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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: November 22nd, 2023

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  • I agree to some extent, but even before then hardware was getting expensive thanks to stuff like the Bitcoin mining craze. Harddrives have been getting cheaper on a dollar per TB basis for a long time (as they should), but I remember the days when it was cheaper to build a gaming PC than to buy a new console, and those days are long gone. And after COVID hit, greedflation set in to declare what the new normal is.



  • It depends on the level of 3d printer you’re talking about. Your average $300 at-home printer is basically the hot end of a glue gun on stepper motors, though you might be surprised at some of the materials they’re capable of printing in. Everything from basic ABS plastics to Nylon and Carbon-Fiber reinforced filaments are easily available.

    If you’re talking commercial grade, $10k+ printers, that’s an entirely different story. Commercial printers are capable of printing objects out of steel. There’s been a lot of work in that area to print all kinds of things from guns parts in military grade polymers to entire engine blocks, no assembly required.

    On the 3d printed gun end, supposedly people have figured out the issues to the point where you can print 100% of the parts out of super basic plastic (the most commonly used plastic in 3d printing is PLA, which has a melting point around 200 degrees Celsius), though the stuff I’ve seen online is more about using internals from cheap guns and 3d printing the external “furniture” of the gun either for custom cosmetics or aftermarket parts like handles and grips, or to create an expensive gun out of cheaper components. As for the ammo, I’ve only heard that “people were working on it.” I don’t know any of the specifics.


  • If I had to guess, the two most likely reasons are: for the challenge of it, and to reduce the amount of required tools.

    I feel like the people who work on 3d printed guns largely fall into 2 camps - the people who just like to build things, and the people who look at a 3d printer as a valuable tool in the whole “become ungovernable” concept.

    I know the second group are responsible for designing a fully 3d printed gun that’s currently being used to fight against a genocidal military regime in Myanmar, for example. The people there are getting zero international aid, and can’t get their hands on guns. But, they can get ammo, and they can get 3d printers. So they’ve set up 3d printer assembly lines to make guns that are at least good enough to kill a soldier and take his gun. It was designed for exactly that kind of situation - basically the Liberator one-shot pistol the CIA designed to be air-dropped into occupied France during WW2, except as a modern semi-auto SMG chambered in 9mm.




  • I think it comes from the other direction. Like, the trans and femboy communities are small, but a high portion of them are in tech jobs and FOSS. So this is a stereotype about trans women and femboys all being into Arch, rather than all Arch users being trans women or femboys.

    Still overused, but I can see why since the 3 most active communities I see on Lemmy are Linux users, trans people, and Trekkies.



  • I made it racist because you bodyshamed her, called her a freak, and then said she deserves to be silenced, kidnapped, possibly killed along with her girlfriend, and whatever other horrible things the Chinese government can come up with. All because you don’t like her. I fail to see the difference between racism and what you said. Which was my point in going that route.

    I’m a trans woman in the US. My life expectancy is 30 years due to suicide rates and how commonly we end up murdered. My colors are supporting minorities against oppression, regardless of whether or not I like them or agree with them.


  • I never said I support China, but I also don’t blame a lesbian dating a minority woman from a group who is actively being ethnically cleansed by the Chinese government for doing what she has to do to survive. She’s been blackbagged multiple times over the years and the government watches what she says very closely. And I also don’t blame her for opposing Westerners who apparently often just tried to use her as a tool to support whatever narrative they were trying to spin at the time and then criticize her for bringing up issues she faced that didn’t support their narrative.

    That would be like me saying that you made your choice when you decided to live in a country founded by a British prison colony, and now you can live with the consequences. Which is where I was sarcastically going originally, but I think the comparison would’ve been lost on you.




  • I’ve seen it described as the social media site for people who hate social media.

    The story goes that when Facebook was becoming mainstream, a guy came along and decided he hated Facebook. So he hired a software engineer at his company to help him make a site that wasn’t Facebook in any way. Basically, the criteria for the site were that he could post photos on it and follow people whose photos he wanted to see, and he didn’t have to see anything he didn’t care about.

    So Tumblr is a very self-curated social media experience where there’s no brands or celebrities. You just search for stuff by hashtags, follow blogs that interest you, and post and reblog stuff at your whim. Everything is displayed on your dashboard chronologically, and the only stuff you’ll find on there is stuff from people you follow.

    The closest thing I’d describe it to is Twitter, but it’s more blogging than microblogging and the more direct interaction between you and the people you follow can feel a lot more personal than other forms of social media. You can send people messages that can be answered in a public post in addition to the usual direct message system. There’s no character limit on posts or anything, and people will write full short stories and stuff. It also has more of a sense of permanence, in my opinion. It isn’t uncommon to see popular posts crop back up that were created in 2012-2014.


  • The US is currently in its second biggest spike of COVID infections ever. At the estimated peak on the 11th, they’re expecting 2 million new infections per day. The current strain going around is supposedly different enough from the ones the vaccines up until September were designed for that it is effectively immune to those vaccinations.

    COVID never left, and in fact the more recent strains have been more infectious and more severe than the original ones were, but we haven’t heard much about them because basically everybody who can be is vaccinated.


  • On the cooking one, I also recommend cooking double portions when you can. If you can cook twice as much with minimal effort, that’s half the cleaning you have to do afterwards and half the meal planning you have to do. You get up in the morning and know that you have leftovers from dinner ready to go for lunch in the fridge. Also, rice. Rice is cheap, good for you, and incredibly flexible in what you can do with it. A rice cooker is also a great appliance to have in general. Not only is it an easy set and forget for a pot of rice, but you can do all sorts of meals in it from steaming meats and vegetables to cooking soups and even baking desserts. An air fryer is similarly flexible and great for making meals for one person. You don’t have to preheat it or anything and it doesn’t cost all the energy that a full size oven does.