jfoutz

I’ve looked at but never tried 2 things.

1, pla melts at about the same temperature as paraffin, people have used candle making kits to cast skulls or whatever. Seems neat to me.

2, similar trick, put the pla between two cookie sheets with weights. Heat to melting. This gives panels you can cut and incorporate into projects. Drawer bottom or robot body , that kinda stuff.

Can't speak from personal experience, but OP laid it out pretty clearly. You wait till you have an edge, then you bet. There are various books that try to capture it. Doyle Brunson's super system is like way outdated, but there are some funny bits about being a Texas road gambler getting run out of town. Annie Duke has a book I believe. My window into that world is pretty narrowly focused on poker.

I'll always recommend _Positively Fifth Street_ by James McManus. He doesn't really lay out how to do it step by step, but takes you along for a ride as to what the world looks like from that perspective. kinda.

Use a fatter marker.

I thought of an analogy a moment ago, and I want to use it.

Drag racing has a super stock category, which is pretty much a normal car you buy and then mess with. Some folks are sponsored, but generally sponsorships are in the thousands of dollars range, not the millions, like pro funny car or top fuel would have. Most of the budget comes from folk's wallets and maybe winnings.

There are race car drivers, there are race car mechanics, and sometimes they're both the same person. Any _good_ driver is going to have some idea about how to turn a wrench. Any _good_ mechanic is going to have taken a few runs, and the fear of death rules out that particular career choice.

I think your point about the material is a good one. I think, that might also be a "level 2" skill. I think there is a huge amount of stuff to do to get a real sense of what CNC can do, and what a given person is able to do with a given setup. super beginner stuff like, what do I click to make the run go? is it connected right? What's a spline? Why is the enclosure orange? Just the safety stuff alone is pretty intense. And like, engaging the safety squint isn't going to help at all.

I'm very much an advocate for getting the shitty version to learn on. Maybe I learn bad practices, but I find I REALLY appreciate good tools. I have the tools I have because I finally understood what I needed and why it needed to be that way. Some of the tools in the box rarely get touched, but they're good enough when I need them.

Sorry to ramble at you, I guess I just needed to get that out.

_edit_

and of course, you're the author of the article. Ahh, it's been a rough week. I think it's a good intro.

These are excellent points.

I think, these are sort of problems after you "level up". Lasers and 3d printers both have pretty light toolheads and no resistance. So you can get away with being pretty half assed with your stepper control, and still get results.

You're not wrong. But there's a big mountain of stuff to learn when starting with CNC stuff. Getting a cheap machine, figuring it out, tinkering with it, improving repeatability, these things are all part of how you get better. This is sort of a hobbyist diy mindset. Even if it's not a very good machine, you can still get results out of fusion360, or scad or whatever toolchain you work through.

Now, you're absolutely right, if you've got some cash burning a hole in your pocket, you can skip a lot of that machine tinkering hassle. pro level gear is absolutely magical. I'm more of a dabbler kinda guy, try it out, learn about it, if it seems cool 10x my investment in the hobby.

Anybody who wants to turn a laser cutter into a business is going to know all the stuff you've addressed. A hobbyist, they're going to need to not die from toxic gas from tanned leather. they're going to need to work out if they want to make stuff or if they want to tinker with the machine (both are totally valid).

To be super clear, I agree with all of your points. And it would be good to indicate the suffering you'll go through with a cheap machine. But, I'd argue a cheap machine can still be really fun. It all depends on what you're after.

It depended. I mean, nobody's going to have everything. It wasn't too hard to come by _man bites dog_ or _run lola run_. European art house stuff. A different place had a deep Spanish selection. In my part of the u.s. southwest, Bollywood, Japan and Korea were under-represented.

I'd imagine different proprietors had different tastes. See something they liked, if it rented, look for more of that flavor.

One manager had regular backlog grooming. Friday afternoon, go through them all. Some would age out, be not relevant or whatever and be closed. Some kicked to next quarter. But a lot actually happened. Oh, we got pages, let’s do this now.

Seemed super effective.

Cards are from before my time.

The blank cards I've seen had printing on one side, and usually some sort of title area. so you could get orientation correct.

The punched cards I've seen were all hand numbered.

The stripe, I think, was mostly a quick check. if it looks like a line, they're probably in order. if there's a spot that looks weird, you can check that range quickly.

I don't think the failure mode was like someone grabbing your deck and throwing it in the air, it was more they got dropped, stayed mostly stacked, but you could quickly file the strays in the right order. and be pretty confident the cards that stayed stacked were right. if you've got a blurry spot of the line, you can quickly check that section.

so, yes? I think the stripes worked? Again, before my time, this is lore handed down from professors. I think if you secretly swapped 2 cards, and they didn't notice, they would hunt you down and beat you up.

IIRC, the cards did wear down, but there were duplicators, that would read old cards and punch fresh ones. Obviously, if something was torn or damaged, you'd have to fix that by hand. I think I've seen one once, but I don't recall exactly where.

edit- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_519#514 <- that's not what I remember, but they did exist.

it's such a weird phrasing. the article just says, 45000 years ago. There are a few more refined dates, but, like 45k seems good enough. maybe too long for the title?

I think more likely, a programmer so frustrated with relative time handling the refuse not to give a relative time, but fat-fingered the anchor.

Although it is pretty strong evidence office space is a boondoggle. That’s a lot of pointless overhead costs that hurt the bottom line.

I like seeing my peers in person. I like hashing things out in person. Apparently that’s a waste of time and money.

can you get to neuroscience, language or culture without physics?

I don't see the chain, but I might be overlooking something super obvious (or not so obvious)

Arithmetic isn't super helpful for calculus, but it's real tough (for me) to construct calculus without a notion of +.

So, I don't have any evidence of math, the very narrow branch of math in the sense of algebra, and proofs without electric meat. I'm open to a very broad definition. I think, we agree that two different things are equal, and if we change both sides the same way, they're still equal. that kind of gives us algebra.

Does anything else do that? Does anything else preserve equality that's not just simple physics?

Again, I'm wildly unqualified to make this argument, but maybe I learn something amazing.

How do you "close the knot"? I've got some computer science background and I can mostly deal with fix points. In what way would neuroscience be free from the underlying systems? I'm pretty sure I can represent computation with gears or electrons or marbles, or whatever, but those are rooted in physics. I'm super curious how you might represent neuroscience, language and culture without that foundation.

vi and emacs are prehistoric. Folks now are ok with / and \ and maybe some can deal with : as a file separator.

But in the precambrian era you needed to know about ^ to edit a specific version of a file, because diffs were tracked.

They're both wonderful and amazing and can handle anything, because they had to handle everything when filesystems were like a brand new invention and nobody really knew what was good or bad, so they threw everything in.

Tough to get standards before standards exist.

I'm wildly unqualified to present a meaningful opinion, but here goes :D

it's not circular. Physics is the root.

philosophy and math might have a claim that there's some extra-physical thing, but in my very very humble opinion, put up or shut up.

All the evidence we have is, math and philosophy can only be understood by electric meat. Electric rocks are making some progress. It's not at all clear if those are a side effect of electric meat, or if there's some other magic dust. But, uh, I ain't seen no magic dust. it might exist, and I might not be able to perceive it, cause I'm electric meat. :shrug:

Anyway, the point is, you can root a tree in physics. And, uh, there's no counter example that says rooting the tree in physics is wrong. Physics produces biology, biology produces math. We have clear examples of this (you can totally throw in more layers, like chemistry or whatever).

Math or philosophy may indeed be the root and all things flow from some deeper underlying organization. But we have very little evidence of that. I don't have the faith of a mustard seed, so I can't move mountains. I don't think anybody has been able to do that for a while, and I find the reports suspect. They may be true! But you'd sorta think that kinda thing would happen more often.

In any case, (as a computer scientist) I think you can pretty safely pick physics as the root. You could be wrong. But, like, you're going to be Newton wrong. Newton was absolutely dead wrong, arrow in the heart of the theory, when Einstein rolled in and upended everything. But it's close, and super helpful. I don't really consider time dilation when driving up a hill. (Maybe I should) Newton's model has been close enough so far.

In any case. I'm not really qualified. But I ain't seen no magic dust.

That's awesome! Thanks!

I haven't messed around with smalltalk since squeak, around the dabble-db days. I was uncomfortable with the montachello (I think?) diff system. Maybe I'll have to give it another spin the next time I get a good long break.

Version control. Small talk is amazing, but dumping the binary to distribute is so scary. Did I unload my email client? Are my credentials in there? Gah. Scary.

I think live shows, improv and plays will stick around for a long time. But probably not for much money. It’s fun to do, it’s fun to watch.

Who knows?

The trick is to throw memory at it. if memoization helps, that’ll work without the memory hit!

my windows had little bits of molding and surfaces for the foil to crumple up against and conform to. I didn't need anything else. I suppose tape would work.

Working graveyard and renting, I learned aluminum foil is perfect. cheap, trivial to install and remove. and perfectly opaque.

This is the most wonderful thing I've seen on the internet in a long time. Thank you.

Even more reason to look them up.

Soviet standing in red square handing out blank pieces of paper.

Police come, and tell him to stop distributing protest flyers.

Protestors: Protest? they're blank paper!

Police: Comrade, everyone knows what's wrong.

I might have messed it up a little, but, you get the gist.

A couple years ago I went looking for soviet jokes. They're amazing. I imagine google can find you some.

A bunch of them were great. One I recall,

American: The U.S. is the best! I can stand in front of the Whitehouse and yell, Ronald Regan is the worst president ever!

Soviet: Comrade, I can stand in front of the Kremlin and yell the same thing!

There's a bunch, with varying levels of grim. If you're ever bored, it's a rabbit hole that's worth poking around in.

I think there are 2 things at play here. 1. It's an old old idea, and the presentation was cogent in ancient times, but takes a lot of effort to get the meaning as expressed at the time. A poor example, because time goes the wrong way, but I'll still offer it, since I think it has some of the flavor of the problem. I theoretically could hand wrap wire memory to run python on a relay based computer, but I'm not going to. and, what would I lose in translation?

2. The form and matter split is probably the core, but I'd guess there are lots of subtleties and consequences of accepting or rejecting the various parts of the argument that the article sorta breezes through.

I don't know though. I'm not a historian or philosopher.

Reminds me of in the beginning was the command line.

Powerful tools, but they’ll rip your arm off.

Learning nix, slowly, really enjoying it though.

I thought pellet stoves got hot enough to be pretty clean. Co2, yes, but not much else?

A lot of rendering will go through the video card if available, like the jvm does this as an optimization.

I've always been a vim guy.

but doom is pretty nice. the curation and integration is really helpful. Might be a nice middle way.

ahhh, I didn't realize steam only. I don't think you'd find many dosbox games that really fit the theme. Robot odyessy is coming up on 40 years old.

but this ``` I say keep it to just Steam games. That way if nothing else it has the focus to be an amazing utility and still has plenty of items to curate. Once the criteria becomes "everything under the sun" it becomes so huge that it's likely to have a low signal to noise ratio for usefulness. ```

seems like a pretty reasonable stance. Completely fair to say if people want old games, go look for old games.

An old old one worth mentioning https://robotodyssey.online/

It’s abandoned and available for dos box as well but the web version is easy to get started with.

I know I'm incredibly naive, and there's no political will to actually make the system work.

It seems like various sections and departments are passing audits. If you're within, say, 1% just allocate the funds.

If you didn't pass the audit, fill out this form and then get the money. The form can be classified.

I have no idea, but I'd imagine like payroll and taxes are pretty much perfect.

Once you get a handle on who doesn't know where their money is going, you can help them figure it out, throughout the year, and be on track next year.

It's huge, it's massive it's trillions of dollars, it's a completely incomprehensible system. But, like, some parts are comprehensible. Those parts are easy. The incomprehensible parts can be broken down and figured out. Is divide and conquer not a thing?