I checked out Aetheris a while back. Congrats! These projects are tough to keep slogging on with.
To be fair, solidcore/SMLib are more mature in some ways than popkern. SMLib uses non-manifold topology for booleans, which popkern is actively working on now, and it has years of real-world use behind it, a level of hardening popkern is still working towards. solidcore builds on that as a Rust port.
On robustness, booleans, fillets, and chamfers are general in popkern, and they work well on a lot of parts, but there are known weak spots. Dense hole arrangements, near-tangent curved contacts, and fillets running into other fillets at awkward corners can still fail. My real-part test corpus is smaller than I'd like too. There are 40+ years of publications to reimplement, and that's a big part of how I'm closing the gaps.
Definitely open to collaborating. Your AP242/PMI and import-qualification work is well ahead of mine, and a shared corpus of hard parts we both run could be useful for both of us. My project socials are on popkern.dev, feel free to reach out!
Hi HN, I'm Graeme. popkern is a free, open-source parametric BRep CAD kernel in Rust. You can try it in your browser here, no install: https://popkern.dev/live/ (I recommend checking out the six-axis robot arm example near the end of the examples list, it's 57 parts and ~1,200 features, all built from script). popkern is currently released under AGPL-3.0, with an exception so your scripts, models, and STEP files remain entirely yours.
The thing I'm proudest of: where several fillets of different radii meet at a corner, most kernels leave a curvature break you can see in reflections. popkern fills those corners with a certified G2 (curvature-continuous) patch, so zebra stripes flow through unbroken: https://popkern.dev/assets/img/zebra-corner.png
Other bits that might be interesting:
- Parts are short Rhai scripts. Bigger parts are folders of numbered "migration" scripts, like database migrations, so models are git-friendly and you can scrub through their history. A later step can reach back and modify an earlier feature.
- The model viewer in popkern live allows you to see into the model via a section view.
- All supported: booleans, fillets/chamfers, sweeps, revolves, lofts, shelling, constrained sketches, STEP in/out, and MCP for direct agent usage.
- When an operation can't produce a valid solid, it refuses and tells you why instead of returning something broken.
How it's built: the code is written by AI agents working from published CAGD research, under my direction. I spend a lot of my time reviewing research to identify solutions that close gaps. Every change must pass thousands of tests plus the kernel's own validity checks, and results are cross-checked against OpenCASCADE wherever the two are comparable. Happy to go deep on how that works.
What's missing: a lot, it's early. Booleans fail many tricky cases, and non-manifold topology is being built out right now. Similarly, the breadth of fillet support will grow over time, and there is much to improve with regards to surface healing. Fuzz testing for all three of these areas will be tackled soon and help harden popkern a great deal.
I hope people find it useful even this early, and I’d love to hear what breaks. Happy to answer questions.
I intend to open source it once fillets work real good. That will take a while, but I've made pretty good progress since I started 10 weeks ago.
Medium term goal is to release a GUI application that can be used to import STEP files and just do very high quality fillets in. Would be very useful for many hobbyists, I think.
"They just work" is a surprisingly important start. FreeCAD improved a lot with it's latest release, but it still has many flaky gaps. Caps / apices are especially hard.
Higher order continuity native to the blend would be a requirement for many, too, and the algorithms only get harder and trickier to verify correct.
I just bought my ppu digitizer two days ago! Very excited to get that working.
There are a couple reasons you would go this route or classic nesrgb, and I was very tempted (I might still do a nesrgb on my other nes, if ppu digitizer goes well).
Primary one is lumacode is a digital signal that requires interpretation before it can be input into a tv. You can use the creator's rgb2hdmi which requires a raspberry Pi, or you can use a scaler like retrotink or ossc (pro). An RGB connection is standalone in many setups, and also works with scalers. If you want to interface with a CRT, lumacode doesn't immediately support that.
Additionally, ppudigitizer doesn't (directly) support multiple palletes. You are stuck with whatever your lumacode interpreter provides (though you could in theory change this yourself).
Only the vaccinated will preferentially evolve variants that are resistant to the vaccine. The vaccines are leaky, as evidenced by the recent outbreak in the Northeast. A saner strategy with leaky vaccines is to vaccinate the small population that is vulnerable and let the rest of the population of develop a natural herd immunity. Otherwise you are creating a fitness advantage to resistant strains.
This is not how it works, and "natural" herd immunity has never been a real concept in epidemiology - which it is clear you are speculating on without bothering to read about but should also be trivially obvious from the fact that until vaccines none of the vaccine preventable diseases ever went extinct on their own.
> Herd immunity is a form of indirect protection from infectious disease that can occur with some diseases when a sufficient percentage of a population has become immune to an infection, whether through vaccination or previous infections, thereby reducing the likelihood of infection for individuals who lack immunity.
Yes, and wikipedia is not the study of epidemiology.
Epidemiology as a field did not publish papers or study the idea of "natural" herd immunity till last year when politicians started throwing the term around and a whole lot of researcher's scrambled to see whether this insanity had any merit.
Of which the answer is what we already knew just spelled out more specifically: no, this doesn't actually happen in the wild without vaccines, because it's literally just spreading the virus. Viruses burn themselves out after infecting basically everyone, provided immunity is long lasting.
It is misleading though, since this definition is merely ‘flattening the curve’ for the rest of human life, and accepting the increased death rate every year. By contrast, a successful vaccination effort also ‘flattens the curve,’ but additionally substantially reduces the rate of deaths. The latter is what we have observed happen with high confidence in the vaccinated population for COVID: deaths of vaccinated individuals is much less common than for unvaccinated (back of napkin math seems to currently be somewhere between 100-1000 to 1 across most age ranges)
I don't think when people talked about herd immunity they meant that the coronavirus would be wiped out, just that it'd get the replication rate down to a manageable level. Just like those diseases that vaccines wiped out, the young would always be at risk of being infected. In this case though, the young (babies excepted) are also fairly protected from it getting serious.
NMN is not approved yet but you can buy them online from reputed sellers. Check their 3rd party testing. Dont buy from Amazon/Ebay, some of independent tests came up with 0% NMN (so what are they?)
Vitamin B3 also increases NMN level and is a precursor to NMN.
It's probably better to just take nicacin (B3) as its safer until NMN is proven to be safe for human in longer doses. NMN is too large molecule to enter cells so anyway its broken down before it can be absorbed.
B3 is a precursor to NAD+ but you also need some amino acids to make it.
Taking NMN directly also had some health issues that were discovered recently. More importantly it can speed up cancer if you are predisposed to it or if you already have undiagnosed cancer.
as far as I can remember, one of the treatments of cancer is removing nmn from body.
You can buy niagen, which has nicotinamide riboside (NR), which is basically the same thing - the goal is to increase NAD+ in the mitochondria. NR is an immediate precursor to NMN which is NR with an added phosphate group, which makes NMN itself unlikely to enter any cell directly.
Religions house many people fearful of what is happening in their lives, the lives of their loved ones. They want explanations for why their expectations and needs are not met. Is it surprising that the powerful would leverage that fear?
Funny how the Hebrew and Greek words for fear have so many other meanings, and yet the church has taught but one for so long when considering the "fear of God".
Seems to contradict "perfect love casts out all fear". Perhaps we would all be better off if we understood "wisdom begins with the awe of God" as the preferred intention.
I checked out Aetheris a while back. Congrats! These projects are tough to keep slogging on with.
To be fair, solidcore/SMLib are more mature in some ways than popkern. SMLib uses non-manifold topology for booleans, which popkern is actively working on now, and it has years of real-world use behind it, a level of hardening popkern is still working towards. solidcore builds on that as a Rust port.
On robustness, booleans, fillets, and chamfers are general in popkern, and they work well on a lot of parts, but there are known weak spots. Dense hole arrangements, near-tangent curved contacts, and fillets running into other fillets at awkward corners can still fail. My real-part test corpus is smaller than I'd like too. There are 40+ years of publications to reimplement, and that's a big part of how I'm closing the gaps.
Definitely open to collaborating. Your AP242/PMI and import-qualification work is well ahead of mine, and a shared corpus of hard parts we both run could be useful for both of us. My project socials are on popkern.dev, feel free to reach out!
reply