I used PLA, which is a non toxic bio plastic. ABS is also an option for at-home 3D printing, which is the material used in lego bricks.
At his age, he doesn't put anything in his mouth anymore, so swallow hazards were not a concern. That said, the only thing that's small enough for him to swallow are the buttons and the knob, which can not be detached from the device without unscrewing the enclosure. If he is able to do that, nothing is save.
Pretty sure the issue with 3d printing materials is that they contain additional materials other than PLA and ABS for proper melting and flowage and those could indeed be an issue.
I have some actually recyclable PLA but even that has no real no toxicity rating.
Next to what others have said (pretty sure there are only very few PLAs who are even close to actual non toxic in terms of small traces of helper materials) but there are finishings you can use to make it food save!
I wouldn't eat from it, but it works and would pretty much solve any issues.
Pretty sure those finishing resins are marketing to finish Beton and stuff like that.
You should never put anything 3D printed into your mouth, regardless if you swallow it or not, because 3D prints aren't "food safe" and may release small pieces.
Also, some materials are hazardous to print (ABS or resin for example) but fine when they've cooled down.
> “They’re having all the private conversations because they weren’t allowed to have the public conversations,” Andreessen told Torenberg on a recent podcast, [...] “If it wasn’t for the censorship all of these conversations would have happened in public, which would have been much better.”
I identify as very liberal/progressive (and was, e.g., already helping out trans people before many "woke" people were born), and I'm very skeptical of (and often angry at) techbro right-wingers, but I was also taught to believe in "the marketplace of ideas".
(Of course I know it's not that simple today, due to large numbers of bad actors with Internet-powered soapboxes, massive organized psyops of various kinds, and sketchy social media companies. But please bear with me.)
So I was horrified by the years of large numbers of liberal/progressive people who were rabidly witch-hunting, attacking, de-platforming, etc. people with whom they disagreed, and sinking to the levels of bad-faith non-dialogue as some of the people they attacked.
When a student at a great liberal arts college (to which I was donating) was in the news, for leading an effort to prevent an invited campus speaker from being heard, and the university didn't gently smack the basics into the student, I stopped donating.
(I recall my thinking at the time: I knew people who very much needed money, and who never had the privilege to attend the university that this student was pissing away.)
Even if a large slice of liberal/progressive hadn't gone rabid, maybe we still would've ended up in the horrifying situation of Nazi salutes at a US Presidential inauguration, and the various actions following.
But their behavior definitely helped drive some voters that direction, at the same time the behavior forfeited many opportunities to teach and to learn.
We got complaints about your use of the word "rabid" and I think they have a point. That crosses into name-calling in the sense that the HN guidelines ask you not to do.
OK, sorry for violating the decorum. At the time I wrote it, thought it was an apt term, about behavior by "my own team", but point taken, and I think I have a better sense of the rule now, thank you.
The right is winning elections and your side is not. Maybe consider stop being alienating liberals long enough to build a coalition that wins elections?
Eventually the Democrats are going to recognize that hardline "if you're not with us, you're against us" progressives are costing more votes than they're worth and show them the door.
The "if you're not with us, you're against us" mentality is exactly what won the current administration. People like the image of a strong man with his own opinions. Democrats have been retreating to the center on nearly every policy position, and it clearly isn't working.
The disinvitation data is so incredibly small that there's no way on earth we can call this "rabid." In Haidt and Fukuyama's "The Coddling of the American Mind" they present data on disinvitations attempts. And it is in the tens of attempts nationwide. They even have to present the data with Milo Yiannopoulos removed since he made up a considerable portion of all disinvitation attempts.
You can think that students are foolish for doing this. You can choose to stop donating because of a response by an institution. But to use this to claim that the left has "gone rabid" is ridiculous given the actual data.
The students' behavior is not what drove voters towards the reactionary right. Breathless media coverage that blew this behavior completely out of proportion is responsible for this.
My general observation is that none of these things (witch hunting, attacking, or deplatforming from the left) happen at any scale to merit their coverage other than perhaps "public figures get yelled at on twitter."
And, I dunno, I feel like the fact that my friends who aren't public figures but do research on climate change get weekly death threats just seems more important than the fact that people yell at JK Rowling online for being transphobic.
That's awful about your friends, and I agree there appears to be a huge general problem with that kind of thing. I hope the FBI are able to help, on at least a case-by case basis, if they can't solve the pipeline problem.
I still think there's a large problem with a dominant mode of interaction we're seeing by much of the left-leaning (it's pervasive online, and transparent pandering and manipulation in left-appealing news shows), and that it's hurting more than it's helping.
I agree that there are people on the left who are mean online and that they shouldn't generally act this way. I just think that
1. This largely ends here (there are exceptions, and it is definitely no fun to be yelled at online)
2. The right has consistently acted in all of the same ways (plus more bomb threats) to no similar criticism
3. The political strategy of the left cannot require "literally everybody online is on their best behavior all of the time."
And no, law enforcement is absolutely uninterested in dealing with death threats sent by people who think that doing research on climate change is evil. The idea that the FBI would help out is odd to me.
Understood, though I didn't have that idea about #2. My impression was that it was a well-known problem (going back to talk radio and Rupert Murdoch properties, and then growing and being more in our face with everything the Internet enabled).
Maybe one of the problems is that, online, a flood of dozens of angry tweets stomping on someone, by (for the sake of argument) a small minority of people who are having a bad day... has the effect that people are routinely (almost systematically) stomped, because there's always some dozens of people having a bad day? And they all sound the same, so maybe it's a rotating vocal minority that looks like a bigger problem than it is?
Regarding death threats...
I think we have different expectations about the possibility of gov't help (I'm still a bit Pollyanna on this). Local police might or might not have the resources to take the report and coordinate with federal resources, but it's likely inter-state, so the victim could go direct to the FBI.
I'm sure I've read news stories of the senders of death threats being tracked down by law enforcement.
And, I suppose the sender just might be linked to a domestic group/network (or foreign agitators) that the FBI is already tracking.
If the researchers are under a university or NGO, are they getting support from their organization, or do they need to confront the org's administration into interfacing better with law enforcement regarding death threats?
(I'm speaking of baseline situation in recent years; I have no idea what the situation at the FBI is this week, given the various gov't disruption going on, and the keyword "climate" being targeted by some. Even if the situation is complicated at the moment, maybe lead the reporting of a crime and request for assistance with the death threat part, and then the details relevant to the investigation/analysis include that the victim is a climate researcher?)
If all else fails, an org's lawyer (and investigator they hire) might also identify doxing and egging activity (especially online) that's traceable to death threats, and be able to do more with law enforcement and/or civil courts.
It is true that basically every public figure has people screaming at them on twitter or bluesky constantly. This is probably bad in general, and I think it is worth understanding how this sort of thing can affect the opinions and behaviors of public figures. I suspect that I wouldn't respond well to waking up every day to having people yell at me online.
But this effect isn't politically aligned with the left. So it becomes frustrating when this is used exclusively to criticize the left and to excuse the right.
I'm curious if you've ever interacted with law enforcement organizations for something like this. Remember, my friend gets regular death threats. Even if somehow magically the FBI acted on the first one, will they act on the 10th?
And no, public universities do not hire private investigators via their legal office to track down death threats their faculty receive.
If it's a public university, and their personnel are getting death threats regarding university work, the university had better make an effort to help -- if not for decency, then for liability. Including working with law enforcement.
One easy thing the university can do themselves (under the direction of a lawyer or administrator) is to ask IT for the Web server logs (or analytics) for accesses to the person's pages. They don't have to subpoena ISPs to see that, right before the most recent threat, there was a burst of referrers from `https://webforum.example/bobs-basement-militia?post=1232767`.
Well let me tell you very clearly: this is not how any of this works.
The FBI won't care. The local cops won't care. The university won't pull logs for network traffic, nor would the existence of this information be meaningful to anybody to take any action.
The data above is since 1998. So in the last 27 years we've seen an average of 28 successful deplatforming attempts annually. The website cites 172 attempts (not necessarily successful) in 2024.
There are thousands of colleges in the US. Surely hundreds of thousands of invited talks annually. I just cannot imagine thinking that this is a substantial social problem that should justify changing one's voting behavior.
This is a perfect example of the law of American politics that only Democrats have agency. Anything Democrats do is the responsibility of Democrats, and anything Republicans do is the responsibility of Democrats.
> or leading an effort to prevent an invited campus speaker from being heard, and the university didn't gently smack the basics into the student, I stopped donating.
The student was using his free speech and you was angry the university did not prevented him from using it by force. Funny how people like you never ever use the same power to force left or liberal speakers. It is ok to boycott or criticize those.
> Even if a large slice of liberal/progressive hadn't gone rabid, maybe we still would've ended up in the horrifying situation of Nazi salutes at a US Presidential inauguration, and the various actions following.
No, we got those because far right was consistently excused, because people like you always blame left for what right does. We got nazi salutes, because these people were deep in far right wing echo chamber, because media refused to admit it and those who said it were punished.
Maybe if these people were not consistently radicalizing, the left response to them would be milder. Left was responding to real thing that was happening and it was proven right.
It is funny - far right attacking others is their free speech, everyone else must prioritize far right. And whatever far right do is always fault of someone else.
This crosses into personal attack and you can't do that here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and edit out such swipes in the future, as the rules ask, we'd appreciate it.
Edit: this has unfortunately increasingly been a problem with your account lately:
You've made many fine contributions to HN in the past and I don't recall your account having been involved in so much ideological and political flamewar. Could you please fix this? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
IIRC, there was an invited talk at the unversity, and some student organized people to go in to the talk and disrupt it, such that the speaker literally couldn't be heard.
That's not the student exercising their free speech. It's the student denying the benefit of free speech to their fellow students and the rest of the university.
The university apparently hadn't yet educated the student on the basics of university, and there was not yet any sign that the university was going to. Reporting followed up with the student, when they promoted their personal brand, and solicited funding to continue their fight.
(You might be happy to know that, instead of my modest donation going to the university with the student who thought a first-rate university was the place to ignore the fundamentals they teach, and instead play self-promoting influencer... IIRC, that was the year the money went to a homeless trans person, who'd been through more hell than most people can imagine, and who needed a discreet laptop so that they could practice coding job skills, but without the laptop getting violently stolen from them in whatever shelter they could get into. I'm not making this up, and the contrast was striking.)
Regarding your other comments, much of the rabid left didn't seem to be acting as the savvy political operators you suggest: a whole lot of people were mindlessly flinging their poo, and playing right into the hands of some of the worst of their adversaries. Maybe it was partly a combination of crisis mode over the best of intentions (e.g., help those who need help), and anger and fatigue from same (which I certainly felt), but there also seemed to be a whole lot of not knowing any other mode of reasoning or acting. Maybe that's not their fault -- you might blame the deterioration of popular journalism, social media sites preying upon their users, and a dearth of visible role models demonstrating anything else -- but that seems to be where we are, for large slices of the vocal population. And there's been a lot of counterproductive.
I am not saying they are super savy. I am saying they were right about the right.
They were right, because they were not determined to excuse dveryone on the right up to absurdum and because they read what right actually said.
Moderate right and center consistently and always excused far right and refused to beloeve it exists even when it was completely apparent. And consistently deployed double standards where right was excused and left acts massively exaggerated.
> Funny how people like you never ever use the same power to force left or liberal speakers. It is ok to boycott or criticize those.
Do you know OP personally? Do you really think it's reasonable to assume that everyone in the universe (except for you, perhaps) is a hypocrite like this?
There's plenty of people that feel the administrative force of the university shouldn't be used to suppress either side. Let the gun club invite Luigi. Let the trans club invite the Stonewall rioters.
You're welcome to say you dislike the speaker. You don't have to attend. But you shouldn't have the authority to stop other people from inviting them to speak, or to stop other people from listening.
I see it not as 'right is the way they are because' but 'this is what the right exploited, and I too allowed myself to go down a crappy path'. It's a pretty brave, honest, and self reflective post.
I think we got the far right reality of today by liberals completely ignoring working class pain and appearing to solely focus on a controversial minority. I say appearing because they didn’t seem to do anything else.
This allowed the current administration to step in by promising something different, with no intention of delivering anything but tax relief for the wealthy and unchaining corporations from those pesky regulations that prevent higher profits.
It's kind of unreal that in the comments of an article about an actual (successful!) conspiracy between ultra-wealthy tech elite and extreme right activists to undermine american democracy for their own benefit, you're most concerned about liberal campus protests. You may not be as progressive as you think!
The anecdote was my writing mistake, not what I was most concerned about. (I started writing the anecdote, then decided what was important was the much larger problem, and oopsed the writing.)
As for your point, I had some of the same thoughts about the overall article as you did. But I quoted a small piece of it, to narrow in on one point I wanted to make, which might be less obvious to people who think like us about the topic.
Of course some wealthy and powerful have been undermining democracy; but what if that quote was honest: is it a valid criticism, and can we improve the situation?
As long as we're stuck with billionaires, wouldn't it be great if more of them decided it was better to promote an informed and functioning democracy?
Speech is not created equal. What some students say in some college campus has very little power compared to the speech of one of the richest people __in history__.
When someone famous and rich says something fucked up, the reaction to that isn’t deplatforming but rather a basic attempt at defense.
One thing I've wondered about for awhile: How do you find a business co-founder you can trust?
For one example, the article says that some of the best value that a business co-founder can contribute is disproportionately building the relationships. But those relationships can be more connected to the business cofounder themself, than to the company.
It's a bit different for the technical co-founder, since your perceptible contribution is usually IP expressed in in artifacts like code that is owned by the company, and can't legally be taken with you.
There's also the perception of the value of that IP: much like a novice programmer might think that most of the value is in their own software/knowhow/grind/brilliance, the novice business person might think most of the value is in their own ideas/leadership/network/hustle/brilliance.
The business person might also perceive the technical contribution as being commodity skills, and ones that can increasingly be done by "AI" robo-plagiarism for $20.
So, if the business person is, say, having second thoughts about the 50/50 split, they can make a backroom deal with investors to cut out the technical cofounder, or bring their new relationships with investors and/or customers with them to a different (or 'different') startup.
Obviously, one defense is for the technical co-founder to somehow be a superhumanly valuable non-commodity, and to make sure that the business co-founder understands that.
But, realistically, doesn't the technical co-founder probably need a lot of trust in their character and commitment of the business co-founder? Maybe even more than vice versa?
If you get a list of all the startups that got acquired or IPO in the last 10 years, you will find it's extremely rare the technical co-founder is still around. The staying rate for CEO is like 99% while the staying rate for CTO is more like 50% (making up numbers here but this is directionally right).
With enough scale, a great CTO can be hired for the right salary. The way I answer this for myself is two-fold:
1. I've vowed I will never be the second chair guy because I don't wanna get pushed out.
2. It's important to up-skill yourself so you can contribute more value than a glorified engineering manager by driving vision, being a headhunter of superstar engineers, among others high-value skills
This is something you learn when you actually raise venture and meet peers that have raised capital. Beyond the very early stages, the CTO can easily be replaced, the CEO is the face of the business.
Maybe, although students in the dotcom boom was a different situation than now.
(Source: Was one. Many people were trying to fund you, sometimes without you even asking. And you couldn't go to a student party without some Sloan or HBS student zeroing in on you, and wanting to talk with you.)
>One thing I've wondered about for awhile: How do you find a business co-founder you can trust?
You can only look at past actions. Even the self-proclaimed "most ethical" people change the moment there is money on the table and their hired professionals are telling them to take as much of it as they can get away with.
If you are the technical co-founder who is writing code you should ensure you have legal protections before anyone else has access to what you have written.
This can be a legal agreement or built in protections via copyright law.
Same as any author who produces work that others can profit off of in perpetuity, don't sign your built in protections away.
In the example I'm giving, code IP isn't very relevant to a business cofounder screwing, because the (real or perceived) value of the code IP is less than the relationships that may be tied to the business cofounder.
All the code IP protections mean, in this regard, is that the technical cofounder has less value comparably tied to them personally.
> some of the best value that a business co-founder can contribute is disproportionately building the relationships.
The other subtle thing I take issue with on this is: What relationships, exactly? Most of the time I've seen this surface as a few early customers you might not have otherwise gotten, which is great and necessary, but IME that well runs dry pretty quick, and those customers oftentimes don't stick as well as ones that were found on merit. A better relationship with vendors? Again, weird, merit should trump that personal relationship.
If you're building a business that relies on a small number of very high value contracts, I think I could see a world where having a foot in the door on those high value customers is worthy of elevating the body that foot is attached to toward Founder. That isn't, generally, how most software companies sell software though.
The point I maybe did not stress enough on is the relationship aspect is two folds:
- Have ability to gain hard-to-obtain relationships in the beginning
- Have ability to grow the pace at which you gain those over time
It the beginning it will give you the money to play the game long enough (ie: customers and angel investors). In the short term it help tremendously in deal-making, fundraising, enterprise sales, hiring superstar employee. In the long term, you can broker insane deals like OpenAI convincing Microsoft to invest $10B and bet their AI future on you or get acquired.
PS: Microsoft is now backtracking out of that situation, but Altman convincing them to get in bed in the first place is very impressive.
You might've hit what bugs me about dining out (in the US).
My favorite place for first dates was this particular cafe-restaurant, where a server would come to your table for your order, eventually, but otherwise didn't bother you.
For example, they did none of the apparently standard barge-in of your conversation, 10 minutes after you're served, asking how everything is.
Also, in restaurants in general, some servers have mastered the art of refilling water glasses like a ghost, and somehow asking if you want to refresh your drinks without interrupting your conversation.
But others either aren't able to do that, or come from a school of thought that the top priority is that guests be conscious of the server's willingness to serve.
I tip 20%+ in any case, but I wish more servers would be more subtle.
I think it would be jerky to give feedback notes to a server, and almost no one will do it, so the message wouldn't come across that way.
I'd guess what's needed is to promote a different school of thought via broadcast (e.g., through lifestyle articles and restaurant trade publications).
Though it might be that I'm not representative, and more US diners want to go through the rituals of being served conspicuously, as part of the experience.
You just did the same thing—hinted at some larger risk but didn’t actually spell it out. I do agree that it’s long passed time that media needs to be way more direct instead of hoping the audience figures it out by themselves.
HN knows some of the risks, and I don't have to spell them out.
I called out a journalist, writing for a broader audience, who was effectively implying to the populace that those risks don't exist, and that the only thing in question was how relevant the ads they are shown.
Assuming that this is truthful about your changing perceptions (not just a familiar astroturf tactic of "I used to think X, but now Y"), that's really commendable.
It seems we don't learn and revise much lately; we mostly just get angry and try to score points against the opposing team.
Done in Microsoft Windows. Hackers who believe in freedom and sharing probably want to move to Linux or a BSD (or some more exotic open source platform) if they haven't already.
No volunteer is going to put in the effort to support Ubuntu especially when the other ~5% of linux users would complain that you aren't supporting their even less used linux variant. They would then do a crappy job of adding support for their distribution and absolutely none of it would work.
If you develop for Linux, shouldn't the software build and run on all the distros (with the end user doing the building using "./configure" until the distro picks it up and packages it)? Even for hardware interfacing with SDR devices?
Amazon knows about the day.
Amazon has third party independent sellers.
Amazon decided this was a good opportunity for them and their marketplace.
It's not mysterious. It hurts small stores that aren't aligned with Amazon and helps Amazon and small stores aligned with Amazon. Looks like typical Amazon bullying which has already been accepted since nobody is challenging the passthru book marketplace. Amazon used to sell books though, so that matters?
Yep. Biggest marketshare will have the largest presence, after a certain size. Then they will always eat the little ones. Standard capitalist market economics. Amazon will benefit more by copying the little market innovations. This is an aspect of bullying.
"We don't pay attention to the book trade at all for over a decade -- random books just show up in our warehouses, and then money appears in our bank accounts -- so we didn't know about the annual independent booksellers event, and nobody told us."
"Our elite data scientists built an inscrutable deep neural network to predict and maximize sales opportunities and this is what it told us to do, we will swear complete innocence up and down"
There are definitely people in Amazon who are aware of this, but do not want to get themselves in trouble for talking out loud, because this is not their responsibility. I would have done the same thing.
Large corporations don't make off-the-cuff comments on viral controversies. If Amazon made a statement to Variety, there were definitely urgent meetings about the issue before that statement went out.
One thing they would have concluded pretty quickly, though, is that there's no way for a large corporation to win a public argument with random small bookshops. If it was in fact inadvertent, writing a fact sheet with detailed refutations of every argument that they acted in bad faith would just make them look obnoxious. So Amazon says what they think is best to say, independent bookstores say they don't buy it, and that kinda has to be the end of it.
Maybe Academic Batpoop Insanity disease is spread at international conferences.
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