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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.






  • 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.


  • Cheapest city with moderately decent public transit is probably Washington DC. With an average home price comparable to the one I live in without public transit of about $600,000 more than my current home. Even if I didn’t own my truck outright (8 years old, 58k miles) and the price of gasoline doubled, my payback period for 100% free public transit is greater than infinity with a 5% cost of money calculated in.

    It’s a bit like solar. I’ve run the numbers, and had others run the numbers, and the conclusion is that it would require replacing solar panels twice before I made back my investment, even with a 0% loan for the panels and install.

    I’d love to be part of it. I’d love to have European-style public transit. Even in the few places where viable public transit exists in the US, it’s not affordable to move to those places. shrug