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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • As a modeler, 3D printers are a bit like AI art to an artist. It’s fast, it can do some things that are nearly impossible to replicate, but it feels like a hack or a crutch at times. Part of the thrill of old-school modeling (for which I’m neither old enough nor patient enough) is taking very basic, simple shapes and making something realistic out of seemingly nothing. Adam is absolutely from that school. And - like AI art - to go from almost good to presentation quality is nearly as much work - or more - that just building from scratch. As a long time model rocket enthusiast, my printer is an amazing utility. But for some of the really intricate models, I have a lot less pride in the final product because I know I just pressed a button and it popped out.


  • Yeah, I made nearly that mistake. Twice, actually. First with a monoprice, then a creality. I probably have more money in upgrades on my CR10s than I have in the purchase, and I still haven’t upgraded the board. I keep thinking I’ll fix it but I’ve resolved to strip a couple of parts and throw it away. My Prusa XL preorder came last month. I made one update to it (for better TPU performance), and printed one QoL add-on (nozzle wipers). That’s it. I’m done. It prints like a dream, multi-material supports are indistinguishable from magic, and even swapping nozzles is fairly quick and easy. Now I’m (almost) exclusively printing things for my other hobbies rather than worrying that something on my CR10s will fail or need re-tuning.



  • Me: Should I buy a prebuilt 3D printer?

    Reddit 3D printing sub: Oh, heck no. I put mine together for $18.22 plus some spare parts from seven printers I got of craigslist for $1 from some widow. Only took me three weekends to do it, plus a couple hundred hours to update the firmware to match the parts and troubleshoot it.

    Me: Uh, so does it print better than the one I could just buy?

    Reddit: Well, I’m still tuning it for all my filaments. I’ve been through about 40kg, and I’ve got a trashcan full of benchys though. The last few have been pretty good.





  • Say your pc torrents 2 TB of media

    those people in engineering and comp sci who have massive files of projects

    Neither of those people are using windows as an appliance.

    because they already use backups to github

    This is where everyone who loves Linux - and nearly everyone who works in IT/CompSci fails to understand the rest of the world. If you have to do anything from the command line - or if anything is easier from the command line - you’ve excluded roughly 90% of the population from calling it “easy”. You may as well tell someone how to adjust the fuel mix in their carburetor or set up a bridgeport mill to make a quick replacement for the plastic buckle that broke on their backpack (and much stronger/durable to boot!). Not only does nobody today want to, they’ve probably only seen exist in a movie.





  • stealing * information* Nobody was harmed; nobody was deprived of life, limb, security, or physical property or currency. Knowledge was transferred without authorization, meaning that only the potential reduction of future profits for a corporation is at stake. It’s a breach of contract - about the least impactful thing that a human can do to non-human. This kind of crime should never result in prison, or else it should be applied to every knowledge worker, ceo, or vc who remembers any part of any business they’ve every been involved with in the past (which it never is).





  • You know what’s funny - before I clicked through to see the context, I thought you were replying to a comment I made about the Houthis attacking it ships in the Middle East. We get attacked by terrorists all the time. Lots of people around the world hate Americans because, like most of the colonial powers, we’ve been reading assholes to lot of people. They also hate us because the rules of life that were made up in the name of our imaginary deity conflicts with the version of rules that they made up in the name of their imaginary deity. And we hate them back.

    People are kidnapped and/or killed on a regular basis by “terrorists”. That’s a tragedy to everyone who hold them close. The lack of perspective is thinking that one particular tragedy is somehow larger because of the news coverage afforded.


  • This was my thought a well. Just using the internet at all guarantees that we’re supporting Amazon, Google, and Microsoft because they host most of the content.

    This conundrum points back to our need to have agency, and something OP will/should address. One way to lower anxiety is to understand where we have personal agency and where we don’t. No matter how hard or how long I beat on a brick wall with my bare hands I will not damage it, only tire and damage myself. This isn’t limited to man made/capitalism. I also cannot swim across an ocean. Recognizing when I can make a difference and accepting my personal limits allows me to focus my goals around things where I will succeed or produce results. They may be (globally) small, but they affect me and my community in a meaningful way. I might even use that brick wall to provide a brace for leverage or the water in the ocean for salt or brackish irrigation. Expending energy that I know will not affect change only lets them beat me twice.


  • Americans have no sense of perspective. I have friends who were affected by the tower collapse in NY. We sent more service members to die looking for Bin Laden than were killed that day. And more than 10 times a many people die from gun violence in the US every God damned year than died in all four plane strikes. And every one of those other tragedies destroys families and communities.

    It’s so overblown it’s practically a meme to everyone but the boomers and Christian “patriots” who need a way to make people angry about foreigners so they can ignore our home grown violent tendencies.



  • You’ve touched on a great point. The power provided is so low that solar can effectively provide equivalent power in nearly every application except one where the continuous operating environment is pitch black. 15x15mm for 0.0001w is small. For comparison, that’s about 1/6 of the power that falls on a 15x15mm patch in an indoor office (300lux environment with led lighting), out about the same as could be harvested by an efficient solar panel off the same size. You could collect a full days power from this battery (and store it in a 2mm thick li cell behind the panel) in roughly three minutes of sunshine or ten to fifteen minutes on an overcast day.

    There certainly are applications where it would be useful, but most could just as easily be served by a small solar patch and lithium cell or super capacitor.