting point for me to work with.
Right now my wife is enamored with a 3D printed purse design for halloween but the separately printed hinges are a weak design (a circular mortise and tenon rotating hinge). Working with Antigravity again, it's been able to take measurements, rotate parts in space on its own and create me a new object design that's better suited to be printed in TPU. It's held dimensional accuracy and even inferred some dimensions and spacing I didn't have out of the primary purse's shape. It's gone great. Next up will be having it combine all the parts into a single STL so I can do a multimaterial print in one shot, printing the purse in PETG but the living hinge in TPU without assembly needed.
I think "it's here, now" for home and hobbyist CAD needs for functional prints. It's not displacing a mechanical engineer's job yet, but this recent iteration is markedly better than the previous generation of models at spatial reasoning and 3D design because it's suddenly capable of it at all when even 4 months ago it was not.
In your other comment you mentioned "just learn CAD", and I have already, I could have cobbled together all of this myself in Fusion 360, but that would have taken far more time than a few minutes of prompting and walking away. I know enough domain lingo to describe the task well, and if it falls flat I will do it myself, but it's coming along faster than you seem willing to accept.
> I know enough domain lingo to describe the task well, and if it falls flat I will do it myself, but it's coming along faster than you seem willing to accept.
Could you do meaningful things without domain language you learned the long way?
I don't doubt it is coming along. But as with all of these things, this one is painted into a corner from the very start by using OpenSCAD.
And a mechanical engineer's job isn't just fiddling away in CAD, is it? If it was I would be on the way to being one by now, and I am not.
What it means is that a good CAD model is not just sticking stuff together in 3D space. Parametric flow means that a small number of measurements ripple through the design, and sketches and solids adapt. To do this right, it's easier to just understand the purpose and intent of the model, how it was manufactured, and draw from there.
One of the things you get from studying CAD diagrams — like the Solidworks exercises everyone works through — is that real world parts often have surprisingly few dimensioned constraints. A lot more emerges from geometry.
So you can look at a diagram and initially think "where the heck does it define this radius!?" and find that it never needs to, because that radius emerges from tangency, parallelism, perpendicularity etc., combined with fewer measurement constraints.
Specifying it as a measurement would therefore be overconstraint; it might lead to solids that are difficult/impossible to manufacture or erroneous when another measurement is changed.
The diagram will specify the actual driving measurements that come from the part's purpose, with the intent to adapt to different real-world requirements.
Any CAD tool that works from images is going to have to approximate, which will create over-complex models with to many measurements that are more fragile with respect to changes, whereas a design that has geometrical constraints in place that are logical will be simpler and more adaptable.
With functional parts, roughly, form follows function first, and manufacturability second. But you have to understand why, to be able to make a good part. Even (perhaps especially) with 3D printing. But not uniquely. For example, would this tool be able to understand why the draft angles on a plastic part were important, what determines the bend radius of a part that was made from pressed metal, etc.?
I must stress that I am an amateur. But my amateur skills have come from reading and learning about CAD and learning what makes a viable design.
(Sorry… this was a stupidly long answer but I am hungry and I figured I should try to blurt it out before I have to get up from my desk and cook. I've edited it a lot and cut out a bit that I will probably put in another comment later)
Astra does that. I've fed it STLs, told it to inspect, make a model for it, derive 'conceptual' measurements (e.g. - there were USB type A sized slots in one design, it recognized those, and knew not to change that, but only let it be swapped out for type C slots), and make parameters for everything that is relevant (that's pretty much the level of detail I gave it). It distinguishes 'implementation detail' from 'conceptual measurement' and implements the model in terms of those 'conceptual measurements'. As always, with OpenSCAD (well CSG in general) the problem is bevels/chamfers/fillets, so it needed some instructions to look for those and not mistake geometry stemming from them for 'real' measurements. It does that too, now.
And yes, telling it 'add draft angles to make this castable' works.
Then you are not actually getting a model with a constraint system at all. Which is the point of the thing I'm replying to.
CAD constraints are more powerful and flexible than OpenSCAD, and the power comes from analysis of what the part is actually for, not merely what it looks like.
You can't even compel OpenSCAD to keep a line and an arc tangent. If hull() can't do it, you're making it up yourself with maths.
Wait.. Al this started with you saying Ai can't design cad that is useful. Does that mean you consider openscad not capable of doing anything that is "useful"?
It's a slight overstatement, maybe. But in the general case the answer to your question is yes. I believe OpenSCAD is absolutely not the right tool for functional parts. It has fundamental weaknesses.
You can use it for basic shapes and very simple geometry. But you can use Tinkercad for that too.
Should you use it for CAD generally: I think not. Because complexity balloons out of control. An AI is going to struggle as much as a human does with a complex part in OpenSCAD.
All the text-to-CAD packages are relying on it because there's lots of simple examples in the training set, and because it is declarative — there's a belief that there is a mapping from text to declarative spec and from declarative spec to an object.
But it is the wrong choice for flexible designs that adapt correctly when measurements are changed.
It's clear to me that "AI CAD" developers who think OpenSCAD is adequate to the task have a fundamental misapprehension of the capabilities of the technologies they are actually seeking to replace. OpenSCAD is not representative of the nature or capabilities of modern CAD.
I think that if you are trying to make an adaptable functional part you would be better to start from CAD drawings, with proper constraints on them, and that an AI CAD package should be interacting with those (there are some attempts to do just that).
It's just not that difficult in a modern CAD package, it's not arcane or obscure.
But if you're going to be using code-CAD, you want a programming package that can represent fundamental aspects properly. OpenSCAD cannot.
CadQuery, to be fair to the authors of this post, does now have an experimental 2D constraint solver:
And it has a proper bRep kernel, so it can represent vertexes, edges, arcs and faces in mathematically abstracted (not mesh approximated) forms, and do operations on those (including fillets, though it has its weaknesses there inherited from OpenCascade).
I think an AI that could operate properly on CadQuery models and implement appropriate sketch constraints with an awareness of their implications, choose the right operations, make use of libraries, etc., would be a lot more capable. But it's so much further down the line than people think based on these OpenSCAD toys that produce trivial parts.
I just run a VM with linux running WINE so I can browse securely on Safari, and all of this is on an rPi I actually vampire tapped into the coax network of the local town hall.
Something they might have is a lot of strain gauges around the rocket. They can tell if the rocket is bending and compressing (and how) -- but they are also essentially high-speed microphones. Valves make sounds (cause vibrations) and they are easy to spot if you have high-speed samples of your strain gauges. You can also triangulate distances if you have multiple strain gauges with synchronized high-speed samples.
It's good practice to dump data into several flash memories + transmit live. The live transmit is likely only a small summary of all the data that they capture -- distributed flash memory locations is a cheap way to increase the chances of getting useful data after a boom/crash (put them in orange water tight containers that can float + give them a beep-beep radio transmitter).
They are likely going to have access. Lots of things have built in cellular modems these days, and your cable provider already uses your cable modem as a hotspot for other people.
You can do things like physically modifying your TV, or seeing if there are undocumented settings to disable things.
The traffic was separated so that anything on the public hotspot was not attributed to the private subscriber network.
Secondly for years I lived somewhere very remote so that meant that hardly anyone ever got to use my broadband connection via such a hotspot, but I got to use hundreds of other peoples hotspots when I was somewhere less isolated.
I was quite happy to opt in to this system as I benefitted hugely from it.
Yes. Xfinity is the big one. Their devices create two hotspots: one for the customer and one to power their Xfinity WiFi service and for bandwidth offloading for their cellular service.
Yea this almosts sounds like it could be a great idea with proper execution, nothing like this in the UK. Imagine if they were upfront and said "well knock a tenner (or whatever is reasonable in the US) if you allow your access point to be used as a hotspot"
It turns out there are several similar services offered in the UK by ISP's like O2, Sky, and BT¹ (recently rebranded as EE-WiFi²) who claim to be the UK's largest WiFi Hotspot Network. Perhaps that's due to it being opt-out on their routers since it was first introduced over a decade ago.
This is actually hotspot rollouts as far as I know though? You dont see BT/EE wifi networks everywhere, particularly not where you'd expect to see a concentration like residential streets / buildings with this kind of system, mainly see BT / O2 hotspots in public spaces like train stations + event spaces.
Tbf may just be less monopolisation of broadband making it more sparse, but they actually have a map of hotspots on that site which implies they are intentionally placed.
Yes. Cox has been doing it for years. They boast citywide hotspot access for all subscribers. I formerly thought that this hotspot network consisted of dedicated APs which they mount and maintain on utility poles in public places. But that’s just the start.
Every Cox customer has a Panoramic WiFi router that advertises as a member of the “CoxWiFi” SSID, and other customers can authenticate there and access the Internet through your connection. This is on a strictly opt-out basis.
I’ve opted-out, and also my router is permanently in Bridge Mode, so there is no technical way for me to provide anyone a WiFi connection. But all my neighbors do, even if they are blissfully unaware.
The best thing about fibre rollout in my region is that the ONT appears to act as the modem so I don't need to set the modem/router into bridge mode any more.
Absolutely. Independently of the unauthorized sharing of your bandwidth, ISP gateways are notoriously insecure and underspec'ed. They also have nasty backdoors[0].
Major ISPs in the US have been doing it for at least a decade. Xfinity Wifi [1] claims over 20 million wifi hotspots provided through customer routers.
If its a hotspot you'll have to login to authenticate, so presumably the traffic is uniquely identifiable. I'd hope when LE contact ISP for details theyd be able to go oh that ip address is here but it was actually this persons traffic.
I'm fairly confident that ISPs do not log all customer traffic, especially for an indeterminate amount of time. There would not be enough storage on the planet available.
Plus the DNS spying even after disabling their safety stuff (impossible to change DNS on Comcast Xfinity-provided gateway). Still trying to get as good speeds with my own equipment.
Router: Something I have to upgrade, though trying for approx a full gig speeds at the modem first. Eying an OpenWrt-compatible one. Looks like the GL.iNet GL-MT6000 (Flint 2) comes with it preinstalled! ( https://www.gl-inet.com/en-us/products/gl-mt6000?country=US )
Cloudflare sets up a reverse proxy as part of their core offering, so by default they can MITM your proxy. The “orange cloud” by a DNS record means it points to their proxy instead of your server.
That's how you get DDOS protection / edge delivery, so it's not a dark pattern. I imagine it's the main reason why people would DNS through them in the first place.
An “orange cloud” with no other indication to represent a feature that is enabled-by-default (with implicitly enabled analytics) sounds like quite the dark pattern. The UI makes the DNS record seem to point to A (your entry) but actually points to B (Cloudflare). This isn’t an oversight, it’s an attempt to obfuscate.
Even if the choice to enable it by default makes sense for Cloudflare’s userbase, the implications are hidden and non-obvious.
It's essentially the entire reason to use Cloudflare.
As sibling mentions it is indeed labeled and not just some icon. People just refer to the orange cloud UI for it for convenience and because it makes it easy to spot whether you have it on or not.
But regarding the icon, the icon is their company logo, it really is the primary feature. It's also not like you have to go find it in settings to turn it off after adding DNS record, it's part of the form when you add the record (default on, yes), and it's prominent when viewing the record.
It's the reason for its existence and the reason people are choosing it. If they are making a mistake, hoodwinked by hype, that's totally unrelated to the point being discussed. I think you've just seized the opportunity to post your disdain for them without regard to the actual topic being discussed.
I would say that Cloudfare having customers who don't know exactly what they are getting (into) is actually a Cloudfare problem they should take responsibility for.
Fair, but I don't use YouTube as much anymore. Except for music and old videos it lost its purpose for me. I mostly rely on word of mouth now, a friend recommends me this art channel or that show. If I like it I forward it to another friend etc.
I still feel bad for what is happening though, it's wrong and anyone with our best interests in mind would agree generated content needs to be firewalled from the human internet.
Log in, pay for premium, and use the like and subscribe buttons liberally. Use the downvote button too. It learns.
My feed is really fantastic. Once a month or so I notice some AI slop (usually with a handful of views - clearly the algo testing something out). Thumbs down, problem solved.
Lots of people will take any treatment offered. Indeed I would. That's a perfectly acceptable approach.
Yes, medical treatments are improving and hanging on is a good approach cause something may be around the corner.
I don't think the article is advocating for no treatment ever.
I think it is advocating for a balanced understanding of what treatment looks like, and balances that with quality of life. And indeed balances your age as well.
If I'm 80, I'm (somewhat) less concerned with length of life, and more concerned with quality. If I'm 50 that's a different equation.
It's very much a personal choice, but to make a choice you have to have information. And it's helpful if you can make the choice in a calm relaxed environment. Both can be missing immediately after hearing a diagnosis.
The point is that medical intervention is usually desired. But equally there's a place for acceptance and contentment.
The father of a good friend passed away recently from a brain cancer. He was a doctor, but atypically accepted every treatment available. His last 3 years were spent in surgery or sick from chemo, did not have one good day after his initial diagnosis. If he could have gone back I'm sure he would have decided not to be treated.
You might not want it for yourself but many people, especially health professionals in my experience, will take a smaller but less painful lifespan over a chance to live longer through horrible treatments.
Yeah, it is a big difference to undergo aggressive treatment at 50 vs. 80. Not just because of the potential years or months gained, but also because older bodies don't heal that well, or at all.
This is something that may be revolutionized through regenerative medicine, but hasn't so far.
Agreeing with your overall sentiment, but this caught my eye:
> If I'm 80, I'm (somewhat) less concerned with length of life, and more concerned with quality. If I'm 50 that's a different equation
Why is that? Is quality less important at 50? Would you be more willing to endure suffering if you are younger? Why? I'm thinking that no matter age, people would generally like to avoid a painful death. Maybe it's because it feels more likely to "beat this thing" when you are younger, and then still potentially have decades ahead of you?
By 80 most people have reconciled with the idea that they don't have too many years left even in the best of conditions. There's no hope of extending life, and there's little to look forward to, they already lived through all the important milestones they could realistically see. Quality is all that's left to hope for.
At 50 they still can still hope for recovery and a life beyond that. They have a lot of moments and milestones ahead of them, at least with family and loved ones - see their kids graduate, get married, or have their own children. So if the hope is stronger than the pain, they'll sacrifice the quality of life.
> By 80 most people have […] already lived through all the important milestones they could realistically see.
That’s at least partially culturally determined. As the healthy live expectancy creeps up slowly, I expect that idea to change. There’s some truth in the saying “50 is the new 40”
This doesn’t really make a difference in the argument. You can sub 80 with 90 and the point remains the same. There is some age where you stop caring about trying to be cured, and just care about the quality of life in the immediate future
It makes, if cultural expectations lag reality of longer life spans.
I think it does; society thinks 80-year olds are physically less fit than they are in reality, shaping expectations of what 80-year olds should want, and I also think 80-year olds are influenced (even if slightly) by that.
> society thinks 80-year olds are physically less fit than they are in reality
If anything the bias is the other way around. You get to see all the 80 year olds who are fit enough to interact with society. You never see the the ones who are wasting away in their homes, hospices, and hospitals. Being old and needy is an invisibility cloak.
> I also think 80-year olds are influenced (even if slightly) by that
That "slightly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. At that age people care about society only in the "decent human being" kind of way, not in the "let me please some strangers" kind.
> If anything the bias is the other way around. You get to see all the 80 year olds who are fit enough to interact with society. You never see the the ones who are wasting away in their homes, hospices, and hospitals
That’s true, but I still think there’s societal pressure on acting old for the elderly.
As a tiny example, if you’re in your 20’s friends and family ask “how’s your job hunt going?”. In your 40’s, they ask “how’s work?”. In your 60s they ask “are you still working?”, even if you’re fit as a fiddle, and even though pension age creeps towards 70 in many countries.
The expectation, basically, is that you work till your mid sixties, enjoy retirement for ten years or so, grow old, and die.
That’s statistically true, but there are outliers. I think that expectation makes some of the outliers at the healthy end reach that final stage slightly earlier than needed.
That's good to hear but that wasn't really the topic of the conversation. We were discussing people with life threatening illness where the treatment severely lowers quality of life for a very uncertain outcome.
Do you think the "things to look forward to" would incentivize your parents to focus on clinging to life at the expense of drastically increased suffering and plummeting quality of life, or on maximizing the quality they still have at the expense of losing some months or years?
Even if you are still in good condition overall, at that age you know you're probably running your last lap and the things to look forward to are nowhere near as satisfying as they were even a few decades earlier. You can always find joy in the little things but they're always shadowed by other inevitabilities.
I was responding to "there's little to look forward to, they already lived through all the important milestones they could realistically see .." which seems to imply that by 80 life is over and not worth living.
> which seems to imply that by 80 life is over and not worth living.
That's a big leap you made. But I'll tell you what, this is a question you'll be able to answer when you are in your 80s, not your parents. I have a strong feeling you'll understand what I mean without needing to jump to conclusions.
Perhaps don't have kids in your 40s. It's pretty mean to have kids at 50 because of the high risk of sickness or death while they're teenagers (or younger). Plus the risks of genetic faults in children rises dramatically for dads or mums much over about 40. After 40 kids will often miss out on having grandparents.
Our society says parents can make whatever choices they like, but having children is one of those places when we should be thinking of others (the kids) not ourselves.
I decided against having kids when I reached 40ish for the above reasons (along with some other reasons).
I had cancer, it came back twice in 5 years, but now I'm 10 years out from the last time and my odds are good. Just mentioning it, in case it's helpful to hear a positive anecdote.
Sending my hopes for your recovery. You're right that new research is yielding fruit, but I don't have to tell you that.
Are you a youngish person (<60 yrs) ? If so then this article probably isn't meant for you. This is more meant for the thousands of elderly that get subjected to needless procedures in ICU when their chances of survival are already low. I can recount them from experience of working with people who administered them. This is just the case of American medicine. And in many other countries doctors wouldn't feel pressured to do this.
I don't know specifically how these operations advertise, but what some people might call a scam is that cryonics does factually damage your brain extensively, and it's unclear how well anyone could possibly recover from this damage. One of the common thoughts is that maybe super advanced future sci-fi level brain scans could digitize your brain, but taking anyone's money with that as a potential outcome is probably less than awesome. And there's no currently known way that we could thaw these people's brains in a way that would persist life basically at all.
From my understanding (and I never seriously considered cryonics) all patients know very well that the likelihood of recovery is very low. Just not zero.
Making a movie that has basically the same plot as a previous movie with slight changes is a common occurrence.
The thing you have to be wary of with movies is trademark law. Your Star Wars copy can't use the word "Darth Vader", that's trademarked. It can't use Darth Vader's mask, Darth Vader's suit or Darth Vader's breathing either, all trademarked. And with trademark law the bar to pass is basically "would a reasonable but uninformed consumer be at risk of confusing your product for the trademark". LLMs can't launder that for you. You have to make actual changes, like Spaceballs did
Spaceballs is a parody, which is specifically an exception to the rules; it’s called “fair use”. If Spaceballs was not a comedy, it would not be permitted to exist.
The alternative is that you are not easily replaceable, which means that moi2389 is the one who doesn't get to do the work. Which is good for moi2388, perhaps, but what about moi2389? Either way someone is going to be left out in the cold.
First off they can’t just fire me, I’m from a civilised country.
Secondly, feel free to use whatever work I have done in the past, I still think you won’t be able to do my work in the future.
I have a lot of coworkers in civilized countries, they seem to get made redundant too. Sometimes they go on garden leave for a while first but the end result is the same.
The author there reads the point "Two different data entry operators, given a person’s name, will by necessity enter bitwise equivalent strings on any single system, if the system is well-designed" by thinking in terms of erroneous spelling, but also relevant is encoding issues such as lookalike characters.
It's not a small change, it's from "not useful" to "pretty good"
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