timmaxw

> Cut threads into printed parts with a thread tap for quick design of low-reuse joints.

I've found wood screws work well for this. The wood screw can cut its own threads without needing to use a tap.

It does put some stress on the part, though. I mostly print in PETG, which is strong enough; but PLA might split if the hole was parallel to the layers.

> A design limitation of threaded inserts is that they are not reliably usable for screws inserted from the back side. During insertion, heat-set inserts often push some molten plastic into the hole beneath them, preventing easy insertion of a screw from the back side.

A trick I sometimes use:

1. Before installing the insert, insert the screw from the back side

2. Screw the insert onto the protruding screw

3. Use a soldering iron to install the insert+screw together into the plastic

Because the screw is filling the hole, the molten plastic can't block the hole. Instead, the molten plastic forms itself around the screw, and it acts like a Nyloc nut.

> If someone owes you $1B and they owe me $2B, and they've got an asset worth $500M, I can't just pledge $2B of bad debt to buy the asset. The only fair way is to sell it for $500M in actual cash

No, that's not the _only_ fair way. Suppose the $2B creditor bids $200M in cash and also agrees to forfeit their share of the proceeds from the sale. Then the $1B creditor would receive the entire $200M, which is more than the $167M they would have received from a $500M cash sale. The bid is effectively equivalent to $600M.

Isn't that what happened in the InfoWars case? The bankruptcy judge agreed that the structure of the Onion's bid was valid; he just said the auction would have continued for more rounds.

Really? I zoomed in on the Towers of Bologna and then used the "measurement" tool to draw a 97m line on the ground. The line seems about as long as the tower is high. If you try that, do you get the same result?

Yes, Python dicts remember insertion order. This is different from C++ std::map, which maintains the keys in sorted order. For example, std::map::lower_bound(X) finds "the smallest key in the map which is greater than or equal to X" in O(log(N)) time. I don't think Python has any data structure in the standard library that supports this operation while also supporting insertion in O(log(N)) time.

Well done. It's horrifying that the Python standard library "+/-" operators don't handle DST correctly.

> Non wealthy people are largely not willing to pay ... what it actually costs to make them

The general public pays enough money to pay the artists' salaries, plus the marketing budget and all the other costs. Otherwise Hollywood would go out of business.

The reason people complain about "high art" is because we're told that everyone should aspire to appreciate high art, and that people who appreciate high art are somehow better than the general public, even though it's deliberately niche and opaque.

> There's an endless continuum libraries, languages, tools and machines out there which have trivial impact on the world but are absolute objects of beauty when you know what's inside.

Imagine if the SF MOMA were replaced with a museum full of those niche libraries and languages, showing these absolute objects of beauty to the general public, and (implicitly) saying "you ought to appreciate the beauty; if you can't appreciate e.g. the beauty of the Haskell programming language is, you're ignorant".

The non-wealthy regularly pay for books, music, movies, video games, etc. Hollywood is a $40B/year industry. All these industries follow a model of "make a work of art, then sell infinite copies"; this makes it possible to sell the copies at reasonable prices. These prices are appropriate, and the non-wealthy pay them.

The "high art" world, on the other hand, fetishizes the original physical work of art. If an expert painter spends weeks on a painting, then they must sell it for enough money to cover "weeks of an expert's income"; so of course only wealthy people will be able to afford it. How is this price more "appropriate" than the prices that non-wealthy people pay?

If Uruguay can run on 100% renewable energy, the unstated implication is "The US could do it too, we just lack the political will". (As opposed to the idea that "Renewable energy is a genuinely hard problem that will take time, effort, and technological advances to solve.") The implication that "we just lack the political will" can feel like a criticism of anyone who's not maximally-environmentalist. I think that's why people are getting defensive about it.

Yeah. I agree with most of what David Gerard writes, but this attack on Scott Alexander was weak. The "54 billion lives" thing was obviously a joke.