> things like variables and such do not quite work in the way you would expect from a programmers point of view.

I'm a novice at OpenSCAD still despite doing a bunch of small projects with it recently. Can you give an example of this happening? Most of the confusing stuff so far has been geometry breaking my brain and not some kind of scope issue.

Well, you could be forgiven to think that if you wrote i=5; some code and then i=12; that 'some code' is executing with i set to 5. Instead all code is run with i=12 because there is only one value for a variable per scope.

This can lead to extremely annoying bugs because your brain is wired to read and understand this stuff sequentially rather than all at once. I've stared at some page of OpenSCAD code for a long time before realizing that it was yet another one of those footguns.

So it's not the C of CAD, it's the Verilog of CAD. Got it.

That's a good analogy. The annoying part is that it looks like C, but it really isn't.

What is a "squat-length string"?

I realize this is one of Claude's copy tells (using excessively hyphenated words) but in this case I can't figure out what it means.

I'm curious whether anyone has run into hallucinations with this kind of use of an LLM.

They are pretty great at converting data between formats, but I always worry there's a small chance it changes the actual data in the output in some small but misleading way.

Guess you didn't see the old version of the screenshots on the page, which showed things like 1.5 pounds of lamb being converted into 1.5 kg, that is, more than doubling it.

I've used OpenSCAD for a few small projects. The main draw for me is avoiding all the "fiddly mouse stuff". I figure it's a trade-off between simple stuff being more complicated, and complicated stuff being easier to bulk edit and organize.

This is a neat idea.

I don't know enough about the underlying proof-of-work stuff to comment on how effective this could be, but I think it's pretty funny that the UI examples say "I'm a human".

I guess "there's only a few of me at most" or "I could allocate enough computation to this that I'm probably not up to no good" don't read as clearly.

It's a pity they don't ship to other countries than the US. I looked through their website and saw some fun stuff, but no international shipping.

Send them an email asking for a quote. For a small business like this, I'd expect they can probably ship it to you but the complexities of quoting shipping internationally means they don't have it on the site. Yes, shipping APIs are readily available, but implementing them costs more than the shoestring budget they likely have for the site and would also require integration with their inventory software. I'd be willing to gamble that they are likely using a homegrown WMS that is a combination of excel sheets and several layers of scripts from former and current employees who can write code but aren't professional developers.

I've consulted for similar size businesses, and shipping integration was always the reason to not support international shipments. Send them an email, you'll almost certainly hear back from a real person and if you let them know what you want to order they can probably make it happen.

Good to know, thanks for the explanation!

I'm probably just not thinking through the problem fully, but: Wouldn't this be better solved inside the coding assistants? They're the parent process and should be able to tell when a sub command has hung.

This is incredible, love how much further you've taken it than just the proof of concept as well.

This is probably just my opinion, but I kept thinking that a better word for "drive" given the domain would be "clock". It's basically a binary clock signal driving these, right? Maybe "clock drive"?

Yeah, I'm not 100% sold on "drive". There's a few competing ideas here -- initially I called it a "loom", but then I wanted to lean more into the analogy of loading a disk, so "drive" kinda won out.

I get the feeling there's some word in the vicinity of "clock" that I'm missing. Something like "metronome", "pulse", "synchronizer" etc -- because you're right, the (primary) purpose of the drive is to deliver phase information to the disks. Drawing a bit of a blank tho.

(Thank you for the feedback and encouragement!)

I opened this on a mobile device, and it only shows the top and bottom topic buttons. I was pretty confused until I tried turning on "desktop site" in Chrome and saw the left/right buttons. Having only a linear track of topics kind of undermines the overall idea!

yeah was originally a way to keep mobile more constrained and usable -- but definitely isn't as fun. Will add 4 directions back in on mobile :)

What brand of toothpaste do you use for this? I often struggle to find a toothpaste that's SLS-free but still has fluoride.

Also see Hello toothpaste (not affiliated) which has fluoride but not SLS: https://www.hello-products.com/products/naturally-whitening-...

Same problem for me, constant canker sores. Switching to Hello hasn't totally eliminated them, but it has reduced them.

If you don't mind a baking soda toothpaste, then another option is Trader Joe's. They made a baking soda & fluoride toothpaste that is SLS free. Been using it for a number of years now... Though it's been briefly discontinued and is slated to be back later this year.

Burst - https://burstoralcare.com/products/toothpaste-fluoride

Also Native has one too.

Sensodyne is one that's readily available at most stores.