IMO the bigger problem with FreeCAD is the topological naming problem. It's very easy to get frustrated because your model broke due to a change you made in an earlier feature.

The UI isn't amazing though, and that unfortunately happens quite a bit with open source software. Hopefully it'll go the way of Blender and KiCAD with an eventual major release that overhauls the UI.

Ondel has a nicer user interface, but I personally use and recommend realthunder's LinkStable branch of FreeCAD. Mainline FreeCAD (and by extension, Ondsel) suffer from the topological naming problem, which can be especially jarring to users coming from proprietary CAD software. realthunder put a lot of work into a solution that handles the problem pretty well, so I'm using his fork until toponaming gets mainlined.

Personally, I'd prefer that projects use forums for community discussions rather than realtime chat platforms like Discord or Matrix. I think the bigger problem of projects using Discord is not that it's closed source, but rather that it makes it difficult to search (since no indexing by search engines) and the format deprioritizes having discussion on a topic over a long period of time. Since Matrix is also intended for chat, it has these same issues (though at least you can preview a room without making an account).

As of right now VLC also doesn't properly support Wayland, but MPV does. It's a great piece of software!

Agree on the sentiment about VLC though, having an open source project demonstrate what is possible and stand the test of time definitely paves the way for future work and improvements.

I'm a researcher in ML and that's not the definition that I've heard. Normally the way I've seen AI defined is any computational method with the ability to complete tasks that are thought to require intelligence.

This definition admittedly sucks. It's very vague, and it comes with the problem that the bar for requiring intelligence shifts every time the field solves something new. We sort of go "well, given these relatively simple methods could solve it, I guess it couldn't have really required intelligence."

The definition you listed is generally more in line with AGI, which is what people likely think of when they hear the term AI.

I believe this is the referenced article:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.03348

I think what they mean is that ML models generally don't directly store their training data, but that they instead use it to form a compressed latent space. Some elements of the training data may be perfectly recoverable from the latent space, but most won't be. It's not very surprising as a result that you can get it to reproduce copyrighted material word for word.

Not sure what other people were claiming, but normally the point being made is that it's not possible for a network to memorize a significant portion of its training data. It can definitely memorize significant portions of individual copyrighted works (like shown here), but the whole dataset is far too large compared to the model's weights to be memorized.

Entirely fair! I think FreeCAD is still fine for hobbyists like myself though. It does take quite a bit of getting used to (I came from Fusion360 and Inventor first) since it operates somewhat differently, but it's good that we have at least one option.

Hopefully it'll see more development and become substantially more viable in the future.

This is a result of the topological naming problem. FreeCAD currently doesn't handle this well at all. There's been a lot of work on this front though - you can use realthunder's fork which should be a lot better in this regard. Alternatively, you can avoid creating features directly on top of other features, and instead make planes and reference them exclusively.

This isn't true? Fillets and chamfers are available in the PartDesign workbench.

The big thing you get with frameworks is super simple repairability. This means service manuals, parts availability, easy access to components like the battery, RAM, ssd, etc. Customizable ports are also a nice feature. You can even upgrade the motherboard later down the line instead of buying a whole new laptop.