It's not "really" espresso but the AeroPress does make great small, strong coffees. There's a James Hoffman video on it. You'll want to use the inverted method (aeropress upside down, mug on top) for a short brew time, a large dose of coffee, and relatively little water.

IIRC I used 18g coffee, stir immediately after pouring 90g of water, then after 90s I flip the AeroPress + mug and press. You don't want to use a ton of force or you'll end up with a really bitter taste.

I haven't built the OAT but I have built the larger variant (OpenAstroMount). OAM is pretty well designed in my opinion, with the biggest weak point being the connection to the tripod. In my case I machined a replacement for the printed part.

I believe OAT should be more than enough for light setup, but you have to make sure you have a good place to set it up. It isn't designed to sit on a tripod. They have a new model in the works (OpenAstroExplorer) which I believe is designed for tripod use without being as massive as the OAM.

You can bring the cost down by purchasing components for cheap on AliExpress. That's what I did for my OAM. Take advantage of their sale events too. You'll want to avoid cheaping out too much on certain motion components (namely pulleys and belts, possibly also bearings). For aluminum extrusions, a local supplier might be cheaper, especially if you can buy a long section and cut it yourself.

You could also look at the OG Star Tracker for a cheaper build, though I believe that doesn't support GoTo and may not have as good performance.

I work in CV and a lot of labs I've worked with use consumer cards for workstations. If you don't need the full 40+GB of VRAM you save a ton of money compared to the datacenter or workstation cards. A 4090 is approximately $1600 compared to $5000+ for an equivalently performing L40 (though with half the VRAM, obviously). The x090 series cards may be overpriced for gaming but they're actually excellent in terms of bang per buck in comparison to the alternatives for DL tasks.

AI has certainly produced revenue streams. Don't forget AI is not just generative AI. The computer vision in high end digital cameras is all deep learning based and gets people to buy the latest cameras, for an example.

Last I tried it, there was no fix. Their latest update on the website says:

The work on the toponaming problem is an ongoing project, and we are very grateful to the FreeCAD community for contributing a lot to that effort. But it’s not complete yet, there will be much more to say when it’s largely done. So let’s focus on the other three.

So I take it they haven't implemented a fix. They previously said they were going to work with the FreeCAD team on mainlining a toponaming fix, using realthunder's work as a proof of concept, but said fix has not landed in mainline FreeCAD yet. I believe that's the major feature they're looking to implement for FreeCAD 1.0.

Definitely excited for Ondsel though! Hopefully that fix can be integrated quickly.

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

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.

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.