Yeah, and a lot less time, likely, too. CADing that would be pretty quick.

That’s a marketing video, of course, but that looks really good. Even ignoring everything else, multi-material TPU printing would be amaze balls since varying hardness/flexibility has so many applications.

I’m going to have a hard time not pre-ordering it to get the early bird discount, lol. I imagine it’ll be north of $1K CAD…

… Hmm. Maybe if I start a side hustle selling 3D prints, I can raise enough to buy it?

I know Creality has a reputation for inconsistency, but their hardware is also fairly easy to disassemble and fix with cheap parts, so that’s not catastrophic. I was super lucky with my Hi, only having typical issues with filament-related stuff, but I also troubleshot some problems with my friend’s Hi, and it wasn’t a big deal to fix.

Thanks for sharing!

If I could afford it, that would be my choice.

I’d probably get the Creality Sparx i7 right now, as an entry-level multicolour 3D printer. I got the Creality Hi Combo last year, and it’s been a great printer for me, and it sounds like the Sparx i7 is mostly just better.

Yeah, ‘y’ every time should be pretty safe for updates, right? Like, the reason it’s suggested is because it’s the suggested alternative for the package it’s replacing and the change has been tested by the CachyOS/Arch team(s) already.

And worst case, something big breaks when you reboot, so you roll back to before the update, wait like a week, and try again (lol).

Exactly right, which is why the hot McDonald’s coffee lawsuit had such a high penalty. They were knowingly giving near-boiling coffee to their customers to avoid giving free refills, and knew about the dangers and burns caused to their customers for years.

Punitive damages are the capitalist system answer to disregard for damages caused by products and business practices.

I suppose that makes sense. I almost entirely print short things, and when I do taller prints, it’s always single colour because it’s a functional piece.

I’m not interested in giant 3D print display art, personally, so I’ve never run into that challenge. Hell, I set my prime tower brims to 0 just to make it easier to get off the plate.

I don’t have one, but I expect they kept that default setting for the reasons outlined above, but because of a lack of poop chute.

I have a Creality Hi, and a 3D-printed poop chute off the side of the printer holds plenty of poop for typically-sized 4-colour full-purge prints.

For really huge prints, I empty once mid print, but those prints last for days anyway, so it’s no big deal.

With no need for colour/material purging, I would expect a purge tray to be plenty for a multi-toolhead printer. I can’t imagine it purges much?

I don’t see the full reason anywhere in the thread; the prime tower is essential to quality multicolour prints. Purging quickly shoots out a high volume of filament to quickly clear as much of the previous colour as possible, but then when it goes to start printing, the temperature and pressure are all out of whack and you get inconsistent flow.

So, if you skip the prime tower, you’ll get globby over extrusions and gaps from under extrusion on the first thing printed in that colour each layer, which looks terrible.

That said, the prime tower can be much smaller than default. I set mine to 3mm³ of priming and it comes out 95-100% perfect, with only very occasional blobs on the edge, which pop right off with a fingernail flick (or a deburring tool, if you’re fancy.)

Don’t skip the prime tower. I did for a few weeks before cluing in to why I was getting 1 bad print on every plate.

I suppose if you’re changing filament by layer, then you could maybe skip it, but then definitely don’t print outer wall first or you won’t get a clean print. But even then, a 3mm³ prime tower is tiny, so why risk it?

Hell, even the Snapmaker U1 uses a prime tower, and it has 4 hot ends; it’s needed to normalize the flow after a temperature/flow change (being idle). I don’t have one to test, but I expect it would greatly benefit from a bigger prime tower, since it hasn’t just been extruding filament as purge to get things flowing. But that’s just speculation, as I sadly don’t have one to test with.

That makes complete sense! Thank you. I think I have a fix, so including details below for future potential searchers:

The end of my g-code looks like this:

[... many copies of the below 10 lines + 2 comments with different X/Y values ...]
SET_VELOCITY_LIMIT ACCEL=3000 ACCEL_TO_DECEL=1500 SQUARE_CORNER_VELOCITY=8
G1 F11594.621
G1 X171.826 Y109.39 E.02808
G1 E-.8 F2400
;WIPE_START
G1 F11594.621
G1 X172.61 Y110.174
;WIPE_END
SET_VELOCITY_LIMIT ACCEL=6000 ACCEL_TO_DECEL=3000 SQUARE_CORNER_VELOCITY=12
G1 X184.059 Y110.251 Z1.76 F30000
G1 X190.225 Y110.293 Z1.76
G1 Z1.16
G1 E.8 F2400

;TYPE:Ironing
;WIDTH:0.403219
;HEIGHT:0.015
G1 F3000
G1 X190.225 Y91.775 E.04527
[... many G1 lines and one M73 ("print progress") line omitted ...]
; stop printing object Ironing_Test_LH0.16_medium_high id:0 copy 0
;TIME_ELAPSED:4501.019531

G1 E-.8 F2400
;WIPE_START
G1 F3000
G1 X171.925 Y93.707
;WIPE_END
EXCLUDE_OBJECT_END NAME=Ironing_Test_LH0.16_medium_high_id_0_copy_0
M106 S0
;TYPE:Custom
; filament end gcode
G1 X0 Y180 F8000
END_PRINT
M73 P100 R0
;TIME_ELAPSED:4502.550781

; EXECUTABLE_BLOCK_END

The first section shows z-hop (of 0.6mm) is enabled, as it moves to and from Z1.16 / Z1.76, and that it is doing a wipe on extract over and over again without affecting apparent print quality, as most ironing test patches look great. So, this confirms that z-hop is on (I’ll revert to 0.4, the default), and that Wipe while retracting is likely safe to leave on (default setting).

The problem is the ; filament end gcode section. As we can see from the Ironing g-code, it never changes from Z1.16. This confirms that @[email protected] and @[email protected] are correct; Creality Print does not add z-hop on the last layer.

The fix, I believe, is to change the Extruder’s Machine end G-code from:

G1 X0 Y180 F8000
END_PRINT

to: (comments unnecessary, of course)

G91                  ; Relative movement mode
G1 Z2 F600           ; Lift nozzle 2mm
; Note: F600 is the speed I copied from the default Hi Machine start G-code: G1 Z1 F600
G90                  ; Absolute movement mode
G1 X0 Y180 F8000     ; Park head
END_PRINT            ; Run END_PRINT macro (heater/motor cleanup)

Thanks for your help!

Right, like what’s the ROI of a million computers switching from US-based for-profit Windows to Linux?

Funding open tools/tech/research is exactly the sort of thing that governments are best equipped to do, relative to private sector/individuals. Millions of dollars is a rounding error relative to government licensing costs to proprietary software alone, even ignoring the downstream benefits for the rest of the economy. And if we had lots of money in open software, it would attract a lot more talent to make it even better for the rest of us.

The headlines focusing on AI layoffs are still mostly missing this, too.

The real reason for layoffs in tech are from a quiet recession that’s hidden by circular AI cashflows, correcting for inflated staff count from COVID overenthusiasm, or to free cashflow for throwing more money into the AI pit. (Or all three, of course).

AI doesn’t reduce headcount; it just slightly increases the efficiency of skilled workers to do simple, mundane tasks—and even that requires careful oversight or it’ll inevitably fuck it up.

But skilled workers are quick at mundane tasks… it’s just boring. So it’s not really generating much value, even in the best case.

And the sloppening is showing us all the downsides.

The house of cards is going to come tumbling down soon, and it’s going to be a lot worse than the 1999 dot com crash. I heard that OpenAI needs to pay big bills for datacenter expansion in the fall with money they don’t have—I don’t have the source for it, but, if true, that could be the domino that triggers the crash. Circular cashflows between highly leveraged companies makes the entire chain as fragile as the weakest link.

An 80% market correction wouldn’t be outside of historical norms. Hold onto your hat on the way down!

When it was new, I got a lot of “Certainly! …”

Like, come on, mate. You didn’t even read the first sentence before submitting.

The Mozilla numbers are wildly inflated. They were effectively just advertising for Anthropic’s mediocre LLM with that blog post.

VB is still great. I use it to fully automate a lot of Excel-based tasks, like looping through thousands of Excel files to pull values or update spreadsheets with new features.

Sure, there are more powerful tools, but VBA is built in and works really well for some tasks like that.

It’s great for coding things that you don’t care if it gets it wrong, though. Like, I vibe coded a JavaScript injection to add a client-side accessibility feature to a website running a fairly complex tech stack. I don’t know JavaScript, but I know how to code, and I know enough HTML and CSS to do simple things.

It failed quite a few times, but each time I just needed to refresh the page for a clean slate, tell the LLM how it fucked up, and try again. In about an hour, I had a functional script I could inject in the site to bolt on a new feature.

I was reading the code along the way, so I know what it’s doing for the most part (not some of the JavaScript things, like why there are extra brackets in places I wouldn’t expect, but whatever.) It wasn’t doing anything dangerous.

Not mission critical. A small block of code to do one simple thing. There was no real downside or cost of failure, aside from wasted time. And it’s small enough that it’s easy to understand from scratch; it’ll be fairly easy to update and maintain.

On the other hand, it sounds like Microslop and NVidia (and many others) are using AI slop in complex, mission-critical projects. I’d be nervous for their future, if I cared about them.

OctoPi is included by default for a GUI app, iirc.

Brittleness didn’t get talked about enough. I couldn’t figure out why my fundament was breaking on retraction to my Creality Hi CFS over and over again. It was driving me nuts. The prints all came out looking great, so I thought I wasn’t having humidity issues and that there was a mechanical problem somewhere. Took the whole damn thing apart to clean and check that everything was tightened to correctly. Multiple times.

I just needed a filament dryer.

I had no idea that filament snapping on retraction could be caused by wet filament, and I read about 3D printing a lot more than most. Almost all threads about wet filament are about print quality, and people rarely mention brittleness. Conversely, in threads about filament jams/errors, most comments focus on the mechanical parts (tension, loose screws, debris in the gears, temps, etc.) and rarely mention wet, brittle filament as a possible cause.

If you’re reading this and don’t have one (or another method for it), get a filament dryer. I recommend the Creality one when it goes on sale as it’s one of the cheapest options that can hit the high temps needed for some filaments and that can also be used as a dry box you can print from. My only gripe is needing to prop the lid open when it’s drying to release the humidity. It’s silly that it can’t dry filament properly without the door cracked open.

What the AI slop did I just read? That wasn’t even edited.

The infill selections for comparison don’t make a lick of sense, and one of the tables doesn’t even have content that matches its introduction.

What a waste of time.

Edit: 57 upvotes? What the hell. Does nobody read the article?

Sounds like Windows Search Indexer. I just changed the settings in my Win 11 VM to only index the Start menu, but I’m also an old school folder user, so I never use the Windows menu to find files anyway.

Before the change, my VM was arbitrarily locking up, unable to do just about anything. It’s been a lot smoother since the change.

I’m with you. I started boycotting tourism (and shopping) travel to the US when they re-elected Bush.

I drove through the US a few times to save hours of driving when Obama was president, but otherwise I haven’t been south of the border in over 2 decades.

The Republican Apparatus is the problem, and Trump is one of many symptoms. As much as it will be painful in the short term, I have high hopes for the end of American hegemony. It’s been a long time coming.