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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • It’s the same thing the right does with government. It is a truism that there is all sorts of “inefficiencies” where the money is going to the wrong people for the wrong stuff.

    In both cases, it’s sort of correct and sort of wrong. Corporations, governments, and any human institution beyond a certain scale (a few hundred people), will leak wealth into places it shouldn’t. It’s an unavoidable feature of our species as best I can tell.

    It’s fine to accept it, it’s fine to be angry about it. It’s silly to blind yourself to it in some places and whinge about it in others.




  • Losing an election = ratfucking!

    You people really are only a few preference away from fiting in with the maga idiots you know that.

    If we want a progressive majority we have to build it. It starts at school boards and city councils. It starts with policy wins that give people what they want but didn’t know they could get. All you lazy fuckers that think you take the shortcut and the American voters just give you senate seats and the presidency have set back the cause by decades.

    Your internet bubble != the voting public!!



  • There are so many things you can do to make these cheap printers reliable that I really could not list them all. When it comes to bed and first layer issues here are the biggest ones

    Make sure your X gantry is tight and not sagging. The eccentric nuts on the guide wheels should be set so that there is very little play. If you lift the left side it should not move much without raising the gantry.

    Tram your bed with the screws almost bottomed out. Loose screws mean that the bed is moving more and will not likely hold a level for long.

    The bed must be warm during abl. these things warp and twist like crazy when you heat them. You will not get good results on these cheap ass beds if your machine measures its shape cold.

    If you are not using a pei coated sheet to print on buy one asap. It is a superior print surface and a huge leap in print technology. It’s less important with pei, but it is worth noting that the print surface must be clean. Oils from your fingers mess with adhesion to the print bed.

    Those are the big ones. There are like I said a million little things you can do. These things can be made into reliable work horses but it takes A lot of research, work, time, and often money to make them such. My ender 3 has cost me more than a prusa would have, which is pretty dumb tbh. On the other hand, it’s mine and there is no part of it that I do not understand. I like my printer. It’s very fast, very reliable, and I made it that way.



  • I definitely did not claim it was braking privacy. As far as I can tell it was just querying an update server but for some reason it was doing it with such frequency (hundreds a minute for hours out of the day) that I deemed it was broken and that the OS was not managed well.

    Other people took a more suspicious view but mostly they just lost my trust that they had any business running a system on my network. If you google around you can get more nuanced takes I don’t actually know if they ever fixed it.


  • HAOS is a managed operating system, which is perfect for people who want to automate their home but don’t want to manage a Linux machine. It’s a little wild to me to see a person in this community advocating a managed OS. Like, what are we even doing here??

    I killed HAOS and set it up in docker because it was phoning home a lot. Sometimes there were hundreds of dns queries a minute to HA servers. No thanks.






  • I know that software developers want to be called engineers. But honestly it is a horrible analogue

    Software is honestly almost more of a scientific discipline. Sure it’s applied (things are built to a specific function), but the actual work proceeds much more like a rolling series of compounding experiments.

    Computer scientist is a great piece of language that I think software developers should wear with pride.

    Also, without a PE role who has legal responsibility for the design, you just can’t call it engineering in my mind. I make my living validating software that other people make. It’s gotten better but 20yrs ago we were expected to release test drugs on instruments running toy grade software. If an engineer designed a bridge with flaws equivalent to lab software that can’t do a linear regression properly they would end up in jail.



  • This year we deployed a CURE for sickle cell! Cured a congenital disease with gene editing. It’s hard to do and crazy expensive, but the end of suffering from this disease is actually in sight.

    The mRNA vaccine tech that got a boost from Covid is now being used to cure certain melanoma cancers. This is a potential sea change in the fight against cancer.

    More and more of our energy is coming from fully renewable sources. We are behind (way behind tbh) but humanity is actually moving the right direction at this point. We could honestly be seeing peak carbon in the next few years. The climate will change, probably already has, but we might actually survive this.

    We’ve got problems, lots of them, and some pretty nasty. But you are almost certainly better off living today than just about any time in human history.



  • Stardew Valley will probably be the game that looms largest in my kid’s nostalgia. They have both played the life out of that thing. Other things that come to mind: Minecraft, phasmaphobia, fnaf, Skyrim, duck game, BOTW, and Nidhogg 2.

    There is no guiding aesthetic driven by the technology, just whatever is available and cool.

    Re: loot boxes, there is no denying that fortnight is(was?) a huge deal in this gen of kids. I’m sure at least some kids are going to have fond memories of getting v bucks for their birthday.


  • Another vote for home assistant. It is not just the best FOSS option, it might just be the best option altogether.

    Some advice, think carefully about what you want to achieve with automation before you start. Take some time to draw up what you are going to do before you buy anything. Think about extensibility and don’t force yourself to lay out big money and time all at once. Will Smith (tested.com, tech pod, not Independence Day) recommends doing one room at a time and focusing on spaces that are primarily yours first.

    Things to consider: If you live with other people, it might be wise to make everything transparent. Meaning the light switches still turn the lights on and off on demand etc.

    Wi-Fi is sort of a poor solution to communicating with devices, especially ones that don’t have access to mains power all the time. Consider if you are going to deploy zigbee, z-wave, or a matter mesh. Matter, being very new would be challenging but it is clearly the future of low power wireless communication for home automation.

    Set a goal that NOTHING requires a external service or internet connection and stick to it. That might mean giving up on some types of devices but it’s YOUR house, not google’s.

    Think automation first. Phone and voice control is cool. But having things just happen the way you would want without have to do anything is even cooler. Be smart about complexity though. How would things have to change if your partner started working a different schedule for instance?

    Finally, get creative. Lots of silly problems can be solved with this technology. My favorite automation turns the damn hot glue gun off after 30min so my kids don’t start a fire if they get forgetful after a craft project.