There is nothing more cat than hanging out, getting cuddles, and then running like hell at the first sign of danger.

The modern world needs to change. Humans are getting more and more depressed, broken, struggling and mentally ill just to get more and more exposed to ads, social pressure and the lot.

This is by design. People are rightfully criticizing the US for barely protesting our fascist regime. But everyone is either living paycheck to paycheck or well aware how quickly their savings will burn away if they get fired. So protests in the middle of the week, when politicians MIGHT see it, are a no go. And weekend protests mostly are ineffectual and just antagonize people who “just want some peace and quiet on their day off”

UBI is definitely something we have needed for decades now. I personally come down on the side of UBI for basic living expenses but encourage people to work for luxuries and advancement (and if that sounds like the dystopia of Mars in The Expanse…). But we need something so that people can actually live without a job as we put more and more work into automating those jobs away.

As for the topic at hand: I was fortunate enough to have a 9/80 job for a number of years (basically every other Friday off) and loved the schedule. And it is why I am so skeptical of the 4/40 movement and am increasingly suspicious it is a poison pill.

Because it isn’t like the workload is going to drop. So people are going to be expected to get a full week’s work done in four days. For some that is going to be trivial because they have such a small workload (that they are super eager to find ways to use AI to automate…). For others? That means early mornings and late nights and even faster burnout where they have to fit every single errand and the like into that Friday off and have even less energy to do anything on the weekend.

Like I said, I loved my 9/80 and it was really nice for making me value that every other Friday off and try to do something with it. But the number of times I had to swap a Friday last minute because of meetings or just come in for a half day to get a deliverable done…

And the logical reality is that companies will decide 4/40 is good for productivity… and pay people 90% of their former salaries because “We respect the work you are doing but you also only work four days a week…”. 90% of already stagnating salaries during a time of global inflation.

Having consistent uptime and not locking broken IMAP behind a paywall would beat Tuta.

I have a proton subscription (although I am in the process of switching to fastmail since that better suits my needs) but I think “privacy respecting email” is a fool’s errand and increasingly a red flag. In a lot of ways, it is no different than a VPN: They can say whatever the hell they want. If you are in a situation where you are trusting them then you have already made a mistake.

Proton et al ARE awesome because you can get a mostly functional email for free without any other identification (mostly functional in that a lot of services put the proton domains on a spam list… because anyone can get a burner). But if you are sending ANYTHING sensitive, you want to be encrypting that. And you want to do that in a way that is not asking the company to do it for you.

So as long as thundermail doesn’t require a phone number or some other form of personal ID to make an account: f’ing A. After that it is just a question of their support for IMAP et al (highly probable considering… Thunderbird) and what it costs to use your own domains.

Hell. How do you know they were ever “good” to begin with? We have seen an increasing trend in long cons in open source projects and social media and the like.

Especially when most discourse is largely indistinguishable from AI anyway. Just make a vague non sequitor that aligns with the politics of the audience and everyone cheers.

And all of that is super easy to detect and assumes that the majority of major instance owners are actively fighting this. Just like how free market capitalism ensures everyone is happy and satisfied.

This is not a simple problem to solve. It was a problem in the days of message boards, a problem in the days of digg/reddit, and is still a problem today.

Understand the risks and dangers of what you use rather than just assuming things will be ideologically pure.

While I obviously support and use lemmy:

You DO realize that lemmy has even fewer protections against bots and no vetting of instance owners (or even mods on those instances), at all, right? The big difference is that there won’t be a news post about “special interests” controlling discourse on here.

No. Right wing politics is 100% about “personal liberty”… for them.

It is the problem with trying to implement theoretical socioeconomic and political models in reality. Because WE can all agree “nobody should be enslaved”. But… who actually WANTS to dive into the sewers to break up the fatbergs?

Because personal liberties inherently conflict. You want to be free to let your dog roam wherever he wants. I want to be free to let my cat out on her catio without fear of neighbor dogs attacking her. Which of us get our personal liberty respected? And so forth in terms of religion and speech and choice of labor and so forth.

I actually think it is incredibly important to understand these distinctions. There is an entire generation of people who grew up with “I want weed and to not pay taxes. I guess that makes me a libertarian?” just like we have a generation of people who grew up with “I think it is stupid that I will be in debt forever because of college. I guess I am a communist?”

Understanding these distinctions is important.

Just because someone aligns with socialism doesn’t mean they are a libertarian socialist or a communist. Just like how someone can also be a libertarian but not be a socialist. The reason there are two words in that term is because it is a merging of multiple ideologies.

We see it all the time. Leftists become tankies because they listened to the equivalent of a facebook post at a drum circle and don’t want to actually understand their own ideologies. So rather than being a socialist democrat or a libertarian socialist or any other flavor, they become full on tankies because “Well. I like socialism and socialism is communism so the CCP never did anything wrong”. And that is used by right wing governments because… the vast majority of communist governments were evil and corrupt fascists (also many had stopped being communist along the way but…)

And same here. You and others are insisting that it was “co-opted”. But if you actually go back to the roots of the movements and even look at how the left uses it, it is one aspect. And yeah, right wing politics did push to use the term… because the idea of “tear it all down and make it better” aligns well with youths. But… just because they “won the branding” doesn’t mean that their pseudo-anarchists aren’t libertarians.

And I also very much argue it is worth making people look themselves in the mirror to actually understand what they are advocating for with “libertarianism” regardless of if it is “polite anarchy” or not.

I already addressed all of that in the other branch (its cool, you probably started typing that before I posted) but, the super short version:

As you yourself acknowledge, the “libertarian” part of that is related to the “anarchist” part of “anarcho-communism” which came out of the anarcho-capitalist movements of the era.

And, over the past 150 years or so, modern libertarians have continued to embrace ideologies of personal liberty that align more with the anarchist movements. Whereas modern socialists have largely decided that The State needs to provide for its people (with lots of arguments as to what The State should actually be).

Insisting that “libertarianism” should somehow be used by socialists because they came from a similar root movement is like insisting that all socialists should ACTUALLY call themselves feudalists because you can draw a line from the various philosophers back to concepts from feudalism (and beyond). It ignores WHY different philosophies and forms of government were constructed but it sounds much better, I guess?

And if the argument is that you consider yourself a libertarian because of your pseudo-anarchist leanings and don’t like that other people ALSO consider themselves a libertarian becuase of their pseudo-anarchist leanings… tough titties?

Yup.

Although I would definitely argue that “Liberal” probably IS more accurate for what the American left is. Even going back to bush era republicans… we as a country tend to be right of center. With the American Left being fairly center-right/center-left and still prioritizing liberal politics to protect donors.

The left/right distinction is just one axis and makes all these discussions complicated (hence the confusion over where anarchy and libertarianism actually falls or the belief that socialism/communism is fundamentally left wing). But it is also important for people to realize that overton windows actually are very important to understand when discussing regional politics.

I elaborated on that in the other branch and why, even historically, “libertarian” is MUCH closer to the modern libertarian than the modern socialist. But if the entire argument is “that sounds cooler and we should take it back”… that is a really stupid point.

Americans like to vote Republican. Let’s just call the Democrats “Republicans” and be done with it (bonus points for people who get the historical irony of that).

Both have their roots in anarcho-capitalist movements and the idea that The State must be abolished.

The root anarchy and libertarian aspect of that is the idea that The State must be abolished. The difference is that (libertarian flavored) socialism is largely based on the idea of small communities to replace The State (and if that sounds contradictory…). Whereas (modern) libertarianism, is that the idea is that you replace The State with individual enclaves with the remnants existing solely to protect those rights. The “libertarian” aspect fundamentally boils down to the idea of individual liberty (hence the name) at the cost of The State and the distinctions between that and anarchy is, to put it bluntly, questionable.

It would be like insisting that those in favor of socialist democracies rebrand themselves as anarcho-communists because it sounds cooler and there IS a direct line between libertarian communists/anarcho-communists and modern socialist democratic thought. Which ignores that there is a reason that said thought evolved.

You… should really educate yourself on what libertarianism actually is. Just because the root word “liberty” is in there does not mean it is a socialist concept.

In fact, libertarianism is kind of anti-socialism as one of the founding principles is individual autonomy. That is in direct opposition to the idea of social ownership of the means of production.

Ironically, you are highlighting what led to a LOT of people self identifying as libertarians in the early 00s. You hear a word that sounds nice to you and figure that must be a good thing. When it is actually in direct opposition to your implied claim of being pro-socialism.

Now, I COULD go on a long rant about how the vast majority of modern socialists ALSO don’t actually understand the political ideology they claim to support. But that just makes people pissy.

It is “news worthy” in that basically every outlet doing printer reveiws/content will mention it. Even fricking Norm on Tested pointed out the problems with bambu and the issues if you want to use the laser cutter on anything other than Windows.

Holy shit. There is so much gatekeeping here that Cerberus themselves would say “Yo dog, take it down a notch”

I think there are two big aspects to this.

The first is that, yes, we are seeing a big push toward locked down ecosystems. Bambu is a great example of this and people are still falling all over each other to talk about how amazing their products are. And, as someone who has been pointing out that AMSes don’t actually do what people think they do for years now, it has been frustrating to watch them take over the cultural zeitgeist even before the current bullshit.

Which leads into the second aspect. FDM printing is very much a “prosumer” hobby. It is about taking industrial/corporate processes and marketing them to hobbyists. Some of that is awesome because it provides a platform to rapidly prototype and iterate on new tech (which benefits the companies more than the users but…) and some of that is miserable because it means we have astroturfing campaigns out there to explain to people why they NEED 24 AMSes chained together for their single printer… because that model works a lot better for print farms.

And, as an aside before I get to the “real” point: We see the same with home cooking. There was a MASSIVE push that everyone should sous vide everything for a couple years. And… that was mostly because we had restaurant chefs talking to The Masses without a Food Network/PBS producer telling them to shut up. So OBVIOUSLY the best steak you will ever eat is the one that spent 11 hours in a hot water bath and was quickly seared to be plated in under 5 minutes. Rather than the understanding that this is a crutch used because a line cook can’t spend 10 minutes butter basting their steak.

And most of that still is incredibly obnoxious and outright wasteful. But it also led to people like J Kenji Lopez-Alt who used that to popularize “reverse sear” cooking.

So, now to the real point. People are gate keeping mother fuckers. They are angry that they had to read twelve different articles to figure out what “the paper trick” was rather than having a printer having an automatic tool that kind of gets you… probably closer than you would have gotten anyway. And countless other pain points that were resolved because… they were pain points.

And people decide THEY are heroes and legends rather than realizing that people like Naomi Wu et al came before them and got it to the point where it was learnable for the hobbyist sickos.

Which… not to shit on the OP TOO much (I would not be surprised if this came out of the LLM pass) but it is why I more than side eye anything that has “Make them great (again)”. Because, invariably, it is a case of people yearning for a time that never actually existed where they are on top and everyone bows before them.

I think this kind of sums up everything. “Well, they are actively trying to lock down the ecosystem and make everything worse but shiny ad!”

As for the industry as a whole: Multi-filament setups have always been a marketing tool. They are useful in lab environments where you want users to be able to switch from prototyping to production filament without ever touching the bowden tube. Actual multi-material prints are INCREDIBLY finicky due to temperature needs and multicolor prints are a novelty that people use for social media clout but stop when they realize it can increase print times by an order of magnitude.

But multi-tool? That DOES start to make (some) multi-material prints viable as you can balance ambient temperature between the filaments and keep both strands near enough to temperature that you can still bond the layers. And multi-color is even easier.

That said? Having both filament in the same printhead/tool is going to have a large impact on what kinds of multi-material prints you can do because it is two differently hot things in the same box. Which is why most existing multi-tool setups are closer to a “real” CNC mill where said tools (think “printheads”) are kept on a shelf in the back of the chamber and the arm swaps them. Both (Will Smith’s Tested’s) Adam Savage and Shane from Stuff Made Here have done great videos demonstrating these and why are so awesome.

I dunno. I am pretty certain that the big thing for 2025/2026 (if chips and supply chains hold) will be multi-tool setups. In large part because CNC Kitchen and a few other channels have been doing deep dives on multi-filament versus multi-tool setups and it is pretty known that Stefan has a lot of industry contacts. I assume it will basically be the same as it was for the multi-filament era: Bambu is early/first to product for a consumer friendly version and all of their poor decisions (massive amounts of filament waste) become industry standard as everyone copies them. But they will have a drastically reduced social media presence this time since most of the major FDM influencers either have ethics or realize they can just get a bigger sack of cash from Prusa and Qidi.

So… I assume that means linus media group are going to do a massive collaboration with Bambu, heh.

I tried bookywrm a year or two back. It was nice that I could import my goodreads history. But something like 70% of my books just weren’t in the database.

And I am not just talking kindle exclusive authors. It was (not necessarily one of the books but at the same level) seminal works like Lois Lowry’s The Giver.

These days I am checking out Storygraph. Import was very smooth. Not super huge on the excessive amounts of AI but AI generated premises that (theoretically) cater to my own interests seems like a good use of the devil’s silicon.

Even those examples are the kinds of things that “fall apart” if you actually think things through.

Art? Actual human artists tend to use a ridiculous amount of “AI” these days and have been for well over a decade (probably closer to two, depending on how you define “AI”). Stuff like magic erasers/brushes are inherently looking at the picture around it (training data) and then extrapolating/magicking what it would look like if you didn’t have that logo on your shirt and so forth. Same with a lot of weathering techniques/algorithms and so forth.

Same with coding. People more or less understand that anyone who is working on something more complex than a coding exercise is going to be googling a lot (even if it is just that you will never ever remember how to do file i/o in python off the top of your head). So a tool that does exactly that is… bad?

Which gets back to the reality of things. Much like with writing a business email or organizing a calendar: If a computer program can do your entire job for you… maybe shut the fuck up about that program? Chatgpt et al aren’t meant to replace the senior or principle software engineer who is in lots of design meetings or optimizing the critical path of your corporate secret sauce.

It is replacing junior engineers and interns (which is gonna REALLY hurt in ten years but…). Chatgpt hallucinated a nonsense function? That is what CI testing and code review is for. Same as if that intern forgot to commit a file or that rockstar from facebook never ran the test suite.

Of course, the problem there is that the internet is chock full of “rock star coders” who just insist the world would be a better place if they never had to talk to anyone and were always given perfectly formed tickets so they could just put their headphones on and work and ignore Sophie’s birthday and never be bothered by someone asking them for help (because, trust me, you ALWAYS want to talk to That Guy about… anything). And they don’t realize that they were never actually hot shit and were mostly always doing entry level work.

Personally? I only trust AI to directly write my code for me if it is in an airgapped environment because I will never trust black box code I pulled off the internet to touch corporate data. But I will 100% use it in place of google to get an example of how to do something that I can use for a utility function or adapt to solving my real problem. And, regardless, I will review and test that just as thoroughly as the code Fred in accounting’s son wrote because I am the one staying late if we break production.

And just to add on, here is what I told a friend’s kid who is an undergrad comp sci:

LLMs are awesome tools. But if the only thing you bring to the table is that you can translate the tickets I assigned to you to a query to chatgpt? Why am I paying you? Why am I not expensing a prompt engineering course on udemy and doing it myself?

Right now? Finding a job is hard but there are a lot of people like me who understand we still need to hire entry level coders to make sure we have staff ready to replace attrition over the next decade (or even five years). But I can only hire so many people and we aren’t a charity: If you can’t do your job we will drop you the moment we get told to trim our budget.

So use LLMs because they are an incredibly useful tool. But also get involved in design and planning as quickly as possible. You don’t want to be the person writing the prompts. You want to be the person figuring out what prompts we need to write.

Again: What is the percent “accurate” of an SEO infested blog about why ivermectin will cure all your problems? What is the percent “accurate” of some kid on gamefaqs insisting that you totally can see Lara’s tatas if you do this 90 button command? Or even the people who insist that Jimi was talking about wanting to kiss some dude in Purple Haze.

Everyone is hellbent on insisting that AI hallucinates and… it does. You know who else hallucinates? Dumbfucks. And the internet is chock full of them. And guess what LLMs are training on? Its the same reason I always laugh when people talk about how AI can’t do feet or hands and ignore the existence of Rob Liefeld or WHY so many cartoon characters only have four fingers.

Like I said: I don’t like the AI Assistants that won’t tell me where they got information from and it is why I pay for Kagi (they are also AI infested but they put that at higher tiers so I get a better search experience at the tier I pay for). But I 100% use stuff like chatgpt to sift through the ninety bazillion blogs to find me a snippet of a helm chart that I can then deep dive on whether a given function even exists.

But the reality is that people are still benchmarking LLMs against a reality that has never existed. The question shouldn’t be “we need this to be 100% accurate and never hallucinate” and instead be “What web pages or resources were used to create this answer” and then doing what we should always be doing: Checking the sources to see if they at least seem trustworthy.

People love to make these claims.

Nothing is “100% accurate” to begin with. Humans spew constant FUD and outright malicious misinformation. Just do some googling for anything medical, for example.

So either we acknowledge that everything is already “sewage” and this changes nothing or we acknowledge that people already can find value from searching for answers to questions and they just need to apply critical thought toward whether I_Fucked_your_mom_416 on gamefaqs is a valid source or not.

Which gets to my big issue with most of the “AI Assistant” features. They don’t source their information. I am all for not needing to remember the magic incantations to restrict my searches to a single site or use boolean operators when I can instead “ask jeeves” as it were. But I still want the citation of where information was pulled from so I can at least skim it.