Onshape is free in the browser as long as you are not doing commercial work. It’s a professional system from the founders of Solidworks that competes with all the top CAD tools.
I'm old enough and lucky enough to have had my first computing experiences (1978-80) be on a teletype in our elementary school which was connected to a minicomputer that the town owned. The connection was an acoustically coupled modem/analog phone line that ran at 300 baud. The exciting thing was to write very basic BASIC programs and see results on the printout. There was no CRT, everything was via the literal teletype - a keyboard and a clunky printer.
I'm very used to tools which keep track of connections to documents based on internal IDs, not folder structure. It seems primitive to be so brittle.
It seems even more stupid that it was so hard to get Codex to fix this for me. I managed to get it to solve the problem, but not before it got itself in this crazy loop of restarting the app, wanting to quit, quitting even if I canceled the quit dialog, and restarting over and over. I was able to reboot my machine and it had sorted out the missing references to most of the projects, but wow.
I've been using the Codex app for a while (a few months) for a few types of coding projects, and then slowly using it for random organizational/productivity things with local folders on my Mac. Most of that has been successful and very satisfying, however...
Codex is still far from ready for regular people. Simply moving a folder that Codex has been working on confuses the hell out of it. I can't figure out how to fix "Current working directory missing. This chat's working directory no longer exists". I've tried asking it to fix the problem and it tries lots of terminal commands and screws around with SQLite. Something this brittle is not for non-developers.
This is an amazing deep dive into color difference measurements and how sensitive the math is. The idea that we really need to save characters - bytes - in CSS when we have so many web sites chewing through 49 MB with the enshitification of the web is hard to reconcile.
I've been using Codex (GPT-5.4 extra high) to code custom FeatureScript in Onshape (3D mechanical CAD software). It's challenging to get it to do TDD that involves any visual reasoning. At the moment I've got tooling through Google Chrome Devtools MCP and Playwright to extract things and control the browser and I use some custom features which help with formatting and controlling debugging outputs (text and visual overlays). Mostly the text debugging outputs are very helpful to Codex. It will often add debugging payloads when we're focused on a particular issue. I do occasionally take screenshots and paste them into Codex and explain the issue that I'm seeing. It seems to understand a certain amount, especially if the issue can be seen in orthogonal views.
I have a pair of the first generation AirPods Max. They leave dents in my scalp if I wear them for any real amount of time. I've been an Apple person since the 1980s. This is one of the most disappointing Apple products for me ever, and I really don't want to know how much $$$$$ lifetime customer value I've contributed to Apple's bottom line.
Might as well be 3862 grams considering how much they hurt to wear for any length of time. I was also hoping this update would improve the ergonomics, but no. Still too heavy and no mention of any improvements to the headband.
This reminds me of the articles I occasionally see in the local newspaper about a restaurant that is closing down. So often it’s one that I’ve never heard of before that. To me, that’s the number one issue. If your likely customer base (or at least an audience member who reads a lot about the industry/market) hasn’t heard about your product, how are you going to have a successful business?
I'd really love to see the prompt(s) you used with Claude. The way the article was written I mistakenly thought you would expand upon that in a footnote or sidebar.
Yep. Came to say the same thing. I'd only used Codex in VSCode and in the Codex app, and at least those have the same history, but my understanding is that the cloud and CLI versions have this hierarchy of 'visibility' [0]. Perhaps they'll need to change this design decision?
Many have predicted the singularity, and I found this to be a useful take. I do note that Hans Moravec predicted in 1988's "Mind Children" that "computers suitable for humanlike robots will appear in the 2020s", which is not completely wrong.
He also argued that computing power would continue growing exponentially and that machines would reach roughly human-level intelligence around the early to mid-21st century, often interpreted as around 2030–2040. He estimated that once computers achieved processing capacity comparable to the human brain (on the order of 10¹⁴–10¹⁵ operations per second), they could match and then quickly surpass human cognitive abilities.
I would also argue that even people who I like a lot and have known for many years can be very different "people" online than in person. It's sometimes shocking the dichotomy. I try to remind myself and others to ignore some of the online weirdness and focus on the in person interaction.
As someone who's been doing mechanical product engineering for 30+ years, doing this as a first project is way more than jumping off the deep end. Impressive.