I like LibreCAD, but it’s a little too simple sometimes. I miss the power of AutoCAD, but I don’t miss its price.

Three things I want are

• being able to assign heights to objects and do 3D stuff
• being able to assign labels to objects (instead of circle3761 I’d like to call it ‘fountain’ or something)
• splines are really finicky, and you can’t do things like a fillet on more complex objects

It took a couple of days to get used to and probably a week of use before I was 100% comfortable, but I find that it meets most of my needs now.

I use LibreCAD for architecture work and will take a look at FreeCAD.

Has anyone else tried both for architectural work? How did they compare for you?

I feel an urge to go play Horizon Zero Dawn now.

I’m still using my Galaxy S8 with only one problem: Verizon’s voicemail app won’t run on something this old. Every other app is fine. It figures that the only app that encourages me to upgrade is from the phone company.

I’ve been doing this for 30+ years and it seems like the push lately has been towards oversimplification on the user side, but at the cost of resources and hidden complexity on the backend.

As an Assembly Language programmer I’m used to programming with consideration towards resource consumption. Did using that extra register just cause a couple of extra PUSH and POP commands in the loop? What’s the overhead on that?

But now some people just throw in a JavaScript framework for a single feature and don’t even worry about how it works or the overhead as long as the frontend looks right.

The same is true with computing. We’re abstracting containers inside of VMs on top of base operating systems which is adding so much more resource utilization to the mix (what’s the carbon footprint on that?) with an extremely complex but hidden backend. Everything’s great until you have to figure out why you’re suddenly losing packets that pass through a virtualized router to linuxbridge or OVS to a Kubernetes pod inside a virtual machine. And if one of those processes fails along the way, BOOM! it’s all gone. But that’s OK; we’ll just tear it down and rebuild it.

I get it. I understand the draw, and I see the benefits. IaC is awesome, and the speed with which things can be done is amazing. My concern is that I’ve seen a lot of people using these things who don’t know what’s going on under the hood, so they often make assumptions or mistakes that lead to surprises later.

I’m not sure what the answer is other than to understand what you’re doing at every step of the way, and always try to choose the simplest route (but future-proofed).

Technically, each time that it is viewed it is a republication from copyright perspective. It’s a digital copy that is redistributed; the original copy that was made doesn’t go away when someone views it. There’s not just one copy that people pass around like a library book.

I’m thinking about it from the perspective of an artist or creator under existing copyright law. You can’t just take someone’s work and republish it.

It’s not allowed with books, it’s not allowed with music, and it’s not even allowed with public sculpture. If a sculpture shows up in a movie scene, they need the artist’s permission and may have to pay a licensing fee.

Why should the creation of text on the internet have lesser protections?

But copyright law is deeply rooted in damages, and if advertising revenue is lost that’s a very real example.

And I have recourse; I used it. I used current law (DMCA) to remove over 1,000,000 pages because it was my legal right to remove infringing content. If it had been legal, they wouldn’t have had to remove it.

how do you expect an archive to happen if they are not allowed to archive while it is still up.

I don’t want them publishing their archive while it’s up. If they archive but don’t republish while the site exists then there’s less damage.

I support the concept of archiving and screenshotting. I have my own linkwarden server set up and I use it all the time.

But I don’t republish anything that I archive because that dilutes the value of the original creator.

Yes, some wikipedia editors are submitting the pages to archive.org and then linking to that instead of to the actual source.

So when you go to the Wikipedia page it takes you straight to archive.org – that is their first stop.

What do you mean by “engagement”, exactly? Clicking on ads?

In SEO terms user engagement refers to how people interact with the website. Do they click on another link? Does a new blog posting interest them?

Lmao you think Google needs to go through Archive to scrape your site? Delusional.

Any activiity from Google is easier to track and I have a record if who downloaded content if it’s coming from my servers.

The mechanisms used to serve ads over the internet nowadays are nasty in a privacy sense, and a psychological manipulation sense. And you want people to be affected by them just to line your pockets? Are you also opposed to ad blockers by any chance?

I agree that many sites use advertising in a different way. I use it in the older internet sense – someone contacts me to sponsor a page or portion of the site, and that page gets a single banner, created in-house, with no tracking. I’ve been using the internet for 36 years. I’m well aware of many uses that I view as unethical, and I take great pains not to replicate them on my own site.

I disapprove of ad blockers. I approve of things that block tracking.

As far as “lining my own pockets” goes, I want to recoup my hosting costs. I spend hours researching for each article/showcase, make the content free to view, and then I’m expected to pay to share it with anyone who’s interested? I have a day job. This is my hobby, but it’s also my blood, sweat, and tears.

And how do you suggest a site which has been wiped off the face of the internet gets archived? Maybe we need to invest in a time machine for the Internet Archive?

archive.org could archive the content and only publish it if the page has been dark for a certain amount of time.

You misunderstood. If they view the site at Internet Archive, our site loses on the opportunity for ad revenue.

I just sent a DMCA takedown last week to remove my site. They’ve claimed to follow meta tags and robots.txt since 1998, but no, they had over 1,000,000 of my pages going back that far. They even had the robots.txt configured for them archived from 1998.

I’m tired of people linking to archived versions of things that I worked hard to create. Sites like Wikipedia were archiving urls and then linking to the archive, effectively removing branding and blocking user engagement.

Not to mention that I’m losing advertising revenue if someone views the site in an archive. I have fewer problems with archiving if the original site is gone, but to mirror and republish active content with no supported way to prevent it short of legal action is ridiculous. Not to mention that I lose control over what’s done with that content – are they going to let Google train AI on it with their new partnership?

I’m not a fan. They could easily allow people to block archiving, but they choose not to. They offer a way to circumvent artist or owner control, and I’m surprised that they still exist.

So… That’s what I think is wrong with them.

From a security perspective it’s terrible that they were breached. But it is kind of ironic – maybe they can think of it as an archive of their passwords or something.