It depends how it was printed.

As a SUPER simplified basic: Any 3d print consists of walls/perimeters and infill. The walls are the exterior surfaces of the print. The infill is what is inside. And the vast majority of prints tend to be sparse infills. So rather than solid plastic beneath those walls, you mostly just have air and a mesh structure of some form.

So if the wall is thick enough (generally referred to as “number of walls”)? Sure. If it isn’t? You’ll just see the void inside the shell itself and make things much worse.

What is generally done to reduce “3d printed texture” is a mixture of smaller print layers (so the ridges are much thinner), printing with more walls, and actually lightly melting the exterior surface (either through chemicals or heat).

VKB are probably the kings of the mid-range sicko HOTAS market and I am like 90% certain they 3d print the shell of their sticks for the Gladiator (?). But they do such a good job that I genuinely can’t be certain. Whereas the vast majority of ploopy builds… aren’t that.

I keep thinking I should give a ploopy a shot but I’ve increasingly grown to like/need vertical mice and, like most ploopy related efforts, it is mostly “you CAN do it” with nobody ever having even tried because it requires pretty hefty redesigns of almost every part to mount things correctly.

Theoretically, you can mold it to fit your hand but the tolerances and mountings make that a hassle.

As for the print itself? Most people just do a quick print and have the telltale ridges from layers. But you can futz with settings to improve the smoothness or just finish the print itself. At which point it is not going to be as smooth as injection molding but it will be more “different” than “bad”.

I would argue more that anyone grabbing this from the app store is painting a target on their back. It doesn’t matter what permissions it does or does not have: You are now giving a mega company run by a c-suite that have demonstrably bended the knee to a fascist information that you care about this.

Push notifications are incredibly valuable. I still argue that doing it through a dedicated app at all is idiotic and it should instead be through a semi-anonymous chat system like Signal or Matrix and the like and get group blasted.

That still seems high to me but actually checking the StatCounter website… it has more or less been steady at 5-ish% for three years?

It depends on the size/“disruptiveness” of the company but yeah. You either have your own tape back up system or you contract out to someone who does and try not to think about what it means to be doing a glorified rsync of all your data offsite every week.

I wouldn’t quite go so far as to say anyone doing genuine offsite backups using a spinning disc is wrong but…

The caveat I’ll carve out is the hobbyist space where a lot of us will back up truly essential data to a cloud bucket or even a friend/family member’s NAS. I… still think that is more wrong than not but (assuming you trust them and they have proper practices) it is probably the best way for a hobbyist to keep a backup without worrying about that USB drive degrading since it gets plugged in once a year.

Words hard

And I would go so far as to say that nobody who is buying 36 TB spinners is doing offsite backups of that data. For any org doing offsites of that much data you are almost guaranteed using a tape drive of some form because… they pay for themselves pretty fast and are much better for actual cold storage backups.

Seagate et al keep pushing for these truly massive spinners and I really do wonder who the market is for them. They are overly expensive for cold storage and basically any setup with that volume of data is going to be better off slowly rotating out smaller drives. Partially because of recovery times and partially because nobody but a sponsored youtuber is throwing out their 24 TB drives because 36 TB hit the market.

I assume these are a byproduct of some actually useful tech that is sold to help offset the costs while maybe REALLY REALLY REALLY want 72 TBs in their four bay Synology.

Assuming you aren’t striping, up to 36 TB. If you follow even halfway decent practices with basically any kind of RAID other than 0, hopefully 0 Bytes.

The main worry with stuff like this is that it potentially takes a while to recover from a failed drive even if you catch it in time (alert systems are your friend). And 36 TB is a LOT of data to work through and recover which means a LOT of stress on the remaining drives for a few days.

While I do hope this leads to a pushback on “I just put all our corporate secrets into chatgpt”:

In the before times, people got their answers from stack overflow… or fricking youtube. And those are also wrong VERY VERY VERY often. Which is one of the biggest problems. The illegally scraped training data is from humans and humans are stupid.

I don’t use jellyfin but my general approach is either:

1. Expose it over a VPN only. I usually use Tailscale for this so that I can expose individual machines but you do you
2. Cloudflare tunnel that exposes a single port on a single internal machine to a subdomain I own

There are obviously ways to do this all on your own but… if you are asking this question you probably want to use one of those to roll it. Because you can leave yourself ridiculously vulnerable if you do it yourself.

You uh… don’t need to tell people stuff like that.

I mean… I have seen some REALLY REALLY stupid drivers so I could totally see multiple people thinking they found a short cut or not realizing the road they are supposed to be on is 20 feet to the left and there is a reason their phone is losing its shit all while their suspension is getting destroyed.

But yeah. It is the standard tesla corp MO. They detect a dangerous situation and disable all the “self driving”. Obviously because it is up to the driver to handle it and not because they want the legal protection to say it wasn’t their fault.

As if I weren’t already on enough watch lists:

Consumer drones aren’t conducive to “a 9-11”. They just can’t carry enough explosives. A terrorist attack using drones will be isolated attacks on public gatherings and likely not even put a dent in the M-4 tax we pay every fucking day.

Also: Defense against drones actually isn’t all that hard from a military and hardpoint standpoint and mostly uses existing tech. The same mic arrays that installations use to triangulate gunfire? Picking up drone motors is of comparable difficulty and gives a pretty fast angle to point the baby phalanx (or net guns) at. Would be HORRIBLE in an area dense with civilians but would protect anything that “we” actually care about (military resources and whichever politicians trump likes this week). Chaining the net gun/tiny gatling gun to the sensors with a human in the loop so it doesn’t violate any treaties covers that.

The reason they are so ridiculously effective in Ukraine are because Russians have horrifically bad opsec and tend to leave armored vehicle hatches open (even at bases) and have sprawling unfortified trench lines that are only designed to keep infantry out.

And if it sticks, good. But it still has the fundamental problem of needing to re-train all your existing employees AND train new staff who haven’t been brought up in that system.

Its on a completely different scale, but plenty of tech youtubers have done the “Let’s get rid of all the Adobe in my life”. Some succeed. Most tend to come down on some variation of “I can do about 99% of what I used to do in these two or three tools. And these ten things are actually genuinely easier and more performant. But we can’t take a month off making videos to get all of our editors up to speed. And this also removes our ability to contract out an edit to someone with the industry standard workflow”. And from my professional experience in different fields, that is true. Hiring someone and then spending a week or a month so they can use YOUR tools becomes a huge burden in not too long of a time.

I really hope Germany pulls it off this time and more governments follow. But I also remember all the other times I have read this story.

I want to say various cities/regions in Germany make statements like this every few years? And they usually end up rolling back when it becomes clear the cost to retrain both existing staff and new staff isn’t worth it.

That said: This gets the national security bump so maybe it will stick. Also nobody on the planet likes to use Teams.

If you are capable of setting up your own personal VPN, you don’t need Tailscale. You still may want to use it though, depending on how much of a novelty Network Fun is for you in your spare time.

For me, the main advantage to Tailscale et al is that it is on a per device basis. So I can access my SMB shares or Frigate setup remotely while still keeping the rest of my internal network isolated( to the degree I trust the software and network setup). You CAN accomplish that with some fancy firewall rules and vlanning but… yeah.

In fairness, this is a dot ml board so 404 might get banned for completely different reasons.

… Have you tried? Been a minute since I signed up for my free “account” but I want to say the only requirement was that the email is a real one because you’ll be sent an auth link whenever you login. No identification beyond that unless I choose to pay.

So… if you are truly concerned then use a VPN and a free email service every time you want to read this or any other independent media sites that use the same model?

You know what an even bigger barrier is? Not existing.

Independent journalism is good. 404 is REALLY good (it comes out of all the best parts of Vice’s tech reporting). They have a very small barrier that basically exists solely to fight bots as a mixture of reducing traffic load (keeping costs down) and encouraging people to actually consider supporting said independent journalism.

Instead we have chucklefucks immediately wanting to remove that paywall or outright accusing them of abusing SEO and data scraping and all that. And these are the same people who will then get mad when EVERYTHING is AI slop.

And this ties in directly to what right wingers want in terms of making the populace even stupider and more uninformed.

This is literally why these sites have the free paywall. Some get bypased. In this case, I suspect 404 gave archive dot org access because they rely so heavily on that site for researching articles.

But. Regardless: if you think a journalism outlet is so evil and are scamming everyone… Maybe just ignore them because you clearly don’t think they are worth your time.

Also: republican love people like you who do everything possible to attack independent journalism.