That's not true. Most just charge a surcharge for under 25. When I was under 25 I bought a AAA membership which waved that surcharge as several major car rental companies.
Most of the truck rental places DGAF how old you are as long as you have a valid license. All the B2B ones basically expect that the person doing the rental won't be the one doing the driving and they're gonna slap a min-wage 18yo in the seat regardless.
Programmatically generating geometry is very cool, but I don’t know of anyone doing real work with it. OpenSCAD is probably the best power-hobbyist software I know of for this purpose. AutoDesk seems to be trying this approach with DyanamoBIM, which I’m excited to experiment with (I just don’t get visual programming though).
Personally, I would never consider a web-based software for professional use. An opaque profit model makes me think you’re looting my intellectual property to resell, mining crypto with obfuscated JS or WASM, or you’re snatching up market share to get bought by Google who will just kill the service and leave me hanging.
There’s a lot of room for better software in AEC but CAD is pretty robust and very affordable at this point.
AutoDesk has supported this kind of automation from almost the very beginning (originally you had to use their Lisp variant AutoLisp but now there's more flexibility).
I agree with you about the web-based criticism though. Working in a browser feels pretty limiting and it's so slow.
I've been programmatically generating geometry in Dassault CATIA since 1998 or so. Relational Design is essentially the CAD version of object oriented programming.
I would encourage looking into Rhino3D and Grasshopper3D. As @jpgleeson mentions - this is already widely used by architects as they move from a world of buildings made up of mass-produced identical components (e.g., every brick is the same shape and size), to a world where mass customization is possible (e.g., every brick has variable shape, massing, structural properties, etc.). Being able to prescribe that programmatically has a lot of promise. Tools like Grasshopper already enable some of this customization via code as you can see here https://developer.rhino3d.com/guides/rhinopython/ghpython-ca...
Plugging into existing frameworks (like Rhino) is quite easy and can open the door to other realms of optimization/simulation for the designs you are scripting. For instance you could leverage generative design (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HLRtXSG7fQ) and other software that can be used to evaluate designs according against variety of criteria ranging from structural integrity, to environmental performance, to 3d-printability, etc. If there’s open source frameworks you can plug into, even better.. and if not.. then maybe that’s what’s missing: an easy standard way for various opensource projects to share and edit information.
Programmatically-defined designs make sense to me only if you can easily change parameters to quickly produce, evaluate, and optimize the designs/variations/results. Otherwise - Better to use a GUI that allows for more direct (and less abstracted) expression of designer intent
Similarly open source CAD makes sense if it can be augmented by other open source projects - including sharing and editing data from these various projects
> Personally, I would never consider a web-based software for professional use. An opaque profit model
I worked on a web-based version of a major player in the industry and the projected ended up getting canned. Ironically, because (I think) they really couldn't figure out a good way to profit from it. A license for the desktop product was like $xx,000, but the ideas tossed around for the web-based version were like $y.00 per minute of instance time (basically like EC2 pricing). Turns out that $y would need to be Very Large to be even remotely profitable.
The product itself was pretty slick though. I was really surprised at how well it performed.
It's a little different but essentially it takes data to define geometry and machine operations. We generate that data in code and pass it on to cadcode. Cadcode then passes that on to our NC machines.
I've previously worked at 2 large engineering companies in the oil and gas space, and both were using automation to generate CAD models from configuration - not exactly the same thing, but close enough. They were doing this with both AutoCAD and SolidWorks.
> Personally, I would never consider a web-based software for professional use.
I've seen a lot of enthusiasm for OnShape (a relatively new web-based CAD tool) among professional CAD users, particularly when there's more than a handful of people working on one project.
I think the parametric constraint driven way of doing CAD is actually already pretty programmatic. While I'm not sure, I'm imaging that there might be some sort of isomorphism between CAD-style constraints and Prolog-style logic programming...
If there are disputes about consumption and production across national boundaries, who resolves that? Different parts of the world don’t even have similar objectives within the energy market. I also think an unaccountable international power utility that can control if I survive the winter or not is a terrible idea.
I don’t think there are many wheel guns that would give you 249,999/250,000 odds of survival. The number of people killed or injured by mRNA treatments is also not zero.
Sure tell that to the families of those who died from COVID19. Getting vaccinated is a much better way to get protection from COVID. I knew quite some folks who were hit by COVID twice, tell them that they were better off suffering through COVID twice instead of relying on the vaccine.
If I told you that it's extremely unlikely that you would die by rhino attack while going on a vacation to southern Africa, and your answer to that was "tell that to the family of X random guy who got trampled to death", as a reason for why you think i'm insane for saying you shouldn't be paranoid about African vacations, your argument would be obviously derided for being obsessive about focusing on only one abnormal thing. But apply the same logic to COVID and suddenly you think it's perfectly valid. It isn't. The vast majority of people who get the illness recover completely, and if you exclude the elderly, the statistical odds of recovery increase immensely. For the very young, they really are in the range of hundreds of thousands to one against dying.
Yeah poor analogy here, you can choose to not go to Southern Africa, you cannot will for COVID to not infect you. Why should we not be eager for vaccines when they are available for such a highly infectious disease.
Flip the scenario, during the second wave in India, we were one of the few families in our neighborhood who were lucky that no family members caught COVID. All the local hospitals were filled, a large number of people we know survived but there were people who died around 4-5% of the people we knew who were infected and 40% who came very close to dying. The Delta variant arrived when a significant part of the elderly population had been vaccinated. You should recheck the your stats about the elderly, the second wave was brutal to under 40 folks as a good number of above 40 people had been vaccinated by the time the second wave hit.
Sure COVID might have a low fatality rate of 2-3% but 2-3% of a very huge population getting infected by a rapidly infectious disease is still a humungous number.
I have no idea where you got your 2-3% fatality rate for COVID from but it's way off the mark. That is the CFR in certain high risk circumstances but the known IFR of the virus after nearly 2 years of study and data collation has been fairly reasonably established by multiple health agencies. Not surprised by the numbers you use though... CDC Best estimates as of March 2021, For all but the very oldest population segments it's well below 1% across all age groups that are not very elderly. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
For 20-30-somethings that probably read a pop-dev news aggregator? Probably not. Or are most of us in our 80s? There is also substantial variation in reported IFR between political jurisdictions per the CDC (1-9% I think). Seroprevalence based IFR estimates tend to be consistent across national boundaries (and is a much lower number), but I wouldn’t make so bold as to tell you to believe research studies over political appointees at the CDC.
Are populations with large majorities of people who’ve received 2-3 injections seeing total or near eradication of coronavirus? I’m not aware of any examples.
I think the hope is to market pharmaceutical products to people who do not currently see a benefit to them given their naturally acquired antibodies. Large quantities of product is expiring soon, and market share must be expanded as quickly as possible to avoid that cost.
You’re thinking about Peter the Great. The Czar. Also, if you think you can get credible reports from Pravda, about a country with Potemkin villages of all things, then I don’t think you’re looking very critically at that information.
I think the single study that supported cloth face coverings of no particular standard of performance was a mechanistic study that depends on the belief that respiratory illness spread is a direct function of the distance water droplets of an arbitrary threshold size travel from a simulated sneeze. Which, of course, is so obviously true it needs no supporting evidence.
> is a direct function of the distance water droplets of an arbitrary threshold size travel from a simulated sneeze. Which, of course, is so obviously true it needs no supporting evidence.
Except it turned out to be false, the primary mode of transmission for sars-cov-2 is aerosols that can spread throughout a room (hence the need for good ventilation), not droplets that quickly fall to the ground (which was what social distancing and masking was predicated on).
