lti wrote on 2026-07-05, 02:58:

I also need a new hobby, but there's so much that is too expensive, requires too much space, or is in the process of being destroyed (see 3D printing).

That's news to me, although I don't follow the world of 3D printing. How and why is the 3D printing world being destroyed? It seems to me like a good idea, a win for consumers, since they can "create what they need" in terms of little gadgets or small projects. I'd imagine it's being killed off by Big Companies since they don't want end users creating anything, but instead want them to buy everything from THEM at a huge mark-up.

zyzzle wrote on 2026-07-07, 02:08:

lti wrote on 2026-07-05, 02:58:

I also need a new hobby, but there's so much that is too expensive, requires too much space, or is in the process of being destroyed (see 3D printing).

That's news to me, although I don't follow the world of 3D printing. How and why is the 3D printing world being destroyed? It seems to me like a good idea, a win for consumers, since they can "create what they need" in terms of little gadgets or small projects. I'd imagine it's being killed off by Big Companies since they don't want end users creating anything, but instead want them to buy everything from THEM at a huge mark-up.

It has to do with the rules for thee, not for me psychotic liberals that want spyware installed on all 3d printer that blocks anything that looks anything like what could be used on a gun

cyclone3d wrote on 2026-07-07, 03:18:

It has to do with the rules for thee, not for me psychotic liberals that want spyware installed on all 3d printer that blocks anything that looks anything like what could be used on a gun

I see. Chiseling away our personal freedoms, to include the ridiculous hypothetical of 3D printing being used to create guns. Now I've heard it all.

zyzzle wrote on 2026-07-07, 08:15:

cyclone3d wrote on 2026-07-07, 03:18:

It has to do with the rules for thee, not for me psychotic liberals that want spyware installed on all 3d printer that blocks anything that looks anything like what could be used on a gun

I see. Chiseling away our personal freedoms, to include the ridiculous hypothetical of 3D printing being used to create guns. Now I've heard it all.

Sadly the 3d print bs is bipartisan,

The crux of the bill being thrown around this region
is that anything remotely resembling one of the billions of trademarks, copywrites or patents gets shutdown.

Originally there could have been a paid work around but far as I know it doesn’t work.

Preventing gun creating is more of a happy accident than a feature.

Nothing like making 3d print phone home with a copy of your job effectively made public , take forever and probably crash or not work

cyclone3d wrote on 2026-07-07, 03:18:

zyzzle wrote on 2026-07-07, 02:08:

lti wrote on 2026-07-05, 02:58:

I also need a new hobby, but there's so much that is too expensive, requires too much space, or is in the process of being destroyed (see 3D printing).

That's news to me, although I don't follow the world of 3D printing. How and why is the 3D printing world being destroyed? It seems to me like a good idea, a win for consumers, since they can "create what they need" in terms of little gadgets or small projects. I'd imagine it's being killed off by Big Companies since they don't want end users creating anything, but instead want them to buy everything from THEM at a huge mark-up.

It has to do with the rules for thee, not for me psychotic liberals that want spyware installed on all 3d printer that blocks anything that looks anything like what could be used on a gun

Oh its far worse than that, its not just guns or anything gun related they are after, they want the ability for the printer to call home to their DRM IP server to check and see if what you want to print is protected by an IP holder and deny the print if it is.

Guns are just the door in for 3d Printer DRM.

You need to remember they don't want you to have any freedom they cannot control, 3D Printers right now are the wild west and just like the internet they too will fall under the DCMA and copywrite control lobbies.

If you have a 3D printer right now . .hold on to it and stop it from doing any kind of updating as they will try their fucking best to make sure legacy 3D printers without the DRM are made to not work. (Also keep backups of older versions of the 3d Printing software . .because they will make that unable to work with legacy printers...yes they are assholes)

It's a wasted effort on their part.

Much like the 'social media ban for kids!' Is doing in australia right now.

You can make a 3D printer using COTS parts, which means you cant really stop random people from making their own printers that conspicuously lack the 'mandated!' features.

Even things like resin printers just need a UV laser pot, a focusing collimator to sharpen the beam to an active point, a scanning mirror driven by 2 servo motors, and a build tank with a lowering floor, driven by a third.

Still essentially an 'on/off' signal, and six PWM capable gpios. Throw in some dumb endstop signals, and you have enough to work with.

You could make it a bit fancier with a linear bearing sled to hold the collimator, then have a 4th servo actuating it forward and backward, so that the laser's focal point can better reach extreme edges of a larger build plate after being reflected by the scanning mirror.

I should point out firmware to get generic microcontrollers to do this job exist, and are FOSS, like Marlin.

https://github.com/marlinfirmware/marlin

Trying to 'kill' them with this legislation will be about as effective as the afore mentioned child social media ban. (Which has been anything but.)

https://www.euronews.com/next/2026/06/29/fine … ocial-media-ban

Trying to ban it would be like trying to play whack a mole, with endlessly replicating moles.

wierd_w wrote on 2026-07-07, 12:15:

It's a wasted effort on their part. […]
Show full quote

It's a wasted effort on their part.

Much like the 'social media ban for kids!' Is doing in australia right now.

You can make a 3D printer using COTS parts, which means you cant really stop random people from making their own printers that conspicuously lack the 'mandated!' features.

Even things like resin printers just need a UV laser pot, a focusing collimator to sharpen the beam to an active point, a scanning mirror driven by 2 servo motors, and a build tank with a lowering floor, driven by a third.

Still essentially an 'on/off' signal, and six PWM capable gpios. Throw in some dumb endstop signals, and you have enough to work with.

You could make it a bit fancier with a linear bearing sled to hold the collimator, then have a 4th servo actuating it forward and backward, so that the laser's focal point can better reach extreme edges of a larger build plate after being reflected by the scanning mirror.

I should point out firmware to get generic microcontrollers to do this job exist, and are FOSS, like Marlin.

https://github.com/marlinfirmware/marlin

Trying to 'kill' them with this legislation will be about as effective as the afore mentioned child social media ban. (Which has been anything but.)

https://www.euronews.com/next/2026/06/29/fine … ocial-media-ban

Trying to ban it would be like trying to play whack a mole, with endlessly replicating moles.

I mean sure if you have the know how, skills, parts and tooling you can do this but ...seriously now how many people would actually do this over just buying an off the shelf model.

Not many Im willing to bet.

Beating age verification is far easier than rigging your own 3D printer with easy to use braindead software.

lti wrote on 2026-07-05, 18:25:

I hear lots of people claim that they don't like what's happening, but the "pushback" is just a few angry social media posts whi […]
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Trashbytes wrote on 2026-07-05, 03:12:

I feel Ya, I've been watching a lot of the interesting modern hobbies getting perverted and destroyed by corporate greed of late and as much as I want to fight against it ..I'm at that point in life where I don't have enough fucks left to give. It honestly seems like the more we push back the worse they get with Enshitification, they find new and creative ways to essentially control what, where and when we do things. I don't see this changing any time soon either and just this morning the UK has decided to find a way to force YouTube to promote their official "Trusted" media channels over everything else. If this passes then you can bet 100% other nations will follow suit and force their "Trusted" media into your feeds.

They are all hell bent on controlling the entire narrative and making sure we the people only ever see what they want us to see or hear.

I feel its only going to get worse, so for me . .selling up and going bush is a viable option, might even see if I can find a nice spot to go off grid, Australia is a huge place with lots of places to disappear. I like a challenge and itll keep me busy too and away from the overpriced , overregulated cesspool modern IT has become.

I hear lots of people claim that they don't like what's happening, but the "pushback" is just a few angry social media posts while continuing to use enshittified products. They don't take any real action against it because they've convinced themselves that they're such an overwhelming majority that the corporations and government will listen and naturally revert everything.

The narrative even tells us that hobbies are a waste of time. We're supposed to sit indoors and fight each other over things that didn't happen, and when that makes us feel bad, the "cure" for depression is to buy stuff that we don't need.

I've thought about going to the mountains a few times. It's too hot out here anyway.

As the subject of Sony's discs has split off, maybe we can take to core idea forwards instead.
The idea that people object to Sony doing something like ending disc production, but then those people still use their services. Thus encouraging it to happen.

It will be like 'The EA Games situation'.

That being, 'EA Games is horribly abusive I hate them!', gets immediately overriden by 'OMG! New Madden NFL!? SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!'

EA knows gamers will cave immediately.

Sony probably sees that, and says 'Oh, yes! Me too!'

Great, now I'm the one who derailed this thread with the 3D printer thing.

Back on RAM, I'm going to say that 16GB is going to have to be enough for me. Even if I have the money, I don't want to buy any at current prices out of principle. My dad still needs the upgrade (just buying a second identical module off eBay or something), but I'm sure that his computer is also badly infected (I don't know of any portable or bootable scanners to see how bad it is, but it does funny stuff like disable Windows Update in the registry or suddenly have about 100 rundll32 processes running). Windows itself is such a mess that it's hard to tell if some program running out of a temp directory is malware or a real Windows process. Also, his 256GB SSD is full, so now he's working out of the external hard drive that was meant for backups (meaning that he has no backups). I was going to get him a 1TB SSD, but I didn't get around to it before prices exploded. Of course, I don't have any spare SSDs that I would trust, and my own storage situation is screwy. I switched back to my older desktop and suddenly realized that I haven't made a backup of the new desktop in a while. I need some files off of it.

On a well configured linux box, you can get a lot of mileage out of zram, but it's not magic.

With 16GB, you can very reliably get 8gb of highspeed swap without risk of OOM.

The real question, is if this shortage really us 'the new normal', if it will finally break developers of the 'ram is cheap and plentiful!' bender they've been on for the past 20 years.

In the past, when its been just merely suggested they not do this, collectively they act like you insulted their mothers.

It will be interesting to see how this shakes out.

I remember when it seemed like eggs were gonna be 10$ a dozen forever too. Things will cool off, more production will come on line, its just a matter of when.

Hi,

While I also consider this price increase to be a bad thing, at least I think it might make programmers learn proper memory and storage usage again.

I remember when you still had to fit a whole business application inside real mode address place. Somebody who learned programming nowadays without also having embedded programming in the curriculum might not even know how to use memory optimally, but humans can adapt...

And the higher price of SSDs might finally drive the "use XML for data storage" anti-pattern to an end, I stopped counting how many times I have seen programs storing data in that format (without compression I might add) even though it is one of the most inefficient way of storing data. Maybe the developers of these programs finally realize that it was intended for different programs to share and use data easily in a human readable way, and for storage of a single program where human editing is not needed it is an anti-pattern. This also applies to binary formats as well, many times I see in modern programs binary data that could be shrunk to at least half its size by using even simple deflate(AFAIK patents already expired, so it can be freely used) or even using only its parts: Huffman Encoding and LZ77. This would also make filesystem caches more efficient as less "storage boilerplate" to waste space.

To make my point clear I repeat that I also consider this price increase a bad thing, but developers got used to memory and storage being cheap that they essentially handle it as a free resource, while it should also be benchmarked and optimized like CPU/GPU usage and IO/Network bandwidth.

Yeah, that's what I am referring to when I mentioned the 'memory is cheap and plentiful!' Bender modern devs have been on for 20+ years.

Suggesting that maybe they be mindful of the difference between a ulong on 32bit vs 64bit platforms, so you dont take twice (or more) memory than you actually need to store a value, and other 'low fruit' awareness things, has only ended in angry outbursts from them about 'the compiler deals with that!' And 'I use dynamic typing to avoid thinking about that!', and the eponymous 'RAM is cheap and plentiful! Why do you care!?'

Maybe if ram stops being cheap and plentiful long enough, they will understand why this is, and has always been, bad practice?

Then again, I might just be hopelessly optimistic there.

It will be interesting to see what shakes out.

MagefromAntares wrote on 2026-07-07, 19:46:

Hi,

While I also consider this price increase to be a bad thing, at least I think it might make programmers learn proper memory and storage usage again.

Only non-programmers would say that. Programming never stopped being constrained by I/O and CPU power.

Be careful. 'Programmer' is a loaded word.

It's true that *good* programmers care about how long a function takes to complete, and that it does not engage in anomalous behaviors, or fails to free memory after its done with it.

Then there are programmers that 'dont care about that', because 'It does what I want it to, and that's good enough. CPUs are fast enough that it's not important anyway.'

And, outside of those boxes, there's more circles on the diagram, where 'But the host OS's function call takes too long to complete! So we reimplemented it inside our own codebase!' (Which is a major reason why wdb browsers are mini-operating systems these days, and 'need' to be, because the afore mentioned bad programmers are writing webapps, and their turds need to get polished), and other sins 'of necessity' live.

'If I write it as a webapp, I dont have to think about where and how it runs! I save so much time!'

Is just an abstraction of 'CPU, RAM, and diskspace are plentiful!'

It leads to things that should not be web apps, being web apps, and the resultant turd polishing to make those performant.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2026-07-07, 21:20:

MagefromAntares wrote on 2026-07-07, 19:46:

Hi,

While I also consider this price increase to be a bad thing, at least I think it might make programmers learn proper memory and storage usage again.

Only non-programmers would say that. Programming never stopped being constrained by I/O and CPU power.

So very true, I just didn't want to put the word programmer inside quotation marks 😁 Nowadays the bar for programmers become so low, in-fact I have met someone during an interview who had the face to call himself a programmer, even though he admitted later that he has never made a full program more complex than a "Hello World" and "Calculate a Factorial" without the help of an LLM, and when I still tried to help him get the job by letting him write a Factorial calculator in the language he choose (He choose Python), he was still able to make a bug calculating the factorial of a number 1 higher than the one given as an input 😁 (Obviously after that I had to tell the Manager that the candidate is not fit for the job, sorry no matter how bad the job market is, I simply cannot let someone near code which will be actually used in production if a simple factorial calculation is beyond their skill.)

MagefromAntares wrote on 2026-07-07, 21:32:

xcomcmdr wrote on 2026-07-07, 21:20:

MagefromAntares wrote on 2026-07-07, 19:46:

Hi,

While I also consider this price increase to be a bad thing, at least I think it might make programmers learn proper memory and storage usage again.

Only non-programmers would say that. Programming never stopped being constrained by I/O and CPU power.

So very true, I just didn't want to put the word programmer inside quotation marks 😁 Nowadays the bar for programmers become so low, in-fact I have met someone during an interview who had the face to call himself a programmer, even though he admitted later that he has never made a full program more complex than a "Hello World" and "Calculate a Factorial" without the help of an LLM, and when I still tried to help him get the job by letting him write a Factorial calculator in the language he choose (He choose Python), he was still able to make a bug calculating the factorial of a number 1 higher than the one given as an input 😁 (Obviously after that I had to tell the Manager that the candidate is not fit for the job, sorry no matter how bad the job market is, I simply cannot let someone near code which will be actually used in production if a simple factorial calculation is beyond their skill.)

Are you *seriously* telling me that I, a guy who stopped that path after only learning some awful high level shit like visualbasic, am somehow *more hirable* than what is in the modern talent pool?

A factorization tree is not hard to make. The seive of eratosthenes is wasteful, but can be adapted to find all factor trees of any given number. It's algorithm is very well documented, and easy to follow without a computer. You know, since it was invented in ancient greece and all.

It can be done in simple powershell, bash script, or dos batch syntax with little difficulty. It's standard intro to programming faire.

For its *intended* use, finding prime factors only, it can be greatly sped up by not doing useless busy work, like not bothering to check factors ending in 2,4,6,or 8; or factor candidates greater than 5, and ending in 5, or 0, etc. Those will Never be prime.

😮

I fear for the world at such a revelation.

They made a new version of the mobile app a while back at my workplace. They said it wasn't possible to transfer settings from the old app due to new platform and they were supposedly at it for hours. I found that methods in .NET MAUI for reading/writing settings are basically copy-paste from Xamarin.

And the guy who worked on it thinks it's fine wasting CPU resources just because they're so powerful.

Another guy there apparently didn't even think about CPU architectures in a long while, he got curious about my commit restoring 32-bit support (32-bit ARMv7-A and x86). Well the terms x64 and x86 seemed alien to him, along with the concept of native libraries in Android's APKs.

wierd_w wrote on 2026-07-07, 21:44:

Are you *seriously* telling me that I, a guy who stopped that path after only learning some awful high level shit like visualbas […]
Show full quote

MagefromAntares wrote on 2026-07-07, 21:32:

xcomcmdr wrote on 2026-07-07, 21:20:

Only non-programmers would say that. Programming never stopped being constrained by I/O and CPU power.

So very true, I just didn't want to put the word programmer inside quotation marks 😁 Nowadays the bar for programmers become so low, in-fact I have met someone during an interview who had the face to call himself a programmer, even though he admitted later that he has never made a full program more complex than a "Hello World" and "Calculate a Factorial" without the help of an LLM, and when I still tried to help him get the job by letting him write a Factorial calculator in the language he choose (He choose Python), he was still able to make a bug calculating the factorial of a number 1 higher than the one given as an input 😁 (Obviously after that I had to tell the Manager that the candidate is not fit for the job, sorry no matter how bad the job market is, I simply cannot let someone near code which will be actually used in production if a simple factorial calculation is beyond their skill.)

Are you *seriously* telling me that I, a guy who stopped that path after only learning some awful high level shit like visualbasic, am somehow *more hirable* than what is in the modern talent pool?

A factorization tree is not hard to make. The seive of eratosthenes is wasteful, but can be adapted to find all factor trees of any given number. It's algorithm is very well documented, and easy to follow without a computer. You know, since it was invented in ancient greece and all.

It can be done in simple powershell, bash script, or dos batch syntax with little difficulty. It's standard intro to programming faire.

😮

I fear for the world at such a revelation.

As a Senior Software Engineer, I'm regularly called in during interviews to check the technical competency of the applicant (For Junior positions I may be the only one doing that part of the interview, for Senior positions multiple engineers from my team are called to evaluate the applicants performance), during the last years, there was a serious rise in people applying who doesn't really know how to code, but they call themselves "programmers" making something compile after prompting an LLM.