It was limited options at first and then increased cost later, I speculate. New fabs are built in much better locations.

TSMC likely had to build in-country when they started and didn’t have other options. Chip fabs require some serious precision and those factories need specialized vibration resistant foundations. Hell, even Kodak had to build on a massive, specialized foundation and that was just for film manufacturing. (See Kodak factory tours; Smarter Every Day on YouTube)

That is just one example that I can think of, but long term cost and the willingness of friendly countries to host a foreign company, in that capacity, are what come to mind first.

If AI becomes sentient and decides to kill us off, this will be the way.

I’ll sell you mine. Hell, I might even trade some points for a block of your finest cheese.

Drugs are a helluva drug.

The GPS guidance modules were massive back in 1918 as well and they didn’t have transistors yet. But yet, those old ladies at the factory could crank 'em out. Talk about spirit!

Not really surprising as we had recently evolved to stand on two legs and probably lacked the brain power to hunt effectively. We only started using fire sometime during the following two million years as a we transitioned into “modern” humans. Fire was likely a huge motivator to begin consuming meat once the maillard reaction was “discovered”. The last ice age probably kicked out hunting skills into high gear due to sparse vegetation and the need to consume more fats and proteins.

My substring-ball theory uses bits of string attached to balls that are 10^-36m in size… You will never be able to see my balls, but trust me bro… we will have the tech to see them in about 100 years, just you wait.

Seriously though, it just seems that every answer ends with “But wait! If you do this thing with that thing that we can never test or prove, then everything makes sense.”

Maybe. People with more technical knowledge should understand that LLMs aren’t magic or sentient and have some severe limitations. Hell, I have been tinkering with ML and ANNs for a better part of 15 years or so and they can be extremely useful. (I am no expert and never indend to be.)

It’s the marketing wank, scams, art theft and all the bullshit that pisses me off now. In that regard, I am squarely in the “Fuck AI” category. There is absolutely nothing phenomenal that has come of this recent bubble in the commercial space. AI generated images are mostly trash, articles are riddled with gross factual errors, phishing and other scams are more realistic (and maybe even more dynamic) now and public forums contain even more annoying bots. And the worst bit is that AI generated media, like music, is just a collection of averaged values with no originality.

That bell curve represents something but it isn’t IQ.

It’s a multipurpose CPU, for sure. I have the 7950X3D/7900XTX and could disable a CCD for gaming, but it’s not worth my time. I might game but then switch to CPU heavy work a couple times a day. Unless a new game comes out that really needs to push the GPU and needs x number of cores, I won’t change system configs because I am lazy.

I recently upgraded to the X870E and any bottlenecks that I had before are just gone and with that, any incentive to switch CPU modes. (The bottlenecks were replaced with memory tuning bugs during boot, but that is another story.)

A blog post is not a terms of service agreement. You are in for a world of hurt if you continue to believe that what a company says and what is written in the terms are equal. This ain’t just about Bambu and is an extremely common source of confusion, which is the point.

Meat on a stick.

The sketch is a sketch and not a blueprint or engineering diagram so don’t worry about how a screenshot looks. (It looks fine and I can almost read it, FWIW.)

My advice is just general advice for parametric CAD. It’s hard to learn, but so awesome to use.

Get a good set of calipers and reverse engineer everything you see. If something seems super awkward to make and you feel like you are building a domino tower, stop and attack the problems from a different angle.

Fully constrained sketches are super important at first. Constrain everything until you learn what bits need to be adjusted later. The goal is to build solid components that can be adjusted later while they are part of a much larger assembly. I have a subset of “stock” components that I share across my models. If I change one measurement in a core component, all the other models that use it are adjusted almost automatically. That might just be for Fusion 360 though, but it shows the power of understanding constraints and how they trickle up through your projects. If my sketches weren’t constrained correctly, the results may be wildly unpredictable further down the workflow.

I have been working seriously in CAD for about 5 years after I decided it was going to be my pandemic project. TBH, I still don’t know everything and probably never will.

I wouldn’t lean too much on their open source sales point. Yes, it’s open source, but there isn’t much more to that than a custom config for Klipper. The engineering diagrams on their GitHub are mainly just standard measurements for fans and such. They do include their own custom parts measurements, so that is nice.

Cheap printers come with cheap parts and sub-par QA. I have heard great things about Sovol, but also very bad things about Sovol.

The SV08 has been around long enough now so maybe most of the bugs are worked out. If Sovol didn’t solve some problems, the community likely did. It’s the nature of 3D printing communities, after all.

If you want a cheap printer to be a workhorse, it needs to be disassembled completely and rebuilt after inspecting and replacing any critical parts with quality ones.

These kinds of printers are just what they are. They work great until they don’t.

Fuck you. Quit playing victim you sack of shit.

The weight test is typically super useful when you want to maximize extrusion rate. Even though it can be minimal, there is almost always a correlation between printed plastic weight and temperature.

My thought here is that you are just within the minimum temperature range for that particular filament. If the hotend temp drops while it is printing, even just a hair, it’s binding the extruder enough to cause this artifact.

My second thought is that the bed/hotend heaters are sagging the power of the entire system just enough to slow the steppers down a hair when they turn on. Testing this theory is not trivial and requires some EE knowledge and an oscilloscope. In the worst cases, the power supply would start to get really hot from hitting or exceedibg current limits. (If this actually is a deeper issue, I would check to make sure your kitty didn’t insert some rogue resistance into your electricals by way of chewing on the wires. The wires themselves might be getting warm in those spots, if that is the case.)

I would PID tune the hotend temperature. It doesn’t look like a mechanical fault like a stepper motor issue or belt.

If you look at each layer, the striping is offset every layer somewhat consistantly and it looks like something is turning on and off on a regular interval, with the same pattern of “blips” in between. (The stripe seems to happen every x mm of printed line.)

Plastics will behave and look different depending on what temperature they are printed at. There are typically glossy and matte sections in every print, actually. You may be hitting a temperature range at one of those texture-transiton points. A few degrees high, it may be translucent. A few degrees low, completely opaque. If that range is within your existing PID tune, that might contribute to the visuals here.

Even with your micrometer, you are only measuring the widest layer over x layers. If your temperature is not stable, it could also contribute to some lines being thinner and more translucent.

Testing extrusion rate by weight is a method that might be good here. Print 100mm of filament into a blob and weigh it. Change the temp a hair, print another blob and weigh that. Create a chart of 10-20 tests to see if there is a spot where extrusion is inconsistent. In your case, we want to replicate that striping, but for a weight test instead. The weight of the blob will change if hotend temperature is affecting extrusion rate. You need a good scale and preferably one that can weigh into hundredths of a gram. That precision is not required, but it helps.

The reason I suggested a weight test is because your temps might be swinging between a temperature that is good and also just a hair too low.

The hotend “heating response” might be laggy, is my guess, regardless of what may be causing it.

Edit: The hotend temperature is kept constant in “bursts” of power. There might be a threshold where the hotend power is just full-on.

Represented in a series of H’s and L’s (H for high, L for low), here is a pseudo-representation of what I see each layer and it matches a heating pattern of hotend but with a lower limit where its “full-on” heating:

HHHHHHHHLLLLHHLLLLHHLLLLHHHHHHHHH…

It’s not a perfect pattern in your case because a dozen different things contribute to final nozzle temperature.

No.

I think the concept of stars literally hitting each other is rather moot

In many ways, I agree with you. I was simply trying to paint a picture of how much space is in between stars. Visualizing the scale and distances of the universe can be extremely difficult, so I opened with that to help explain why the chances of collision or significant interaction were low. However, given amount of time involved, a significant interaction has probably happened before and may happen again. (Visualizing space and time is hard for me, actually.) With that, I should cap my improbability to “within the time that humanity has ever existed, or will ever exist”.

However, you did get me thinking about disruption on a much larger scale, far beyond the oort cloud. Could a cluster of black holes disrupt our orbit around the galaxy center significantly? Locally, even something of considerable size passing through our solar system can disrupt our own solar orbit, but may only measurable after thousands of years.

We are in a relatively quiet spot in our galaxy now from my own understanding, but if something was able to bump us (and hundreds of thousands of other stars) just a hair, it might have dire consequences in a few million years. (I wouldn’t imagine that we would notice getting kicked out of our own galaxy completely though. Dunno.)

It would be really interesting to see a fleet of glowing shlongs dropping out of the sky.