I had a booth about this at the Bay Area Maker Faire lately.

If we’re all printing the same object on our 3D printers, it’s proooobably a lot less trouble to just have someone injection mold it and save us all the trouble. 3D printers are really great for one-offs and mass-customization and things like that. Aaaaaand, I feel like it’s kind of an under-appreciated problem in 3D printing. Because, yeah, CAD is hard and we’re never going to reach a world where every 3D printer owner is very very comfortable with CAD, and so it should be more of a concrete goal for the 3D printing community to make sure that we’re focusing on this problem. It’s important that every 3D printer owner can do at least some amount of tweaking and customizing, otherwise we’re failing as a community.

Now, I don’t Tinkshame. I spent a lot of time learning Blender, FreeCAD, and OpenSCAD to prove Naomi Wu’s assertion that we should all just get over ourselves and use TinkerCAD. The only real problem with it is that it’s not really free, it’s “free at the pleasure of AutoDesk” where they could raise the “Mission Accomplished” banner at some point and turn it off. And there’s not really an open source version of it for roughly the same reason that random thingiverse models are always kinda halfassed and bad. Doing a good TinkerCAD-but-actually-free-by-some-definition is actual work to get everything right and polished and documented and bug-free and nobody really wants to pay for it.

Also, maybe I am pedantic and obsessive, but I don’t really like screwing around too heavily with models in a slicer, so I’d rather they take some of the magical code in the OrcaSlicer/PrusaSlicer/SuperSlicer tree and actually organize it into something that could be TinkerCAD-esque?

Anyway, the core of the talk of my booth was systems and libraries of 3D printable objects. So, for example, there’s the Honeycomb Storage Wall system and some of us have been writing some neat lil OpenSCAD libraries and models for it (and another group of people have been doing similar things in Fusion) where you can make a parametric model so you can measure your flashlight and print a cute 40mm holder for it based on the measurement without having to model things from scratch and it’ll click into the HSW wall and it’s fine unless you are married to someone who has ommetaphobia and then you need to make sure that the honeycomb is the same color as the wall. And the same is true for Gridfinity, just you can put that in the drawer.

And there’s also a lot of parametric models. I’m not sure what you are looking to print, but there’s a decent selection of people who have done stuff in Fusion or FreeCAD or OpenSCAD where you can download the model and change the parameters to get it a lot closer to what you want without going through all of the drama of making it all over again.

I love using OpenSCAD. I’ve got a buncha years of experience using various 3D modelling tools at various times and so I can use Blender or FreeCAD quite well actually, but in the end, I do a lot of functional bits and it’s so darn easy to just write some code because, actually, I’ve been working as a professional software engineer for quite some time.

So… dono, it depends on your aspirations? There were a good number of Gridfinity-like systems that were around before Gridfinity came out and they were … ok, but not great, but then Gridfinity came along and did a boxy-box system just like was already there but with some interesting tweaks and making it more amenable to real customization and suddenly everybody went gonzo over Gridfinity in particular. So you might not be just making a thing that exists in a dozen forms better if you borrow an idea and make your version of it.

Also, I learned 3D modelling tools mumble mumble years ago in a failed attempt and/or dodged-bullet because I’d wanted to do games or special effects as a kid. The software I learned on is long gone, but it turns out that once you are thinking about things, it tends to stick? Which means that I learned pottery while visualizing the objects I was making on the wheel as if they were in the CAD window of my mind, got good at photographic lighting based on what I’d observed in the 3D program, and then transitioned back to CAD because I wanted to make things, so it’s kinda one of those things where you probably won’t waste the time spent.

tl;dr: I learned OpenSCAD, FreeCAD, and Blender to prove that Naomi Wu is right and we should all get over ourselves and use TinkerCAD and … she’s still probably right, LOL.

OTOH, Divergent3D / Czinger Motors has 3D printable (with caveats) hypercars that are more … reasonable?

Apparently the Local Motors Rally Fighter (made by the same folks as the Strati) has downloadable files in this Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/carmodification/comments/kztg6l/localmotors_rallyfighter_plans/?rdt=40977

It’s not necessarily that useful, mind you, but at least it’s exciting.

I guess the thing to note is that if you are looking for a project, you probably could create some really good downloadable plans for an e-Bike that could have the key important parts printed on someone else’s SLM metal 3D printer and it wouldn’t even be especially silly or that absurdly priced, which would be a nicer argument for the superiority of bikes over cars if I haven’t been unable to bike because of wrist problems for the past few years.

Well, one option, which can be pushing the boundaries of selfhosted for some, would be to use a hosted k8s service for your public-facing stuff and then a home real k8s cluster for the rest of it.

Engineering leaders have to work as bullshit detectors. People aren’t even necessarily trying to lie, they just built up an unconscious tower of their own ego and it’s hard to step back far enough to get them to realize that maybe the surefire solution they are emotionally invested in that’s theirs is actually super-sketch. Presumably there’s a bunch of people on the Boeing team working thrusters who were totally convinced that they understood it well enough, the simulations all showed it was fine, etc.

But you can’t, as a leader, inspect everything in deep detail. So you have to have a shortcut, which is you detect bullshit.

Boeing triggered the bullshit detector. (Or, depending on how you see things, “Boeing finally triggered the bullshit detector”) And once you’ve triggered the bullshit detector, now everything’s going to be checked for bullshit.

So, there’s a lot of things to unpack here.

First, the idea that your spouse is your primary sole emotional connection is a relatively weird new concept on the scale of things. There’s been a huge period of history where your primary emotional connection was your male companions and your spouse was infantalized by comparison. If you were well-off you might be so lucky and have your group of emotional companions, your group of romantic companions, and the person who bears your legitimate children.

Second, there’s really not much of a good underlying working model for actual modern conservatism. The frontiersman/“house on the prairie” sort of rugged independence was never actually a thing back then and a lot of big issues like medical bills were a lot simpler when the answer to having any sort of illness was that you either get over it after relatively inexpensive and simple treatments or you die. So the conservative movement must necessarily sell you a false bill of goods. US politics are such that there is no actual fully-left political party, so that by default makes you a democrat.

There’s also a bunch of added uniquely christian baggage. So there are left-wing christians who also have their own set of weird baggage.

Third, mostly irrespective of politics, there’s a lot of cultural programming for males that they can’t actually worthwhile work though their emotions in a productive fashion. Movies, TV shows, books, literally everything in the media creates this idea of maleness and the writers are just trying to write a catchy story and seldom have time to think about what kind of male they are creating. This is, overall, a relatively recent concept.

Fourth, “things men need emotionally that women cannot provide” is actually pretty silly. Outside of practical advice about what to do with specific pieces of anatomy where maybe it would be nice to have some reference, the things people do is a pretty wide field. “Oh, someone to watch football with” ignores female football fans, et al. This ties in a lot with right wing men because they can’t necessarily have an emotional connection with someone not-male because that’s equivalent to messing around with someone’s property. And it also ties in with the social programming that created a stereotype for how men are supposed to relate to each other that’s just a writer trying to put a good story together without thinking of the social implications.

Radicalization doesn’t work on people who are emotionally connected and comfortable. Part of why we are where we are is that there’s a whole class of people whose happiness has been precluded by the structure of their lives and the best people who can take advantage of this are fraudsters selling a false bill of goods. And I don’t even really feel sympathy for those people anymore because they are hurting people who I do very much care about and after a point it doesn’t matter if they are just too dumb to see it.

But, I guess, to return to your initial point, the idea that if you find a person and get married to them that you have “solved” connection, that’s the road to unhappiness. Partially because marriage generally requires a commitment and effort to stay together as things happen and people change… but also because relying on one single person without other social connectivity is not a stable equilibrium.

Nothing would change, ironically.

In 2006, the band Stefy released the Orange Album. They were amazing electro-pop but after they completely failed to make themselves a presence, they got dropped from Wind Up Records and Stefy went off into obscurity.

If you listen to it now, you can kinda place it into a whole genre of electro-pop music that really started to catch on a few years later. People weren’t ready for it yet.

A few years ago now I was thinking that it was about time for me to upgrade my desktop (with a case that dates back to 2000 or so, I guess they call them “sleepers” these days?) because some of my usual computer things were taking too long.

And I realized that Intel was selling the 12th generation of the Core at that point, which means the next one was a 13th generation and I dono, I’m not superstitious but I figured if anything went wrong I’d feel pretty darn silly. So I pulled the trigger and got a 12th gen core processor and motherboard and a few other bits.

This is quite amusing in retrospect.

A giant swath of 80s-90s teenagers thought that anarchism was “chaos everywhere and no homework!!11” it’s just that thankfully most of them didn’t collect a bunch of questionable advice into a book, LOL.

But, good connection that cryptobros are the modern version thereof, I hadn’t quite realized that until you posted.

CrimethInc published some years ago a book entitled Recipes for Disaster: An Anarchist Cookbook that covers their Anarchist view of revolutionary action which they explicitly titled in reference to the old one.

And I think I also saw at one point, someone had collected a bunch of recipes from actual capital-A Anarchists to make an Anarchist Bookbook full of yummy food recipes but I can’t find it right now.

From the article: “Tesla began delivering the Blade Runner-inspired truck in November 2023”

Me: Fuck you. That is an insult to Syd Mead’s legacy.

It’s the Pravda of the VC-centric tech scene and has been for a very very long time.

(I am referencing the Soviet Union implementation thereof, for clarity)

It’s never going to bite the hand that feeds it, where people will voting-ring or the owners will just force-edit it to prevent that from happening. Outside of that, sometimes it might say something useful. The problem is that today’s problems are not because of a lack of advanced mathematics understanding or new programming languages.

I mean, I think he’s a textbook example of why not to do drugs and why we need to eat the rich, but I can understand the logic here.

When you navigate a car as a human, you are using vision, not LIDAR. Outside of a few edge cases, you aren’t even using parallax to judge distances. Ergo, a LIDAR is not going to see the text on a sign, the reflective stripes on a truck, etc. And it gets confused differently than the eye, absorbed by different wavelengths, etc. And you can jam LIDAR if you want. Thus, if we were content to wait until the self-driving-car is actually safe before throwing it out into the world, we’d probably want the standard to be that it navigates as well as a human in all situations using only visual sensors.

Except, there’s some huge problems that the human visual cortex makes look real easy. Because “all situations” means “understanding that there’s a kid playing in the street from visual cues so I’m going to assume they are going to do something dumb” or “some guy put a warning sign on the road and it’s got really bad handwriting”

Thus, the real problem is that he’s not using LIDAR as harm reduction for a patently unsafe product, where the various failure modes of the LIDAR-equipped self-driving cars show that those aren’t safe either.

It’s important to realize that the nerd you saw on the news has always been someone wearing nerd as a costume and the entire history of technology is loaded with examples of the real nerd being marginalized. It’s just that in ages past the VC’s would give a smaller amount of money and require the startup to go through concrete milestones to unlock all of it so there was more of a chance for the founder’s dreams to smack up against reality before they were $230m in the hole with no product worth selling.

More to the point, the company using shady means to collect the data does not need to care if the data is useful, just that it’s marketable.

While there is arguably a larger pool of people who you can reach by not having open racism and the CEO whipping his dick out (and mysteriously not slamming it into his Tesla door, even if it is a masterful gambit) you can still get a lot of white men of privilege who are smart and hardworking who don’t nominally worry about being on the receiving end of most of the harassment so it’s OK as long as they end up part of the winning team because they’ll get mega stock bucks at the end. And this does extend to the factory floor, at least people’s impressions while joining the factory floor. They wouldn’t be an engineer but they’ll be a supervisor or something?

It’s kinda un-earned? Like, there’s stories that people tell each other of questionable veracity? Some set of startups in the days of yore gave their cleaning staff or whatnot options so I think it’s become part of the cultural mythos now even if the reality is that the cleaning staff these days is contractors who are mistreated so even if it did actually happen then, it won’t happen now.

And, dono, once you’ve solved the hard problems early on, there’s less of that drive to do the truly novel things and so you get more of the people who want to be part of a company that’s going to the top and wouldn’t mind if they could coast and/or fail upwards along the way.

The problem is that employers tend to presume that they can continue to abuse people going forwards into the future because they’ve gotten away with it so far. Until they do things like yank offers from new college grads or laying off too many of the professional staff, at which point you’ve shattered the illusion.

tl;dr: Elon sowing: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!

Elon reaping: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

All things being equal, however, I’d rather they do the version more likely to remove themselves from the gene pool.

Masterful gambit, sir.

Yeah, like, we’ve got a fairly nice sporty-ish sedan that’s approaching 300k and since we’ve only got one car we kinda have to be ready to buy a new one quickly, I’ve done some of the thought process based on our needs and where we are in life. And the thing is, I like a nice car but I’m unclear on exactly how nice of a car I would actually appreciate driving, given that I don’t like to die or hurt other people, so I’m not going to go 3x the speed limit on some backroad and have never gotten a speeding ticket just that the upgrade from a 1.8L engine ecomony-ish sedan to a 2.5L engine sporty-ish sedan did feel real nice.

Meanwhile, one in-law got a Porsche so another in-law on the same side of the family had to trade in his Audi SUV for roughly the same SUV on the Porsche side and it’s all some douchebag power fantasy.

But, yeah, I like seeing actual-car-persons nerd out because I know enough to get at what they are nerding out about. Joy is much funner than douchebaggery.

There’s a lot about the hatred of Bambu that’s just sinophobic. Which is too bad because there’s plenty of completely rational reasons to avoid Bambu printers.