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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • I pay a premium for Prusa because I like their philospohy of making as much of it as possible in house, and their general openness, not just in code, but in how their business functions.

    My first 3D printer was a Makerbot Thing-O-Matic. I’m very willing to spend if I think it will benefit the entire ecosystem I’m interested in.

    Also, with Prusa, I get to feel like I’m DIYing it, but with great and detailed instructions, and an all-in-one parts sourcing. They are also great at supporting their devices after the fact, which is sometimes necessary, because they often come out a little too hot.




  • It’s pretty clear that robotics hardware has advanced way beyond the software. Do a backflip? No problem, that’s a predefined routine with good secondary control mechanisms to handle the variation between requested movement and actual movement.

    Pick up a dish? Well, that’s going to take vision, control, understanding of how the grabber and various materials interact, and then fuse all that data into an expected result and a plan of action, then control of unexpected things like the plate slipping or the floor being slightly wet.

    It’s amazing how far we’ve come and how much it has highlighted how far we have to go.


  • Obviously I don’t know your setup, but Linux is far easier for printing in most cases. The drivers are built in, and just work. No third party driver packages full of spyware and ink ads necessary.

    Hardware support, in general, has always been a struggle for Linux, but in the last few years, two things have happened to tip the scale:

    1. Technology kinda stopped advancing. Products are, more often then not, a rehash of last years model with no major changes. This means if Linux gets support for last year’s device, it’ll probably work with this years with minor to no changes.
    2. Growing Linux popularity has increased the profile enough that companies are at least trying a little to support Linux, even if it is mostly just making sure Linux developers have documentation on the device.
    3. And secret number 3, the tools and systems for reverse engineering USB devices have gotten better and more understood.

  • AI is finding bugs, which are getting fixed. That’s great, it means a more secure and stable system. As these vulnerabilities are patched out, they are gone forever(regressions not withstanding).

    Theoretically, Linux could become perfectly secure. It’s not going to stop people from doing insecure things, but it could mean there are no unintended security weaknesses. We could hit a point were an “LTS” copy of Linux never receives a single security patch, because as long as the code isn’t changing, there’s nothing to fix.

    Of course, this is all theoretical, and assumes that new classes of attacks or bigger chains for attacks are never found, but vulnerabilities should be a finite resource in a static codebase, and once that resource is fully exhausted, the code is now fully safe.

    Ideally, open weights or open source models catch up, and this can all be done without paying a ransom to OpenAI or Anthropic, and is available through the whole stack, not just kernel level.




  • They do far better today than they did three years ago, but they still get stuff wrong constantly. I’ve had it give me the source for claims, and the source says the exact opposite of what it claimed. This isn’t a quantized to hell model running on my own hardware, but Opus from Claude.

    My go to is to get people to ask it something they know a lot about, and see how bad inaccurate it is. If it gets something you know about so wrong, how wrong is it for everything else?








  • One thing a lot of people here seem to miss: The onedrive app actually calls it “Backup”. So users assume they have a copy of it on their computer and it is “backed up” to OneDrive.

    But the other thing OneDrive does is turn on “Selective Sync”, where it will actually delete the files off your local device “to free up storage”. It looks like it is on your local computer, but when an app goes to use it, OneDrive quickly downloads it so the app is none the wiser that it wasn’t actually there a moment ago. This is all seamless to the user, until one day they are offline and can’t get to most of their files, or they lose access to their Microsoft account.

    Everything a user needs to know is in the interface, Microsoft gives little symbols on the file to specify if there is a local copy or not, but most users have no idea what any of that means.

    To top it off, just a little icing on the cake, if a user signs into the computer with a Microsoft account, bitlocker (full disk encryption) is automatically turned on, and the recovery key is shoved in their Microsoft account. This is convenient, but if they lose access to their Microsoft account, they can’t log into the computer to get it, and they can’t log into the website to get the bitlocker key. So even if their files are still on the PC, they have zero way to recover them.

    Honestly, they’ve created a very convenient system, until it is impossible to recover anything. Business Environments have administrators that can help users by resetting their passwords or pulling a bitlocker key out of Intune, but for a home user? You’re just SOL.