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This looks super nice! That is kind of the interface I wish FreeCAD could have. I am more the type of person who likes to use a python interface to create parametric models, but this is really cool!

Anyone knows what is the status of Truck [1] in this regard. Are they going to implement an open-source CAD program with their CAD-kernel? That also looks like a promising project.

[1] https://github.com/ricosjp/truck


CADmium is built with the Truck kernel, though it looks like CADmium has no repo activity since June '24. https://github.com/CADmium-Co/CADmium

There's also the Fornjot kernel. https://github.com/hannobraun/Fornjot


Cadmium is long dead and unfortunately neither truck nor fornjot are "there" yet - "there" been anything more complex than a cube

Context: I was the main contributor/maintainer of cadmium


Thanks for clarifying cadmium's status and offering your take on the state of truck and fornjot. So, what happened with cadmium? Is Truck just too primitive to build on top of so far? It looks like both of these kernels are actively being developed, what do you think of their rate of progress?


meh, internal problems mostly

No idea where truck is going, it'll take me quite some time to tinker with CAD I think, it left me quite a bitter taste...

Fornjot seems to be doing good, I'm donating to them and I get regular updates (you should too!). Still, there's a long, long road ahead

If I were to do this all over again I'd either go the OCCT route (like chili3d or zoo) or solvespace. they're both "lacking" kernels if you compare them to the commercial ones, but I think there's enough "market gap" for makers that would prefer a sustainable CAD format instead of perfect fillets (and IMO freecad is not the solution).

Keep in mind though that my efforts where laser focused on non-math stuff. From what I gathered from my time in cadmium, b-rep kernels are hard in an unsustainable level. Browser level unsustainable. I just hope that out of seer necessity we'll find another way to solve the CAD problem, instead of a b-rep kernel


> This looks super nice! That is kind of the interface I wish FreeCAD could have.

What do you dislike about FreeCAD's interface?


I think that the tools are not will organized, and I always have problems finding the tool I need in the menu. The concept of having different workbenches does not work good for me, as often I am looking for a tool and then realize I am in the wrong workbench. But it is not always clear why something is in a workbench and not in the other, and there are duplicated functions in some workbenches. Also, the fact that it does not support Wayland makes everything look blurry in hdpi screens. I like that it has a good python API though, but the documentation is a bit lacking. However, the different workbenches also sometimes complicate the use of the Python API. I like e.g. how build123d works.


FreeCAD interface needs to take a lot of pointers from paid CAD programs, this Chili3D interface is quite close, larger icons in ribbons at the top of the screen with clear definitions


There's an active knee-jerk hostility in the FreeCAD community to any user problem that even hints that it might involve a comparison to proprietary CAD. I've had "FreeCAD isn't Fusion and you shouldn't expect it to behave the same way" thrown at me when I've been discussing something bone-headed FreeCAD was doing.

I've never used Fusion, in any incarnation.


- There are too many views whithout explanation of what they are

- By default the position of the tools and buttons is a chaotic mess

- There are things that seem to be the same but arent (e.g. Sketch from the "Part Design" and "Sketch" view)

- The 3D view is glitchy. The reflections make things invisible, AA is off by default, there is no proper Grid...

- The QT stylesheet is kinda ugly. If you literally delete it completely and revert to the default that QT has it looks much nicer.

- The settings are a bit messy and often it's not clear what they do.


I also hate the youtube "feature" that translates the titles of videos to your setting's language. This is so annoying. I can understand English and don't need these automatic translations.


> I can understand English and don't need these automatic translations

I think it is far worse than that:

1. If I don't understand a language, probably that video is not for me. Most videos targeted for international audience are in English, or at least the author translated it by theirself.

2. Titles are small sentences, and they don't have enough context to be translated. Once I saw a video called something like "Vamos assistir uma conexão com o passado", which in Portuguese means "Let's watch a connection to the past". I needed to de-translate it in my brain to understand that the original title was "Let's play A Link to the Past"

3. Online resources are a great way to exercise a second language. So, please, don't underestimate my capabilities. At least let me try to read in the original language by myself, if I need the translation I how to use Google Translate or a dictionary.

I reckon that this feature makes the access to online content more democratic, it's ok. But at least let me disable that since it makes the experience worse


There's a video that Youtube keeps sending me with a translated title "O segredo das lavadouras" (what translates to "the secret of washing machines") that is about picking screw washers...

But the real problem is when it decides to translate the titles of some perfectly watchable videos in English into something that uses the Cyrillic alphabet, what has no relation to my accepted languages, and is only used half-way across the world from where I am.


My computer is set to English even though I'm German, and sometimes Youtube will treat me to this really uncanny machine voice with really weird phrases because it auto-translated some German video or advert. Lidl is worth it, ja!


I absolutely hate this. I have the exact same thing. Even if the technology was good, I speak both languages and want to see the original.

Why is it so hard to just add something as a setting/feature and offer it to people without forcing it on the user?


> Why is it so hard to just add something as a setting/feature and offer it to people without forcing it on the user?

Office politics. Google is famously "performance-driven", so the manager in charge of that feature needs usage metrics to be high for the sake of their own career.

(Speculating, of course.)


That's a funny idea—if the KPI was boosting adoption of a feature and the PM just made that feature the default and suddenly adoption was through the roof.

The sad part is we can't rule that out.


This would also be good for movies :D

I can speak german, I don't need forced subtitles for the nazis


Sometimes we do, when actors actually don’t speak German very well (or Russian or Chinese or French)


I wonder if Lidl or the other advertisers know and approve of this.


I mean it's probably somewhere, deep in the ToS but pretty sure if you showed that machine voice to the advertisers they wouldn't approve.


Same here. My native tongue is German, I live in Switzerland, but my settings on all devices are English.

I do this on purpose, because I find everything is more searchable. I don't even know any German terms for most technical things I might search or look for. So even if the automatic translations were good, which they aren't, this would be a non-feature.

My browser already tells them what my preferred language is. Just use it.


Living in Zurich (German part of Switzerland for those who don't know), Windows 10 in English, the built-in Microsoft Store used to offer content in... French.

Now it's a mix of German and English, e.g. 1 heading is "Spiele-Bestseller", and the next is "Best selling apps". And prices displayed as "28,00 CHF" (correct would be to use the decimal point).

Like Van Halen's brown M&Ms, it just shows how sloppily this thing is programmed: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/


I thought I was the only one getting such a messy ads.

At least I know I didn't mess anything on my WebOS TV.


its especially funny with asmr video, not gonna lie the first time I was beyond confused


idoundernotstandwhothisfeatureisdivisiblebytwoinproductionandi

just dislike video and move on. I'm guessing Google wants uploader penalized, and I do feel sorry but it's not my problem.


Not only the titles, but also the audio track. There's a few youtubers I regularly watch who are trying to branch out into some additional languages by providing fan-made translated audio tracks, and english is sometimes one of those. Every single time I watch one of those videos, I have to manually set the language back to the original because often the translations lose some of the word play or hidden meaning in the original language. Often it also means I need to rewind the video because it started playing before all the controls have loaded (because youtube hates FF with youtube-related extensions) and I could swap the language track back.

One of the sister replies linked to an extension to help with that, which I'm going to give a try, but it's annoying that there's not a simple toggle in the youtube settings to tell it to always use the original language. On the rare occasion that I want to use the translated audio track, I can do _that_ on my own; I speak enough languages that this is a very rare occasion with the type of content I watch.

This isn't even something I can understand as them being hostile to ad blocking or wanting to push ads. This is a 'convenience' feature that is just poorly implemented. But I'm sure there's some PM that got a pat on the back for it.


I'm sure YouTube's algorithm rewards people for using this feature and making their "content accessible", but if you serve me up an ugly machine translated Norwegian title rather than the English one I could read just fine, that's from my experience a signal that your YouTube channel is low quality algorithm-chasing garbage, so I click "never recommend this channel".


What a catastrophe. You punish the wrong person, and even worse, a channel owner will not even receive that signal! The vast majority of channel owners with English content is not aware what's going on. A friendly e-mail to the channel owner explaining the problem and asking to manually disable auto-translation is much more likely to achieve what you want.

If you want to get rid of auto-translation on a systematic level, provide feedback to the operators of Youtube through their official communication.


So what you're saying: Please complain through proper channels and hope they accept your input?

Or should he just keep using the signals he gets and immediately clean up his feed?

I actually see this as a feature. YouTube recommends a lot of garbage. I suggested that they improved my feed but they implemented this signal instead. I use the exactly this method to weed out a lot of content I do not care for.

You cannot tell the 500 pound gorilla anything. I prefer my videos without subtitles. I have that set as a preference. Yet when chromecasting it is common for the subtitles to spontaneously turn on. And has done so for a long time.

English is not my first language and my first language is not widely used. Hence I am not used to dubbed movies/programming and I am used to seeing subtitles.

If a native english speaker could understand the horror show that the machine generated subtitles are. If you are used to subtitles they are extremely hard to ignore. You will then read and get the understanding (often hilariously wrong) before the audio catches up and you might end up rather confused.

I can understand an American might have a hard time watching a subbed German movie. Thats natural because it is not common. But when you grew up with subtitles it is actually effortless. Except when they are poor. Then it becomes worse because of the cognitive load of 2 languages and the effort to figure out what is correct.

Dear english only speakers: Translation is hard. A poor translation is worse that no translation as it obfuscates the message. AI is not there yet at all. Maybe impressive but often not helpful or plain and simply distorts the real message.


As a fellow non English native speaker, I concur with all of the above. But if you only have time for one sentence:

> A poor translation is worse than no translation


What I wanted to transport is the following idea: attacking a channel owner (who is most likely innocent and did nothing wrong) with a metaphoric sledge-hammer when a more gentle and precise tool will do is not a great way to conduct oneself in society. vintermann and clan have a feed now without content that bothers them, but at the cost of lowering the channel owner's reputation in the eyes of the operators of Youtube, with the effect of slashing recommendations for the videos of the channel owner at large and his earnings. That's not nice, we should be considerate of the consequence of our actions. Does this make sense, do you understand this perspective?

This behaviour rankles me, I think is on the same level as the misuse of the feature "report this as spam (to some upstream entity/3rd party)" for e-mail messages that are not actually spam.


Attacking? By saying "don't recommend this", I'm just saying I want to give someone else the chance to be seen, rather than the ones who will make their stuff objectively worse in order to juice their stats for the algorithm.

I'm sure my "don't recommend this" clicks don't in any way make up for Google's promotion of channels that "make their content accessible", because it doesn't even stop them from recommending me more machine-translated videos.


There will be no understanding if you do not even make a token effort to suppress your egocentric worldview and engage in honest conversation.


Did you?

They base the feed on user input. The feed is then (supposedly) adjusted to what I like.

What I call a signal you call an attack.

I signal that I do not like Minecraft videos. But I do not attack them.

Your anger is misdirected. You should be mad at YouTube because they do not seem to understand that there can be multiple signals at once.

The chances that I click on a Minecraft video is low. Autotranslated even lower.

So we differ strongly in opinion on how the platform should work. I read your "attack" argument as I should write to the Minecraft creators and tell them their content would be better if they played Minesweeper instead.

I do not punish anyone. I just pursue a clean and (for me) high quality feed.

If you are up in arms that I punish your channel that is another signal that I am probably not your target audience.

When dealing with audiences at scale you need to listen to these signals as handling personal opinions in mails from the discerning viewer is not feasible.


The vast majority of videos are not translated into borked machine-Norwegian, so if this isn't something you opt in to, it's something everyone opts out of (I doubt it).

> A friendly e-mail to the channel owner explaining the problem and asking to manually disable auto-translation is much more likely to achieve what you want.

No it isn't, because I see what kinds of channels do this, over and over again. They're very clearly publishers who don't care that they make something objectively worse as long as the algorithm rewards them for it.

> If you want to get rid of auto-translation on a systematic level, provide feedback to the operators of Youtube through their official communication.

Ha, as if they ever read that. Probably more Google employees will read this comment than will ever read any of my (many) "please stop translating things without asking, I know where to find machine translation if I need it, doing it without asking that means I have to translate back from broken Norwegian into English in order to understand what the hell you were trying to say" feedback reports.


The channel I'm interested in would be of great interest to English speakers. There are only a few people brave/stupid enough to travel to dangerous places (Ukraine near the front) to do a documentary. I cannot blame the author for turning on the translate, it likely overall expands his reach and is a good thing for those who are not interested in his native language. However I'm trying to learn his native language and getting dropped to English out of my control is not helpful to me.


Youtube really doesn't make it obvious that a title got auto-translated. I now realize that I've seen this happen before, with a video that had a different title on my TV than on my computer, but up until this very second I thought it was my TV's fault.

Even being aware of this - how do I know that it's an auto-translation, rather than someone making AI slop in my native language, without watching the video?


One way to tell is when the video has text in the thumbnail. If it's in a different language than the title it has likely been auto translated.


I guess it's the default option. I've seen a few good channels that have that "feature" enabled. I hate it too.


Now Reddit results are translated as well in Google, Kagi, so you think you have found a relevant response in your language, but it's just a machine translation from an English post.


Leads to foreign-language posts on English-speaking small subreddits as well. I see plenty of Portugese, Spanish, Italian and German in communities that barely have enough traffic to debate in a single language.

But nobody pays to get answers, so it's alright.


At least for Kagi they seem to working on solution[0]. But Reddit seems to be fighting back by translating server side so it's no longer detectable.

[0] https://kagifeedback.org/d/5212-low-quality-translated-reddi...


Thanks for the link, good to know. Gives me a fuzzy feeling to pay for a search engine whose devs you can actually interact with and are actually working on improving their product.


I've been noticing the same, this completely breaks searching for reddit results for me


Try "Reddit Untranslate" addon.


I'm a bit fed up with having to use a million plugins to make the web usable.


You can filter them out by adding this operator to the query:

    -inurl:?tl=


duckduckgo seems to do it as well


Yep, this is coming from Reddit itself. It's using different URLs, and they seem to be making an effort to SEO-rank those translations.


It's interesting that the quality is so low. You can do very good translations for many languages today even with fairly cheap LMs, but for some reason (cost?) automated translation online seems to be still mostly at Google Translate level.


its impressive how poor the end result turnout, when zero effort want to be spent


It's even worse for videos with "official" dubs. I have been jump scared by German and French dubs on certain videos recently, I distinctly remember MrBeast, Mark Rober and Nick DiGiovanni. I have set my language to English and my Region to US (worldwide) I don't know what gave YT the idea to preselect these dubs for me, I have seldomly even watched a video that is not English.


Yep. Youtube is the worst:

- If I select German subtitles for a German video, it will auto-translate all English subtitles to German in the future.

- If I select subtitles for an English video, same.

- If the video has an Arabic, Hindi, French human-made subtitle to help that audience, it shows it to me instead of the automatic captions

Horrible.


And you can't turn it off. I really hate this non-feature.



Using Brave on iOS I haven't encountered it yet. Perhaps it strips some information? But with the official YT app I have, and it was both fascinating and annoying.


I don't even get the point of that. If I need a translation of the title, I won't be able to watch the video anyways. At least ot makes some sense with the horribly auto-translated videos now, but they had the title translation for a long time while the video was still the original language.


There's been automatic subtitle translation for a long time.


Good point, I didn’t even think about that because I would never watch a video in a foreign language with auto-translated subtitles.


I get you and normally wouldn't either. I was a little impressed when I could switch to like 10 diff languages on the fly. As a foreign language learner seems like it could be pretty helpful.

It's probably most useful for utility or news content. Not 'high effort videos' about an interesting topic. I'm imagining you find a video in another language that fixes a problem you have and can switch to your language to watch.


I sometime watch videos in English with the automatic subtitles. Sometimes I can't understand a few words and the subtitles help me. Most of the time I watch them without subtitles, and rewind the video a few seconds to rewatch a short part with the subtitles enabled.


Worse is the auto-dubbing in some channels. Which cannot be disabled. That has resulted in me stopping to watch a channel completely due to the inability to select the original language (youtube mobile website).


There are a few browser extensions to fix this, I use this one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-no-tr...


Thanks! This is great. Although embarrassing for YouTube.


I can also recommend FreeTube


What I don't get is how the feature works. I see it for veeery few videos and those are usually highly profitable clickbait and/or big budget productions, so my assumption has been this is actually something the uploader has to enable or even fill out. My language is very "small", so it makes sense that only the broadly-popuar and highly-profitable would be worth translating the titles for.

Unfortunately, all the translations are machine-translated garbage and there is no setting to turn this off as a viewer, so it's just incredibly annoying.


Gosh this annoys me so much. I am native Portuguese speaker but have all my settings in English. It always tries to auto-dub Portuguese content into English, how do I turn that off?


Can't recommend "DeArrow" browser extension enough. YouTube is a miserable experience without it (and its sister extension SponsorBlock).


It is not just that these translations are not needed, they are often - in my case German - of a low quality, contain errors and lose information which the original language contained. And the roboter voices loses all the interesting modulations of the original voice. Even a Fireship video sounds terrible when translated.


Even reddit does that now and for some reason shows the translated version by default when I search a post through google.

Very annoying, because instead of just seeing the english post, which I'm easily able to understand, I see half-broken german...


So much this. I suspect the idea that a person speaks more than one language is absent in US silicon valley. Else I can't explain why youtube only lets you set one language. Heck, even google allows you to configure all spoken languages in your account, the very same google account you use for youtube. Yet youtube ignores it and has its own settings.


I think the issue is not speaking more than one language, but not preferring your native language over the original content's language. This is a very American-English-centric view of the world, where content is made for your language and your demographic. Consumption from outside the US is the exception.

In the rest of the world, and especially in Europe, this is the norm, not the exception. On one hand there is the prevalence of US English media (hello hollywood), US english literature (esp. in tech); and on the other hand cross-consumption between EU countries is much more common.

Oh, and the content ends up being in English too, because that's how to reach many people. We don't want those to be translated, because we don't want a double translation. This is something that the US / Silicon Valley mind cannot comprehend.


> I suspect the idea that a person speaks more than one language is absent in US silicon valley.

Which has been baffling to me considering how many foreigners work at these companies.


I think it's more a matter of "why would they have their system language set to X if they speak Y? If they want Y, they should just set their system language to Y!"

It's the idea that the user has a preference for something, and it applies always and everywhere, even when it's not applicable.


It should be absolutely clear, when i speak English and German, do not auto-translate any video title in those languages to the other. You wouldn't believe how bad the translations are, and how unwanted by me (the user). Worse when you speak a third or fourth language, and tend to watch videos. It gets messy.


Yeah I know, I watch videos in six different languages and the automatic translation are pretty universally bad.


> why would they have their system language set to X if they speak Y? If they want Y, they should just set their system language to Y!

If only they respected my system language. All my language settings are set to English, yet I routinely get autotranslated crap to my native language.


It was more of an example in how they pick up on _some_ signal about a users language preference and then arrogantly assume they're correct in their decision, and that it's the user's fault if they assumed wrong.


This is actually something that foreigners working at Big Tech US companies should be able to understand very well, because English as a system language is often how software developers set things up for themselves regardless of their native language.

But they don't make those decisions. It's a UX thing, which means that in practice whoever is in charge of "driving up the numbers" is going to be making the decision; the engineers just get to cuss while implementing it.


> I suspect the idea that a person speaks more than one language is absent in US silicon valley.

Exactly, it's like they've never left their own state levels of ignorance


While i appreciate the effort that Mark Rober puts in his Youtube videos making them multilanguage, i absolutely hate that native voice. It's one of the few Youtube shorts i have to play twice because of it.


Jesus H Christ, I once a month google to see if there's a proper way of stopping this (You can block this with TamperMonkey)

2 things that absolutely kill my experience,

1. Messing up with titles, specially if the contents of the video are still in a different language, Which Kurzgesagt will I get today? Only YouTube knows, this is annoying if I know the youtuber could use a different language in the title to make a joke

2. Messing up with the default audio tracks, I don't mind if the YouTuber has a dubbed track, that's awesome for getting more exposure, but I already know and expect a specific voice and it's extremely jarring

I know what Mark Rober sound like, leave it be


By the by, one quirk of poor language handling that I think it probably harming YouTube is advert language.

Every one of my subscriptions is an English language channel, and my language choice on all Google properties (where possible) including YouTube is English. It's not hard to judge that English is my favoured language.

And yet... every video advert I receive when travelling is served in the local country's language. It doesn't especially bother me, since I actively avoid listening to adverts (and indeed, now pay for Premium lite to avoid them almost altogether) but it's a weird not-so-edge case that I'd have thought a company as large as Google might have addressed already. They've absolutely got the tech to deliver adverts in any language. (And it could be powerful: imagine receiving adverts for local businesses in your native language while on holiday.)


Do you have en-US or en-GB as an alternate, lower-priority language?

If an English variant is in your Accept-Lang: headers, I'd hope YT wouldn't auto-translate English titles.

The other thing that Google might properly use is account-specific language settings. But if they're using GeoIP as has been suggested, I agree they're doing it wrong.


> If an English variant is in your Accept-Lang: headers, I'd hope YT wouldn't auto-translate English titles.

Your hope is unfortunately entirely misplaced. Google is one of the worst offenders for assuming language and region from users' IP.


Hear! Hear! It enrages me. They also automatically turn the subtitles ON, making you constantly have to disable them. There is no way for multilingual users to add a list of the languages they understand, which is an insane limitation that's been driving me crazy for years at this point. Wtf are they even working on at youtube's HQ? Making video thumbnails larger still?


And most of the times, the translation misses a core part of the title, making it harder or even impossible to understand. A recent example is "I booted windows from Google Drive (part 2)", which got translated to "inicié ventanas de Google Drive", which misses the whole point. Luckily for me, the miniature said what the video was about, and I could understand and watch it.

About the translation, sure, "boot" ≈ "iniciar", "window" = "ventana", but for (microsoft) windows, and other names in foreign languages, the same name must be kept.


I mean, I can deal with the titles, but recently it has been auto selecting machine translated sound tracks, without any way to disable it. And they're bad, like maybe one level above 2010 phone TTS system


If that is the case, then I don't see any novelty here. This has been done for a long time. In Germany, this is called "Panzerholz" (something like "bulletproof wood")


Modern Panzerholz (Kunstharzpressholz, 'synthetic resin densified wood') is manufactured with resin - this new material doesn't seem to rely on resin, but only on the cellulose contained in the wood.


Yes, but Panzerholz is plywood. They seem to be doing the same, but with bulk timber.


Why isn’t panzerholz wood used everywhere? What is the article missing?


Same reason we don't build bridges out of titanium: panzerholz is more expensive than normal wood, and normal wood is good enough for most applications where it's used.


Titanium's strength is in its weight: steel's Young modulus is almost twice as high, so you'd have to build rather large bridges to compensate. Titanium is useful where weight is a concern, like things you launch into space. Steel is perfect whenever weight isn't a concern and sometimes still works really well because you get so much strength out of so little which is why there are so many fans of the thin, shock absorbing, steel bike frames.


Titanium's advantage is imo not so much its weight, as aluminium is better still in that respect. Titanium is mostly better where corrosion and temperature resistance are important. Relative to weight, high grade steel, titanium and aluminium are about equal in tensile strength.


> Titanium is mostly better where corrosion

Until we mix metals and have galvanic corrosion, where an Al + Ti system corrodes exactly where the metals touch.

It's not titanium that will corrode when you have an aluminium frame bike with a Ti bolt at the bottom bracket.


> Relative to weight, high grade steel, titanium and aluminium are about equal in tensile strength.

Scale of the artifact is also a variable if size is a constraint.


Those steel bike frames don't have much in common with the steel used for structural steel. They both are iron alloys with added carbon content, the similarity stops there.

Similarly trying to compare "titanium" to "steel" is dumb. No one uses pure titanium for structural purposes & there are hundreds of common steel alloys.


> thin, shock absorbing, steel bike frames

Please stop repeating this FUD. The notion that a rigid steel frame provides measurable shock absorbtion over the supple, air-filled, rubber tires is mind numbingly stupid.


Steel bikes feel “better” and “springier” than aluminum bikes. Objectively, they last longer than aluminum bikes.

What exact differences in physical properties or construction leads to this, I couldn’t tell you, but you can pick up an old steel bike frame for cheap and experience it yourself. Well-made steel frames are much lighter than poorly-made ones, so I would recommend finding one of the good ones.


So long as that "feel" is just that, there's nothing to talk about.

Unless of course you tried two of the exact same bike with the only difference being the frame material, in a blind test. Then we could talk.

But most likely, you tried two completely different bikes, felt some difference and arbitrarily decided it must be the frame material.


No, I tried probably ten or fifteen of each type over a 35 year period.

There are a bunch of factors, including tube thickness, alloy (I’m sure that when it comes to steel this matters, I think it doesn’t matter with aluminum), and frame geometry.

One thing I can say with absolute certainty is that, if you are using rim brakes, aluminum wheels are so much better than steel wheels it’s not even a conversation worth having. This is because aluminum wheels, unless they are painted, will have a nice aluminum oxide coating. This is effectively a ceramic and the coefficient of friction with rubber brake pads doesn’t change when the rims are wet, say on a rainy day. Steel rims lose all friction when wet.

Because I have been around for a while and made a lot of “experiments” (mistakes), I know some things. I’m happy to share what I know with you.


The limiting factor in most structural uses of wood is stiffness not strength.

You could build your floor joists out of scaffolding boards, but they'd bend unacceptably.

Stiffness is basically a product of geometry rather than strength. Making your wood stronger doesn't help you if you need it to be stiffer.


As you can see from Figure 3a at the top of the third page of the paper, this densified wood is about ten times the stiffness of natural wood, in the sense of Young's modulus. Stiffness is basically the product of Young's modulus and geometry, not geometry alone.


Does it remain so stiff for decades, as would be needed in construction? Many wood treatments' effectiveness fades after time.


My assumption is that it would. Steam-bent wood stays bent once it cools and the lignin sets. It's a lot like thermoforming plastic.

There's another advantage of putting wood through a heating-and-cooling cycle: you remove internal stresses that cause it to twist.


I'm curious about that too. See my comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44027557 for more.


Thanks, I actually just read that and replied there as well. I didn't even notice it was from the same person.

You've been extremely informative and helpful, thank you.


Thank you! I am not a specialist in the area so I may be overlooking something important.


Oh man if that's true I hope it replaces dimensional lumber for floor joists. I'm not sure which psychopath invented span charts for home building, but it's extremely rare I'm in a non-slab house where the cabinets and such don't rattle from just a normal person walking across the floor!

I ended up putting beams in to half the span across my own house because it got so annoying(I want to say they are high grade SYP 2x10s @ 13 or 14')


I-joists + glue and screws are just fine if you want to avoid deflection.


"armor wood"


You can probably do that already without this material. Glued laminated timber is already a pretty good material for such cases.


Absolutely, its unfortunately just a matter of cost. To get an equally sized wood beam that could support the weight, its almost 5x the price. Even factoring in other materials and labour.


CLT is not inherently more expensive and the cost difference is typically less dramatic. Steel just has a few centuries of a head start on learning curves, economies of scale, etc. Scaling up usage of CLT would bring down cost just like it has with steel.

The biggest issue actually is that there's a lot of resistance in the construction industry that is simply locked into using steel and concrete and more or less blind to the advantages of wood. Switching materials would mean new tools, new skills, etc. are needed. I have a friend who is active in Germany pushing the use of this material and he talks a lot with companies in this space.

Companies seem to default to doing what they've been doing for a long time without considering alternatives. Many construction projects are actually still one-off projects that don't leverage economies of scale or learnings from previous construction projects. Construction could be a lot cheaper and much less labor intensive than it is today.

CLT could actually make on-site assembly a lot simpler and faster than it is today. Ship pre-fab components created in large scale facilities optimized to manufacture those cost effectively. Assemble on site using simple tools and processes.


I don't work in the industry, but from my admittedly very consumer-oriented perspective that wanted to build a house for a while:

The reason why economics of scale never really made sense in this context was that shipping the prefab components to the building site mostly wiped out the savings.

Ignoring the actual shipping cost (which is substantial for heavy things that get assembled into a house), it also comes with the risk of things getting damaged while en-route etc. another reason is the fact that places in reality very rarely are actually the same. They can do best effort, but things will likely still vary a little. That's another error scenario wiping out a good chunk of the savings, which fundamentally doesn't exist of you just build on-site.

I'm not knowledgeable on this new material to judge wherever this could potentially change this status-quo, but I wouldn't hold my breath either.


I think the concerns you raise aren't actually show stoppers for a lot of prefab housing that has been happening for decades.

Wood is a lot lighter than steel and concrete. And that has to be transported as well. So you'd have less cost there, not more. About 50% weight savings. That's a lot of diesel.

As for parts getting damaged. That's what insurance an warranty are for. I don't think that's a show stopper issue.

And there are advantages to producing prefab components in a facility that is optimal for that and climate controlled that has all the right tools, specialists, equipment etc. Also, pooring concrete in the winter is problematic. Water freezes. And it expands when it does so. Working with steel is a PITA when it freezes as well. It conducts heat very well. Construction sites aren't very active in the winter in those places that have them for this reason. Prefab wood components don't have a lot of these issues. You can still work wood when it freezes. And bang in some nails. Or drill holes.


It isn't a show stopper, but it is why site built it competitive with prefab unless (as is all too common) prefab cuts corners. Prefab because it needs to ship on current roads often has size limitations of the modules that limit how you can arrange your house.


It’s not just construction company resistance to change.

The regulatory landscape around home building is intense. Especially for fire code. You basically have an entire industry of inspectors whose job is to fail things that don’t match any known pattern, so getting new patterns established is quite difficult.

There is likely also some resistance to it in the home insurance space where they are incredibly data driven, so until you have data built up to justify the statistically supported lower prices of stone houses, the insurance companies will keep premiums higher resulting in non standard materials being limited to the wealthy or fanatics willing to eat the cost.


Yes, the Glulam alternative tends to be a bit more expensive for some applications, but I am surprised that it is 5x more expensive than the steel solution. The reference I have (in Europe at least) is that the cost of Glulam is currently about 350 €/m³. Steel is quite more expensive, but of course, the profiles are slender, so less material is used.


Are you saying that wood is 5× the price of steel, or that glu-lam is 5× the price of wood?


The total cost of replacement as quoted to me by contractors is 5x. I've reached out to several and none of the quotes go below it.

I'm doing a lot of things myself, but anything that can get dangerous or wildly expensive when I fuck it up I let skilled contractors handle.


That's even less clear. The total cost of replacing what with what is 5× what? I think what you want to remove is steel beams, but I'm not even sure of that.


I have to replace a steel beam inside my house. It's old and when it was installed (1936), the building and load requirements were quite a bit different. With the modifications I'm making to the house, a new one is needed.

The beam runs across the ceiling in my living and dining room. Previous owners installed a lowered drywall ceiling to hide it but that took 20cm of height from the rooms. I'd like wood beams because I could leave this exposed in the room as a design element and have 20cm more ceiling height. I would not want to see the steel beam (even the new one).

For the entire replacement, including labour, materials, and anything else to have a finished ceiling, the quotes I received from multiple contractors are all at least 5x more expensive for the wooden beams.

This may ultimately not be down to the cost of the beam itself but rather that partial wooden construction is newer trend in Germany and they can simply ask for more but I don't have confirmation for that.


So the total building project becomes 5× more expensive if you use wood beams than if you get a new, thicker steel beam with a new lowered drywall ceiling over it? Where does the glu-lam alternative come in?


Nice work. Maybe you could do some preprocessing of the XML data, so that you actually have a diff of the content and not the whole XML block.


I thought about it, but decided against pre-processing: The repo is meant to be an archive, and the XML spec can be looked up. If I were to introduce a new structure by pre-processing the files, I think that might be a plus for reading, but not for archiving. Whoever has a concrete use case (the "Digebu" website above looks great!), can write their own pre-processor for that use case.


I am not sure that Wayland forces you to run all those things. That might be the case if you use Gnome, but e.g. sway is much more minimalistic.


I guess that using Consent-O-Matic [1] has saved me some hours of my life :)

[1] https://github.com/cavi-au/Consent-O-Matic


Thanks for sharing this! I've always wondered why the browsers themselves can't implement this type of feature to improve the web. I assume it's some legal factor.


For Chromium based browsers... why would the advertising based company make it any easier for users to opt out of advertising. The optimal resolution for Alphabet is users clicking "Accept All" and writing their member of the EU Parliament in frustration.


A risky strategy. There's a moderate chance that the EU comes to its senses and mandates an automated way to opt out of cookies.


What, like a do not track http header say.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track


Probably not. It will probably be more than a single flag.

And also it has to be something backed by legislation. Do Not Track was a dumb idea because it had no teeth.


As a die-hard Firefox user do note that it too exists solely because of advertising.


Firefox has the ability to send the "do not track" header iirc, but websites chose to ignore this. They'll rather nag the users.


Well yeah, obviously? Why would anyone ever respect the "do not track" header? The whole point is to get people to click "accept all" out of fatigue or apathy!



Brave just disables the cookie banners (they don't even load), while this fills such forms if I understood correctly. Somehow I get very targeted ads in other apps after using Brave, so I tend to use firefox-based browsers for personal (i.e. any not work-related) stuff.


Thanks for sharing. By skimming through readme some stuff is still not clear to me:

- Can it be used for rejecting consent and not just consenting to everything?

- If so, do you maybe know what happens when it doesn't have a rule for rejecting consent on some site? It would be great if it just lets the pop-up pop up normally.

- How does it handle the "legitimate interest" checkboxes? I.e. can I make it uncheck them all on every site that provides them?


The only thing I need to start writing more serious documents with Typst is an equivalent to latexdiff. But I really think (and hope) that this will replace latex in the future. Alone the compilation time makes it so much nice to use! Meanwhile I am supporting them by having a pro account, which is not even so expensive.


It was fun to read the recommendation to switch from W to X. I guess we are now back to W :P


ayland :)


This looks very exiting! I am a long-time Sony DPT/Fujitsu Quaderno user and love these kind of devices. My question would be whether you have plans in the future to make a 13.3" version. The 10" versions are just too small for my use (mostly reading scientific papers).


yes we do! ipad mini and 13.Xin versions are kawaii af


Can we pre-order the 13.X" version?


Great to hear that! I'll be looking forward to it.


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