Sure, but the point of this post is to highlight Bambu’s anticonsumer practices.

I’ve been considering what printer to buy for a while now, but I sure as hell know it won’t be a Bambu.

You’re doing great and we all appreciate you!

I’d say you shouldn’t compare yourself to others. It’s rarely a fair comparison and it doesn’t help you much. It’s pretty pointless - there are 20-year old who have more money and success than you. It’s just how the world is, don’t fret what other people have. Think about what you have and whether you feel you have enough for yourself, personally.

As for the loneliness, that sounds like a more tangible issue. There are ways to deal with loneliness, but not any super easy ways. Being afraid of being alone is a good natural instinct - it’s your social human brain telling you to connect more with other people. Listen to your brain.

he’ll never be able to put out those fires without you.

Why do you say that? I would guess that we are very few years away before we have AI systems monitoring for downtimes and such that can quickly diagnose and fix issues that occur completely automatically - in fact I would not be surprised if this already exists today.

Which model are you using? My experience is that it can definitely do “standard boilerplate”. What programming language are you using?

It’s clearly a controversial thing to say on the fediverse, but everyone must realize that AI is another tool - a sometimes faulty, sometimes great tool. A professional can use it well, a careless person can use it carelessly. But it is a tool that can help in certain cases. It’s a nuanced thing, which many people unfortunately have trouble accepting. It has flaws, yes. It also has benefits. This shouldn’t be controversial to say.

That of course doesn’t guarantee that providing that tool must be profitable. It may well be that providing AI models is just too expensive to actually make sense, at least as it is right now.

I think I’d have a hard time picking out single projects to support. I sometimes do one-time donations to things I like (for example I donated to LocalSend one time when I discovered it and liked it a lot).

I have a regular donation to the Electronic Frontier Foundation though, which I feel sort of covers the same area in a more general sense.

It would be really hard to decide which open source projects would be deserving of such a foundation’s grant.

That said, if you want to support open source in a more general way, I would say you should donate to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Cory Doctorow, the guy that invented the term “enshittification”, is part of EFF. I donate myself, it’s well worth it I think.

I applaud you for that, but it sounds like you’re admitting that Prusa is overpriced and that you can get equally good printers for cheaper elsewhere - is that correct or do you think otherwise?

I really couldn’t care less about speed 😅. Dunno why so many printers advertise speed as a main selling point, I’d always choose high quality and reliable prints rather than speed. I guess it’s important if you’re running a printer farm or whatever, but I’m just looking to get the one printer.

From what I can read, Voron is more like the printer itself becomes the hobby, rather than actually printing stuff. I’m not really interested in tinkering with the printer itself, I just want it to work.

Snapmaker U1 looks really good, but then again it is another Chinese brand in the sea of other chinese brands. But multi-color printing included in the price… It’s a really good deal.

I wouldn’t say that. I think you can definitely tell if something is AI generated. If nothing else, you can see it via the git history, with the amount of code written in a short amount of time.

I have this feeling that a lot of people are against AI-generated code, even if you use it in this “responsible” way - but maybe I’m seeing an exaggerated view? I’m sort of wondering if I should start using AI models in my own work, including open source stuff, but I don’t want it to be like I’m just having the AI do everything for me and I’m worried that others will disregard the code as slop. I’ve seen a lot of frustration with new open source projects that are largely AI-generated, but then again, we’re seeing a lot of those because it’s a useful tool that lowers the barrier for a lot of work. I’m conflicted, anyone have thoughts?

FreeCAD unfortunately seems to be suffering from “open source hell UX”. I just tried installing it and the UI is glitching with black sections when I move my mouse. I can’t even get to the point of using this software. Unfortunately, FreeCAD is clearly not ready for serious wide-spread usage.

I disagree that the reasoning you have makes gacha not gambling. It’s definitely still gambling if you ask me.

The crucial thing to note is that gacha and other loot box mechanics activate and exploits the exact same human psychological weaknesses as traditional gambling does. The point is to incite the player to keep playing “just one more time” because they might get that big win, that dopamine high fix.

That’s the underlying problem with gambling and the problem is the same for gacha and loot boxes. So I think it may as well be called gambling. But even if you don’t agree on using that term, hopefully you agree the the psychological effects are the same.

Okay, but surely upon arriving to said address with a huge swat team and discovering nothing amiss, no panicked people, no gunfire, no anything, their first reaction is to raid the house? The US sure is a strange place.

abusing emergency services

I don’t understand - someone called the swat team on her? Why would they go to a private house with a giant swat force based solely on some anonymous tip? That makes no sense in my head.

I don’t have my own domain for my email, I just switched to Infomaniak’s domain. I then use Thunderbird with the unified inbox to view all my emails in one inbox. So I get both my gmail and infomaniak emails in Thunderbird. I didn’t bother changing all of my old accounts using the gmail to use infomaniak instead - there’s just so many accounts and it didn’t seem worth it. Primary goal for me was to stop paying Google for drive space.

The transition was pretty easy honestly, once I sat down to do it. The largest obstacle is honestly the mental one, of getting oneself to actually commit to doing it.

Can you set up cloud backup of photos from your phone, etc?

Yes, the kDrive app can be set to automatically upload pictures you take on your phone to your kDrive. I actually like it even better than on Google, cause on Google my photos never got to Google Drive, but went to Google Photos. So I didn’t automatically have them on my PC. With the kDrive app, you just choose a folder in your drive where the photos are saved, and then it saves them there, and it gets synced to your PC if you run the kDrive app there obviously.

I switched from Google (email, cloud storage, etc.) to Infomaniak in august last year. It was european, got more cloud storage for less money and though the user experience wasn’t 100% polished, it was basically 90% there. Good enough.

I couldn’t be happier with my choice now - this seems like a really good move. This looks like a similar sort of setup as Mozilla the for-profit company has with the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. Good on the founder for doing this!