The problem is that images of $50 bills have enough alignment marks that the code to detect them could run on hardware from the ‘90s. From what I’ve seen, these bills naively assume that somehow the printer has to detect whether something is a gun or part of a gun. The fact that slicer software has to transform a mesh into gcode for a specific printer and specific settings means that a printer can’t just hash the file or something to check a blacklist. And how do you tell if something is part of a gun? A PVC pipe could be a gun barrel by that metric. Or maybe a trigger assembly is designed for a rubber band gun instead of an illegal firearm.
I doubt there is a weapons expert that could look at a given STL file and unambiguously tell you whether something was “part of a gun” or not. If these laws pass, they will be either unenforceable, effectively ban all 3D printer sales due to the immense difficulty of compliance, or worse, be another avenue for selective enforcement.
Furthermore, the whole “ghost guns” thing is entirely overblown and misunderstood by people who have never seen or used a 3D printer except in the movies, where Hollywood has latched onto the idea that they are designed primarily for making guns. A consumer grade 3D printer is going to print a gun that will explode in your hands the first time you try to use it, if any of the meaningful parts of the gun are printed. And nothing is stopping people from say, fabricating gun stocks with a table saw and router, or building a gun out of hardware store parts. Why aren’t we also banning mills and lathes while we’re at it? There are also chemicals at a hardware store that could be used to make explosives. If the concern was really “making guns at home”, we’d outlaw Ace Hardware and Home Depot.
>Furthermore, the whole “ghost guns” thing is entirely overblown and misunderstood by people who have never seen or used a 3D printer except in the movies, where Hollywood has latched onto the idea that they are designed primarily for making guns. A consumer grade 3D printer is going to print a gun that will explode in your hands the first time you try to use it, if any of the meaningful parts of the gun are printed.
Here's a relevant article that addresses a lot of these points.[1]
Try Alpine? It's not designed to be a "desktop" OS but it functions well as one. I find it easy enough to wrap my head around the whole thing, and it uses OpenRC by default.
Returning to C after a decade away, I think the bottom line is that the reason why C has stuck around for so long is straight up path dependence. C is the foundation of Unix, and Unix-like operating systems took over the world, and C is a decent enough systems programming language that people started using it to write other OSes as well.
It bothers me that there’s some kind of mysticism around C. I keep seeing weird superstitions like, “modern processors are designed to run C code fast”. Or that there’s some inherent property of C that makes it “closer to the hardware”. The reality is just that C has been around for so long that there are millions of lines of optimizations handcrafted into all the compilers, and people continue to improve the compilers because there are billions of lines of C that will benefit from it.
FORTRAN is also crazy fast, but people don’t worship it the same way. SBCL and even some BASIC compilers approach the speed of C. And C is a high level language, despite what many people who have never touched assembler may assert.
C is not a bad language, and once you get your head around it you can write anything in C, but it’s absolutely full of landmines (sorry, “undefined behaviors”).
The author makes some really great points about the standard library. A lot of C’s pain points stem from memory management, string handling, etc. which stem from quirks in the standard library. And yet it’s possible to completely ignore the standard library, especially if you’re on an embedded system or bare metal. Personally I feel that a large standard library is a liability, and a much stronger property of a language is that the base language is small enough to keep the entirety of it in your head and still have the ability to implement any algorithm you need in a minimal number of lines without resorting to mental gymnastics, and still be able to read the code afterwards. I think this is why Lisp is so revered. I feel like Lua also falls into this bucket.
We need to stop starting flame wars about which language is best, cargo culting the newest shiny language, and instead just learn the strengths and weaknesses of our tools and pick the right tool for the job. You can machine almost anything on a lathe, but sometimes a drill press or a mill are much better suited for the task.
I was an active member of the VB community back in college. I did really fall in love with mine. I never experienced any nausea or headaches, and when properly adjusted I didn’t think it was terribly uncomfortable. The “screen” technology was actually very cool, two arrays of very small LEDs are swept across your field of vision by two rapidly fluttering mirrors, so in essence it’s an LED display. The picture is very bright and crisp. If you listen closely to a running Virtual Boy you can hear what sounds like fan noise, that’s the mirrors moving.
The first party games were (as usual for Nintendo fare) fun and quirky, but other than than Wario Land served more as tech demos. The one actually “3D” game for the console (Red Alarm) ran at a pitifully low frame rate. And also as today, there were no games for the platform that “didn’t work” in 2D, but they were for the most part enhanced by the stereo experience.
It was, as with most “virtual reality” experiments in the 90s, crippled by lack of processing power and cost constraints. It didn’t live up to its lead designer’s ambition and was rushed to market with little expectation of success.
I am excited for the games coming back, I really enjoyed Teleroboxer and Wario Land.
WD-40 works great for its intended purpose. The problem is that they've marketed it the way that the dad from My Big Fat Greek Wedding raves about Windex. It's not a good lubricant, as many people have noted, as it evaporates and concentrates contaminants. It's not a good protective coating because again, it evaporates. What it is good at is drying off metal parts, and as a mediocre and cheap rust remover.
If I accidentally leave some pliers or my socket set out in the rain, I soak them with WD-40, scrub off the rust with a wire brush, and wipe off the excess with a towel. It does a decent job of preventing further damage. If I have some rusty parts sometimes I'll throw them in a glass jar, soak 'em with WD-40, shake them around, let them sit for a day or so, and then scrub them with a wire brush. Gets most of the rust off.
If you want a lubricant, just buy the correct one for the job. Silicone oil, lithium grease, graphite, all will do a better job in the long run than WD-40 if you use them in their intended role. My goto "universal lube" personally is "Super Lube", a PTFE-based lubricant which is NSF rated for incidental contact with food and dielectric.
When I was a kid some family friends used WD40 on their joints - arthritic knees and such. Church friends, actually, which I mention only because stuff like that probably helped me reject the religion as readily as I did.
A web search for "WD40 arthritis" shows that there are still people doing this.
There isn't one. I guess the actual reason I mentioned it was I felt weird calling them family friends when they weren't, but I also felt weird calling them church friends for no stated reason, so I added a little personal anecdote about it, which now I think I shouldn't have.
But since I did, lemme clarify, it was a pretty out-there fundamentalist church that I'm glad to have escaped early, and my comment is just that seeing people there do stuff that I couldn't make sense of, even totally unrelated stuff like this, probably helped undermine any sense of authority they had in my mind.
It’s like python. It’s not the best at anything but it’s a decent all arounder. Not everything that’s practical and useful has to be super specialized + best in class.
I've grown to dislike the smell of 3-in-1. It's not awful, but once it gets on the skin you smell it for hours, even after washing.
I've started using M-Pro 7 gun oil for the same tasks. Not that it solves world hunger or anything, by I always have some around, I don't end up smelling volatile organics for the rest of the day.
3-in-1 is pretty unpleasant, I agree. I use it as a cutting fluid for drilling steel mostly and it's not any nicer when hot. Perhaps I will try some of your gun oil.
Best smelling shop liquid I've yet encountered is Marvel Mystery Oil. It's amazing.
Pluses and minuses as cutting fluid. It's not sulfurized or chlorinated, like actual (and lower cost) cutting fluid. On the other hand, the vapors are non-toxic, being mostly polyalphaolefin synthetic oil, and it likely is better than 3-in-1 as cutting fluid for adhoc use, if only due to significantly lower vapor pressure and higher flash point.
Came to post this; Ballistol works brilliantly; and can also be used as a leather conditioner, wound dressing, & marinade for carne de cheval, with the addition of some juniper berries and a little rosemary.
>If you want a lubricant, just buy the correct one for the job.
I use WD-40 exclusively as the lube to mount rubber tires onto wheels. I've found it's the best choice for that task. The wax paste tire lube is inferior. I'm just reaching for the WD-40 anyway to remove the wax paste residue on the wheel rim.
This was my belief for many years, but then I tried sniping (with the same prices I was putting as my maximum bid before!) and my success rate skyrocketed and the prices I was paying dropped.
It seems that despite repeated reminders and explanations, there are three groups of people using eBay "incorrectly" that make the sniping strategy viable:
1) People who do not understand proxy bidding and think that they "need" to repeatedly bid in increments.
2) People who are irrational about their price ceiling and are willing to bid above their price ceiling because they want to "win".
3) People who want to drive up the price either to deprive others of a good deal, or to drive up the price on behalf of the seller by starting a bidding war with the two above groups.
From a sellers perspective it is common to deal with buyers who won't pay because they paid "more than they wanted", although this is against the eBay ToS and a bid is a contract to purchase the item, because there are few consequences for not doing so.
For some reason, auctions with more bidders seem to attract more bidders, whereas auctions with zero bids seem to go unnoticed. I wonder if this has to do with eBay's search ranking algorithm or some other irrational behavior that I don't understand. At any rate, bidding with 5 or less seconds left to go seems to defeat the above behaviors. I find it distasteful and irrational but it works so I put up with it.
eBay's reputation and trust network is really what makes it a viable product at this point. Given how unreliable Facebook Marketplace buyers are and how many scams are present, I would hesitate to conduct any major transactions beyond a local area.
Auctions are 90% bad deals because you often end up with someone getting over excited and bidding more than the next buy me now price for the same product. But 10% of the time you get lucky, particularly if auctions end at odd time of the day. So I find it's worth throwing some bids, knowing that you should almost always lose. Ebay is best when you are not in a hurry and happy to wait for the right bargain.
> you often end up with someone getting over excited and bidding more than the next buy me now price for the same product.
I don't find auctions exciting or compelling, so I doubt I'd get overly excited about bidding. I'd just set a max bid (probably about half what I would expect to pay with "buy it now", to compensate for the extra delays and hassle involved with auctions) and call it good. If I'm outbid, I'd just do the straight purchase like I would have anyway.
The reason that unnoticed auctions might be worth me looking at is to expand the pool of possible sellers to buy from. Although if my bid makes the auction suddenly attract the attention of automated bidders/snipers, then there's no point to it for me. This might be a nonstarter.
I'll probably give it a try and see how it goes, though.
I mean, an auction is something where you "win" by agreeing to pay more than anyone else. It's always going to be a bad deal for the buyer. The key with Ebay is to actually sell stuff on there too. If you're just a consumer you'll lose out on auctions in the long run.
> It's always going to be a bad deal for the buyer.
That's not true. Sometimes there's not a lot of demand and you pay much less than average market price.
If something is priced super low then someone might step in to arbitrage, but even with perfect knowledge in a perfectly efficient market, an arbitrager will only be willing to pay the true value minus the cost of relisting, the cost of reshipping, the cost of their time, the cost of tying up their money, and the cost of the risk it won't resell. If you beat that by fifty cents you'll get a great deal on the item.
Some items are poorly marketed - in the wrong category, missing a model number, listed as 1MB rather than 1GB, poorly described, poorly photographed etc.
This either limits the number of bidders though worse discoverability or just less desirability and lower prices.
Ebay has filters to display sold listings, so when you're looking to buy something, check out the closed auctions and see what they're going for. If the prices are similar, you might as well buy from fixed-price listings, but if auction prices are lower, you can save a lot by being patient.
You can also save searches for a fixed-priced listing below a specified value, and enable alerts, so that if someone lists something that's priced to sell, you can get it quickly.
i am looking for a bargain not a bidding war. i dont know what is my price ceiling but i know i will only increment twice. if someone outbids me instantly twice in a row i dont want the thing anymore.
The problem is with items that have a national market but not a local one. For example - there may be very few local buyers who will pay a decent price for a vintage slide rule, but many on eBay. My general strategy is to list on FBM first for the eBay price that I hope to get, and then accept offers down to 75% of the price. If I don't get any bites after about a month I switch to eBay.
This. I was selling an obscure book once. I doubt there is anyone local that would be interested in it. It was sold on eBay within a week.
Same for a half functioning Xbox. No "normal" person would want that. But apparently, on eBay, something like a dozen people took serious interest in it, and it was sold in a few days in "parts only" condition. For sure I didn't like how much the transaction fee I paid, but at least I got rid of it for a decent amount of money.
My high school computer science teacher (best one I ever had) once told us this anecdote when we were learning sorting algorithms:
He was brought in by the state to do some coaching for existing software devs back in the 90s. When he was going over the various different basic algorithms (insertion sort, selection sort, etc.) one of the devs in the back of the class piped up with, "why are you wasting our time? C++ has qsort built in."
When you're processing millions of records, many of which are probably already sorted, using an insertion sort to put a few new records into a sorted list, or using selection sort to grab the few records you need to the front of the queue, is going to be an order of magnitude faster than just calling qsort every time.
Turned out he worked for department of revenue. So my teacher roasted him with "oh, so you're the reason it takes us so long to get our tax returns back."
Thinking that you can just scoot by using the built-in version is how we get to the horrible state of optimization that we're in. Software has gotten slow because devs have gotten lazy and don't bother to understand the basics of programming anymore. We should be running a machine shop, not trying to build a jet engine out of Lego.
Having been a longtime Windows user, an on/off Linux desktop user, and now primarily a Mac user, I really think it's just what you're used to. Each desktop environment has its own strengths and weaknesses, and trying to bend one to be like the other is going to end in frustration. The userland of each OS is sufficiently different that different desktop metaphors break in different ways when you try to port them. MacOS will never have a taskbar, Windows will never have a functional dock and system menubar, and Linux will never have a cohesive toolkit because it's too fragmented. But each has its strengths and the key to productivity is to work with the desktop as designed rather than against it.
My experience with paid independent Mac desktop apps (e.g. Little Snitch, Al Dente, Daisy Disk, Crossover, anything from Rogue Amoeba etc.) is that they try a lot harder to integrate well with the system than equivalent freeware apps on Windows. MacOS is definitely "missing" some features out of the box (per-app volume control?) but makes up for it with certain things largely being more seamless, especially with regard to drivers (in my experience).
I also miss Linux DEs some days for their extreme customization potential and low resource usage. But it's hard to achieve compatibility between the "best" applications of each DE and GTK and Qt have their own warts.
Just go with the flow, and if Windows jives with you then more power to you. I can't stand it anymore though.
> Having been a longtime Windows user, an on/off Linux desktop user, and now primarily a Mac user, I really think it's just what you're used to
I've also used all three OS's in anger and largely agree.
I like to call that sort of attitude YOSPOS, named after one of the technology-oriented subforums on Something Awful. It stands for "Your Operating System is a Piece Of Shit."
Which OS? Your OS, whichever one (the royal) You happen to be using at the time. They all stink for different reasons, and it's just a matter of which OS's annoyances you decide to put up with.
That said, good lord, Windows 11 has been rough. I actually don't mind most of the UI changes, but the AI psychosis and the general lack of stability has made Windows 11 one of the only versions of Windows I can remember that started mediocre and kept getting worse with updates instead of better.
I had a Thinkpad X200T with a Core 2 Duo serving as my home router for a while, eventually I upgraded to a Dell Optiplex that my work was throwing away. Laptop as a router is great because they blow SBCs out of the water while preserving a modicum of energy efficiency. I do miss just being able to pop the lid open when I needed to troubleshoot something instead of having to lug the Optiplex into the office to attach a monitor and keyboard.
https://xkcd.com/1425/
I doubt there is a weapons expert that could look at a given STL file and unambiguously tell you whether something was “part of a gun” or not. If these laws pass, they will be either unenforceable, effectively ban all 3D printer sales due to the immense difficulty of compliance, or worse, be another avenue for selective enforcement.
Furthermore, the whole “ghost guns” thing is entirely overblown and misunderstood by people who have never seen or used a 3D printer except in the movies, where Hollywood has latched onto the idea that they are designed primarily for making guns. A consumer grade 3D printer is going to print a gun that will explode in your hands the first time you try to use it, if any of the meaningful parts of the gun are printed. And nothing is stopping people from say, fabricating gun stocks with a table saw and router, or building a gun out of hardware store parts. Why aren’t we also banning mills and lathes while we’re at it? There are also chemicals at a hardware store that could be used to make explosives. If the concern was really “making guns at home”, we’d outlaw Ace Hardware and Home Depot.
reply