alden5

After they teased this announcement I expected a desktop sls machine (after they acquired micronics and canceled their $5k desktop machine kickstarter -2 years ago) but still pleasantly surprised, have a much better view of them as a company that they’re willing to sell a $700 printer and also not restrict resin like their more industrial machines. Their rent seeking with “open material mode” for $1k irked me enough I made the stand at work to not purchase their printers despite the cost not being an issue. Really nice to see them reconsider that business model for a more consumer device.

Am I the only person increasingly paranoid about the inevitability of having to give my fingerprints to the government? Once they're out there you can't exactly change them and in the future i'm sure imaging technology will become significantly advanced enough that a portable device could be made that identify everyone who touched a scanned surface. Maybe it's just a phobia I've had since I was super young but fingerprints feel like a really sensitive piece of biometrics to give up. I live in the US and have traveled to europe a few times but have never been fingerprinted as far as I'm aware.

The thing that's also not grasped is because of the low earth orbit nature of these satellites they eventually succumb to drag and only have a useful lifespan of ~5 years. Using that and 100,000 satellites that means the constellation will take ~54 satellites/day to maintain, they're also quoted as being 2 tons which about the weight of a Sedan/SUV. Reframing it it's like if Comcast had to crash 54 supercars into a brick wall everyday to keep their infrastructure up and all that material also got dispersed throughout the atmosphere. SpaceX is already making/launching ~10 satellites a day and metaphorically crashing them into a brick wall, the wall is just ~5 years away.

Humans have been around for a long time but also don't live very long, but to sustain this internet infrastructure for an average person's lifespan it'd take ~16 replacement cycles. In terms of human civilization timescales this infrastructure cant/won't be sustainable for very long. Personal opinion but I think we should figure out how to run network cables to remote places better, we managed to do it with gas and electricity.

Unless I know I’m making a ton of variations of a model I’ll usually start from scratch every time. Maybe I’m blinded by my own experience but describing unique geometry with just words seems so much harder than just using regular cad. I design fixtures on a manufacturing line for a living and so I spend most of my time turning people’s ideas into 3d models and nobody can explain what they need with just words. People definitely try to explain what’s in their head but words aren’t enough for anything more complex than the examples on the page above. I always need to see a physical demonstration in person or a napkin sketch.

The fact the campaign is run on crowdsupply makes me a lot more hopeful it'll get to market vs a site like kickstarter. Crowdsupply requires a working prototype before launching and they provide all the expertise to actually get projects to market, off the top of my head I don't believe any crowdsupply project has failed to deliver.

I love openrouter for this, I just put in $20 and i’m able to chat with almost every model out right now or plug their api into any ide that supports openai api requests. I use llm’s off and on and it’s nice not worrying if i’m getting my use out of a subscription. just note that claude subscriptions can be a lot more cost effective vs paying per token if you’re a power user.

So insane to me that these ai companies are perfectly fine trying their absolute best to automate as much knowledge work as possible but as soon as this capability can be turned on them they start implementing hidden interventions to sabotage anyone trying to beat them at their own game.

God that's really disappointing, having ads in the app store was bad enough but in an app I use everyday lowkey makes me reconsider using an iphone. I know I can always install another app but I feel like apple's moat is their 1st party software and them cheapening it to make a few cents is really disappointing. It feels really dumb going to a nice apple store opening up the app store for the first time on your $1k+ phone and you're immediately served ads so apple can make a few cents. The customer experience downgrade does not seem worth it to me.

Having public investors forces companies to try their best to make a profit with the threat that you could get sued if you don’t. Sacrificing short term gains for long term goals is something public companies aren’t really good at. One good example where not having public investors has drastically helped a company is spacex. Almost every one of their programs has had really bad failures that public investors could’ve investigated and shut down. As someone who worked for them I really don’t want them to become public, forcing a company to do that seems crazy.

on a mac you can downgrade freely if the hardware supported it at one point, isn’t like all their other hardware which prevents you from downgrading, all arm mac’s can downgrade to sequoia

This talk was given at crowd supply’s 2025 teardown convention which after going for the first time last year I highly recommend it to anyone interested in hardware development. Met a lot of super cool people and managed to get my ticket price back 4x in the amount of free dev boards I got lol

The app isn't accurate at all, magic 8-ball of scales, anything you put on the trackpad it'll settle on a weight and give you a number but it'll be random. The app will accurately tell you how much force you're applying with a finger but when putting something else on it'll settle on a random number

It goes in gram increments and my laptop was able to read 7300g pressing as hard as i could, which I was surprised it would be designed to read that high, might go up to 10kg but I don't want to crack my trackpad lol. The actual measurements though are extremely unreliable. I've found it can't reliably measure anything, measuring a roll of tape gave me measurements from 70g to 700g, it always settled on a number but was different every time. Maybe the underlying data is more accurate but this API is definitely just designed for outputting the force of a finger. M1 MBP for reference

That's your monkey brain hard at work making sure you notice movement that could mean danger in your peripheral vision, funny how much technology is built off of manipulating primal parts of our brains

apple actually didn't release any 'pro' airpods at this event, the feature is for the pro 2's which have been out for over two years now, was glad it wasn't made a feature only for a new version