I don't have a Bambu; previously, I had Prusa printers from the MK3 generation and I struggled to get good prints (poor bed adhesion and the extruder breaking frequently, requiring very intensive repairs); since not having a working printer slows my hobbies down, I ended up with two. Both broke down and I got tired of fixing them, but when I looked at the prices of new Prusa, they were high enough to make me pause.
Instead of a Bambu, I got a Flashforge Adventurer 5M. It is incredibly cheap (cheap enough that I am more than happy to replace it after two years if it stops working), and is pretty reliable (compared to the Prusa MK3 and MK3S I had), and most of all, the self-calibration works well enough that I don't spend any time debugging prints that fail at the first layer anymore; I just re-run calibration and it's fine, and if it's not fine, I clean the plate and it works.
It also comes with a terrible slicer (dervied from Slic3r I believe) with annoying "log into the cloud every time you start the app", but I moved to OrcaSlicer. I had to give up a few nice features but it hasn't truly impacted my workflow. And it does receive firmware updates (it's connected via wifi to my home network). My hope- just a hope- is that they don't do anything truly stupid with future firmware updates or end up getting in a hissy fit with prominent youtubers.
I agree. I would almost say the best argument to make is "liberal humanism is compatible with machine intelligence and regulated capitalism, but we must still remain wary that authoritarians will abuse the system".
I do see prices when I look at the instance selection box. "On-demand linux base pricing: 0.0104 USD per hour" for t3.micro (matching the published pricing). it does not show the full price (based on any additional volumes or other configuration details).
It gets far more complicated when you have reserved instances, and combine reserved instances with RAM sharing when working in a larger org.
Modern US coke doesn't taste much like the coke I drank growing up (late 70s, early 80s, before they switched over). I remember drinking "a perfect coke" on a hot day, it tasted almost "botanical". These days, the closest thing I can find is Mexican Coke (which they sell at Costco), it's a lot dryer (less sweet) tasting to me than US coke.
If you mean specifically the Gemini VS Code Extension: it's terrible compared to Claude Code or Codex. I don't know how they can get away with it. Just constant timeouts, weird failure modes, have to start a new chat to switch modes... but I don't think any of that is specific to gemini the model- it seems to be the extension.
As for actual solutions to problems ignoring the VS Code extension aspect, I find all three premiere models to be excellent coding agents for my purposes.
The overall quality of LLM coding tools is shockingly bad. I haven't found a single one without major issues, and many have the same problems reappear every few months, sometimes bad enough to almost break the entire thing (e.g. 100% failure rate in editing files, broken for weeks, with the same cause each time, multiple times in a year).
When I was a kid I read Asimov's laws and it inspired me to work on robots and machine learning. However, I quickly realized: the computers of the time (Apple IIe) could not implement those laws; they required the ability to parse human text, and more importantly, my read of the laws and how to comply requires the robot to create an accurate predictive utilitarian model of its actions and their effects. And be able to continuously re-evaluate that model and choose actions consistent with the laws.
After looking more into utilitarian models, I concluded there was no way to implement Asimov's laws unless you had a superintelligent AI. But in retrospect, I think I was interpreting the laws in the 'hard' form.
No health claim is ever proven. Even with overwhelming evidence for a claim we can't really say it's proven. At best we can say we have very high confidence, supported by a lot of data.
Further, what exactly are we supposed to believe? Should we read the NY Times or Nature and just accept that what gets published there is the absolute truth? As we know, many paradigms have been overturned over the years- sometimes requiring heroic efforts to change the status quo. Many of the health claims about cholesterol, fat intake, and other diet/nutrition have turned out to be less important that originally believed.
There are a few exceptions and even then I wouldn't call them "proof". For example, smoking causes cancer- we have enough evidence to safely conclude actual causality (multiple replicated double-blind experiments).
As a complete non-expert, as far as I can tell, the only true agreement out there is that certain very specific substances are bad for you if you consume them too often. That's tobacco, alcohol, painkillers...and that's about it for consensus ones, with alcohol having wiggle room among the public thanks to some poor studies.
Just about every other piece of nutrition advice out there can easily be categorized as controversial. Not in the sense that one side is obviously stupid or malicious, but in the sense that both sides earnestly think they are right.
> that certain very specific substances are bad for (for the general population) if you consume them too often
There are people who smoke their entire lives, die at 90, and tobacco had nothing to do with their individual deaths or even really any tangible negative health outcomes. There are people who drink or smoke pot every day and it has nothing to do with their deaths or quality of life. There are people who have steak and eggs cooked in butter every morning with no cholesterol or cardiac problems.
As a whole, people who do these things have a statistically higher probability of having negative outcomes. On an individual basis, there is a lot of variation as to what the actually effect might be.
No, not really. If you are not a covered healthcare entity, or a business association of a covered healthcare entity, the law simply does not apply to you at all.
Also, I believe (but am not certain) that if there was any criminal case, it would be leadership (C*O) not individual software engineers who would be charged. This is speculation on my part, if anybody has clear facts I'm happy to hear them.
Instead of a Bambu, I got a Flashforge Adventurer 5M. It is incredibly cheap (cheap enough that I am more than happy to replace it after two years if it stops working), and is pretty reliable (compared to the Prusa MK3 and MK3S I had), and most of all, the self-calibration works well enough that I don't spend any time debugging prints that fail at the first layer anymore; I just re-run calibration and it's fine, and if it's not fine, I clean the plate and it works.
It also comes with a terrible slicer (dervied from Slic3r I believe) with annoying "log into the cloud every time you start the app", but I moved to OrcaSlicer. I had to give up a few nice features but it hasn't truly impacted my workflow. And it does receive firmware updates (it's connected via wifi to my home network). My hope- just a hope- is that they don't do anything truly stupid with future firmware updates or end up getting in a hissy fit with prominent youtubers.
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