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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Like other commenters have said, start by asking the upstream developer (whether that’s by sending a message with a link to the fork or by sending a mega-PR that says you don’t expect it to be merged as-is in the description). They should be the best judge of how they’d prefer to handle it. The thing I’d add is that you should try to avoid taking it personally if their preferred approach isn’t one you think is a good idea. Sometimes good fixes end up never merged because of disagreements becoming too heated even if everyone’s basically on the same page about the fox being good. There’s also a decent chance that your refactors are things the upstream developer explicitly doesn’t want and would otherwise have done them themselves and implemented the same fix, too, or they don’t agree that your fix is good enough. They won’t want to be on the hook for maintaining contributions that use approaches and code style that they don’t like, and that’s okay. They also might know something you don’t about their project that would make something that’s obviously a good idea to you obviously a bad idea to them.

    Basically, just try and remember that if it’s a hobby project, it makes progress when the maintainer is having a good time, and gets abandoned when they’re not anymore, so try and avoid making a mess and having arguments when they’re the one that’ll have to deal with any fallout from any mistakes.


  • Something I’ve not seen mentioned here yet is that one of the reasons it’s such an effective way to make money is specifically because loads of people are buying into it. When you buy a stock (or a derivative like an S&P 500 index tracking fund), it increases its price. If you’re just one person with a normal-person amount of money, it won’t be enough to register, but if you’re part of a group of millions of people, or an investor with billions at your disposal, it’ll make a visible difference, and if people see that happening consistently, they’ll want to join in and there’ll be a positive feedback loop. It only stops when there’s a big enough panic that lots of investors can no longer afford to maintain their investment and have to sell at the same time, and then you can even get a positive feedback loop in the other direction when people see the price plummeting and decide they need to sell before it plummets any further.

    Stocks are supposed to represent the value of a company’s current assets and expected future profits, but this kind of feedback loop muddies the water. With something like Bitcoin, which intentionally has no inherent value, because enough people have agreed to pretend otherwise, it’s gained effective value, and can be exchanged for money, or in some cases, goods and services. That’ll remain the case until everyone agrees that they don’t want Bitcoin, so could go on forever.



  • They have to defend their trademark. They don’t have to defend copyright, and most of Nintendo’s reputation comes from copyright claims. Someone streaming a let’s play isn’t selling a counterfeit Mario game, they’re just showing you things in a real Mario game, so there’s no trademark claim.

    They’re also big abusers of the fact that most of the people they make copyright claims against can’t afford to defend themselves against such a behemoth. Even if you’re sure you’ve not violated their copyright and your lawyer’s sure, too, it’ll be much cheaper to roll over than get the legal system to agree with you.




  • I think the main draw of a moving vat is that you can tilt it during the film-part separation, so it concentrates the peel force in a line that passes over the part instead of having it spread over the whole thing and needing more force which could warp the part or stretch the film. That should mean you can get away with replacing the film less often. If the film isn’t replaced often enough, it can make the print quality worse, or tear and leak resin into the printer where all the LEDs are, which will kill the printer.

    I think all Elegoo’s machines have at least some Chitu guts, and Chitu-free machines tend to make that their main selling point (and also cost a chunk more than equivalent Chitu-based ones).




  • As someone who’s just spent half an hour reading Wikipedia thanks to this thread, I can now dispense a summary of what I read to make it feel like I didn’t just waste a chunk of time I should have spent in bed by wasting another chunk of time I should be spending in bed.

    Fats are made out of fatty acids, which are carboxylic acids with a longish carbon chain. A saturated fatty acid only has single bonds between carbon atoms, a monounsaturated fatty acid has a single double bond somewhere in the chain (and these are sometimes things that turn into buzzwords, e.g. omega three oils are ones where there’s a single double bond three along from the end of the chain), and a polyunsaturated fatty acid has more than one double bond.

    Single bonds in a carbon chain can only be one way around, so you don’t get isomers of saturated fatty acids, but double bonds in a carbon chain can be in either of two orientations. If the hydrogens are on the same side for both sides of the bond, that’s the cis orientation, and if they’re on opposite sides, that’s the trans orientation. Most natural unsaturated fats are cis, so they generally don’t get explicitly labelled as cis fats, and just the trans ones get the extra label. Notably, though, vaccenic acid, which is about 4% of the fat in butter, is trans by default, so it’s cis-vaccenic acid that gets the extra label.

    Unsaturated fats tend to be more liquid at room temperature, but can be made by growing cheap vegetables. They also go off faster as free radicals can attack the double bonds. Saturated fats tend to be solid at room temperature, but mostly need to come from animals or more expensive plants (palm fat is an exception - it’s cheap and mostly saturated). It’s therefore desirable to use industrial processes to artificially saturate fats, and we can do that by heating them up and exposing them to hydrogen in the presence of a catalyst like Nickel. You don’t necessarily want to fully saturate your fat, though, so might stop part way, and if you do, unless you intentionally tweak the process to avoid it because it’s the 21st century and you’re legally obliged to, you get some of the partially hydrogenated fat switching from cis to trans.

    Over the course of the last century, we realised that (except for a few like vaccenic acid) trans fats are harmful in lots of exciting ways, e.g. messing up cholesterol, blocking your arteries, and building up in your brain. They’ve therefore been banned or restricted to certain percentages in a lot of the world. You can get a similar effect by fully hydrogenating things to get safe (or at least safer) saturated fat and mixing it with the unmodified fat, or by switching everything that used to use hydrogenated vegetable oil to using palm oil, which is one of the driving forces behind turning rainforests into palm plantations.

    Apparently, this was twenty five minutes of writing, so I’m nearly up to an hour of thinking about fats.


  • I ran the printer’s pre-sliced 12-minute benchy with cheap Geeetech PLA filament, and it didn’t come out great, but then realised that when I’d removed the nozzle clog that was there from the factory (apparently they test some nozzles during QA, so mine had some dregs of filament with a lump that needed a cold pull to shift it) I’d accidentally plugged one of the part cooling fans into the wrong header and it wasn’t running. After fixing that, it came out much better than what you’ve got here, despite a pause part way through due to trying to do it with the tail end of a roll.

    I’ve read that the throat cooling isn’t great for PETG as the fan as it draws warm air from inside the toolhead shroud, and there’s an alternative one on printables that avoids this problem (although a duct to isolate the fan and its cutout in the shroud from the rest of the shroud interior might be simpler), so that could be related as you’re running PETG.


  • I said he more-or-less killed him, not that he actually killed him. Care was not taken to ensure he’d be revived or revivable. He was left forgotten in a pocket. The likely outcome was that he remained forgotten and didn’t get wet until he’d been dropped under some furniture, crushed like a stock cube or gone mouldy. Maybe he had dependents, like a young child who’d have died without their parent. It being theoretically possible to revive someone later doesn’t make turning them into a dehydrated cube meaningfully better than making them dead if you don’t have a strong plan with a failsafe to make sure they stop being a cube. Even with guaranteed revival, if they’re a cube for long enough that they notice the lost time, it’s just like roofying someone and holding them hostage for a while. Do not turn museum guys into dehydrated cubes.





  • To go one better, there’s http://isthereanydeal.com/, which tracks prices across a bunch of vetted key retailers (i.e. companies that buy wholesale keys from publishers and sell them to users, but not grey-market or dodgy sites) so you can see where’s cheapest and get notified of discounts etc.

    Why check GreenManGaming and Steam (and potentially a bunch of their competitors, too) when you could check one site and know who’s best?

    I’ve accidentally made this read like an ad, but they’ve not paid me to say this, I just always check the site before buying games, and have either saved loads of money by doing so over the years, or have ended up buying a bunch of things I’d have ignored on the grounds they were too expensive otherwise. I don’t know in which direction, but it’s definitely changed the amount I’ve spent on games over the last ten years.


  • I’m pretty sure Reddit used to be profitable. There used to be a bar on the right-hand side that showed how far each day’s Reddit Gold purchases had gone towards covering the day’s server costs. When I first started using Reddit, it’d typically be about a third of the way full when it reset, but a few years after the at, it was filling up after about eight hours, suggesting they were covering the server costs three times over, which should have left plenty of money for staffing costs as they didn’t have many staff back then. Eventually, they got rid of the bar. Later, they did things that would have increased costs, like hiring people to make New Reddit and the Reddit App, and hosting images and videos themselves instead of leaving it to imgur, and I guess these were enough to make them no longer profitable and force them to aim for faster growth.


  • I’m not arguing for anything in the post above, just pointing out that a broken (or badly repaired) insulin pump is genuinely more dangerous than having no insulin pump. That doesn’t have to count against the right to repair one, as if you’ve got the right to repair an insulin pump, and do so badly, it doesn’t mean you’re legally forced to use it afterwards, just like I’ve got the right to inject all the insulin in my fridge with an insulin pen back to back, but I’m not legally forced to do so.

    I do think the right to repair should be universal, but as I think that medical stuff should be paid for by the state, NHS-style, that would end up meaning that the NHS could repair medical devices themselves if they deemed it more economical to do so and recertify things as safe than to get the manufacturer to repair or replace them. The NHS is buying the devices, and gets the right to repair them, and that saves the taxpayer money, as even if they don’t actually end up repairing anything, it stops manufacturers price gouging for repairs and replacements, and if the manufacturer goes bust or refuses to repair something, there’re still ways to keep things working. It doesn’t mean unqualified end users can’t use their new right to repair their medical devices and risk getting it wrong, but if you’ve got an option of a free repair/replacement, most people would choose the safe and certified repair over their own bodge.


  • If you’ve got a broken insulin pump, assuming you’re in a country with a functioning healthcare system, you should have been given a spare pump with the original, and probably some insulin pens, so when one breaks, you fall back to the spare, and get given a new one to be the new spare (or could get the broken one repaired). Using the spare is completely safe.

    If you don’t have a spare, your sugars would go up over several hours, but you’d have a day or two to get to a hospital and potentially several days after that for someone to find you and get you to a hospital, so it’s not safe, but also not something you’d die from if you had any awareness that there was a problem.

    If you’ve got an incorrectly-repaired pump, you could have it fail to give you enough insulin, and end up with higher sugars, notice the higher sugars, and then switch to the spare. That’d be inconvenient, but not a big deal. However, you could also have it dump its entire cartridge into you at once, and have your sugars plummet faster than you can eat. If you don’t have someone nearby, you could be dead in a couple of hours, or much less if you were, for example, driving. That’s much more dangerous than having no insulin at all.

    Prosthetic legs don’t have a failure mode that kills you, so a bad repair can’t make them worse than not having them at all, but insulin pumps do, so a bad repair could.