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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Dude, apparently unlike you, I remember Usenet, which uses precisely the sort of system you’re describing, in its heyday. That means I’ve also seen discussion groups implode because they couldn’t get rid of a single bad actor. Killfiles alone aren’t enough, even when combined with community naming-and-shaming. Someone always lacks self-restraint and engages. That encourages the bad actor(s). They post more, often using multiple sockpuppets to get around people’s killfiles and flood out legitimate discussion. Newcomers to the group see masses of bad actor spam and fail to stick around. The lack of new blood kills the group.

    Self-moderation simply doesn’t work. Yes, bad moderation happens and I’ve seen plenty of examples. But no overarching moderation is also the kiss of death.


  • Anyone who thinks you can have both absolutely no restraint on speech and an environment that isn’t a cesspit hasn’t seen what humans do in an environment that has absolutely no restraint on speech. Constructive discourse requires that there be someone to moderate and throw out the trolls, the spammers, and that guy who, wherever he goes, preaches about the effect of weather conditions inside the hollow earth on the lizardmen who select US presidential candidates.



  • All technically true, but how many man-hours would it take to calculate the set of holes necessary to print each layer of a non-trivial object (say, a Benchy) without electronic assistance? I’m sure it could be done, but most people couldn’t do it in a practical timeframe. Taking presliced gcode and translating it via an automatic or even a manual system should be doable, but you still need a computer to slice the model into gcode.

    Jacquard looms are a whole other crottle of greeps. Each warp position gets either raised or lowered, so it’s in essence a binary model rather than full analog—conceptually much simpler than this printer, whose punch language is going to have to include slots for longer motor moves. I’d guess that, in the old days, Jacquard patterns were set up for manual punching by drawing up a diagram (which would look like a piece of black-and-white pixel art) and transferring the information one row at a time to the punch. That doesn’t seem like it would work for this printer.












  • If the storage all belongs to one machine, yes. If it’s spread across multiple machines with similar setups that share a LAN, then you need to put in a little thought to make sure that there’s only one copy for all machines, but it’s still doable.

    In this case, we’re talking millions of machines with different owners, OSs, network security setups, etc. that are only connected across the Internet. The logistics are enough to make a hardened sysadmin blanch.