…

Yes, the reason multiple people accused you of being gullible is because they are bots.

And if you don’t think there are backdoors then I have a bridge to sell you.

The best you can hope for in any case is increased friction. Because if you have pissed off a government org to the point they declare you an actual national security threat… you start realizing why israel et al tend to be known to have tools that can crack a few generations back.

Which is why journalists, when they talk about stuff like this, are pretty adamant that they don’t trust those devices at all. One of the more common tactics is to have completely separate devices for sensitive communication that are kept physically isolated from any of their personal devices… and preferably in a place that a trusted associate knows about. If someone gets taken away in a black van? Someone else goes for a walk with a power drill for no apparent reason at all.

20 or 30 years ago? Sure

These days? And ESPECIALLY for 3d printing? Fusion 360 IS the intermediary step between TinkerCAD and professional software… and is the professional software too. And OnShape isn’t THAT much of a step if you understand the basics from TinkerCAD et al.

Stuff can get VERY complicated if you are trying to make stuff for different processes (e.g. CNC) or want to run physics simulations (essential for any “real” part). But if you are just making a model to get sliced? TinkerCAD teaches you more or less everything you need to know to get going and the UX of Fusion and OnShape are insanely good.

And if you really DO want to go free: FreeCAD exists and is almost kind of usable these days (moreso if you have already learned the fundamentals of CAD in a more friendly tool).

The issue is that if you accept it, there will be no better option. Once you get out of the evangelists (who rarely actually contribute much code…) you are looking at professionals who are choosing to spend their free time contributing to the community. And having a few users (or, in this case, ad watching customers in the android app…) goes a long way. You don’t get that if everyone has decided the vibe coded slop is “good enough”.

Is human written code necessarily better? No. But, at the very least, if someone cares enough to obfuscate their project so it is not obvious it was shat out by Cursor? Maybe they care enough to provide support.

Eh. Some stuff does make sense to centralize.

Like, the concept of a thin client (what these basically are “close enough” to) is a really good one. They drastically simplify security and costs for corporate environments. And, even in the before times, it might genuinely make sense to just pay for a month/hundred hours of GFN if you wanted to play the latest AAA game rather than upgrading your five year old computer that handles everything else you play perfectly.

The bigger issue being that it now increasingly makes sense to pay for years/thousands of hours of GFN because of how broken the everything is. And the vultures (like Amazon and nVidia) smell the decay.

And… I didn’t want to crap on the other person too much but I do think p2p is why so many people think this can’t work. There is a big difference between streaming from your computer over starbucks wifi and connecting to a major data center. And there are also arguments for power and ecological impact but that becomes a MUCH bigger mess full of bad actors and incomplete comparisons.

Again, plenty of folk, self included, have no issues with streaming from a datacenter and geforce now is quite successful.

Understand that the codecs make a huge difference. But the actual inputs are literally bytes per minute of data. MAYBE kilobytes if you are particularly good at Starcraft

I don’t know what to say. Plenty of folk, myself included, have had no issues with the majority or games. And stuff like geforce now is quite successful

And a big factor in trying to combat/delay that is to not frame it as “This doesn’t even work”. Because then it is literally one free trial away from being normalized for like 95% of the audience.

Can we not pretend the problem is solely performance based? People keep doing this with generative AI and it keeps resulting in “oh shit, ghibli AI is so awesome”.

Especially since… can you watch a twitch stream? Congrats, you can stream a desktop. Even back with Stadia it was very much viable to play games like AssCreed over streaming and have a very comparable experience to it being local. And stuff like Geforce Now actually work REALLY well.

The issue shouldn’t be “can you make this perform well enough I want to use it”. It should be about ownership and the implication for… everything if all “personal computers” exist solely in a data center and all documents exist solely in The Cloud and so forth. Preservation of anything becomes nigh impossible and you suddenly have to pay a monthly fee to ever see your kid’s pictures again.

Yes and no.

At its very core? “Agentic AI” is about the idea of having a bunch of different “agents” communicate with one another in a network with defined(-ish) communication pathways. This is an “agent network”. And if that sounds like microservices/task graphs/how every fucking app works then… you win the No-Prize!!

And, in that regard, it isn’t any difficult. This service has access to that database. It always has. Hell, this service might still have zero “AI” in it but count as an “agent” for marketing purposes. If the credentials are checked and passed in an appropriate and authorized way, it is as safe as it ever has been. Which… is a different depressing discussion.

The issue comes into play when you are looking at people rapidly rewriting existing infrastructure just to say they did. And doing so with generative AI that they fundamentally can’t vet (even if they wanted to). THAT is how you break things and THAT is how you introduce new CVEs.

The issue isn’t that you have this data stored in a SQL table that is accessed by that service which was pre-seeded with credentials in a secure way. The issue is that you have no rewritten both that service and the SQL server in a way that “optimized” things by removing that costly security check.

Yes. For true emergency/disaster relief, that is the baseline. I doubt most of the meshtastic repeaters will survive a real storm and you can bet people will be spamming/attacking longfast from the comfort of their homes a county or three over. And there is no good way to communicate proper regional channels ahead of time.

But not every internet outage is a disaster. I live in a region where it is not uncommon for construction crews to cut the fiber line and take out all traffic for the county… sometimes multiple times a month… And I can speak from experience that having a mesh network with locals is incredibly useful for “Yes, it is all of us. And Verizon/Tmobile/Spring is also out” as well as “If you go to the park on 5th and MLK you have line of sight to a working cell tower”. And even just “So… I got all of Frasier on my Plex if anyone wants to hang out for a few hours”.

If you whip out your emergency HAM radios (without a license) during that? You can bet ALL the narcs are gonna tattle on you because “you weren’t prepared”.

But even during the prelude to a disaster it can be an issue. We also have wildfires in the region and get a pretty big scare maybe once a decade. Last time we were in a state of “be ready to evacuate at a moment’s notice” for the better part of a week. And just a bit of gossip that “today is going to be the day” was enough to trigger panic and clog up cell service faster than you can say “9-11”. We even got an emergency push telling us that there were no planned evacuation orders for the day and to go about normal activities.

If you are someone frantically trying to figure out where the school took your kids? Yeah, you have an emergency. If you are someone who doesn’t have a strong support network trying to figure out what is even going on? The narcs are gonna whinge at you. But, like I said, it is very useful to coordinate your evac with that support network. You can plan ahead of time to try to all get hotels/campsites in the town a few hours North. Then you drive through the hell of the evac until you get a few cell towers away, pull over, and use an app to book a hotel/campsite. But if all the people with families have to go South to pick up their kids from the school drop off site? You can only communicate when you are all an hour or three away from town and… ain’t nobody going back through that traffic snarl.

Hopefully it ends up being a false alarm and you come back a week or two later to some smoke damage (that everyone TOTALLY fixes…) and not much else. But it’s the difference between a week or two where you are able to hang out with your friends and have some degree of normalcy versus a week or two isolated and worried that you are going to lose everything.

And that is where mesh networks thrive. I am not talking about “I have a repeater in my garden” (which I should get on…). Stuff like the t-deck is what is actually useful. Plug it in, turn it on, and the pseudo-blackberries mesh with each other well enough for coordinating because enough people in town are doing the exact same thing.

One thing that people trying to make Meshtastic/Meshpro/whatever work might want to try:

odds are that your town/community have a social media system that is generally used to discuss events and the like (probably facebook, sometimes reddit). Make a post on there basically providing a link to a “getting started” guide and the credentials/key for the local mesh.

And, most importantly: Schedule an event (maybe every other month or once a quarter) where everyone with a device should turn theirs on and either be near a window or stand outside. That is a great way to rapidly detect all the temporary nodes that might only exist during a “not emergency” and for people to debug all the messes because meshtastic is a cluster.

Got it. Nobody should consider the need for a license because, in an emergency, you don’t need one. But also get a license so that you can use it in non-emergencies otherwise you’ll get a fine.

Good talk.

If you are in a situation where you need help, the odds of someone (even the person you have been talking to for weeks on the radio) doing a day or two journey to MAYBE be able to reach you is pretty slim. And such long distance communication has other implications for bad actors.

And in the event of “rebuilding” some kind of community, you aren’t going to be using a handheld device at all. You’ll raid… I don’t even know what at this point (I miss Radio Shack) to install a radio on the tallest building you can find. Oh, a HAM Radio Nerd’s house. That’ll work.

Whereas if you are trying to communicat4e with others and signal for rescue? Whatever you can get from walking up a hill/mountain or climbing the stairs to said tall building with your handheld is probably about what you can expect.

Same with in stuff like hurricanes and the like. If you are in a region that is at all hospitable then the relief teams know to send helicopters/people to that area. And if you are in the kind of situation where even a few hours might mean the difference between life and death… odds are nobody is coming.

Maybe you’d understand more things if you continued to read after the first opportunity you see to spew whatever you want to?

But in a “the internet is out” situation? Or even a “please evacuate in a calm and orderly fashion” for a wildfire or a bad hurricane? That is where meshtastic (et al) shine and it is well worth convincing friends to pick up a t-deck or whatever. Excellent for the “is it out for everyone or just me?” checks. Also useful for letting people know which field can see a cell tower a county or two over for emergency communication or to even coordinate whether you are all gonna head North or South to hang out for (hopefully just) a few days.

I’ll also add on that it is useful to be able to practice and get familiar with a tool without risking a fine.

I wish this energy was just put towards promoting ham, tbh.

I wish you put more energy towards reading the comments you are replying to

Yeah… if I am trying to reach people tens of miles away during The Apocalypse, I am already dead.

Anyone who is within range to be helpful (or… not) would generally be within signal range of a handheld.

In a true emergency? Yes, HAM is the way to go and I need to get around to buying one of those super sketchy Baofengs. In theory you can configure them to use without a license (which is also on the todo list) but it is super easy to tick into the licensed use. How much people will care will mostly depend on whether your local HAM folk are narcs. But, regardless, all bets are off in a true emergency and Baofengs are dirt cheap.

But in a “the internet is out” situation? Or even a “please evacuate in a calm and orderly fashion” for a wildfire or a bad hurricane? That is where meshtastic (et al) shine and it is well worth convincing friends to pick up a t-deck or whatever. Excellent for the “is it out for everyone or just me?” checks. Also useful for letting people know which field can see a cell tower a county or two over for emergency communication or to even coordinate whether you are all gonna head North or South to hang out for (hopefully just) a few days.

And anyone thinking of using any of that for stuff the government don’t want you to: You are an idiot and you need to learn about how insecure all of those are.

Do yourself a favor:

Use Onshape until you are comfortable and confident with your CAD work. Onshape’s design is much more industry standard (I think it is derived from Solidworks?) and pretty much all of the workflows and terminology are similar. Contrast that with FreeCad where a lot of tools have very specific names and some are split out into two.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaTNTUzA5dM is a great video on the subject. Just… watch at like 1.25x-1.5x speed because Deltahedra has a very specific speaking cadence and… yeah. But a great example is the mindset of extrude (positive or negative) versus having to decide if you are padding or pocketing. It isn’t a huge difference once you know what you are doing but it can really trip people up when they are learning the ropes. Especially since most people will just say “make a sketch and extrude it”.

FreeCAD is an excellent second (or third) CAD tool. I strongly discourage anyone from making it their first. And yes, it sucks to use closed source cloud only nonsense. But OnShape is actually REALLY good (for now…) and it is more important to have that solid foundation so you can move on to FreeCAD.

Like, if you learn OnShape you have also more or less learned SolidWorks and Fusion360 and… If you learn FreeCAD… you have learned FreeCAD.

The other side is to make actual models in Blender. Blender… I actually like blender a lot. I don’t have enough of a background to know if the workflows are meaningfully different as my experience is limited to using one tool decades ago (might have been Maya?) for making models for UT before switching to Blender. Just understand that Blender is more for making “art” rather than functional parts.

And, when discussing stuff like this, it is important to understand that “all VPNs” actually means corporate and public VPNs.

If you want to have an actual conversation then context matters. Rather than just fixating on nonsensical overly literal interpretations because you only want to be “technically correct” by attacking a strawman.

If your corporate VPN is routing ALL traffic then your IT department are idiots. And I am pretty sure said company would thank google for blocking youtube from their employees.

It very much is possible to ban “all” public and even commercial VPNs. VPN traffic tends to have very distinct characteristics in logs and it is not overly difficult for orgs to get the IP ranges allocated to each company.

What is not possible is banning all vpn traffic in the sense that a friend or family member sets up wireguard for you. But that is a drop in the bucket to the point of being functionally nonexistent.

The middle ground, of course, are pseudo-botnets of compromised computers. But those also tend to be a fairly small percentage (outside of DDOSing) and are likely getting blocked for other reasons.