I think there is room for both approaches. Like it or not, photoshop/adobe is the defacto standard everything else is measured from. A compatibility layer like Inkscape does for illustrator has for PS-like behavior is welcome to bring “industry” users in the fold.
My primary use case for gimp is using path and selection tools for removing backgrounds and the UI and shortcuts in gimp are painful coming from a decade of adobe use.
In the US, phds and professional degrees are more or less geared toward students who are comfortable enough financially to stomach the opportunity cost of 6-10+ years of additional education, unpaid or underpaid residencies and internships, and long apprenticeship hours (which prevent backfilling financial gaps) before making “real” income.
Parent was complaining about the lack of a built in sketch constraint solver in build123d, which is table stake feature of any "real" GUI CAD suite. build123d has some constraint options and you could probably use solvespace with it. Of course you can roll your own.
The reality is build123d is a fairly thin layer over the OCCT kernel with some pythonic affordances. I'm not sure OCCT has a robust constraint solver, so there is little development there. FreeCAD on the other hand (besides being significantly more mature) is also build on OCCT, but also does a lot on top of the kernel to make it more featured and stable.
Maybe I grew up with Windows so the older uis don’t phase me, but I find these sort of complaints rich considering differences between gtk, qt, etc in Linux userland. The average Windows user might stumble on an aero dialog, which is arguably less jarring in win11 than og metro.
I understand people don't like this kind of OCR stuff for privacy reasons, but selecting text from images is probably the most useful feature added to iOS in the last ~5 years for me.
Modelling isn't the slow part. If one is copying a drawing and have exact dimensions its pretty straightforward in most software even if the software is bloated.
IMO, please continue buying records, but don’t buy tickets to shows you can’t attend. I can’t speak for live music, but in SF there is/was an issue of club nights selling out, but having low attendance due to people buying tickets as an “option”. This is a problem because it screws up venues planning for bar sales as a revenue source and deterring last minute buyers/door sales (who may either be heads or punters) who see a sold out show online.
I've used a Dell Precision 5530 professionally and got a 5570 refurb this year from ebay for ~$800. The fit and finish of the Precision 5000 series is great as far as I'm concerned, though I'm happy the camera is back on top of the screen and would appreciate a 10 key. The work model I used for 3 years and basically the only issue I had was on the Windows side with sleep states (waking up from sleep while commuting). I rarely work long off ac power, but <40% is always kind of a danger zone, especially when doing intensive tasks like CAD modeling. Again, worked connected to Dell workstation dock 90% of the time, so ports are not an issue, but the state of unpowered usbc dongles/micro-docks with hdmi/usba/usbc/++ makes stationary use a non-issue. I also had a 2016 XPS13 I only stopped using as a primary due to lack of ram expansion.
The hard part with 3d part creation isn’t the graphical interface or language, it’s actually describing and translating part requirements to a manufacturable design, weighing material, weight, fit, geometric, and cost tradeoffs. Openscad, opencascade, etc have been around for a long time and have specs for describing features in a way that llm should be able to handle, but if all the part constraints were available it’s far faster to make accurately in Solidworks.
In MCAD, “parametric” does not mean a high level part or feature is driven by editable parameters or procedurally generated features. Parametric refers to the underlying storage format representing part features in a parametric way rather than as a mesh. Mesh formats like stl cannot represent a circle by its position and radius, while a parametric format like step can. This distinction is more akin to raster (bmp) vs vector (svg) graphics. Both can be generated procedurally by “parameters”, but only with svg can sub-features be faithfully extracted or transformed.
The problem with FreeCAD and every other free/open source MCAD project of note is the Open Cascade kernel they are built on. While Open Cascade is fairly mature, it has dealbreaker issues in a few key areas: fillets cannot consume connected faces and may fail for a number of other reasons, cylindrical and spherical faces require seams which often cause issues with boolean operations, and shapes like helixes are also often troublesome.
Bart from SFO to downtown SF is about $11 due to a surcharge and the combined fare AirTrain + subway is also about $11.50. LIRR is a bit more expensive. The Paris RER is €13. I don’t see how the fare is objectionable.
I personally appreciate the subway connections exist. Taking LIRR would require a subway transfer to most destinations anyway.
I don't get the gripe. AirTrain gets you to A,E,J,Z, and LIRR, all of which get you to "Manhattan" or a significant number of intermediate destinations in about an hour. LGA is far worse.