Can’t you turn on Developer Mode to enable third party slicers?

I think of the Bambu P1S as the inexpensive alternative to the Bambu X1C or a comparable printer from Prusa, at least in terms of print consistency and ease of use.

My Bambu was my fourth 3D printer (second FDM printer) and it took 3D printing from a frustrating, time consuming hobby to just a thing I do to enable other hobbies. I don’t have to spend time tweaking settings to get a decent print, because the default settings are already good enough. Instead, I can focus on designing models or working with finished prints.

I’ll have to check out both OpenSCAD and Code Comic. Some completely non-CAD DSLs that you might be interested in, since you mentioned GraphViz:

Mermaid.js does something very similar to Graphviz. There are a couple other similar tools like that out there, but Mermaid is supported in a lot of places natively or as an easy to use plugin, like GitHub Markdown (and other git forges like Forgejo), Hedgedoc, Obsidian, SilverBullet, etc…

I’d also argue that LaTeX counts, and to a lesser extent, Markdown - compare using them to using Word.

And reveal.js is an equivalent for slide deck creation that would normally be done with PowerPoint.

For reference, Anthropic is currently valued at $183 Billion and their annual recurring revenue is currently $5 Billion (up from $1 Billion in 2024). So this will cost them roughly 30% of their current annual revenue.

If you’re a size 4-24, the Gloria Vanderbilt “Amanda” line has a variety of jeans with almost bo embellishments. They come in multiple shades of blue, black, mint, khaki, white, off white, etc… The colors other than blue are a bit stiffer and less stretchy, but they fit very similarly. They also have “Ponte pants,” basically business casual dress pants (though basically only in black), which I also recommend. I’ve worn the black jeans to the office mid-week and could probably get away with wearing the khaki ones, too.

I get them at Kohl’s, but from a quick web search I see they’re also available at Amazon, Walmart, JC Penny, Macy’s, and Costco. MSRP is around $50, but I don’t think I’ve ever paid more than $30 for a pair. I see some listed at $20 or so right now and I think I’ve gotten some (maybe on clearance?) for as cheap as $15.

Do NOT buy the “Pull-On” versions! Those either lack pockets entirely or have inadequate pockets. I could fit my phone in, sideways, but it dug into my side (my hipbone, I think, though it’s been a while since I wore those and tried to use the pockets).

Sizing is split between products (at Kohl’s at least): 4-18 and 16W-24W, with 16W being one size above 18 as opposed to overlapping. There are also Short (or Petite in the Ponte Pants) and T/L variants.

For reference, I have a standard sized iPhone - specifically the 15 Pro - in a case, with a MagSafe wallet. I often carry a similarly sized work phone in the same pocket, also in a case, so my pockets need to be able to handle both. The top of my phone is basically flush with / right below the opening of the pocket, which I prefer. A taller phone, like a Pro Max iPhone, would fit, but would need angled a bit to not have the top poking out.

Some other info on these:

• The fit, for me at least, is comfortably snug, but not tight. The cut is flattering, but not lewd.
• Durability is better than expected for fairly stretchy jeans. I ended up with a hole in the first pair I bought after a year or so, just from walking around (inner thigh friction basically) - but to be fair at that point I was wearing them twice a week, so that’s like 100 wears, 50 or so washes… I think that’s reasonable. However I don’t think they’d hold up as well if I wore them while doing yard work or something similarly stressful.
• Sizing down - I can fit into up to two sizes down, but even one size down: the fit wasn’t flattering, they were less comfortable, and they were so tight that my phone barely fit into my pocket (and wouldn’t have fit if I were sitting).
• Sizing up - one size up is great. I haven’t tried two sizes up. The fit isn’t as flattering, but it’s still fine. I generally wear a belt when wearing a sized up pair, since the waistband ends up a bit loose otherwise, but they’re still snug around my hips, so they stay up well enough without a belt.

If you’re a size 0 or a size 2 and don’t want to size up, they sadly aren’t an option (I may be wrong - their size chart goes down to 2, but I didn’t see any offered in a 2). If so I can keep an eye open for decent jeans in that size range, but I won’t be able to speak to fit, of course, as I’m nowhere near a size 2 myself.

To be clear, I’m not saying most women’s pants have pockets. I’m saying that there are options, and I’m of the opinion that if you care about something enough to complain about it, you should also care about it enough to do something about it.

I own dozens of pairs of women’s pants and shorts with pockets large enough to comfortably fit my cell phone. Several pairs where I can not-so-comfortably. Probably a dozen each of dresses and skirts with decent pockets, too.

Would you like some recommendations?

This is basically an “I can’t have my cake and eat it, too” complaint. If none of your pants have good enough pockets, it’s either because someone else is buying your clothes or because you didn’t prioritize having pockets when you bought them.

When buying women’s pants or shorts (and even dresses and skirts), you have the choice between a pair that has decent pockets and a pair that doesn’t, generally because the designer chose to prioritize aesthetics over pockets. If you buy the cuter pair, despite their lack of suitable pockets, you’re reinforcing the designer’s decision.

Even leggings / yoga pants and short running shorts / leggings have versions with pockets. Not every brand, sure, but enough.

With men’s pants and shorts, there’s much less variety. You have to go out of your way to find pants without decent pockets, but at the same time:

• Your pants and shorts are all bulkier and thicker than the equivalent women’s style
• Your shorts all come down to the knee, if not a bit further
• You don’t have the option of skirts, dresses, capris, leggings, etc…
• You don’t get the same options within a given style, i.e., far fewer embellishments, less stretch (in, e.g., jeans), often fewer colors, and most cuts are looser

Now, maybe the store you’re shopping at or the brand you love doesn’t sell women’s pants with pockets. I’m sure there are many like this. If it bothers you, find another store that does. Buy from a different brand.

Summary of my comment: the study showed that the AI tool in question was an effective tool for the task, nothing more.

I didn’t read this particular article, but I recently read a different one about the same study. I also clicked into the study itself and read the abstract and everything else that was freely available. The study was paywalled, but as far as I could tell:

• Performance immediately displayed a sustained increase of 24% relative to baseline while using the AI tool in question
• Immediately after the tool was taken away (after using it for three months), performance was 20% lower than the baseline
• The study did not check to see what level performance returned to after three months without it, nor when it returned to baseline levels
• The study also did not compare performance drops after returning from a three month vacation
• The study did not compare performance drops when losing access to other tools

This outcome is expected if given a tool that simplifies a process and then losing access to it. If I were writing code in Notepad and using _v2, _v3, etc for versioning, was then given an IDE and git for three months, then had to go back to my old ways with Notepad, I’d expect to be less effective than I had been. I’ve been relying on syntax highlighting, so I’m going to be paying less attention to the specific monochrome text than I used to. I’ll have fallen out of practice from using the version naming techniques that I used to use. All of the stuff that I did to make up for having worse tooling, I’m out of practice with.

But that doesn’t mean that I should use worse tools.

I still wouldn’t call a car an “investment” or anything, but 100% agreed. The whole “cars lose 50% of their value when you drive off the lot” thing might have been true before the Cash for Clunkers program, but it isn’t anymore. Or maybe it’s true if you’re trying to trade-in the vehicle.

If I wanted to buy the (fairly popular) car I’ve been driving for over 6 years with the same mileage, it’d cost me over 2/3rds what it cost new When I bought it, new cars were less expensive than used cars (i.e., like less than two years old with less than 25k miles) thanks to how much better the interest rates were on the loans. A couple years later, I was getting offers for more than I paid for it. And none of that is a unique experience.

If the instance or community guidelines state “X isn’t allowed,” then it isn’t censorship to remove X. It becomes censorship when mods start removing things for reasons other than enforcing instance or community guidelines. Until that point, it’s just content moderation.

If the c/Androids community guidelines state that “This community is about human-like robots. Posts regarding the phone OS are unwelcome” and a mod removes such a post, that isn’t censorship. Likewise for spam, or reposts, or any number of other things.

On the other hand if the mods remove a post about a human-like robot built in China because they’re sinophobic, that is censorship. Likewise if the human-like robot was built by Tesla, if the lead engineer were a woman, or anything along those lines. Likewise if the post were instead critical of such a robot - still censorship (unless it’s a news only community and the post was free text or a meme).

Likewise if a community’s guidelines state that controversial statements without reputable sources backing them up, statements known to be false, or statements that have been flagged as false by a fact checker are prohibited, then removing such statements isn’t censorship. It’s moderation.

Certainly the latter.

I have pretty decent insurance through work, but if I’m picking up a prescription, it’s cheaper for me to say I don’t have insurance and use a free discount card (like GoodRx) than to use my insurance. We’re talking $150-$200 for one prescription (a one month supply) with insurance vs $30 without.

To be fair, I have an HDHP with an HSA so my insurance is only supposed to negotiate a discount until I hit the deductible, rather than paying for it. Full price is $200-$250, I think? (I get generics and each generic variant has a slightly different price.) So technically they’re providing a discount, just not a very good one.

Insurance also likes to require a “prior authorization,” which was always a fun surprise after making it through the pharmacy line. That normally takes a couple days to resolve, at minimum, and sometimes longer. If you’re not familiar with prior auths, it’s basically when the insurance company says “Hey doc, can you justify why you’re prescribing this and answer these eight questions?” and then they have someone without a medical degree review the answer and see if it’s good enough.

The only downside to paying out of pocket with a discount card is that the $30 doesn’t go toward my deductible. But since my deductible is multiple thousands of dollars, unless something else happens during the year, I won’t hit my deductible off the $150-$200 prescriptions + regular doctor visits alone. But that’s at most $360 out of pocket that wouldn’t have gone toward the deductible, assuming I had a health crisis in December, vs $1440-$2040 saved if I don’t.

X-rays are even worse, because you’re not told the price ahead of time.

There have been so many places in front end web dev that used the abbreviation “a11y” without defining it (or explaining the 11) that for years I assumed it was just the name of a particular library that had gotten Kleenexed.

(To be clear, I’m using “Kleenexed” as a verb here to mean “genericized explosively, as if a sneeze.”)

It didn’t help to look at the code, either. “Okay cool, so all this does is add a bunch of random extra tags to the DOM? Doesn’t seem super useful but okay, I guess there’s probably some tool out there that depends on them but we probably don’t use it.”

Illegal vote suppression elected Trump, but even if it hadn’t, you should blame Democrats before blaming people who voted for third party candidates. Now, if you’re talking about people who “protest voted” by voting for Trump (in both the primaries and the election), then sure. Those people did, in fact, play an instrumental part in electing him.

Why blame Democrats? Well, beyond just kinda being Republican-lites:

• for opposing ranked choice voting (and alternatives)
• for not rallying around progressive candidates
• for not choosing Kamala via primary elections in 2024

Democrats are the bare minimum “harm reduction” party, and I don’t bare any ill will toward people who voted for them rather than a party that would actually try to effect change, but the opposite mindset - blaming third party voters for not voting for Democrats - is very shortsighted. And as third party voters have never had the power to enact RCV or STAR voting or otherwise improve the system, blaming them instead of the Democrats who have had that power is inane.

I’ve voted for a Democrat every single presidential election that I’ve been able to, but I honestly wish I hadn’t. I’d much rather there be more visibility for third parties, and for more people to feel empowered to vote for third party candidates.

Sure, just be aware that unripe tomatoes (not just the stems) are also toxic to cats.

You can’t just consider the cheese! You gotta look up all the ingredients!

• https://www.cancateat.food/food/bread
• https://www.cancateat.food/food/lettuce
• https://www.cancateat.food/food/tomato
• https://www.cancateat.food/food/mayonnaise
• https://www.cancateat.food/food/beef
• https://www.cancateat.food/food/cheese

Consensus: hold the tomato! Otherwise, if there’s no seasoning, everything else is acceptable in small amounts.

I’m lucky enough to be able to budget for things I want. If it’s in the budget, no justification is required. If it’s in the budget but expensive, then I just have to figure out if I want it more than the other things I want (or will want) that I won’t be able to afford as a result.

I hate how much I agree with you in principle and how ugly it looks in practice. With doubled periods, at least - different marks don’t trigger that same reaction. For example, a question mark inside, followed by a period or comma outside feels right.

It’s not grammatically incorrect to end a sentence with a preposition. It’s a common misconception that it is a rule, basically because one guy argued in favor of it back in the 1600s and had some support for formal writing in the 1700s. But it’s never been a broad rule, and even in formal contexts it’s not a rule in any current, reputable style or usage guides (so far as I know, at least).

Some more info on the topic: https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/prepositions-ending-a-sentence-with

Glaring doesn’t imply a negative meaning. In this case it’s used to mean “obvious”.

Unless you’re suggesting that “glaring” means “obviously staring” (it doesn’t - that would be “glaringly staring”) this doesn’t make any sense.

“[He’s] glaring at [direct object]” is an example of a sentence that uses the present participle form of the verb “glare,” which explicitly communicates anger or fierceness.

If you’re not convinced, read on.

—————

The verb form that takes an object is:

Glare (verb with object): to express with a glare. They glared their anger at each other

The noun form the above definition references is:

Glare (noun): a fiercely or angrily piercing stare.

“Glaring” can be an adjective and one of those definitions does mean “obvious” or “conspicuous,” but the use of that form of the word doesn’t make sense in her sentence. Think about a comparable sentence like “The undercover operative is conspicuous at the bar,” where the bar is the location. (Even then, most people wouldn’t use “glaring” in that sentence, as “conspicuous” or “obvious” are much less ambiguous; the operative could be staring piercingly or angrily at the bar rather than being glaring while being at the bar.) Another example that makes a bit more sense is “The effect of the invasive plants is glaring at the park.”

But for that interpretation to be valid here, you’d have to:

• believe that the dude is trying to hide/blend in, or otherwise explain how he - not what he’s doing, but the dude himself - is conspicuous
• believe that the woman’s referring to her own ass as a location
• assume that she isn’t commenting on how the guy is looking at her ass, even though the joke depends on giving him something different to look at

That’s a bit of a stretch.

There’s a whole history of people, both inside and outside the field, shifting the definition of AI to exclude any problem that had been the focus of AI research as soon as it’s solved.

Bertram Raphael said “AI is a collective name for problems which we do not yet know how to solve properly by computer.”

Pamela McCorduck wrote “it’s part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was a chorus of critics to say, but that’s not thinking” (Page 204 in Machines Who Think).

In Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter named “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet” Tesler’s Theorem (crediting Larry Tesler).

https://praxtime.com/2016/06/09/agi-means-talking-computers/ reiterates the “AI is anything we don’t yet understand” point, but also touches on one reason why LLMs are still considered AI - because in fiction, talking computers were AI.

The author also quotes Jeff Hawkins’ book On Intelligence:

Now we can see the entire picture. Nature first created animals such as reptiles with sophisticated senses and sophisticated but relatively rigid behaviors. It then discovered that by adding a memory system and feeding the sensory stream into it, the animal could remember past experiences. When the animal found itself in the same or a similar situation, the memory would be recalled, leading to a prediction of what was likely to happen next. Thus, intelligence and understanding started as a memory system that fed predictions into the sensory stream. These predictions are the essence of understanding. To know something means that you can make predictions about it. …

The human cortex is particularly large and therefore has a massive memory capacity. It is constantly predicting what you will see, hear, and feel, mostly in ways you are unconscious of. These predictions are our thoughts, and, when combined with sensory input, they are our perceptions. I call this view of the brain the memory-prediction framework of intelligence.

If Searle’s Chinese Room contained a similar memory system that could make predictions about what Chinese characters would appear next and what would happen next in the story, we could say with confidence that the room understood Chinese and understood the story. We can now see where Alan Turing went wrong. Prediction, not behavior, is the proof of intelligence.

Another reason why LLMs are still considered AI, in my opinion, is that we still don’t understand how they work - and by that, I of course mean that LLMs have emergent capabilities that we don’t understand, not that we don’t understand how the technology itself works.