Many materials with desirable properties (e.g. temperature resistance, strength) can only be printed in a heated enclosure. ABS and Nylon, for example.
And if you're printing ABS then you need fume extraction because unlike more common materials, ABS fumes are toxic.
It's not strictly necessary for your basic PLA and PETG, but it can help sometimes if the ambient temperature is really low or if the environment is drafty which can cause prints to lift off the bed.
The license they used was less free than the GPL license. Laundering GPL code into projects with licenses that aren't as free is classic copyright infringement.
> At least for what I buy from aliexpress, it hasn’t been infiltrated by fake reviews.
Aliexpress just fake it themselves. Search for anything, sort by the number of orders, open the product page for the first result.
Next to the number of sales there's going to be a tooltip saying "Sales and ratings are calculated based on all identical products from the platform."
Under reviews there's going to be a message saying "The reviews displayed are from various sellers for similar product in AliExpress."
In other words, they might as well say that these numbers and reviews have absolutely no relation to the specific product you're thinking about buying, they're just there to increase your confidence.
I’ve never bought from AliExpress, but I’m pretty sure everyone does this. Customers are mostly looking for product reviews, not reviews on sellers. For example, take a mouse from Logitech. Even if five sellers sell the product, it’s better to show product reviews for every item. Isn’t that so?
This doesn't work unless you have someone verifying that products from both sellers are identical. Seller A could be selling real logitech gear and seller B could be selling clones, as is common on poorly policed markets like Amazon and Aliexpress.
And most of the products I've seen "grouped" in this way haven't had identifiable branding, they were just generic functional products like "heat shrink", or "M4x20 screws".
> I’ve never bought from AliExpress, but I’m pretty sure everyone does this. Customers are mostly looking for product reviews, not reviews on sellers. For example, take a mouse from Logitech. Even if five sellers sell the product, it’s better to show product reviews for every item. Isn’t that so?
I'd sure like to know if I'm buying counterfeits, and, unless the product is identified as "Counterfeit Such-and-such" or the platform can otherwise identify them, it doesn't help me for reviews of the counterfeit product to be lumped in with reviews of legitimate ones. (And, if the platform can identify the counterfeits, then it should be taking them down, not showing me cleverly mingled reviews.)
They don't build them like they used to, in my experience most consumer electronics/appliance brands that are still considered high quality are just coasting on the reputation they built up in the 70s, 80s and 90s. In many categories it's getting almost impossible to find products that aren't just generic whitelabeled junk resold by "established brands".
1. The whitelabeled junk is getting very good. In some categories, the brand name stuff has degraded to the point that the aliexpress version is better and cheaper.
2. The IoTification of everything means that a lot of traditionally long lasting items are as durable as their WiFi board - i.e. not very. This also plays into number (1) - where cheap, Chinese, items either lack IoT features or provide them only locally instead of requiring an online account.
Come on, let's be honest here, they wouldn't keep sending you products for free if you left anything less than a stellar review. That's the entire problem with incentivized reviews.
> That’s clearly below the proportionality threshold for copyright to matter.
This type of reasoning keeps coming up with seemingly zero consideration for why copyright actually exists. The goal of copyright, under US law, is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts".
The goal of companies creating these LLMs is to supersede the use of source material they draw from, like books. You use an LLM because it has all the answers without having to spend the money compensating the original authors, or put in the work digesting it yourself, that's their entire value proposition.
Their end game is to create a product so good that nobody has a reason to ever buy a book again. A few hours after you publish your book, the LLM will gobble it up and distribute the insights contain within to all of their users for free, "it's fair use", they say. There won't be any economic incentive to write books at that point, and so "the progress of science and useful arts" will crawl to a halt. Copyright defeated.
If LLM companies are allowed to produce market substitutes of original works then the goal of copyright is being defeated on a technicality and this ought to be a discussion about whether copyright should be abolished completely, not a discussion about whether big tech should be allowed to get away with it.
> The goal of companies creating these LLMs is to supersede the use of source material they draw from, like books.
Nobody is going to stop buying Harry Potter books because they can get an LLM to spit out ~50 words from one of the books. The proportionality factor is very clearly relevant here.
> If LLM companies are allowed to produce market substitutes of original works
Did Meta publish a book written by an LLM?
> The goal of copyright, under US law, is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts".
I would consider training LLMs to be very much in line with those goals.
> Nobody is going to stop buying Harry Potter books because they can get an LLM to spit out ~50 words from one of the books.
Not yet, but they'll stop buying books on niche technical subjects.
> Did Meta publish a book written by an LLM?
They don't need to publish a book to substitute original works. They substitute the original work every time they generate a response that is based on the book they substituted.
> I would consider training LLMs to be very much in line with those goals.
Because you're misunderstanding the premise. Original works are the ones that advance art and science. Those are the ones that are supposed to be protected by copyright.
Quoting Judge Alsup from his recent ruling in Bartz v. Anthropic.
> Instead, Authors contend generically that training LLMs will result in an explosion of works competing with their works — such as by creating alternative summaries of factual events, alternative examples of compelling writing about fictional events, and so on. This order assumes that is so (Opp. 22–23 (citing, e.g., Opp. Exh. 38)). But Authors’ complaint is no different than it would be if they complained that training schoolchildren to write well would result in an explosion of competing works. This is not the kind of competitive or creative displacement that concerns the Copyright Act. The Act seeks to advance original works of authorship, not to protect authors against competition.
There's no escaping it. Every bag of store-bought soil I've used as a hobbyist over the past couple of years contained visible plastic scraps and who knows how many microplastics.
> electric cars are a dog and for shit. Specifically the batteries, they're hyper-expensive, the range is for crap, and they need to be replaced every X years.
They are expensive, that's true, but the range is such a non-issue for anyone who can charge at home and drives a reasonable commute (i.e. doesn't need to stop to charge on their way home every day), and battery degradation is less than 2% per year.
> Let market forces decide, legislating what people ought to purchase is what is called a command and control economy and evidence shows that's bad
Equating regulation with communism is really tired rhetoric.
This might be a minority experience but I used to use the Pixel 4a with the reader on the back and now the Pixel 8a with reader inside the display and I find the fingerprint reader of the 8a marginally faster and much more reliable. From an UX perspective I also find it slightly more practical on the front so I can unlock the phone without picking it up.
And if you're printing ABS then you need fume extraction because unlike more common materials, ABS fumes are toxic.
It's not strictly necessary for your basic PLA and PETG, but it can help sometimes if the ambient temperature is really low or if the environment is drafty which can cause prints to lift off the bed.
See: https://help.prusa3d.com/filament-material-guide
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