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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • To be fair, in that specific case it is almost certainly not YouTube directly censoring the phrase. They aren’t known to do any kind of editing like that on uploaded videos.

    What is happening is the person that uploaded that video censored themselves…because YouTube’s policy around monetization. They’ll demonetize videos with certain no-no words. Part of that is YouTube and part of that is advertisers demanding their ads not be placed on content that they find objectionable.

    Indirectly, YouTube and advertisers are censoring our content. A lot of it is also TikTok, which will ban you for no-no words. This seeps over into YouTube where something that might be fine on YouTube but is banned on TikTok gets censored anyway in case it gets clipped for TikTok.

    Genuinely the power TikTok and it’s advertisers have over how we communicate is pretty scary. Imagine how often you hear “unalive” instead of “suicide” these days. “Pdf” (or others) instead of “pedophile.” The list goes on.


  • Instead of pretending One Man With A Gun is going to do something

    I used to agree with this train of thought, why be armed when the government has tanks?

    But the realities of the past several years have shown us that an armed rebellion can be significantly more powerful. Look at Iraq and Afghanistan, look at Myanmar today where the rebel groups are literally 3D printing carbines. A guerilla group with small arms can put serious pressure on a modern military. Will lots of them die? Probably. Will they “win”? Probably not, but they could easily wear down the enemy with attrition. When you need to move a couple dozen men with rifles it’s an entirely different game than coordinating 12 tanks and 500 men, you can employ completely different tactics. Especially on your home turf that you know inside and out.

    Is an armed rebellion happening anytime soon? I sure hope not. But the threat that an armed populace can at the least put some serious hurt on a military/government is a deterrent to tyranny. Just the possibility of it is a huge deterrent, compared to authoritarian countries where citizens aren’t armed and get run over by tanks.

    I’m not saying gun violence isn’t a huge problem, but saying armed citizenry is zero deterrent is just factually untrue.


  • I own the Sovol SV06, it was my first printer but it was also the cheapest option for me ($169 IIRC). The Sovol has given me two problems in the entire time I used it:

    1. When it came in, the extruder was jammed. Wouldn’t print or extrude any filament for some reason. Followed a 2 minute video on Sovol’s Amazon page to resolve it (although it did involve disassembling the hotend).

    2. The extruder decided to encase itself in plastic one day when I printed something on it. That was a bitch and a half to clean, had to take a heat gun to it to soften the plastic then scrape it off without burning myself. My best guess is it was caused by me forgetting to run bed leveling after moving the printer a bit, hasn’t happened again.

    Other than those two times it just works every time I need it. It was sitting dormant for ~3 months and I just kicked off a print yesterday, no problems. Fired right up and everything printed perfectly.

    With that said, is it €239 of “Just works”? Probably not. I immediately couldn’t do some prints I planned because of the build volume (although all three of your options have the same build volume). So I’m already considering upgrading to an SV06 Plus. So check some of what you want to print that it’ll fit in 220x220x250.

    I did some research on your other options and as far as I can tell, the main difference between them and the Sovol is the all metal hotend and print speed.

    Sovol SV06 has an all-metal hotend so you can print high temperature filaments (PETG/TPE/CFN/etc) without worry (does require a harder nozzle most likely though). The other two seem to have some metal but are not fully metal, so if you want to hop into the more exotic materials you’ll have to upgrade those.

    Second is speed, my SV06 prints at 80 mm/s. It is slow. Smallest prints take around 2-3 hours. My current print will be done after 24 hours. This is fine for me as most of my prints need complex geometry, so I’d rather it take longer and be accurate than run it too fast. The others claim a max speed of 250mm/s which would be a bit over 3x faster than the Sovol. If they can actually print at that speed without looking awful, that’s a pretty big upgrade time-wise.

    If you need exotic filaments and don’t want to upgrade the hotend yourself for it then consider the Sovol. Other than that, the price in your region makes it not an option in my opinion. The Sovol just is a budget printer, only makes sense at budget prices. The Kobra and Ended you mentioned look very similar other than that, they both have auto bed leveling (a must have), same build size, very similar designs. Personally I’d lean towards the Ender, just for the community support. But do some research and see how many community member posts you see online resolved with the two. They seem to be functionally identical to me otherwise (just looking at a spec sheet, I do not have irl experience with either of these printers)


  • With guns in general, or with Polymer80 or similar products? I’m guessing he’s intentionally mixing the two to make it sound scarier than it is.

    This is what I hate about the rhetoric around gun control, especially “ghost guns”

    As a gun owner that thinks guns are fucking cool, I’m happy to have reasonable compromises and regulations around them. Compromises and regulations that do something to stop crime. Almost all cases of 3D printed guns being used in crime are when the crime is having a 3D printed firearm (mostly in Europe). Actual violent crime it is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction. We should focus on legislation that does something about the problem, not ban things we arbitrarily give scary names like “Ghost guns.” Look at the actual numbers, the actual types of crimes being committed, go after those things. Don’t start background checking people for 3D printer purchases of all things.








  • This is a pretty big overstatement.

    DO NOT USE AN SSD to store your data long-term! Solid-state storage has a very short, finite life-span.

    This has not been true for years. SSDs are generally more reliable than HDDs except in write-intensive applications (and even then… It really depends on what exact models you are comparing). SSDs have a life-span mostly talked about in terms of TBW (terabytes written) rather than years for a reason, if they’re powered on and not written too they’ll last as long as or longer than a hard drive. (Note: Powered on regularly, SSDs can lose data if stored unpowered for a long time (months)). If you just have an archival drive you’re not constantly erasing and rewriting data to, an SSD is a great choice. Reads also barely affect the lifespan of at all, so you can still access the data you want to protect (hell, write-lock the drive even and it’ll last decades if powered on).

    What you want to do is buy an even number of hard drives, plug them in long enough to copy your data to, and then unplug them and store them in a climate-controlled area. bout once a year, copy the data to a different hard drive

    This is just plain silly. Yes, the mechanical wear of the drives spinning up and down means they’ll die faster. But we’re still talking MTBF measured in years. And replacing a hard drive that’s barely used every single year? That’s not just bad advice it’s creating e-waste for no reason. Also note drives fail on a bathtub curve… If you have two good drives that lasted a year, you are increasing your chances of a failure by swapping them for two brand new drives… The best thing you can do for your hard drives is to not power cycle them constantly, any typical usage is fine. Also mechanical parts can actually wear out from disuse as well. Even archival services don’t go to these extremes you’re recommending.

    If you really care about saving your data follow 3-2-1. 3 copies of your data (live, archival (external HDD or similar), off-site), two-different forms of media (HDD, SSD, cloud (yes cloud is an HDD or SSD but they have their own redundancy)), one off-site (in the event of a fire etc.)

    Honestly 99.9% of consumers would be fine with a 2-2-1 scheme, 2 copies (live and off-site/cloud), 2 forms of media, 1 off-site. If you don’t trust Google or don’t want to pay for cloud storage, set up a server with redundant disks at a friend’s house. Just keeping a second copy on a server with redundancy is plenty of fail over for most use cases. 3-2-1 is for data centers and businesses (and any cloud service you rent from will follow 3-2-1…) Let’s not overcomplicate how difficult it is to keep data intact, if I tell someone to buy a new 12tb HDD each year they’re just gonna give up on keeping it safe.




  • Conveniently I work in this space, but note the following is primarily my own personal opinion.

    Primarily there’s a few reasons I prefer Android Auto over native Android on the car:

    1. Ever had a phone that’s a few years old slow down in you? Now imagine you buy a car for $60k, and three years down the line the (already sluggish to begin with) Android interface is bogged down by updates and is barely usable. Imagine Spotify drops support for that version of Android Automotive. Android Auto puts all the infotainment into something the customer controls, and something external to the car so you are not dependent upon the OEM to do their own due diligence to ensure functionality and compatibility. If my phone slows down from age/wear/increased software demands, I go buy a new $400 phone. If my car’s infotainment slows down I…buy a new car? (Looking at you GM)

    2. Like I said it moves the infotainment to something in the customer’s (and Google/Apple’s) hand. OEMs do not want this. Auto makers want you locked into their proprietary Android skins for two reasons. First, making it more difficult to leave their specific company’s ecosystem. They (will) build in their own apps that you’ll start putting all your settings and private info on. Things like remembering a driver’s preferred seating and mirror arrangement and auto-adjusting, so when your spouse buys a car you go “Oh well if we both have brand X, it’ll be easier to drive each other’s cars.” Etc. Second, they want all of your data. Legitimately the industry is on fire right now figuring out how much consumer data we can scrape and use/sell with these systems. The Android Automotive stack in a car is 300% sending data back to the OEM of literally anything they are legally allowed to collect. Probably more, too. Plug in Android Auto from my phone and yeah they’re still spying on me, but they don’t have my Spotify login info or my specific apps used, they just have what the vehicle can directly measure (still a terrifying amount).

    In your specific case with a third party head unit…go ham and use the stock interface if you want. Personally I’d still use Android Auto, to top off my phone and to access my local music library (I don’t stream music), but a third party has a lot less interest in spying on you or locking you in the same way an OEM does.

    Also out of curiosity, what head unit did you get? I’ve got a 2012 Cruze I’ve considered installing one of those on but I can almost never find anything that seems actually trustworthy.