A CNC router is on my list of tools to figure out and own. Routing aluminium, wood, and things like HDPE and being able to make moulds for silicones and resin? Yes please. 3D printing on the other hand never appealed to me.
I would strongly recommend NOT following the general advice of buying a cheap "3018" or something similar. Makera Z1 should be the baseline. Otherwise you're stepping into a world of frustration where you will spend most of your time trying to get your tool to work, rather than getting parts produced.
Unfortunately, reasonably precise and rigid mechanical assemblies do have to cost a certain amount of money.
Agreed. If you want to just make parts and not tinker with a CNC machine, get a Z1.
I had near-zero experience with CNC and got a Cavera Air last year and it mostly "just works" from the hardware side. I just fixture stuff and run my gcode, zero issues with the hardware. The Z1 seems to be even more streamlined w/r/t things like chip evacuation.
But, my god, Makera's firmware/software is fucking garbage. Especially the CAM workbench.
The community firmware and controller software (https://github.com/Carvera-Community) is so much better and feature-filled that it's kind of sad. They also have a tool library and post-processor for the FreeCAD CAM workbench in that repo which will let you make a clean break from Makera's terrible software.
On the upside: Makera apparently won't invalidate your warranty for using the community firmware/controller software, which is nice.
Start with one of the cheap kits on Amazon. A good chunk of the learning curve is software/design/workflows. On the machine side, learning how to properly secure your work pieces, and find the right bits, speeds, and feeds is another art. You can do all of that on a ~$300 3018 CNC kit. Your work output is limited in size, and precision, but that doesn't matter as much when you're just trying to get the hang of things.
I have both, and a manual lathe and mill, and a laser cutter. 95% of everything I do is with the 3D printers. There is no indexing, no work holding, no dealing with shavings or smoke or dust or cutting oil that gets everywhere, no accidentally breaking your last end mill, no screwing up the only one of the thing you're cutting into, no cutting down stock so it fits in your machine, etc. You just press print. Setting up another machine is a right hassle by comparison.
3D printing and plastic parts isn't good for everything, but it is good enough (and easier) for a lot of things.
Yeah same. I’ve done a lot of CNCing but 3D printing isn’t appealing because I don’t care much for making plastic parts. When metal 3D printing becomes hobby tier I’ll be all over it.
Today 3D printing makes a lot of thing possible. Now that multi-toolhead printers are coming, some already available, it's possible to make composite parts. Like hard frame in soft wrapper, conductive lines (resistance still high), etc. I'm still learning, but it's exiting.
As for CNC, some cheap tabletop are available. FreeCAD is useful for design and g-code generation. The problem with cheap they are imprecise and shaky. I'm thinking about using 3d printed frame with metal everything else. Should be light enough to lift with one hand. For precision it'll need calibration from time to time as plastic moves. The goal is to have 3 axis mini CNC mill able to cut soft metals with precision better than 0.1mm.
I don't see how they can get "special treatment", the difference between someone who couldn't hear the bell because they cannot and someone who just wasn't paying enough attention to react in time isn't obvious without questioning them. Cyclists should simply learn to share shared infrastructure and be careful when passing people instead, because they can't know if that person is aware of them in time and going to react in a predictable way.
Sounds like a good name for renaming the President Donald J. Trump Boulevard leading up to Mar-A-Lago when the current bout of totalitarianism over there ends.
> In "The Miller's Tale", Geoffrey Chaucer writes "And prively he caughte hire by the queynte" (and intimately he caught her by her crotch),[14] and the comedy Philotus (1603) mentions "put doun thy hand and graip hir cunt."
It turns out “grab her by the pussy” has surpringly robust precedent.
I am doing leatherworking as well as woodworking. No idea if it is possible to actually make money with this¹, but damned if I'm not giving it a go just to have skills in an area where AI is not a threat for the coming decade. At the very least these crafts allow me to make things which do not exist and cannot be purchased off the shelf.
1: I mean, it is, certainly. I'm just not sure if I can make money by making leather gear.
I feel ya. I've never been accused of using an LLM, fortunately, but depending on the context I do use “smart quotes” (even in „Dutch” or »German«) and the em-dash obviously… (And that ellips fella there. It's just so simple to type with a compose key set up.)
There are a bunch of typos in there which jar a bit ('deterioted'), but I guess that makes sense for this specific article.
Personally, I would recommend them to simple use any old editor with spellchecking enabled. That suffices for most writing where you just want to keep your own voice. To me, the red crinkly line just means that I should edit that word myself. In the rare case where I'm stumped on the spelling I'll look at the suggested edit of course, but never as a matter of course.
The problem here, the overarching issue is that the subject complaint about AI slop is actually a bigger issue that has been plaguing America in particular for many years now, and of which the AI slop era is only a current top. The qualities of American writing have clearly been on a precipitous decline for a very long time now, predating AI slop and even spell checkers and computers.
Computers, digital text, and digital information distribution/transportation have made writing and thoughts cheap. Arguably due to what we are surely all aware of, humans rarely value that which is cheap, whether monetarily or in effort and consequential qualities. What people seem reluctant or maybe unable to acknowledge is that predating the current AI Slop, was what could be called Human Slop, low quality, low effort, careless output that was cheap; regardless of whether AI slop now outperforms.
It is why you are justified in pointing out that even in the post complaining about AI Slop, the human has apparently abandoned what would have been common practice in just the recent past, using basic spellcheckers or simply reviewing what was written and also practicing with deliberation; the art and skill of writing, grammar, and sentence structure.
No one is perfect and that is also what makes anything human, somewhat inexplicable and random variation. However, it takes a certain refinement before unique human character becomes a positive quality and is not just humans being sloppy ... human slop.
> The qualities of American writing have clearly been on a precipitous decline for a very long time now, predating AI slop and even spell checkers and computers.
> Every NYT bestseller from 1960 to 2014 falls in the seventh-grade level spread, from 4th to 11th.
> ...
> Since 2000, only 2 bestsellers have scored higher than 9th-grade readability.
> ... ...
> The bestselling authors of our time are writing at the 4th-grade level.
> > “8 books tie for the lowest score,” a 4.4, just above 4th-grade level. Prolific, well-known authors with huge sales: James Patterson, Janet Evonvich, and Nora Roberts.”
> These three authors have written a combined total of 419 books.
Whenever I read something from roughly the first half of the 20th century (I'm not sure where the cutoff point is, it seems to the 1960s), I'm struck by the quality of the writing. I'm not sure what happened, but it's pretty clear that at some point we stopped taking ourselves seriously.
We see the same thing in how people dress. People used to write "respectably", and they used to dress the same, and in TV interviews they spoke with great care and deliberation.
> Who banks that often that they really need to do that, outside of places like Sweden where cash is almost dead?
I often pay cash in physical stores, but when buying things online I (and every other Dutch person) use Ideal (Wero). That means authorising each payment via my bank, and that means either using my smartphone (GrapheneOS) with the bank's app, or using the bank provided OTP device with my debit card inserted.
Using my smartphone is, unfortunately, the easiest way. I hate both options for the fact that I need to fetch either my smartphone or my debit card though.
Banks want their stupid app because it is the easiest way to keep some client-side secret secure in a nearly fool-proof manner. I can do everything I want in any browser, but authorisation and authentication happens by means of that app, so even just logging in means scanning a QR code with the app, and then continuing in the browser of any device I want.
I think most people use bank several times a week at the very least. Some do it constantly and put debit cards on their smartphones and concentrate everything financial on that single device, but even folk who keep ready amounts of cash on hand and don't buy things online too often bank several times a month, even if just to pay taxes and keep an eye on their finances.
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