> A horn or bell is mostly for telling other people "hey I'm here, stay out of my way and dont suddenly cross into my path"
This. I only use the bell on bike paths, too. Sometimes it feels like a game of pac-man, where baddies will wander into my path from all directions and in all kinds of ways. Cars doing a right turn, zombies staring into phones, people walking backwards (!), zombies staring into phones walking backwards, it doesn't end.
That is an issue on bike paths that are build inside a sidewalk, the cycling path is usually build using a smoother surface than the one designed for pedestrians. Plus it sometimes has a brighter paint.
I am pretty sure most people don't realize it but they are inconciously attracted to it. It just feels better walking on it.
That's an issue on any bike path in the US, even if it's a fire road in the middle of nowhere. I bet there are people walking their dogs or checking Instagram on the single track course that is used for the Red Bull Rampage.
Yeah, it happens on sidewalks, bike trails, mixed use trails, and dedicated bike lanes. If anything, dedicated bike lanes are the worst because they get errant pedestrians and cars.
No, every bike path in a city inevitably has crossings or is laid out next to a sidewalk. People just do their random-walk thing (Brownian motion, really, sometimes) and wander into the bike path.
I've been trying both Whisper v3 large and Parakeet in MacWhisper, and I inevitably go back to Whisper large. Which one is better depends on what you dictate, how you speak, and which languages you use.
This guide is legendary. It helped me to learn and follow the process, and I made some pretty successful parts. For example, my own keycaps for all keyboards that I use: much larger than usual (for my large fingers), with a pleasant gently matte texture, in beautiful colors.
Polyurethane resins are an amazing achievement, and very much underrated. So are platinum-cure silicones. With care, you can get design-to-parts precision of ±25μm, which is spectacular (and a bit surprising, too). The fact that modern polyurethane resins (Sika Biresin F50) have essentially zero shrink helps quite a bit, too.
Incidentally, there is a whole bunch of youtubers doing casting using epoxy resins, or cheap silicones, there is a large following, but this is not representative of what the techniques really allow.
If you want to step up from 3d-printing, this is the way to go! Especially given the proliferation of inexpensive desktop CNCs with really good precision (Makera and others).
Those resins are absolutely fantastic but do read the MSDS and be very careful, it doesn't take much to get yourself in the emergency ward with that stuff. Another risk to be acutely aware of is that these reactions usually are exothermic and can go runaway faster than you can blink of the conditions are right.
Of course, one should always read the MSDS. I use a 3M respirator with VOC inserts while working on these things. However, one should mention that a) polyurethane resins and platinum-cure silicones are much safer than many other compounds, and b) polyurethane resins are different from the more common epoxy resins and reactions are only very slightly exothermic. It's not a problem like when you're building a river table.
As a rough estimate, using a resin 3d printer is more problematic than these compounds.
A CNC router is on my list of tools to figure out and own. Routing aluminium, wood, and things like HDPE and being able to make moulds for silicones and resin? Yes please. 3D printing on the other hand never appealed to me.
I would strongly recommend NOT following the general advice of buying a cheap "3018" or something similar. Makera Z1 should be the baseline. Otherwise you're stepping into a world of frustration where you will spend most of your time trying to get your tool to work, rather than getting parts produced.
Unfortunately, reasonably precise and rigid mechanical assemblies do have to cost a certain amount of money.
Agreed. If you want to just make parts and not tinker with a CNC machine, get a Z1.
I had near-zero experience with CNC and got a Cavera Air last year and it mostly "just works" from the hardware side. I just fixture stuff and run my gcode, zero issues with the hardware. The Z1 seems to be even more streamlined w/r/t things like chip evacuation.
But, my god, Makera's firmware/software is fucking garbage. Especially the CAM workbench.
The community firmware and controller software (https://github.com/Carvera-Community) is so much better and feature-filled that it's kind of sad. They also have a tool library and post-processor for the FreeCAD CAM workbench in that repo which will let you make a clean break from Makera's terrible software.
On the upside: Makera apparently won't invalidate your warranty for using the community firmware/controller software, which is nice.
Start with one of the cheap kits on Amazon. A good chunk of the learning curve is software/design/workflows. On the machine side, learning how to properly secure your work pieces, and find the right bits, speeds, and feeds is another art. You can do all of that on a ~$300 3018 CNC kit. Your work output is limited in size, and precision, but that doesn't matter as much when you're just trying to get the hang of things.
I have both, and a manual lathe and mill, and a laser cutter. 95% of everything I do is with the 3D printers. There is no indexing, no work holding, no dealing with shavings or smoke or dust or cutting oil that gets everywhere, no accidentally breaking your last end mill, no screwing up the only one of the thing you're cutting into, no cutting down stock so it fits in your machine, etc. You just press print. Setting up another machine is a right hassle by comparison.
3D printing and plastic parts isn't good for everything, but it is good enough (and easier) for a lot of things.
Yeah same. I’ve done a lot of CNCing but 3D printing isn’t appealing because I don’t care much for making plastic parts. When metal 3D printing becomes hobby tier I’ll be all over it.
Today 3D printing makes a lot of thing possible. Now that multi-toolhead printers are coming, some already available, it's possible to make composite parts. Like hard frame in soft wrapper, conductive lines (resistance still high), etc. I'm still learning, but it's exiting.
As for CNC, some cheap tabletop are available. FreeCAD is useful for design and g-code generation. The problem with cheap they are imprecise and shaky. I'm thinking about using 3d printed frame with metal everything else. Should be light enough to lift with one hand. For precision it'll need calibration from time to time as plastic moves. The goal is to have 3 axis mini CNC mill able to cut soft metals with precision better than 0.1mm.
I currently use MacWhisper and it is quite good, but it's great to see an alternative, especially as I've been looking to use more recent models!
I hope there will be a way to plug in other models: I currently work mostly with Whisper Large. Parakeet is slightly worse for non-English languages. But there are better recent developments.
I wish they had a "and we won't screw you in two weeks" plan at, say, 5x the price. It's worth it for my business, I'd pay it.
Should I switch back to API pricing? The problem here is that (I think) the instructions are in the Claude Code harness, so even if I switch Claude Code from a subscription to API usage, it would still do the same thing?
FWIW I've only ever been on the API based plan at work and we never seem to run into the majority of the problems people seem to be very vocal about. Outages still affect us, and we do have the intermittent voodoo feeling of "Claude seems stupider today", but nothing persistent.
Of course it's a stupid amount of money sometimes, but I generally feel like we get what we're paying for.
I never managed to get anything useful out of opencode, to be honest. I tried it many times, with various models. Claude Code always just worked better.
That's one of the possible explanations, but I think too many people are seeing the same symptoms (and some actually measured them).
An "economical explanation" is actually that Anthropic subscriptions are heavily subsidized and after a while they realized that they need to make Claude be more stingy with thinking tokens. So they modified the instructions and this is the result.
> but I think too many people are seeing the same symptoms (and some actually measured them).
Or too many people are slurping up anecdotes from the same watering hole that confirms their opinions. Outside of academic papers, I don't think I've ever seen an example of "measuring" output that couldn't also be explained by stochastic variability.
That is very, very interesting. I've been hoping to have an assistant in the workshop (hands-free!) that I could talk to and have it help me with simple tasks: timers, calculating, digging up notes, etc. — basically, what the phone assistants were supposed to be, but aren't.
"You will have to unlock your iphone first" is kind of a deal-breaker when you are in the middle of mixing polyurethane resin and have gloves and a mask on.
More and more I find that we have the technology, but the supposedly "tech" companies are the gatekeepers, preventing us from using the technological advances and holding us back years behind the state of the art.
I'll be trying this out on my Macbook, looks very promising!
The computing power we all have in our pockets is staggering. It could be tool that truly makes our lives easier, but instead it's mostly a device that is frustrating to use. Companies have decided to make it simply another conduit for advertising. It's a tool for them to sell us more stuff. Basic usability be damned.
Siri does have a setting that'll activate it if you say "hey siri" while the phone is locked. Obvious privacy and battery usage concerns though, and it's still Siri, so it's a little clunky.
I've been replacing my Google Homes and Chromecasts with Snapcast streamers, and this is the next thing I've been planning to look into.
It's truly absurd how the Google voice assistant USED to work properly for setting timers, playing music, etc, and then they had to break it 15 times and finally replace it with much slower AI that only kinda does what you want. I'm done.
Selfhosted is the way to go if you want to keep your sanity. My wife has basically given up on any Google/Apple voice assistants being able to do anything useful above "set a 10 minute timer".
> It's also possible to make an MLX version of it, which runs a little faster on Macs
FWIW, I found MLX variants to perform consistently worse (in terms of expected output, not speed) than GGUF in my measurements on my benchmark that matters to me (spam filtering). I used MLX models in LM Studio. GGUF was always slightly better.
Perhaps someone who knows more can pitch in and explain this.
It isn't 100% clear, but what quantization were you using for each? I've had worse results with MLX 8bit than what you get with Q4 GGUF, same model, seems mxfp8 or bf16 is needed when ran with MLX to get something worthwhile out of them, but I've done very little testing, could have been something specific with the model I was testing at the time.
No, they can't, not unless we get rid of the fossil fuel lobby, which pretty much runs the world these days. Which isn't surprising, given that fossil fuels are the largest industry ever created by mankind. If you compare it to anything else which was actively harmful and yet big money tried to convince you it wasn't (like tobacco, alcohol, or really anything else), there is nothing that huge. So it isn't surprising that the industry fights change.
EV adoption has been successfully held back mostly by PR, Germany shifted from nuclear to coal and gas, the US president is doing everything to dismantle anything that isn't fossil fuel and promotes fossil fuels, the list goes on.
The fossil fuel lobby can only do so much. Solar has gotten so cheap it's taking over on its own. Companies are doing it for no reason other than the math makes sense. EV batteries are nearing that point too. You can only keep BYD out of the US for so long.
Sure, but you're attributing this, deliberately or not, to the wrong cause. It wasn't that the fossil fuel industry somehow won - it was range of factors possibly including geopolitics, some existing plants aging, an emotional response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and the Green lobby.
Basically, they voted to kill nuclear without a solid plan for an alternative, and coal/gas is the default option for filling the gaps left in the absence of timely and sufficiently rapid investment in other technologies.
Hmm. After former chancellor (Schroeder) heavily pushed Russian gas pipelines (Nord Stream 1 and 2) and then swiftly moved to working for Russian state-owned energy companies, including Nord Stream AG, Rosneft, and Gazprom, I have a different outlook on things.
One can never discount lobbying and influence behind the scenes, but Schroeder finished being Chancellor in 2005, which was six years before the initial post-Fukushima vote in question, and even longer since various aspects of the plan continued to be supported by various politicians.
He'd be a spectacularly successful lobbyist if your suspicion is correct.
This. I only use the bell on bike paths, too. Sometimes it feels like a game of pac-man, where baddies will wander into my path from all directions and in all kinds of ways. Cars doing a right turn, zombies staring into phones, people walking backwards (!), zombies staring into phones walking backwards, it doesn't end.
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