Oooh, manyfold looks like exactly what I want. Thanks

Unless you are changing filament VERY frequently, the energy costs will almost guaranteed erase any environmental benefits from filament waste.

Because you basically have the exact same problem that most of the filament reuse methods have: If you want a good connection, you want to have both the filament coming out of the nozzle AND the end of the filament you are printing onto to be hot. That is a LOT of engineering effort as you would likely need to keep the current tail of the output filament hot for the majority of the print so as to not add significant stalls when you change filament. This is why most of the tools to fuse to strands have that sleeve that you heat up

Because the moment you start adding supports for your output filament? Holy crap.

I dunno. I still think the answer is more cost effective recycling facilities. I’ve enjoyed Stefan’s various attempts to reuse filament but outside of the splicing methods for near empty spools, they are all a giant mess requiring multiple tools for an often subpar result. Just standardize a cheap and effective way to throw our poop, failed builds, and near empty spools into a box and send it to a filament company. Then give us a discount for doing so. And let said company use their industrial machines to reuse that plastic.

One other complexity: Again, unless you are changing materials constantly AND doing a super long print, the amount of filament you print during any given print is going to be minimal. So you need to maintain state on the build plate/apparatus in between potentially months of prints.

Honestly?

Unless it is a VERY strong ideological reason, there is no reason to ever subject yourself to FreeCAD. It is an awesome tool but the UI/UX is so illogical that it makes Blender seem sane. And, to be fair, Blender IS sane once you start thinking the right way. FreeCAD you have to think like twenty different ways.

And for 3d printing? If you are windows (or mac?), the free version of Fusion 360 is all you need. If you are Linux things get a bit more annoying but I have found myself genuinely loving OnShape (also apparently the lineage goes back to the tool I learned back during high school). Yeah… everything is theoretically publicly accessible and forkable which is good from a community standpoint and bad from a privacy. But my designs aren’t anywhere near good enough for industry to steal and I can always use a code name for anything that I might not want people to know I am working on.

That said, I think there have been a few semi-sketchy forks of FreeCAD that give it a sane UI/UX? I think Maker’s Muse did a semi-recent video where he talked about a few of those.

It was an amazing expansion that deserves to be in the same conversation as Planescape: Torment

But whoa boy was it incomplete and jank.

Both Pillars and Tyranny are nowhere near on the same level as a New Vegas or a KOTOR 2 but, trust me, Obsidian continued to launch games REAL hot well after they made a south park game.

They haven’t done a “This is 75% of one of the greatest games ever” since Mask of the Betrayer. But they are still Obsidian.

Mortismal has a terrifyingly high tolerance for jank. But if they are excited then I am excited. Both because we tend to have very similar tastes in CRPGs but also because they are one of the bigger PoE fans on the internet.

If you JUST want to read pirated ebooks? Kobo is probably the best bang for your buck. But you can also pretty easily sideload ebooks to any kindle via the email interface (which I believe Calibre can utilize).

That said? I have a mix of ebooks I got from legal and less than legal sources. And some of those legal sources include amazon kindle because the prices are REALLY good.

So I like my Onyx Boox. Yeah… it is jank as hell and it allegedly comes with a free 5g modem so be wary of what personal info you put on there. But it works well as I can use the kindle app (which also syncs with my phone) for amazon stuff and the native ereader for any epub files. And because I use a webdav to sync my notes, grabbing new books is as simple as remembering to scp a folder to my nextcloud periodically.

Skimmed through a few of these earlier and REALLY excited for later today (pre-ordered on Steam for the bonuses, will refund if it is a total trainwreck)

The scores are all over the place because this is a B-A game so it has to actually technically perform well (unlike AA-AAA games like Jedi Survivor that get a pass…), But the actual text is fairly consistent:

The world is amazing. The early-mid game balance is brutal and unforgiving and you will spend a LOT of time using AKs so degraded that they WILL jam. The emergent behavior from the storms and enemy placements lead to frantic struggles to reach cover. And the performance and bugs are all over the place and we all REALLY hope the day-one patch fixes things but nobody is that optimitsic.

And… as a STALKER fan who loved SoC and CoP (and didn’t hate CS…):

Just to add on a bit for people thinking “I’ll wait ten years for the community patches”. Yeah, that will be a less painful experience. But it is well worth looking back at how modders have handled the STALKERs over the years. Even as early as year one there were people who insisted on changing the game balance heavily and EVERYONE wanted to re-enable the cut repair features at merchants. Which made the game a lot less frustrating but also kind of defeated the purpose of the game.

Because the experience of stocking up on ALL the good 9x39 ammo in The Zone to take your VSS up against the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant? That involved using AKs and ARs to go from point A to point B because you wanted to save up that durability for when it mattered. And when it did matter? The fighting was so intense that you burned through ALL that ammo AND your gun was busted and there was the experience of basically throwing away a perfectly good gun that you spent your entire net worth on to sprint out from the cover of a burned out bus (that looked suspiciously like the same asset pack Metro and Fallout 3 used…) to grab an AK off a dead zombie to return fire before the RPG soldiers got a good shot.

Also… this is a Ukrainian as fuck game made by Ukrainians during a war for their very survival. Decide how much slack you are gonna cut for that and how much long term support you expect with the upcoming “wrinkle” of 2025.

but games consoles and its peripherals are indeed related enough to games to be allowed.

I still have no idea what you are on about and it sounds like you actually have a different set of rules you want to enforce.

So rather than confuse everyone when you are tired… maybe update the sidebar and the list of rules so that people know what you want this board to discuss?

REALLY curious how “rigid” your interpretation is and how you feel this is not “related to games”

…

Wait. It didn’t support the PSN cloud from the start?

Like, I thought it was questionable that it couldn’t play ANY games locally (PS1 games run on a potato at this point) but sure. But I assumed it at least supported the cloud streaming Sony occasionally remembers they try to sell.

This thing was SOLELY for playing people’s own PS5s? What the fuck?

Make sure to actually understand how those “non-profit” websites and services are functioning.

It costs money to power servers and to maintain them. Most of the fediverse instances like to claim they are run on donations and so forth. But… think about how angry people get at the idea of tipping for ANYTHING and then wonder how many of those are throwing significant cash at your favorite lemmy or mastodon instance per month.

Everyone is always shocked when they find out how social media or a “free” vpn or whatever is funded and where there information is going. But hey, I am sure it will be completely different this time.

Yeah, Rawlings is awesome. I forget if Matt Easton ever did anything for GS or if he only does Insider (and scholagladiatoria) or what.

For me it is mostly that everyone else has fun and does the “Okay, this wouldn’t work but it is really cool. It might be inspired by XYZ”. Whereas the armor guy just gets incredibly smug and complains that the armor on that Ork isn’t historically accurate.

And yeah. Had a bad feeling when they skipped the week after the Fandom layouts were announced. And last week (the ArmA 3 DLC one) has a note from Dave saying that is the final episode because he was fired.

For what its worth, Jonathan and the rest of the Royal Armouries do weekly-ish shows. Less video game oriented but the same gun nerd logic and the discussion of historical context.

Just to expand on the phone thing because it amuses me:

In a past life myself and a few others had access to cell tower records for a specific company. As a research project, we applied what we would now call AI/ML concepts to sanitized data (basically all customer IDs were mapped to a different ID set and then the mapping was thrown away).

For poops and giggles I checked the tower nearest the local happy ending massage place. And, lo and behold, we were able to immediately get a list of everyone who turned their phone off for 30-60 minutes.

and Fandom owns and is Giant Bomb.

So yes. Giant Bomb laid off two staff and replaced them with contractors.

The various editors at the blog sites generally don’t want to do mass layoffs either. But the end result is the same. People lose their jobs so someone can get paid much less and have no benefits do that job instead.

The fundamental issue is still giving people a false sense of security. It is why it is INCREDIBLY important to be very very specific about what you do and don’t get from various actions. Otherwise you have the same problem as all those people in countries where being LGBTQ was criminalized who realized elon musk owned their DMs.

Also: Putting your phone in a farraday bag half a mile from a protest doesn’t take much effort to detect.

Who reads written text over their favorite YouTube personality, or the SEO garbage that pops up first on their search, or first party articles/recs on steam, and so on?

Few layers to that.

SEO still heavily favors sites like IGN and Eurogamer. Most people aren’t looking at the by-line to see who actually wrote the article.

The other much more insidious aspect? A lot of the legacy influencer outlets ARE still using contractors.

Remap (formerly Waypoint) is awesome and are generally well regarded for having great rates for both written and on-air content. They are also a very “lean” org consiting of three people but pay Janet Garcia to show up for a podcast every week and even a stream or two a month. Janet is ALSO a “cohort” on MinnMax where it is less clear who are contractors and who are core staff.

And, to clarify, I don’t have a (significant) problem with that. It is how you get a broader range of voices out there. But it is still similar to having most of your writing team be contractors (… also, Remap contracts out a decent number of articles).’

But then you look at other outlets. Gamespot spent years HEAVILY dependent on “reaction” content. If you ever watched Jonathan Ferguson talk about guns in video games, that was Dave Jewitt’s work. And… they fired Dave two-ish weeks ago. Haven’t heard if Jonathan plans to still do reaction content for them but you can bet they can find other contractors (like the douche bag who rants about armor).

And… on the other side of the Fandom family you have Giant Bomb. Who have outright fired two core staff members (Voidburger and Jason Oestreicher) as well as a regular collaborator from Fandom proper (Bayley) all so they could repurpose that funding for contractors. And… at this point there are good arguments that Mike Miniotti is in more content than most of the core staff.

So the influencer based outlets are rapidly doing the same. Some of it is just the necessity of working in a dying industry where funding is mostly dependent on whether fans “vibe” with you. But it is only a matter of time until we have the same content farms. Hell, I want to say that is exactly what Fandom DID until they bought cnet gaming.

1. So how ai generated is wired these days?
2. NEVER trust any guide that is about “protecting yourself from government surveillance”. Anyone who has an idea of what risk mitigation is viable will NEVER phrase it that way for obvious reasons

From a quick skimming, it looks like their genius guides boil down to

• SIgnal: Signal is only as secure as every user in the chat. Yes, it is MUCH better than using something like imessage. But if they are beating your buddy with a baseball bat it doesn’t really matter if your message expired or not
• FDE: Yes, that is a good idea. But understand that “oh, I forgot my password” doesn’t work when you have been declared to have no civil rights because you look foreign.
• Get a NAS: A good idea, in general. But maybe understand that means you have a big ol’ box of incriminating info in your house that is available to whoever has a crowbar.
• Use Tor: HA! First, it is only a matter of time until Tor is attacked and likely large numbers of users are brought up on CSAM charges. But also? Understand what a compromised endpoint is and maybe look up what governments tend to be associated with those.
• Get a VPN and turn off your GPS: Yeah. it is a real good thing that our devices don’t all connect to cell towers where they can easily be tracked from.
• Get certain crypto but carry a lot of cash: Yeah… how AI generated was this article?

If you actually care about your vulnerability, look what ACTUAL journalists on the run from a government or megacorporation do (dedicated hardware that can’t even power up within a few city blocks of your other devices, for one). And understand that most of those boil down to “They know it is me and they are hunting me but I can live off the grid long enough to get this story out and then maybe they won’t kill me afterward”.

You should not be touching your mirrors or seat while driving. That is what you do before you leave the parking space (… or at a red light).

Good call on the windows and gear (although… there are arguments that you don’t need to in an automatic) though. Forgot we live in a world where teslas are street legal.

I think, in general, the shift to having MOST functions be on the touchscreen is a good one.

When driving? You should generally only be futzing with (off the top of my head):

• Windshield wipers
• Climate control
• Not the music but let’s be honest here
• Turn signals and headlights

And the rest make perfect sense to keep behind menus you deal with when you are parked. And with modern cars, climate control stops being about balancing the knobs and becomes about setting the preferred temperature and MAYBE tapping the defrost/circultaion button. Which actually also makes sense to not need direct button access.

But yeah. Still 100% need physical buttons and knobs for the rest.

I think it is Subaru who have the big display screen and then a small row of dedicated buttons below it?