archomrade [he/him]

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  • 29 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I imagine both Libre and Free are open-sourced and easily modifiable? I haven’t looked into it, but if it’s anything like Rhino there should be a standard way of writing custom plugins that should close the gap on some of those - at least the object naming would be easy.

    I’ll look into them though, thanks! BIM software is such a pain in the ass to work with and one of the most expensive design software I know of, I think open sourced projects would be amazing for BIM if they took off like FreeCAD did


  • I work as an architectural designer but I’ve never really been allowed to use anything other than Revit for BIM workflows. Our consultants basically only use Revit or Autodesk products, so our hands are kind of tied for projects where we need to collaborate.

    My boss uses Vectorworks for our small projects that don’t need BIM, I might suggest we switch to Libre or FreeCAD so that we all have access without needed another VW license. Do you enjoy using LibreCAD?




  • It’s not a matter of being ok with another country abusing their neighbors, nor is it about ‘letting them do what they want’, it’s about acknowledging the mutually assured destruction established during the cold war and having to reckon with the fact that there are other nations with the ability to end civilization that have other ambitions than you.

    Leftists get mocked a lot about their pie-in-the-sky economic goals, but at least they have an intimate understanding of international conflict and the reality of oppositional superpowers. Unlike sheltered american adolescents who’ve never left their country for more than a week and have been assured their entire life that the US is the most powerful and moral nation on earth.

    And that’s to say nothing about the fact that america is the antagonist to most other nations on the planet.



  • The existence of nukes takes direct military intervention off the table, full stop. Diplomacy is the only way unless a nuclear exchange is acceptable to you.

    The US is so privileged that they don’t realize that “just sit back and let it happen” is how the rest of the world has had to deal with them for the last 80 years, and now it’s unconscionable to think they have to ‘let it happen’ with a foreign adversary themselves

    I think the world would be better if every country had nukes and countries like Russia, Israel, and the US couldn’t simply steamroll every other country standing in their way.







  • Preface: I am an architect based out of the midwest, so I don’t have much direct experience with crawlspace rennovations or construction specifically, but I have worked with lots of wood construction and delt with water infiltration regularly.

    Absent more detailed information (i see your other comment describing the wood piers and wood rot, but there’s still some ambiguity), I think it’s worth pointing out that concrete foundations are not the only way to prevent future wood rot.

    Typically you see rot in conditions where:

    • There has been flooding under the house
    • there is moisture seeping up through the ground underneath the crawlspace
    • there is humidity in the air that is saturating the wood

    The reason you’re seeing wood rot under your house is not because you have wood foundations, it’s because moister is not being properly controlled. Having not had experience on this particular situation before, I couldn’t tell you how you could approach replacing a wood foundation with a concrete one without demolishing the existing structure. It’s possible it could be done, but it’s almost certainly more expensive and won’t solve the water infiltration issue anyway.

    I would reccomend determining the source of the water first.

    • If there’s flooding, install a drainage system (or repair/upgrade the existing one)
    • If there’s water seeping in from the ground, replace/install a vapor barrier
    • If it’s a humid environment and it’s not being controlled, mitigate the humidity by insulating, sealing, and ventilating/dehumidifying the space

    You should not have problems with wood piers/posts if properly done. If you’re still determined not to use wood piers, I would ask your contractor about using CMU instead of the wood posts. keep in mind, though, that this won’t solve the issue of water presence and you would still likely have problems in the future if you don’t mitigate it.



  • There is so much work out there for free, with no copyright

    There’s actually a lot less than you’d think (since copyright lasts for so long), but even less now that any online and digitized sources are being locked down and charged for by the domain owners. But even if it were abundant, it would likely not satisfy the true concern here. If there was enough data to produce an LLM of similar quality without using copyrighted data, it would still threaten the security of those writers. What is to say a user couldn’t provide a sample of Stephen King’s writing to the LLM and have it still produce derivative work without having trained it on copyrighted data? If the user had paid for that work, are they allowed to use the LLM in the same way? If they aren’t who is really at fault, the user or the owner of the LLM?

    The law can’t address the complaints of these writers because interpreting the law to that standard is simply too restrictive and sets an impossible standard. The best way to address the complaint is to simply reform copyright law (or regulate LLM’s through some other mechanism). Frankly, I do not buy that the LLM’s are a competing product to the copyrighted works.

    The biggest cost in training is most likely the hardware

    That’s right for large models like the ones owned by OpenAI and Google, but with the amount of data needed to effectively train and fine-tune these models, if that data suddenly became scarce and expensive it could easily overtake hardware cost. To say nothing for small consumer models that are run on consumer hardware.

    capitalists just stealing whatever the fuck they want “move fast and break things”

    I understand this sentiment, but keep in mind that copyright ownership is just another form of capital.


  • Copyright is already just a band-aid for what is really an issue of resource allocation.

    If writers and artists weren’t at risk of loosing their means of living, we wouldn’t need to concern ourselves with the threat of an advanced tool supplanting them. Nevermind how the tool is created, it is clearly very valuable (otherwise it would not represent such a large threat to writers) and should be made as broadly available (and jointly-owned and controlled) as possible. By expanding copyright like this, all we’re doing is gatekeeping the creation of AI models to the largest of tech companies, and making them prohibitively expensive to train for smaller applications.

    If LLM’s are truly the start of a “fourth industrial revolution” as some have claimed, then we need to consider the possibility that our economic arrangement is ill-suited for the kind of productivity it is said AI will bring. Private ownership (over creative works, and over AI models, and over data) is getting in the way of what could be a beautiful technological advancement that benefits everyone.

    Instead, we’re left squabbling over who gets to own what and how.