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Statistically, fathers who ask the courts for joint custody almost always receive it. Occam's Razor dictates these men you know most likely prefer to complain about their divorce rather than to do the arduous work of parenting. They can also renegotiate this circumstance if they feel like it.

I was a kid at the time, but adults, magazines, and other children convinced me that 3D printing at home would likely replace a huge number of products. This included extremely optimistic speculation, like printers producing smart phones or houses. Then I dated a boy who used his 3D printer to substitute The Container Store at a higher cost with greater effort and lower quality, and that soured me on the concept.

3d printing matured. My makerspacr's 3d printing room is now more busy than it ever been.

But the real magic happens in CAD while printers are good enough that it gets out of your way.


I think we'll see this slowly march along. I just made some custom-designed speaker tilt mount things for my desk. Sure, it's a trivially simple example, but a lot of things are. I was able to get the exact angle I wanted, bigger than most and in a design I liked, crafted by AI in 5 minutes, and on my desk by the next morning and for a fraction of the price of a Chinese made Amazon version.

It's no replicator, but give it 5 years and it might be surprising how useful it is.


I remember hearing “trek replicator” in things like pop mechanics, back in the 90s.

Then it was a lot of “self replicating printers” for quite a while, which never has been a real thing.

Certainly there’s utility in the technology, and much moreso if you’re making aircraft parts. And I love prototyping with my various machines.

But I agree, it has had far more than its fair share of hype at the home printer level.


> Then it was a lot of “self replicating printers” for quite a while, which never has been a real thing.

3D-printed 3D printers got quite far; the reason why this topic got out of perception by people who are not 3D printing nerds is rather that for mass production of 3D printers there exist much better processes.

What was realized was that up to a certain amount of parts, 3D printing these parts on a 3D printer works really well. You can find a lot of designs of such 3D printers on the internet.

Concerning the progress here, also observe that over the last years, home 3D printers got a lot better with respect to handling "engineering materials". These materials are very useful if you want to (partly) 3D-print a 3D printer, but this development is often not associated with "3D-printing 3D printers". :-)

Then you get to parts which can be printed on a 3D printer, but these parts will not be of the same quality as parts that can easily be bought, such as belts etc. The Mulbot is a design that takes this approach very far:

> https://github.com/3dprintingworld/Mulbot

> https://www.printables.com/model/5995-mulbot-the-mostly-prin...

And then you get to parts that are nearly impossible to print on a 3D printer ...

So, after there was a consensus where the boundaries lie how much a 3D printer can sensibly be 3D-printed, people started looking at other manufacturing techniques that exist for producing parts of 3D printers, and started considering

1. could and how far could a machine for this process be 3D-printed (or produced on a 3D-printed machine)?

2. could we bring such a machine to home manufacturing, too (so that people can easily build such a machine at home)?

Machines that were considered for this were, for example, CNC mill (3, 4 and 5 axis), CNC lathe, pick and place machines (for producing PCBs), ...

There do exist partial implementations of such machines, just to give some examples:

- lots of designs of CNC mills that use 3D-printed parts. I won't give a list here, but just want to mention that the "Voron Cascade" project wants to do for home 3 axis CNC milling what the Voron did for 3D printing. Rumors on the internet say that the Voron Cascade is well on the way, but had quite a lot of delays with respect to announced release dates.

- an attempt to build a pick and place machine: https://hackaday.io/project/169354-3d-printed-pick-and-place...

Thus: I hope I could give evidence that in the last years there still were a lot of developments towards the far goal of "self-replicating 3D printers", but these developments were rather silent, impressive developments instead of loud, obtrusive marketing stunts.


> or houses

They're not common by any means, but they do exist. Walls look pretty ugly though.


3D printed houses are much like many hyped technologies where it sounds cool until you start thinking critically about any part of it.

And there are reports they aren't lasting very long before cracking.

What we're seeing instead are companies you can send CAD files to, get estimates, and receive the parts back in a few days.

Just like with vibecoding complains, have you tried the latest models (of 3d printers)? Specifically, Bambu's latest models make the printer a device to just use rather than the project itself. It's the Apple of 3d printing. Previously, you'd spend hours on calibrating and leveling nonsense. Latest models don't have this problem. Open the app on your phone, (doom)scroll until you find something, and just hit print from your phone. You can make it more complicated as desired, but it's not necessary to get something out of your printer.

Which apes vibecoding. ChatGPT 3.5 was laughably bad compared to codex 5.3, but if you're basing your opinion on 3.5's performance, your opinion's out of date.


Having a 3d printer without learning how to use a cad seems kind of pointless.

If the point is to make a plastic switch cover, why is it important that the person CADs it themselves, rather than hitting print of a model they found online? Does it fail some sort of piety test that the end result that comes out the other end is a functional piece of plastic in a specific shape?

Because 90% of the time you won't find the one you need pre-designed.

This is not closely related to varna.

I'm a user of ClearFlow, a layout with similar design goals (and it's available on GBoard by default). Interestingly, ClearFlow is an ortholinear layout, but I'm not sure if that's due to a limitation of GBoard or the intention of its author.

Thank you. Started learning it last night and already up to a workable speed. I was getting frustrated with all the corrections I had to do when gliding on qwerty.

Just enabled—I've been idly wondering if there were any good alternative mobile keyboard layouts for ages, and this one checks all my boxes. Thanks!

I've been inputting Devanagari with a 30% ortho keyboard lately using QMK. ऐसे अति मुश्किल नहीं है । I have an extra layer for nicher inputs just as I do with my usual Roman text. I'm not aware of any writing systems that normally require multiple layers. The most complex I can think of is Hangul, and they all should translate pretty directly to a smaller keyboard.

Any language that has more than 30-35(?) letters needs layers.

Even french and german need layers (shift or right alt) for all the stuff like ß or adding accents like é è ê ë


Ah that makes sense. For Hindi in Roman, I input characters like ṅ ḍ, but I have a one-shot layer for that on my layout.

The eponymous woman in the Playboy photograph.


This is a common rhetorical device for humans named parataxis.


You need `GSL` and `lifetimebound` to approach most modern safety bugs.


Someone already mentioned AppImage, but I'd like to draw attention to this alternate implementation that executes as a POSIX shell script, making it possible to dynamic dispatch different programs on different architectures. e.g. a fat binary for ARM and x64.

https://github.com/mgord9518/shappimage


So autotools but for execution instead of compilation?


If the APE concept isn't appealing to you, you may be interested in the work on LLVM libC. My friend recently delivered an under-appreciated lecture on the vision:

https://youtu.be/HtCMCL13Grg

tl;dw Google recognizes the need for a statically-linked modular latency sensitive portable POSIX runtime, and they are building it.


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