Your idea certainly has some interesting potential, but I think the biggest problem you might find is that it might clog up quickly or dull and lose its abrasiveness and thus be even more quickly disposable (and thus cost-inefficient) than sandpaper already is. That might not be a deal-breaker, if it enables some particular method that you can come up with, like what you mentioned with the chess piece, but I doubt it’s going to be useful as, or cheaper than, a direct replacement for sandpaper or sanding blocks on a larger scale. Yes, a continuous stream of fiber-infused filament is certainly great at sanding away at a nozzle, but that is mostly all fresh filament right off the roll, inch after inch and layer after layer of it, the nozzle is the piece that’s there continuously enduring the relentless abuse, but it rarely sees the same bit of plastic touch it more than a handful of times.

If you try to use the same bit of plastic that’s already sanded its way through a nozzle it may have lost some of its abrasiveness already, but even if it hasn’t I would still be concerned that it might lose its abrasiveness quickly under actual use as an abrasive, it might be difficult to clear out removed material, it might have a lot of friction and heat up, potentially even to the point of localized softening of the surface, allowing any fibers to be flattened or pushed back into the plastic and smoothing the surface. Lots of things are great abrasives in theory, but don’t have any practical use. Sandpapers and polishes are specifically selected to be as cheap and durable as they can be for the job they’re trying to do.

However it is certainly an interesting idea, and worth trying. I’m curious to find out how it performs. Let us know how it goes! Worst-case scenario, using a printed design to make obscure, form-fitting shapes for other abrasives to be applied to seems like an under-utilized application for 3d printing.

It is a perfectly valid approach, and there are also many other perfectly valid approaches. “Better” requires a definition of what you want to be better. If there’s something that’s making you uncomfortable about the process, let us know what concern or issue you’re seeing with it and maybe we can guide you to a better way for you. But there’s nothing wrong with the way they’re doing it. Others may have different preferences (including you, YOU might have different preferences!) but they’re just preferences. It’s not right or wrong, even if some people argue that it is, they’re always going to have some preferences embedded in that judgement. There’s always more than one way to do it. That’s the joy of it, really, and sometimes you’ll have to experiment yourself to find out what ways YOU like the best, that make sense to you, that are comfortable for you, or that do things the way you want to do them.

It’s your own self-hosting setup, you get to make the choices. Sometimes the number of choices can be intimidating and lead to analysis paralysis but the only way out of that is to realize that there really is no way of finding the “best” until you’ve tried many different ways and figured out the “best” yourself. That’s why the only real advice I can give you is to just go through the tutorial you’ve found and do it the way they do it for now. You can change later, as you learn more, when not if you decide you want to do something differently. Because you will. We all do. It’s part of the process.

I agree that the open source package dependency situation in many popular languages and ecosystems has gotten way out of hand. Well, at least my addiction to reinventing almost every wheel myself and self-hosting my own cobbled together infrastructure which has permanently afflicted me with chronic not-invented-here syndrome aren’t feeling like such a crippling disability anymore. Maybe it’s not always such a bad thing in every situation.

As a veteran of gaming on Linux for several years, I have to admit I keep a small collection of various usb bluetooth dongles, because honestly, built-in bluetooth support still remains questionable and unreliable in many cases, at least for me and the systems I use it on. I don’t necessarily blame Linux as much as I blame the manufacturers of the chips and devices, but unfortunately we have to live with the chaos that their reverse-engineered-firmware-reliant devices create. Any cheapass bluetooth dongle is probably fine, the cheaper and more ubiquitous it is, the more likely it uses the same shitty chinese chip that all the others use and that a bunch of someones already hammered out drivers for, but honestly even with multiple different models and brands it still seems like a crapshoot which one feels like working properly at any given time, but usually one or the other will work and get things to connect, and it’s usually perfectly reliable once all the drivers have loaded and it’s all paired up and things start working. The struggle is real, though.

Its wireless is much more compatible, supporting several different connection methods for use with different proprietary systems, and is just generally a better and more capable device. They’re worth every penny, IMHO. 8bitdo’s quality changed my opinion on gaming controllers that had developed after years of being frustrated by cheap, wonky, second-rate, third-party garbage controllers like MadCatz and Logitech that used “features” to cover for the fact that they were cheaply made, overpriced, and deeply inferior. 8bitdo controllers are the only ones I trust anymore. Even Nintendo apparently can’t be trusted to make quality controllers for their own systems anymore. But 8bitdo can.

Why would you conclude that a subscription based model makes them immune from corrupt financial incentives? Quite the opposite. That’s my whole point.

Up-selling and cross-selling. It’s just business. Who’s ever going to pay $25/month if the $5/month plan does everything anyone ever possibly needs? Their lowest level pricing model relies on making you anxious about running out of searches eventually, not finding everything you need within that window each month, and not having effective enough tools to find what you need at the basic level. You may personally reject that you need anything more than the basic plan, but the company’s financial incentive is to convince you of the opposite, and don’t think for a second that they’re not eventually going to try to convince you that you need to upgrade. It may seem like $5/month and $25/month are not that far apart, but multiply that across some arbitrary number of users, say, 100,000, and you’re talking about $2 million dollars PER MONTH of potential revenue on the table. And there’s no guarantee they’re not going to eventually start pushing even more expensive products and plans.

They have partnerships with other businesses too, and while those seem like nice enough businesses on the surface, they’re still businesses and they are going to have motivation to find ways to drive traffic and prime you to get subscriptions to them too. The problem is not that these partnerships exist or that there’s anything wrong with them, it’s that they’re another corrupting influence when money is involved and changing hands.

To be clear, I’m not saying anyone involved is evil, that they’re actively doing this now, that they are even necessarily moving in this direction, or that they’re even slightly corrupt at all… yet, but they’re swimming in the corrupting waters of subscription-based dark patterns and they can’t help but be influenced by them. The lust for profits will inevitably drive them mad. It always does. Enshittification does not make exceptions for good intentions.

No, it’s just trading one centralized search product that is free and profits by using your data and manipulating you, for another that you have to pay for and profits from you more directly but still has financial incentive to keeping you engaged and searching instead of finding. Run your own decentralized SearXNG instead and take it into your own hands. Search isn’t something that should be controlled by anyone who’s in it for a profit.

I will maintain creative control of my life by boycotting EA forever. It’s one of the key plot points in my story.

What if we compromise on fractional thousandths of a kilodog?

Journalism is dead. Capitalism killed it, because they did not want any reliable witnesses to or records of what they are going to do to humanity and the planet. History is written by the victors, and they have already crafted their own narrative of technological enlightenment. And we’re not in that story. At least not in any way we’ll recognize ourselves.

Forgejo also has significantly more active development. Feature-wise, I believe they’re currently working on adding federation via ActivityPub as one of the main goals. I also think they have a much better designed and documented system for workers and actions at least at the time I went to spin one up. I switched to Forgejo and haven’t really looked back.

That’s fair, I hate it too. Java is way better, mine is so heavily modded I can barely stand vanilla Minecraft anymore. The only reason I know what a shitshow Bedrock on Linux is, is because my niece was at first only allowed to play on Switch and that’s only properly compatible with Bedrock, and she likes to show me around her worlds that she works on. I eventually convinced her parents to give her access to something that would let her play Java instead and since then we’ve only looked back at Bedrock once, and she was disappointed too haha.

They’re talking about Bedrock edition, unless there’s some new method of running it that I’m not aware of. Minecraft Bedrock is available as a UWP app through Microsoft Store, which is only available on Windows, phones and consoles. It is not compatible with Steam, Wine, Proton or Linux in any way, The only known way to run Minecraft Bedrock on Linux is to install the Android App for Minecraft Bedrock in an Android emulator, there is a wrapper called MCPLauncher for this purpose.

Alternatively, you can use a translation layer like GeyserMC to use Java edition in a way that’s interoperable with Bedrock, but the Bedrock edition itself is not currently available on Linux.

Sounds like fun, good luck!

More Financial Engineering to try to obscure the fact that they’re all caught in a rapidly expanding bubble that they’ve lost any hope of controlling.

Instead of just centralizing everything with Google, let’s ALSO centralize all of that through Cloudflare too. If we centralize enough stuff onto enough different monolithic platforms it counts as decentralized, right? /s

If an option exists that nobody should ever choose, why is it an option? In what situation would this option ever make sense?

I’m a relentless idealist too, and I get where you’re coming from, but idealism alone isn’t a winning strategy. The state of the world right now proves that. Sometimes you have to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run. This is important precisely because it is so minor and inconsequential: the stakes and consequences for failure are so low while there is absolutely no legitimate argument against it. Not to put too fine a point on it: People are losing hope in our ability to create any change at all. We need a win. We need to start getting traction, and start making progress somewhere. We need to show people that these battles against corporate interests CAN be won so that they are willing to try to fight more of them in the future, including eventually the bigger ones where there will be real consequences and really serious forces entrenched against any efforts for change.

This is just a first step, a tiny example of giving the finger to “the man” to prove that we still can, taking back a sliver of power and agency. It is not the last step, it is merely a beginning, an almost invisibly tiny crack in the armor of capitalism and corporate rights in favour of society and people’s rights. It’s certainly not going to fix the world on its own, but once we’ve got some cracks in the armor, we can keep working at them to make them bigger and eventually maybe we’ll start making real visible progress.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to solve the problems of the world overnight with a single petition too, but that’s not realistic given the scale of the opposition and resistance we are facing. Late stage capitalism and corpo-fascism are not weak or fragile and they have grown to a scale that is almost inconceivable. We will not beat them in a single blow. We will need to hammer at them for a long, long time before we even start making any serious progress. We have to be prepared for a long, long fight, and relish these small, small victories when we get them. Because every victory is valuable and every one counts. Especially ones where we don’t have to fight to the death to achieve them. Small, cheap victories are the best when our resources are so limited. It’s going to be a marathon not a sprint. Right now they’ve got all the money, all the power, all the media, all the organization. A single large decisive battle would almost certainly mean we lose, and lose big. This is guerilla warfare. We will fight on the fringes and fight them where they’re weakest not where they’re powerful. Eventually the balance of power will shift as long as we keep winning battles, but it isn’t going to change anytime soon.

While it’s good to thought-experiment this sort of thing out to try to understand the most problematic areas, the reality is that the internet will never “completely” go down it’s too heavily distributed and not quite enough of a monoculture for even a perfect storm of worst case scenarios to conspire to bring everything down. Like the article mentions, even if only two computers are still running and networked together that is still technically an island of the “Internet”.

And even if everything somehow did completely go away for a time, of course we could start it up again, worst case we would just start making islands and then reconnecting distant islands to each other one at a time; the same way we restart that other great distributed machine: the power grid; the same way we created the Internet the first time, and actually probably much faster because most of the planning, layout, protocols and physical infrastructure is already well-established. It will just take time and work, it will be a a slow and chaotic process, modern life will grind to a halt at first, those things we rely on like the power grid, utilities, and payment networks will be prioritized but will only gradually start working again bit by bit, and it will never get back to exactly the way it was when it started, but the same sort of things happened after 9/11, in the great east coast blackout in North America, during COVID lockdowns. The world shuts down, the things we do and the way we do those things suddenly changes, becomes uncertain and difficult, non-essential stuff might not even be possible for awhile. But essential stuff mostly still gets done no matter how awkward it is to figure out how to do it. It’s not pretty or fun, but we manage, until eventually the problem has gone away and we don’t have to manage anymore.