TootSweet

I installed Cura and it never gave me a reason to switch… until it started to get just impossible to keep it running. My take on Cura is “it’s a fine slicer, but a terrible program.”

I used to run it on a Raspberry Pi, but then they made it impossible to run on ARM. Gentoo abandoned it because Cura made it impossible to build reliably. I don’t remember what the issue I had on Arch (on x86_64, even) was, but it was a pain to even make it run there as well.

So I switched to Prusaslicer and it hasn’t given me a reason to change yet. I think Orca is kindof “Prusaslicer but with more bells, whistles, and gongs”, but I have yet to really need much more functionality than Prusaslicer offers. The bricklaying thing seems kinda cool, but I haven’t had a specific use for it. And most of what I print is very utilitarian rather than artistic, so if I tinker, it tends to be more with the model than the slicer settings. (Honestly, most of what I print is models I designed myself from scratch in OpenSCAD.)

Not technically Pixar. It’s from seven-ish years before Pixar was founded, and one of the engineers involved later went on to cofound Pixar. So… kinda proto-Pixar.

The ZideX printer isn’t quite what you’re talking about, but it kinda has the same idea.

Here’s a video about how to build one that will give you more of an idea what it looks like and how it works.

What I’d love to see even more than that is some kind of pigment cartridge system. You’d use natural, unpigmented filament and the printer would inject pigment in different mixtures as it prints. Just seems… I dunno. More efficient?

I remember seeing a YouTube video (that I might search for and find again if I remember) where some company had developed (and probably patented) an approach that involved inkjet-coloring as it printed. I remember the colors looked pretty pale and washed-out looking. Not vibrant the way I would have hoped. But the approach might be one that could be improved on. 🤷

• Sounds sensationalistic.
• Misleading AI hype. (The kind of AI that helps discover drugs isn’t the same kind that runs LLMs, but the tech bros like to conflate all “AI” to make it seem like ChatGPT or Claude or whatever is actually useful when it’s not.)
• Paywalled.

“AI” can mean a lot of things. Are we talking LLMs here or something else?

I don’t chose what gets built.

Yeah, this is definitely true. I’m the sort of software engineer who logs off after work and works on my own side projects for the passion of it. At work, I do what I can to advocate for better ways of doing things. Not just for customers, but just to keep the cognitive load manageable. But I definitely have to choose my battles. Battles with management and also battles with my coworkers who might think such-and-such super-heavy framework should be imported so they can use one three-line function that it provides.

I’m a software engineer and I can say it’s a huge systemic issue in the whole software industry. (I wouldn’t want to speak to the hardware industry given how little experience I have with it.) Part of the problem is managers. They think more features is better.

A good example is Java web development. (Not directly relevant to your story about iPads, but it’s an example I’m familiar with.) Java 1.0 was released in 1995. In 1996, they released a framework for doing web development in Java called “Servlets”. They definitely made some terrible design decisions when they made Servlets. (The use of XML for configuration. JSPs being impossible to render to strings. The near impossibility of writing your own “Servlet container”. Etc.) But it worked. And many of the issues with it were products of the time and only became apparently “mistakes” a decade later or more.

When people started realizing those were mistakes, they abandoned Servlets and built something bett- just kidding, they built a new layer of way-overengineered bullshit on top of Servlets called “Spring”. It became the industry standard for Java web development. So then in order to do web development in Java, you have to understand both Spring and Servlets. Actually, no you don’t. You just have to be able to throw shit at the wall and enlist the help of the guy who does understand both Spring and Servlets and isn’t afraid to look at the source code of both to figure out why they don’t act as advertised.

Well, of course, that wasn’t good enough. “It’s too cumbersome.” “I have to type too many things.” In true Java fashion, they added another janky floor to the house on the crumbling foundation. “Spring Boot”. It sits on top of Spring and configures a bunch of stuff “aUtOmAgIcAlLy” for you. But if you change the tiniest thing, you better just plan for days of dependency hell trying to get it to JUST COMPILE YOU MOTHERFUCKER.

Java sucks ass in every way and I hate writing Java. But if I have to write Java, I’d rather just use Servlets directly than the house of cards the industry has built on top of it any day. For all its warts, at least it does what you tell it and nothing more. Not to say there are no better alternatives not built on Servlets. But there’s no need for anything on top of Servlets. Any attempt at such could only make things worse.

(Ok. One exception. If I could get Servlets except you can eschew XML with the absolute minimum amount of moving parts strictly necessary to make that happen, I think that would improve Servlets. Also, I’d try to find an alternative to JSPs.)

That’s far from the only example in the Java ecosystem. Java’s just addicted to adding layers of complexity to “fix” the layers underneath.

Outside the Java ecosystem, there are similar issues in a lot of other communities. JS and Ruby developers are known to pull in tons of heavy dependencies without considering the consequences, for instance. C++ is so complex that development teams have to choose a common subset of the language to get anything done.

That’s epic!

Questions for you:

• What material did you print it out of? (PLA, ABS, etc.)
• And have you had any trouble with warping or softening due to the heat generated by the laptop and/or hard drives?

If you don’t have a CR touch on one or both of those, you desperately need to get one (or you’re unlikely to be able to use more than a tiny little spot in the middle of the bed without massive adhesion issues). And getting a CR touch will probably require upgrading the motherboard on your v1.

Hope you like outages.

“You?” As in me? I’m confused.

Ah. Ok. I did watch it at double speed, so I guess I can’t really argue.

What was wrong with the video exactly?

Of course! Just figure out how to get the potato into superposition for long enough to run the algorithm first. The rest is the easy part.

Anything can run on anything with enough effort and ingenuity.

My most played game is probably The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. No idea in terms of how many hours. But I played it, then hundred-percented it (yes I found all the Korok seeds), then the DLC came out and I played that, then I started over in master mode, then I replayed it with mods, then I replayed it with cheats, then I speedran it for like a year.