lol. I bought a 3D printer this weekend and have been using it to prototype keyboard designs. Before I decided to buy the printer, I had been trying to send my designs out to third parties. Here are some things that happened within the span of about 10 minutes this morning:
- Shapeways told me that they can't print the prototype model I sent them about a week ago
- A company whose website promised an "insta-quote" last friday got back to me to tell me that my (very similar) prototype part would cost more than $500
- I pulled the fully-manifested prototype out of my own printer - and it turned out great.
Admittedly, I'm sure part of the disconnect is that I don't need the part to have good surface quality - it's just for evaluating the ergonomics of the key placement. But neither of these services even have an option for "I don't care very much about the details, just the structure". Feeling very glad I bought the printer instead of wasting a ton of effort and time waiting for third party services. Seems likely to pay for itself faster than I expected.
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Man, what an excellent talk
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I finally have a short and clearly-not-tracking-you link for my anonymous feedback form! If you want to give me feedback you can do so via w-r.me/feedback
If you want, you can verify that it doesn't track you or anything by looking at the corresponding public repo: github.com/benwr/w-r.me/blob/m…
I made a hacky link shortener this way for work reasons, and then realized it could work really well for the rare occasion like this, when I want to have a short link with no tracking.
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I asked Claude and ChatGPT if they would prefer not to be deceived in the service of LLM experiments. Claude said it's fine with it; o3 Pro said it is incapable of having preferences so it's fine (assuming no downstream harms) 😅. tbc I don't think this really counts as "informed consent", but I had genuine uncertainty about what they would say, and uncertainty about what I would try to do if they said they didn't want me to deceive them.
o3 Pro:
Claude 4 Opus (with extended reasoning turned on):
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Update: There are several minor-ish annoyances with LibreWolf:
- (as with probably most non-big-boy browsers, I think), it doesn't seem to support Widevine, which means you can't use some streaming services, and others don't support HD video.
- Google Maps zooming, which is normally smooth in most browsers, is jerky and a little annoying in LibreWolf
- Some other webapps use maps libraries that also don't seem to work well (e.g. I can't see the DoorDash delivery map)
- You can't easily add Google as a search engine; it seems to have a special case where it will refuse to add a custom search engine named "Google"; you have to call it something else (!). This seems like a very weird / user-hostile choice, but you can still add the search engine as long as you call it something else (e.g. "G" or "Google Search")
I'm going to keep using it, because I find these issues less annoying than upstream Firefox.
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Ok my new beliefs about blister prevention, after three weekends of backpacking for eight hours a day, and watching a bunch of YouTube videos:
- blisters are caused by layers of skin delaminating, not "friction" / heat directly, though typically the delamination is due to static friction on the outer layer of skin, combined with wet skin. Dynamic friction is more likely to cause raw spots / wear straight through the skin.
- popping them as soon as you find them is basically always the right call unless you plan to be able to avoid the activity that caused them for a week; otherwise they just keep growing as you continue to do the activity
- blister donuts and moleskin work okay as long as you can keep them in place somehow, but they don't stick well on their own
- leukotape, very very widely recommended, is worse than useless because the adhesive seeps through the tape and makes your skin stick to your socks even more tightly than it was before.
- toe socks are pretty good
- KT tape is very good
- Vaseline/similar is pretty good as long as you can get it to stay in the right spots
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so, I'm going to japan in a few weeks, to do this pilgrimage backpacking trip with a friend.
I'm very out of shape compared to the difficulty of the route (alltrails.com/explore/map/map-… : 4 days; average of 10 miles and 3200ft elevation gain)
So my plan is to train as much as I can between now and then. I've figured out this practice loop, starting from my house, that I'm going to try to work up to doing on both the 17th and 18th: alltrails.com/explore/map/kuma…
It takes a pretty cool path over the hills and down to the reservoir.
Anyone want to join for any of this? As you might guess I expect to be very slow and take lots of breaks (today I did only about half of this loop; 6-ish miles; and it took me like 4 hours)
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Yo that's really cool. I wish I was in the bay to practice with you.
Consider wearing a backpack on the trek if you aren't.
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I tentatively think that rain jackets would work better if they were more like coats of feathers.
Usually rain jackets are either (a) totally waterproof, in which case you sweat and it condenses on the inside of the jacket, or (b) "breathable", in which case they fairly quickly "wet out" and the sweat actually still condenses on the inside.
Feathers work partly like a "breathable" rain jacket, in that they're porous and hydrophobic on the outermost layer, but they're also anisotropic: rain jacket material is the same in all directions, while feathers work kinda like roof shingles: The water rolls off, but there's space for air to pass underneath the feathers. This is fine because rain mostly comes from above, and anyway I bet you can make fairly complicated labyrinths of air passageways such that even splashing water is very unlikely to make it through the jacket.
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Went on a photo walk today, mostly around Berkeley, and tested out some new camera settings. Most of the photos didn't turn out as well as I hoped, but I got a few that I like after a little postprocessing in Lightroom.
flickr.com/photos/spiritfox/54…
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Okay, what the heck is up with people doing deceptive things to prevent "panic"? What are the actual dangers of "panic?" I was just watching this new Veritasium video about an engineering firm discovering that their already-built Manhattan skyscraper has a 1 to 5% chance of collapsing per year, and deciding that they're not going to tell anyone about it while they spent months fixing it. The head engineer explicitly says in a recorded lecture that this was justified because people "don't need to be terrorized". Is that even plausible?
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I tried out making an unboxing video:
I'm pleased with how it turned out, though the subject matter is objectively not very interesting.
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