Dan Finlay

@danfinlay

Just futzing around

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Dan Finlay@danfinlay· 17h

She could be the new Elizabeth I. commons.und.edu/cgi/viewcont...

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· 6d

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· Jun 25

Neat game! Reminds me of codenames.

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· Jun 21

Before and after on that pond. This after isn't as clear as it got, but I mean, you can see at least 12 inches deep in there.

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· Jun 21

As a guy who once turned a duck-sewage-green pond clear, I'd just share that my mental model is that you're going to have plants as long as you have unspent nitrogen in the water. If I were them, I'd throw in a bunch of those nitrogen-unfixing enzymes.

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· Jun 16

obligatory gridfinity paint set. I actually hadn’t known where I’d put my model paint for a few years, but I finally found them and I’ve been adapting a lot of my organization to gridfinity for some kinds of tool things and this made a great set.

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· Jun 16

I had some reflective paint I used to maybe make the power buttons have a glow hopefully. I think the optics it gives are similar to them being encased in glass. Might record a splat of it later in good light.

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· Jun 16

Finally looked up a painting guide for the TNG type II phaser model I bought at a convention when I was in like 3rd grade (my dad was awesome). I did NOT expect my "speed paint" to end up in the guide for allowing those grooves to pop in the handle.

before, my childhood pass: Sharpied the black areas (honestly not terrible, but colored the peaks black instead of the valleys are on the show), white-out on the buttons, with some gold paint-marker on the thumb button (long worn off). I'd never painted the body before, it was cast in a resin that was close enough for my child self who had no paint kit.

I went back and forth between speckling dove gray and aluminum. In this picture, I think it's a bit too aluminum. I went back and forth until I thought it had a bit of a "cast aluminum" texture.

Here after I did a black wash on the grip and painted the top buttons. Still need to black the front.

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· May 30

Most of them are properly silly.

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· May 30

Generated a first round of kinda intuitively generated motions, just to confirm the model leg mechanisms + simulation environment work. One of the generated motions managed to blindly generate balancing code without having trained at all.

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· May 30

I probably want the accurate model in here for looksmaxxing reasons..

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· May 30

I gave Opus 4.8 a 3d model of one of the robots from the film "Batteries not included" and asked it to design me CAD and schematics to build it into an actual walking robot, and make it a digital twin to train with. So far, kinda plausible looking.

An OpenSCAD screenshot depicting a mechanism for a pair of 6 degree of freedom legs, utilizing a push-rod from the main body to the knee to keep weight focused in the body but achieving knee articulation.

A first 3d render of wheems' digital twin. Would be an animated gif showing the knee articulation but apparently a gif can't be one of several images on a post here.

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· May 30

Opus 4.8 here working with levels of confidence here that are unheard of (guessing hashes)

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· May 30

Well, you came this far. Let’s learn a few things. - Hooligan has anti-Irish roots - Scalawag goes back to making fun of shetland ponies.

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· May 25

OpenAI gunning for that $8T valuation.

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· May 13

I propose a new "R" to the three Rs of waste management: 🤖REPROGRAM💻 Breathe new life into old electronics! The motors can all still move! The sensors can all still sense! Reduce e-Waste: Make electronics do what you want them to do.

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· May 9

"Paperclips, you say?"

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· May 5

But these odd-sided prisms create focused zones that can be bent into lines perpendicular to the source, but their distribution isn't linear...

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· May 5

Ever waved a laser in front of a kettle's steam? You get a really great cross section of the smoke. I've meant to try this with a flat beam laser for a while, and then I'd been thinking of ways of recording multiple slices at once to get a sort of motion voxel cloud out of some vapor/smoke.

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· May 5

Hade Claude make a toy for me to play with different prism shapes with a laser to experiment with an idea for a kind of volumetric scanning.

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· Apr 28

The in-hand to in-bush exchange rate has been brutal lately.

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· Apr 28

So TIL that dental insurance can be... provably more expensive than not having it, and you can just ask your dentist what the insurance co pays, and then say "give me that price" as a cheap haggle.

An Anthem dental insurance company quote displaying a cost of $131.80/mo with an annual benefit limit of $1500/year.

A Claude transcript about the previous screenshot:

$131.80/mo but with a $1500 annual benefit limit seems like weird math to me. $131 * 12 > $1500, so why even buy insurance if they refuse to pay more than you pay?

4:40 PM
Claude responded: You've spotted the actual scam at the heart of US dental insurance.
You've spotted the actual scam at the heart of US dental insurance. The math really is that bad, and it's not an accident.

The $1,500 annual maximum has been roughly $1,000-$1,500 since the 1970s. It has never been indexed to inflation. A $1,500 cap in 1975 dollars would be about $9,000 today. Dental insurance has quietly become worse every year for 50 years while premiums kept rising.

Why anyone buys it anyway:

Negotiated rates. Even when the insurer pays $0 because you've hit the max, you still get billed at the in-network contracted rate, which is often 30-50% less than the dentist's "rack rate." A crown that's $1,800 cash might be $1,100 contracted. That discount alone can be worth more than the insurance payout.
The 100/80/50 structure shifts risk. If you have a bad year — root canal + crown + a couple fillings — you might rack up $3,000-4,000 in work. Insurance pays maybe $1,200-1,400 of that before hitting the cap. Premium cost $1,580. Net: roughly break-even to slightly negative, but you've capped your downside.
Preventive is "free" and uncapped at most plans. Two cleanings + exams + x-rays per person per year would be ~$400-600 per person retail. For a family of three, that alone is $1,200-1,800 of value, though you're paying for it through premiums.
Pre-tax dollars if you have an FSA/HSA, though that benefit applies to out-of-pocket spending too.

A continued transcript with Claude:

Can a consumer simply haggle with a dentist to get closer to the insurance company rate?

7:44 PM
Claude responded: Yes, and more reliably than most people realize.
Yes, and more reliably than most people realize. Dental offices have huge margin flexibility on cash payments because they're avoiding insurance overhead (claim filing, write-offs, slow payment, claim denials, billing staff time). Many will quietly offer 20-40% off rack rate if you ask the right way.

What works:

Ask explicitly: "What's your cash discount?" Many offices have a standard one — often 5-10% baseline, sometimes more if you pay at time of service. Some advertise it, most don't.
Ask: "What do you charge insurance companies?" Then ask if they'll match that for cash. This is the magic question. The contracted rate with Delta or Anthem is public information to them, and some offices will give it to you to avoid the insurance hassle. Smaller independent practices are much more likely to say yes than corporate chains (Western Dental, Aspen, etc.).
Pay upfront, in full, before treatment. This is the leverage. "If I pay the entire cost today by check or card, what's the best price?" Cash flow + no collection risk + no insurance paperwork is genuinely valuable to them.
Get itemized treatment plans and shop them. For anything over ~$500 (crown, implant, root canal), get written estimates from 2-3 dentists. Prices vary enormously — a crown might be $900 at one office and $1,800 at another within 10 miles. The high-priced one will often match a competitor's quote.

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· Mar 26

The access control section of this summary blog post fits in this screen shot. Now let's run through some scenarios & problems, then I'll get to a proposed solution.

Access control
Member list
Each space has a single member list. Each entry is a (DID, read|write) tuple. Write access is inclusive of read access. This is the only ACL data structure.

Write enforcement is ultimately handled by readers of the space. Any user can purport to write to a space on their PDS, but readers of the space compare incoming records against the member list and use that to define the real content perimeter.

The member list is published by the space owner and is synced via the same sync protocol as permissioned repos.

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· Mar 17

This new permissions modal is pretty nice. Not represented: I am fine being quote posted, but I don't want to be spammed when strangers do it.

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· Feb 9

Brand has an unforgiving perspective on people who strive to preserve the role of craftspeople over the results of their craft. It seems easy to transpose to modern AI sentiment.

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· Feb 9

“Maintenance of Everything” by Stewart Brand feels like such a grounded way of looking at the world, at a time that it’s easy to move so fast that we can easily get behind on what matters.

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· Jan 17

I’ve been chipping at my own take on his build. Been making a 3d printed keyboard mount for the leg.

the back of the leg mount, with the thumb screw in place.

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· Dec 15

I find myself in the bowels of irony. where the earliest instance of this misinformation I can find was shared by the apparent author of a book on misinformation.

A screenshot of a newspaper clip, claiming that some of the lights depicted in the governors video where the constellation Orion.

A screenshot of the book verified by Mike Caulfield.

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· Dec 14

When I buy a product, I expect it to shelter me from the reality of death in perpetuity.

Dan Finlay@danfinlay· Dec 9

Threw on the first movie of The Nutcracker recommended by Apple TV. Was surprised to find it starring Macauly Culkin soon after his Home Alone role. And then I noticed how similar the story arcs were, so now here you have it, Claude’s analysis of Home Alone as a retelling of The Nutcracker Suite.