I've appreciated the cheap, practically new equipment on Ebay for pennies. But yeah, it's absurd. I've had a total of 2 ports fail on a switch in the last 18 years. Just run them till something goes wrong. Why else have redundancy?

It's like the old adage: The architect 2x's the design for resiliency, the engineer doubles it again for extra redundancy, the carpenter reinforces it 2x for safety and suddenly you're 8x instead of 2x.

But it's also an argument for the disability-access arguments which are that increasing access for people with disabilities generally helps everyone.

The old fill in the bubble testing has long been obsolete. If you come up with a superior method of testing that is adaptable easily to people with special needs, you'll end up with a superior learning experience for everyone.

I'll find out in mid January, lol - it's en route on the Ever Acme,

Ah cool! I saw one of those leaving Felixstow when I was on holiday near there a few years ago. Can't remember which one. The Ever Grounded? :D

But given our high local prices, it's the same cost to me of like 60kg of local filament, so so long as the odds of it being good are better than 1 in 8, I come out ahead, and I like those odds

Yeah that's pretty good. My experience of Aliexpress has so far been exceptionally good. Some thing have been a bit duff, although in fairness some of those were silly cheap. But otherwise a lot of stuff has just been really good value. Got a lovely rotary broach for £150 or so including the bits.

The only thing filament wise is Prusa claim a higher manufacturing tolerance than the standard, so give better surface finish. With that said, so do Yaisn by the looks of it. Prusa claim 0.02, Yasin 0.03 and I think the standard is 0.05.

Anyway since we're both regulars, let me know how it works out!

Teh free market works, but only for oil! It can't possible work for resources affecting things that free market worshippers don't believe in like EVs.

A large part of the German population is against watering down the 2035 goal. This is lobbyism from car manufacturers who failed to commit to EV. Merz also appears to try to please right wing climate denier voters.

Apparently the German car lobby is also trying to eviscerate the vehicle safety regulations in the EU so that American self-certified toddler mashers with zero pedestrian safety measures are legal. Why? Well they figure if the EU and US have reciprocal safety legislation then Trump might lift their tarriffs.

It's a nakedly murderous grab to exchange deaths for more profit.

When you're the only guy still driving a petrol car, are you going to be able to afford to run the oil refinery single-handed?

Refineries are going to continue for a while. Batteries are quite a way off for aviation and oil will still be used as feedstock for the chemical and plastics industry. So, it will be merely very expensive as opposed to unobtainable!

But the bubble will burst and a ton of companies are going to end up with racks and racks of useless GPUs that they will simply switch off and throw in the trash.

I hope not! GPUs are pretty amazingly useful things. I'd hope they would flog them off to people who want a nice chunky compute card.

That makes a good deal of sense. Is this ac past or future thing? I.e. is the half ton of filament any good?

Go outside. Experience sunshine.

In London in the winter? How???

What's weird is the lack of unified electronic system.

Over here for example, you can simply transfer money to someone's account using their sort code (i.e. numeric bank id) and account number. We also have a related bill paying system.

One referendum, one general election. Both in favor of Brexit.

Oh right we're into la-la-land invention of reality. There was not a general election in favour of Brexit. That's a made up fact.

And the referendum was ruled to be flawed because of irregularities.

This is relevant, I promise. Just today, I received a Shelly H&T (humidity & temperature). They have s cloud service and spot, but explicitly explain that you can set it up purely locally. I did, and attached it to my OpenHAB installation.

Every IoT device should offer this option.

I think that's just a symptom of the user base growing smaller. Decades ago articles had far more comments. There were always troll posts but there was a lot more discussion to make those seem more inconsequential. Even if posters disagreed politically (I'm sure 2000 election threads are just as bad as any of the recent ones) there was a shared for in Microsoft that everyone could unite behind. Since then open source has won in a lot of ways. It generally rules servers and mobile phones. Even if the Year of the Linux Desktop never really arrived, every year makes it less and less relevant. Without that, the user base will find something else to squabble over.

There's also the vicious cycle that's created where this sort of behavior drives away others and leaves a larger proportion of users that engage in that behavior. It's not so much different from a neighborhood that doesn't solve its crime problems or other issues facing it. The good people slowly leave for greener pastures, but the problem causers stick around or grow worse. If it goes on for long enough you get the dilapidated ghetto or gutted trailer park that no one wants to come to and who the bitter denizens are often resentful to have visit. It's somewhat worse with internet communities because one person can use bots or sock puppet accounts to have an oversized impact.

There's also a tendency for any internet community to become a hive mind. Slashdot, for example, was never going to become a forum where Microsoft was well regarded. Anyone who really liked Microsoft quit posting here shortly after joining to find something else other community that was more open. Any community that slants towards anything will tend to continue heading in that direction as it slowly drives away whatever outgroup is has identified. This can happen along political lines as well, with Reddit and Something Awful before it being examples of this. Slashdot seems more immune to this to some degree. It's not really designed to be as much of a social media site as most other internet communities and was built at a time when no one cared about trying to generate engagement so much as fostering discussion. I don't think that prevents the problem, but it does slow it down considerably.

The user base here is likely much, much older than the average internet community. I don't think previous generations were any better than the current or upcoming generations, but they are all different in their own ways. A lot of us grew up before the smartphones, the internet, or perhaps even ubiquitous personal computing. I think that does have some impact on how we engage with others socially. However it also means that we're a lot closer to the grave than other communities. I've often wondered about some posters who have disappeared over the years. Even people I might normally have disagreed with vehemently on some topics often had insightful or interesting things to say about other topics. Over the years many have dropped off and while it's always possible that they got fed up and got the hell out of town as it were, I think the more simple explanation is that they got old and died. The internet hasn't been around long enough yet for most communities to go through this process where the people who started it all pass away. Slashdot is old enough where that's starting to happen. Anyone who was in their mid-20s when the site was started will be approaching 60 by the end of the decade. A lot of the early users were older than that.

TLDR: Slashdot is dying. Netcraft confirms it!

Most people who have (not so) fond memories of the BSoD predate that era and experienced it on a daily basis. The problem was drastically reduced going from Windows 95 to 98 to 2000/XP, to the extent that it's impossible for hardware to be the primary culprit. Windows dominated the landscape, but they weren't the only OS around and nothing else was that unstable despite using the hardware of that era. Before NT, Windows was an absolute mess. I think the only reason most people put up with it was that they didn't know anything better was possible and since Windows was so widespread it was a misery everyone shared

I've done my first test of buying a whole pallet of filament straight from a Chinese manufacturer.

I'm curious what the shipping is like. I've looked at Alibaba and Aliexpress for buying certain items, and over a certain size, the shipping is quite punishing. For something like a side channel blower (i.e. palette sized, 15-20kg or so), the prices are a lot better in China, but the shipping eats up the difference, to the point where local vendors are competitive price wise but with faster shipping and better certification.

I imaging if I was buying a container load it would be a different proposition, but it's one at a time at the moment.

it could be all junk - but if it's usable, the price advantage is insane. Like $3/kg for PETG at the factory gate (like $5/kg after sea freight and our 24% VAT). Versus local stores which sell for like $30/kg.

Yeah that sounds about right! There's probably plenty where it's really good, and you get a massive bargain. For me, the 3D printed parts are one of the lower cost items in the bill of materials even with brand name Prusament filament.

Yeah it's weird stuff. I've done a of normal fiber reinforced composites, and to me the filaments just feel like completely normal filaments with the same kind of different tradeoffs you get switching between plastic types, such as more yield strength, lower toughness, less surface detail rather than a whole new material like the macroscopic type.

I didn't know that about glass vs carbon. At the moment, I'm printing for business reasons so I'm sticking to things where I have a reasonable expectation of being able to get more of the same filament in a year's time. This limits the amount of experimentation from smaller suppliers since I can't rely on the parts if I can't reliably get the filament.

Really it's mostly Prusament right now...