Spotify and other such services almost certainly sound worse because they are compressed. But it’s not really a like for like comparison with vinyl. Spotify is streaming audio for people who want to play music casually in cars, earbuds etc. It offers convenience, not perfect sound fidelity. FLAC / CD on the other hand could be compared to vinyl and would win hands down for better frequency and range. The only reason they wouldn’t is if the CD master sucked and the vinyl master didn’t.

And vinyl is very lossy in its own way. The (digital) master of each side undergoes dynamic range & frequency compression to fit the limitations of the format (e.g. to reduce sibilance, track width). Then the master is cut into a lacquer disc from which a “father” is made, from which “mothers” are made, from which stampers are made and from which the vinyl record is made. So the vinyl in someone’s hand is a copy, of a copy, of a copy, of an altered digital master. The stamper too wears out so if someone is unlucky they get a pressing right the end of its life. And playing the disk can cause wow, flutter, distortion and general wear & tear can cause hiss, pop, dullness and scratches.

So vinyl will never sound better unless it received a better master than other formats.

In the 70s and 80s there were kids toys which played injection moulded plastic discs with a stylus that tracked the groove. I think you might be able to achieve something similar out of a printed record if it was spun fast enough but it wouldn’t sound great.

I had the misfortune to have some PLA snap just before and after the direct drive in my Bambu P1S and it took ages to get it out. I think age and moisture can affect filament, especially it blended with wood dust, sparkles or something which undermines it even further. I’ve resorted to packing my AMS with silica beads to hopefully mitigate for the issue and I threw out the filament that caused the issue. Ironically this is one of the few places a bowden extruder is any benefit - if the filament snaps just push it from behind through a heated nozzle until the blockage clears.

The EFF has some info about the practice - https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots.

I imagine there are ways and means of obfuscating / anonymizing the dots such as blocking the printer from emitting them (e.g. an empty yellow cartridge that the printer perceives as full), modifying the firmware, using a burner printer, or using a mono laser jet.

As a side issue, most modern bank notes have a bunch of yellow circles integrated into the design on each side. They look random but they’re in a recognisable pattern called a constellation that enables devices like copiers / scanners to recognize when people are trying to copy money or other financial instruments like checks.

Haven’t been to Thailand since my 20s (with girlfriend) but there were plenty of bars where the hostesses seemed like they would perform other services if the clientele had money for them. Not to mention actual brothels and sex shows. I went looking around Pattaya on Google Maps to see if it was still like that and was disappointed to see that many of the streets had been knocked and big resort hotels built there. Still a few dodgy areas though still.

Forgiving is the word for this - being able to undo mistakes and recover. I reckon FreeCAD would massively benefit from doing a complete feature freeze and focusing on usability for a couple of releases.

I think FreeCAD would win a lot more converts if it focused on usability. Fusion360 and Onshape are parametric modelers just like FreeCAD yet they’re way simpler, taskcentric and more forgiving tools to use.

Did you turn layer ironing / smoothing on for the last layer not all top layers? Aside from smoothing modern slicers can also use more attractive patterns for top layers than zig zag such as hilbert.

It also looks like you might have underflow issues so maybe check your e-step setting on your printer to ensure you’re extruding proper amount of filament. There are articles that explain the process but you basically mark a reference point on the filament, e.g. 10cm away from where it enters the extruder, tell the printer to extrude 10cm, mark and measure how far away the mark is from where it’s meant to be. So if the filament moves 7cm when it should have 10cm then your e-steps need to be multiplied by 10/7.

Wouldn’t the problem be that you’d still have to remove the print, wash it, empty the vat, clean the vat & build plate and only then could you put the print back in and then fire up the UV. Meanwhile you won’t be using the printer for anything else. Maybe it’s easier to just buy something that can wash & cure separate to the printer or leave the print out in the sun to cure.

Plastic cutlery is disappearing in most countries - it’s all wood or cardboard now. I suppose someone could make a business of collecting used cutlery where it’s still in use and recycle it (not necessarily into filament), but I wonder if it would be economically viable.

BL touch works great but you need to get the Z offset. Then you can just G29 before the print or whenever and it works great. I hate manual levelling and these days there isn’t much reason for it. I’ve just upgraded to a Bambu P1S and levelling is even more straightforward since there is no Z-offset since it uses the hotend itself to probe.

In my Ender 3 Pro I found tightening the screws too much made the bed bow, so I loosened them until they were just firm but not forcing up the corners. I also replaced the default springs with stiffer ones so once set they stayed set. I also built a custom Marlin firmware and I changed the bed mesh algorithm to probe more points and use a more sophisticated algorithm to compensate for levelling. This was with a Bigtree 1.2 board which barely had enough memory for the firmware but I made it work. After that I really didn’t have any issues. Biggest pain was dialing in the Z-offset on the BL touch.

I have a P1S and I don’t really follow why it is necessary at all to send prints off to the cloud. Yes, it could be useful if printer and PC / app are on separate networks. But if they’re on the same network then they should directly communicate.

Some US news websites still geoblock European visitors rather than fix their site to not track the ever loving fuck out of visitors who say no. So imagine what they’re doing to their domestic visitors.

A lot of subjectivity about what is a success or not, but I would say many nationalised companies (and most were only nationalised for 20-30 years) were absolutely stagnating and/or suffering from widespread union disruption and should have been cut loose. But just picking out a handful of privatisations that went well, I think British Telecom, British Gas & British Airways did much better as privatized companies. Some privatisations went not-so-well - look at steel or coal privatisations or British Rail.

And an example of successful nationalisation - hospitals & doctors were a loose arrangement of private / charitable causes before being nationalised as the NHS. I think we can agree the situation is far better for everyone as a public health service than if it were run for-profit.

That’s literally uncomparable. Government does things that ignore profit. That’s what government is for. The provide services at a loss. The only “profit” might be things like societal improvement, education, security, and such.

People pay taxes that fund the government. If the money is wasted then services suffer. So it’s not profit or loss but they must deliver value. Value is harder to quantify than profit but governments have to figure a way out of doing it and provide incentives to staff to deliver it.

This is something you really can’t say one way or the other.

I could cite examples of sick, failing government owned companies that did better under privatization, or simply shouldn’t have been governments owned in the first place. On the other hand, I could cite disastrous privatization efforts that should never have happened because they were vital services, or in the national interest. I lived through most of it in the UK when they were privatising stuff left right and centre - some succeeded, others didn’t.

And if they stay under the control of government then they need incentivization and means for measuring success. Success doesn’t just mean profit but it does mean value and quality of service. And in some ways that would require operating similar to if it were a private company.

I live in Europe where trucks are fairly rare but you still see large SUVs, 4x4s and vans around. My own feeling is that certain classes of vehicles should be considered commercial for the purposes of insurance, taxation, VAT, inspection, tolls, permitted usage and everything else. The legislation already exists for commercial vehicles so extend it to these kind of vehicles.

So is someone must have a stupidly oversized vehicle purely for personal reasons they can enjoy all the bullshit and restrictions that goes with it. Doesn’t stop them complying but making it more onerous to do it will take demand for these vehicles off the market entirely.

The issue is that Rockstar never remade GTA.

They outsourced that work to Grove Street Games who had already done the mobile ports and said have at it. Grove Street Games took their mobile ports (which were already compromised) and adapted them back to console & PC with a new engine. I assume everything was done on the cheap and to a deadline and what they produced is what they produced. For Rockstar it wasn’t a labour of love, it was money for old rope and if they had given a damn they wouldn’t have outsourced it or at least had stricter quality controls & acceptance on what someone made for them.

Rockstar made a slightly better job with their RDR port in that they didn’t completely fuck it up but it was still outsourced and a minimal effort.

A company like Paradox should certainly be able afford testers who run the game on a variety of configurations to see if optimization is necessary.

One thing I would say and this is a broad statement - generally you don’t do optimization unless you know you need it. And you only do it after the thing you’re writing is working correctly non-optimally. Optimize too soon, or when you don’t need to just makes code an unmaintainable mess. That doesn’t doesn’t preclude writing efficient code in the first place but efficient is not the same thing as optimal.