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bluescrn

3,998 karma · joined August 7, 2016

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bluescrn··on California AB 2047 makes 3D printers off-limits to students, educators, business
They'll also have to ban motors and microcontrollers. As they can be used to build 3D printers and drones.

Maybe they'll ban Github, too - as it hosts unregulated open source software that can power these scary tools.

bluescrn··on California AB 2047 makes 3D printers off-limits to students, educators, business
In the US I believe there's many metal 'spare parts' for guns available, including the barrel, so don't need to print the whole thing. So they're usually not talking about entirely printed guns.

A pure plastic gun seems more likely to blow the users hand off than hit their target. Especially if just downloaded and printed in PLA on default settings (few walls, sparse infill...)

bluescrn··on The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs
What also happened around 2009?... Smartphones taking off in a big way.

Distracted pedestrians must be a significant factor too. Especially if they've got noise-cancelling Airpods or similar in their ears while looking at their phone.

bluescrn··on Steam Machine launches today
Nah, just rewarding loyalty
bluescrn··on Steam Machine launches today
The people buying this will be a small niche who have a lot of disposable income, already have a high spec gaming PC and a Steam library, and likely already have a laptop or handheld before considering this as a third device for the living room.

At these prices, it's not going to convince console gamers/more casual gamers to move to Steam.

Steam Deck was also vastly more appealing at launch when the base model was £349 (64GB/LCD). It now starts at close to twice the price, £649 (512GB/OLED) despite the hardware being kind of old at this point.

bluescrn··on Britain's prime minister to step down, Burnham puts himself forward as successor
Vandalised military assets on a miltary site.

Actions of a traitor or enemy saboteur. Lucky they didn't get shot.

Some of these protesters seem to think they're invincible these days because they support a popular cause (Palestine or climate, usually). They need to get a grip on what reasonable 'direct action' is. Obstructive protests are generally OK, Destructive protests aren't.

bluescrn··on Britain's prime minister to step down, Burnham puts himself forward as successor
Locking up placard-wavers is stupid, but so is intentionally waving a placard with the name of a proscribed group, when just about any other message supporting the cause would be fine.

If you do a million pounds in criminal damage and attack a police officer with a sledgehammer, you can't just write it off as 'direct action', you deserve a tough jail sentence whatever the cause.

bluescrn··on Britain's prime minister to step down, Burnham puts himself forward as successor
And he'll be just as powerless to solve any of the big problems as the last half a dozen PMs.
bluescrn··on SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
About 4x what they've spent on Starship development so far.

They're not a space company any more. They're just part of the AI bubble.

bluescrn··on What happened to nerds?
Influencers, activists, narcissists, and grifters

And then there were no 'safe spaces' for socially awkward/on-the-spectrum nerds. The spaces once created to escape the school bullies had let in new types of bully.

bluescrn··on Swiss voters reject proposal to cap population at ten million
> For example finding nursing staff is very challenging

No. Finding staff that'll work for very low wages is very challenging. It's not really about bringing in essential skills, it's about driving down wages.

bluescrn··on WWDC 2026: Apple is Folding
But they still make repairs very difficult in case of accidental damage, random failure, or inevitably battery wear.

Glued batteries, soldered storage, keyboards and screens that absolutely aren't designed to be swapped out in the event of damage. There's still an element of planned obsolescence even if reliability/quality generally seems better than the competition.

bluescrn··on WWDC 2026: Apple is Folding
The purpose of a foldable is to reduce the lifespan of a device, and therefore sell more devices
bluescrn··on India's surprise baby bust
'The benefits of continuing the existence of the species are not clear'
bluescrn··on India's surprise baby bust
We're also teaching the younger generation imminent climate apocalypse is coming, and therefore bringing kids into this dying world would be cruel, or at best contributing to the problem.

(And now there's also an AI apocalypse of some kind on the way even if the climate situation can be resolved/survived. And the ever-present threat of WW3 seems closer now than ever)

bluescrn··on United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert
But bombs apparently use bluetooth now, so he can't detonate it from more than a few metres away...
bluescrn··on Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'
The 'struggle' is that they seem to have regressed from that point, and that the scale of Starship is perhaps too big for a 'fail fast, iterate rapidly' approach.

Especially now that every failure results in a massive wave of negative publicity

bluescrn··on Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'
While the Starship project may be struggling, Falcon 9 is still a massive success, with a successful launch every couple of weeks, making up most of humanity's access to space/LEO right now.

And Starlink is a pretty big deal, particularly in a time of conflict where undersea cables are very vulnerable.

If Elon hadn't shifted so far to the right, these threads would be near-universally praising SpaceX despite Starship's struggles.

bluescrn··on Valve raises Steam Deck prices
I’m much more concerned by the skyrocketing cost of housing, energy, food, and transport than the cost of tech luxuries.

If I never buy another GPU or console again, there’s more than enough quality gaming for several lifetimes available on older hardware and often very inexpensively.

bluescrn··on C64 Basic: Game Map Overhead “Camera View”
BBC BASIC was far better than C64 BASIC.

It had a nice set of built-in graphics functions and an inline assembler, amongst other things.

I can still remember that VDU 23 was the command to redefine a character, so much easier than doing the same sort of thing on the C64 (copy the character set from ROM to RAM, get the VIC to use the RAM copy with POKE statements, modify the desired character)

bluescrn··on C64 Basic: Game Map Overhead “Camera View”
Experimenting with C64 BASIC taught me a lot back in the day, but it quickly became clear that for any real game dev you need to be using assembly.

But a few years later, the Amiga brought us DPaint and Blitz Basic, and suddenly it was very possible to make a pretty competent game in BASIC as a self-taught teenager with no Internet access. That’s probably a better choice for anyone wanting to experiment with retro game dev using the tools of the period without resorting to assembly language

bluescrn··on Ferrari Luce
Really doesn't look like a supercar, let alone a $650k supercar.

Looks more like a design for a premium fairly-mass-market EV from any number of other brands.

bluescrn··on BambuStudio has been violating PrusaSlicer AGPL license since their fork
Do other budget brands really print as well as Bambu out of the box with no tinkering?

Going from an old Prusa MK3s to a Bambu P1P+AMS was a huge upgrade. Mostly speed, reliable bed adhesion, and easy material swapping, it’s made printing as a hobby much more fun, and at this point I’m more interested in designing things to print than tinkering with the printer itself.

I’ve followed the online drama, but so far, not regretting the purchase. Would avoid Bambu if printing comercially/at scale, but the ‘user hostility’ doesn’t have much real world impact on hobbyists with 1-2 printers. Yet.

bluescrn··on Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027
displayedBatteryHealthPercent = max(80, actualBatteryHealthPercent);

(I suspect the health figures displayed are already somewhat fudged to try and downplay the reality of battery degradation?)

bluescrn··on GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
> I think models are going to be local-first.

Why on earth would that happen when everything else is moving into the cloud to tie it to ever-escalating subscription fees and prevent piracy?

Even with gaming, where running high-end 3D games in the cloud seems like madness and inevitably degrades the quality of the experience, they won't stop trying.

bluescrn··on GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
Did anyone really expect AI to be cheap?

If/when it gets to the point where it can replace a skilled worker, the service can be sold for close to the same price as that skilled labour. But the AI can run 24/7, reliably, and scale up/down at a moments notice.

There's not going to be much competition to drive prices down, the barriers to entry are already huge. There'll likely to be one clear winner, becoming a near-monopoly, or maybe we'll get a duopoly at best.

bluescrn··on MacBook Neo and how the iPad should be
What we need is a single MacOS that can run an iOS-like touchscreen launcher and dumbed-down 'apps' while operating via touchscreen, but with a keyboard+mouse connected switches back to 'productivity mode', exposing the full power of MacOS.

MacOS can basically do this already, running iOS software on Macs. It's just a matter of choosing to unlock the potential of modern iPad hardware, putting the same OS on iPads and Macbooks. Full software compatibility. iPads that can be more than locked-down toys.

But would Apple ever give up the control and App Store revenue that locked-down devices provide?

bluescrn··on Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price
We need EVs with standardised modular battery packs, designed to be replced/upgraded without replacing the entire car.

But instead, we're getting EVs that are built more like smartphones.

bluescrn··on Updating Gun Rocket through 10 years of Unity Engine
Unity 4.x to 5.x (removal of Beast lightmapper) remains the worse transition in Unity’s long history.

The more recent frequent breaking changes around URP custom renderer features and render textures haven’t been much fun either, but nothing as bad as losing a working lightmapper and light probes support (the replacement really want ready for actual use) while working on a project highly dependent on baked lighting…

bluescrn··on Europe has "maybe 6 weeks of jet fuel left"
Net Zero, here we come
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