Ugh another one of these slop projects that will be gone and forgotten in 2 weeks time.

The issue is if you don’t put any effort into it, why would we put any effort into trying it out? And if you don’t put any time into it, what sort of chances are there you won’t put any time in going forward?

It’s really fun to shit something out using AI, give it a fancy name, a fancy logo and a website. But then the fun wears off fast as you need to actually support, develop and improve the app. You need to actually fix the bugs and as soon as you do, you’ll quickly see the limits to what the AI can do. The whole thing quickly becomes a mess that nobody can maintain. And that’s where it’s not as fun anymore and you move on to something else.

This isn’t a critique of you personally, but a pattern we’ve seen thousands of times in the past few years since AI coding went mainstream. So many slop projects that get released and shared around on social media, only to die within weeks. We’ve learnt by now it’s a waste of time and aren’t interested.

The smaller ones are usually hobby/self built. There is nowadays something like Carvera, but those seem like a lot of hassle and expense for not a lot of functionality.

In my opinion there’s no such thing as a small CNC. I have a tiny one 40x30cm working volume, I use it to create PCBs from blank copper coated plates. It’s better than what I used to do with laserprinted resists and chemical etches. But these days ordering PCBs from one of those online fabs is fast and better quality, cheap as well. I can’t get the blank copper coated plates for cheap anymore, since copper is so expensive. But small CNCs often lack the power and speed to be useful and the limited working space is a big downside as well. So when I bought one, I went big, with a lot of power, speed and working surface.

Also don’t snooze on the dust extraction required, all the material a CNC or laser removes gets turned into gas and dust particles. You need well and proper dust extraction and filtering. Especially if you do soft woods and stuff like glued panels like mdf or plywood. The glue gets in the air and rains down everywhere. This causes dust to cake up and be hard to clean. It can ruin the machine and make a mess of your workspace. It’s also very unhealthy to breathe.

People doing 3D printing forget about this as well. Sanding plastics or using materials with carbon or glass inside. The dust that comes off of that isn’t good, so proper dust protection and extraction is a must.

I bought both my laser cutter and cnc machine from alibaba. The people on there are genuinely very friendly, know their stuff and can help you select the right machine, any addons you need and logistics. They could only ship it to a port near me on a shared container. From there I needed to handle logistics. Now a normal person can’t just pick stuff up from a port (plus the size and weight would require something larger than I can drive), so I found a local logistics company to pick it up, handle the paperwork and deliver it to me.

Shipping took a while (slow boat, shared container) and setting the machine up was a bit of work. It was packaged very well, but getting it all cleaned up and assembled was a lot of work, then aligning and actually learning to work with it was hard as well. One of the drivers was faulty and they shipped a new one from China by plane which arrived in a few days, free of charge. They were very helpful throughout the process and after buying the laser cutter, I bought the cnc through them as well.

The people I dealt with were more like middle man, not the actual people making the machine. But they were very knowledgeable, being able to tell me details and give advice. This was about 15 years ago now, so they weren’t just using AI. Both machines were around $15,000 and comparable in specs and functionality to a $30,000 machine bought locally. I still use the laser all the time, recently upgraded the brain so I could move away from the ancient Windows XP software I ran in a VM on a Linux laptop I have beside it. Unfortunately I had to sell the cnc because of the divorce from my first wife, but am thinking about getting another one.

If you have some money to spend and are looking for a deal, alibaba is the place.

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For people thinking about opening up their remotes and removing the microphone. You’re free to do so as you please, but also note there has been zero evidence of any remotes doing any sort of recording unless the button is pressed.

Now this isn’t to say the recording isn’t forwarded to the mother ship once you do press that button, but the main concern has been the mic inside the TV. The remote has pretty limited batteries, if it were to record all the time it would run flat in a matter of hours. So if your remote does a year or so on the batteries, it’s not recording anything unless you press the button to do so.

I had a friend of mine ask me today how he could protect his personal website which he completely let AI build, including all the text, from being copied by others. I rolled my eyes so hard I can still feel it. Told him not to worry about it.

Thanks for trying it out. I would model something up, but don’t have time right now. It would also depend on the slicer used, the printer and the settings etc.

It probably doesn’t matter that much and not be worth the effort unless it’s really what you want. But for a quick prototype just having it solid is fine and not worth optimizing.

I think Roetz 4.0 has done some experiments with this iirc. It worked fine, but it was more like one of those multi-color filaments as there is no way to control the color coming out of the nozzle. He tried with 2 different colors I think, but his setup had 4 wires of filament being pushed through.

There is actually a relative long time between filament being pushed into the nozzle and coming out at the bottom. In between is a reservoir of molted and partially molted plastic, which is essentially a chaotic system. When extruding or retracting the filament, this is actually controlling the pressure inside that reservoir. This makes it extremely hard to get any kind of controlled mix.

You also have the issue of the number of filaments required. Remember CMYK only works when printing on white paper, the white is an important component to the end result. And those don’t actually mix those inkts. They just print little dots close enough together for our eyes to lack sufficient resolution and thus see them as one mixed color. For a lighter result less dots are printed, for a darker result more dots are printed and black dots added to go even darker.

So you would need to have 5 filaments being pushed into a single reservoir, which is a challenge. Then you’d never get perfect mixing, even if you machine the combination inside perfectly (look at how nice the machining on Roetz his nozzle was). The pressure inside would vary leading to some filament being pushed less that others, it’s a very unstable situation which makes it very hard to perfectly predict or control. And being it’s mixing inside that reservoir, there is very little control of how the color comes out. It wouldn’t be the same color from all angles due to imperfect mixing and the changing of colors would be a slower gradual thing, not instant. And the way the color presents is also dependent on the direction the nozzle is moving.

The amount of material being pushed in would vary a lot, where we’d want mostly the same continuous pressure on the nozzle side. And when moving reduce that pressure to prevent stringing. Controlling this with 5 filaments would be borderline impossible and would require a high flow large diameter nozzle. So only very large high speed printers would work. Or the filament would need to be thinner, so less material is pushed in, but then you run into compression strength issues in the filament.

I think for practical results, people either just paint it after the fact. Use a multicolor filament for cool colored results. Or use a different technique that offers prints in precise colors.

There is this super cool 3D printing technique from HP that is abandoned now, but does kinda work like you say with CYMK and a white material. It uses inktjet heads to eject a ceramic powder to 3D print. It can make high resolution 3D prints in full color and when baked the ceramic is very hard, so the objects can be practical to use. The big issue with this technology is the powder clogs up the nozzles on the inktjet heads. Just like with printers when the ink dries and the head clogs, it’s a nightmare. So those machines need constant cleaning and supervision. When they work they produce amazing results, but the technology is such a pain in the ass, they stopped making the machines. I think they still make the material and heads tho, for people who are already using the machines. I think they are often used in medical settings where they paid a lot for the machine and keep using them.

Just a question, but why is the large gear solid like that? It’s probably printed at some low infill, so it shouldn’t matter much. But I think you can massively reduce printing time and material needed, while at the same time increasing the strength of the gear, if you were to switch to a spoked design.

The idea of a dog whistle is as you say only dogs hear it. So in the use case of Nazis letting each other know they are Nazis it’s usually a subtle thing. A phrase or gesture that’s innocent on the face of it, but signals to other Nazis they are Nazis. Like what they tried to do with the OK hand signal.

Putting up your hand and shouting Heil Hitler isn’t really a dog whistle, as everyone knows at that point you are a Nazi.

It is very revealing how the people rebelling against Flock isn’t seen as the people opposing mass surveillance and data being made available to all the cops without cause, due process, oversight, restrictions or consequences for abuse, but instead as the people being against Flock specifically and the same system with a different label would be peachy.

Either they are monumentally stupid or more likely they are corrupt as hell and/or evil.

They should fight fire with fire. Do double of all the tariffs the US does and don’t ever give them up ever. Don’t take any concession, as any time anyone does, Trump does the Goofy meme and says: “I’ll fucking do it again”. There’s no talking to these people, they will only respond to pressure. Tariffs can be renegotiated after the next elections and my suggestion would be for those elections to be held sooner than planned. Trump needs to go, that’s the only way for anything to ever be fixed.

It’s so terrible that the stock jumps up on news like this. All of those assholes already rubbing their hands going: “Yeah, we’re going to make so much money from cancer patients. Fuck yeah, bleed em dry the suckers”.

Instead of a rational world where we make sure these kinds of companies or labs are doing good and have money to do their thing. But once a new drug is developed we make sure we can produce it cheap and safe in enough quantities for patients to get treatment.

There’s absolutely no need for the insane profits we’re seeing recently. We can run the world just on normal profits. The CEO would still be a millionaire, the fat cats would still be fat. But we can make sure everyone has access to stuff they need without going bankrupt. Or in civilized countries, without our collective money flowing into big pharma companies (and especially the owners, higher ups and shareholders).

As a species we’ve lost our damned minds.

Looks like a pretty significant dip yeah. No idea if it’s just an unseasonably warm bit that evens out, or if the ice started retreating really early this year. Normally the peak is in September, not August.

They’re actually replacing humans with robots. It’s why they dropped the “Don’t be evil” statement. They are checking progress, the question is: “Are you already a robot, or still a disgusting human?”

It’s always the ones you most expect…

Step 1: Sell data to AI companies Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit

They are now finding out step 2 is getting absolutely destroyed by AI not sending people along to their platform. And the profit in step 3 is for the AI companies, not for them.

These CEOs are so shortsighted it’s beyond belief. Sure Google paid hundreds of millions for the data, but in turn it’s a death sentence for the platform. But hey it was money in the short term right?

No I mean if you create a material with such a tensile strength, the amount of energy would be well into black hole territory. Like just the energy contained within the material itself, not the energy added to it.

And please note these are just examples, there are so many ways how this cannot possibly work. You would do well to get a foundation in physics first, before trying to tackle these kinds of things. Or just go into writing fantasy books instead, that way it doesn’t matter if it’s possible or not.

My personal preference for fantasy is that the writer does create a rigid framework for rules that work in the imaginary universe and keeps to it as much as possible. That way it prevents major plot holes and inconsistencies within the universe.

This won’t work for many many reasons. But if we’ll allow a bit of fantasy, it still won’t work.

Gravity dominates at smaller scales. If the expansion of the universe were to work like you describe, we wouldn’t exist and there wouldn’t be very many interesting things in the universe. The expansion is a very very small factor, almost non-existent. This means at smaller scales, like say the size of a galaxy, gravity dominates. Meaning the movement and relative position is determined by the gravity of those objects and expansion plays no part. It’s only on very large scales the expansion becomes a thing.

You can think about the expansion as more space being created within the existing space. But when you’re in a gravity dominated area, the gravity pulls the matter together, so the extra space has no impact at all. But when looking at galaxies very far away, there isn’t any gravity keeping them in relation to us. So when looking over vast distances (and vast amounts of time), we can see the red-shift because they are moving away from us. But those galaxies are still perfectly intact, it’s not like all that time ripped them apart, just the distance in between us and them.

There is this idea about a big rip. In this scenario the mechanism creating more space gets more pronounced in the future. This means after a very long time, it might start to dominate over gravity. At first on large scales, later even on smaller scales, up to the point everything is ripped apart and only the smallest of things can exist. That would mean no more galaxies, no more solar systems and maybe not even molecules or atoms. But there isn’t a whole lot of indication this would actually happen and the time scales involved are huge.

Also important, like theneverfox said, the universe has ways of closing off these kinds of loop holes. Imagine creating a whip from this material you describe. When you would make that whip long enough (and compared to the scale you describe it can be tiny), you’d easily be able to get the end beyond the speed of light when whipping it. Obviously this can’t work, so we know this material simply cannot exist. Nothing with a tensile strength like you describe can exist, not even in theory and applying some fantasy magic. It would break the laws of physics. (And not even getting into the amount of energy per volume such a material would have is beyond black hole levels, so that’s a whole thing)

A HUD and AR are something different tho.

A HUD is just a display you can look at while keeping your focus on something else. My car has that, it has no relation to the outside world, it’s just a display.

With AR the information presented is placed within the world around you. Using a camera and motion tracking, it can place stuff in relation to real stuff around you. Think Pokemon-Go.