cecilkorik

That push and pull is exactly why they've been intentionally using them to rot people's brains. The dumber and more apathetic you can make your users, the more you can monetize them, you first minimize the push so you can maximize the pull. This is not an accidental "quirk" of modern algorithms, it's part of the design. Money must be maximized at all costs, including the mental health of the users and the stability of society. Money uber alles. The techbros will drive our society into the ground without a second thought if it makes them a few bucks richer. They're not planning to stay here anyway. We are just a resource to them, and they will exploit us to the fullest to pursue their unachievable techno-utopia fantasies.

I don't agree with your premise that the performance and functionality is so far below every competitor. That is not my experience. What are you basing your claim on?

They are well made machines with high quality components and are in most cases perfectly capable of going as fast as the plastic allows. And if they don't, a few minor upgrades to the hardware will get them flying as they're typically mostly going to be hotend-limited. Are you competing the actual realistic maximum acceptable performance of comparable machines that have been independently tested by an experienced reviewer, or are you comparing numbers someone copied from marketing? Because these are not the same thing and only one of them actually reflects reality.

As far as functionality, the only feature I see wanting in Prusa's lineup is IDEX, which I prefer over toolswitchers for making large numbers of small parts. I keep hoping their next model will be a spiffy little IDEX model, but no luck so far.

Tribes was such a stupidly good game. It would kick the ass of all the battle royale shovelware nowadays.

Prusa is tuned for reliability and consistency. They occupy a weird and illogical niche, for people who don't want to have to tinker with their machines AT ALL but want to have the ability to. I personally fit in this niche, and I love my Prusa, but they really don't make a ton of sense for most people I think, and there are probably better choices if you don't fall into this niche.

The implication is typically that they're popular with guys. ie, they're physically attractive to the opposite sex, they are sex symbols. That's really what it's all about. It's not a two-way label, it doesn't mean the attraction is necessarily returned. Although it is often assumed and commonly leads to people accusing them of being "sluts" despite not being justified. But on its own it just means that they are the object of desire of many boys: they probably have many suitors, lots of people want to ask them to the dance, etc. That is the way they are considered "popular".

It might actually be. Linux gaming has come an awful long way thanks to Wine, Steam, Proton, Wayland, etc. Driver support is improving with or without the manufacturer's help. OpenGL's constant playing catch-up with DirectX has given way to the limitless potential of Vulkan. The web has moved almost entirely to properly open standards like WebExtensions and Canvas, and has become powerful enough that many well-known apps are literally just Electron wrappers around a HTML/Javascript core that can run on any plaform. Likewise Mono has implemented almost all of .NET and even Microsoft's own ".NET core" cross-platform (mostly so it can run on containers and cloud more effectively, not to help Linux specifically, but we'll take it) All these buzzword technologies add up to a seriously strong open source gaming ecosystem, and distros like SteamOS, Bazzite, and others are finally starting to put all these pieces together and polish them into something seriously usable as a daily driver and for gaming.

And once you've got the gamers and enthusiasts, you're on the cutting edge, you've got the tip of the spear, and the rest of the spear tends to follow where they lead. Is it happening? Too early to tell, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility. The "Year of the Linux desktop" has always been a joke, but some people weren't joking and have been seriously working on it. That work appears to be starting to really pay off. Combined with Microsoft's various Windows 11 missteps continuing to fuel the fire, a lot of people are increasingly receptive to alternatives.

We can helpfully answer that for them by making sure they get sued.

Florida is basically the unofficial US Capitol now, so it would be confusing and ambiguous to have it associated with the traditional forms of unexpected insanity. Now it's going to be an entirely new kind of unexpected insanity, so Ohio has been selected to represent the old kind of unexpected insanity that Florida used to represent.

You could probably 3d print a square or hex shaped thing that has a slot on one end to fit onto the stopper, which will give you a better angle to grip it, work it from side to side or twist it. Wood would be another easy material option to try to make a little tool out of.

That said if it's really stuck enough to break the handle, then you're going to need a new one anyway, and at that point destructive measures and eventual replacement may be your only option. In this case you might try driving a long screw into it (pre-drilling a hole for the screw as necessary) or even some kind of hollow-wall anchor to give you a more secure attachment on the other side. If you have to destroy the whole thing to get it out of there, that's an option too. As any mechanic with a blowtorch will tell you about a seized fastener, "it can't be stuck if it's liquid"

It's not that weird. What they're aiming to avoid is the situation where a developer does a bait-and-switch replacement of the original, advertised game concept to chase a new demographic with new money. If you have never experienced this, count yourself lucky. A shady developer can advertise/sell a great concept in some niche like a compelling roguelike, survival crafting game or even a cozy and artistic decorating game, and actually create a decent game with lots of potential... at first. And then when it's collected a bunch of genuine good reviews and they realize either it's harder than they thought to make, or it's not making the cash flow they expected and not likely to, literally just replace the whole product, product page, everything with some generic shoot-em-up battle royale asset flip as an "upgrade" and alienate the early buyers to get a whole new audience to throw money at them until they realize the reviews are for what's essentially a totally different game before it crashes into mostly-negative territory. You might not think something this egregious ever really happens, but it does, especially in the horrible land of Crowdfunding/Early Access.

The first example I can remember that happened to me personally was called "Star Forge" not to be confused with the more recent board game adaption of the same name. The linked post is about the internal development drama behind the scenes, but the bait-and-switch bullshit happened years ago and it went sideways very quickly and was eventually pulled from the store never to be seen again.

Many, many big power-smoothing capacitors inside those jumping from 0 to 120V in a microsecond, that's why. The better-smoothed the power supply, the more capacitors and the bigger the sparks tend to be, although some really high quality ones put most of them behind inrush-current limiters to reduce the sparking, but that can also marginally reduce efficiency. High power electronics are always a bit of a tradeoff. The problem is that capacitors charge and discharge almost instantly in most cases, and when empty they act like a short circuit until they're filled, so they can create some pretty big sparks, even though the actual energy going in is minuscule by any reasonable measurement. It's almost like a static shock, huge spark, tiny energy.

Some motors will also spark badly when disconnected, but the reason is slightly different. They have a huge electromagnetic field which suddenly fills or collapses and that inductance in the coils can draw a lot of amps on startup and generate some pretty high voltages, more than enough to spark across the gap. Like the capacitors, they are very nearly a short circuit until they start moving.

It's also kind of misleading. This map labels North America as 115-120V like everyone always does, when in fact it's ALSO a 240V system, it's just that the "common" plug and the "typical" circuit don't use it, they only use half of a center-tapped 240V line. So that's the "standard" they choose to use to label the whole system.

But it's kind of unfair. It's 240V coming into the house just like everywhere else in the world, except you also get the choice for it to be 120V. Being split-phase makes it easy to run multiple 120V circuits with a minimum of wire and still allows 240V for high-wattage appliances on their own dedicated circuits. It's actually a very clever system and basically every house is effectively supplied with both voltages. It's often poorly utilized, yes, with a few practical limitations and a lot of limitations due to historical conventions, but as a technical design it's really kind of the best of both worlds, and it could be utilized a lot more effectively than it is.

If I was allowed to have an outlet with two 120V sockets, and one 240V European-style socket, there's no technical reason I could not safely do that in a single outlet box. I could choose to plug in whatever I want at either voltage as long as it wasn't more than 15 amps. Of course code would never allow that, because we consider the higher voltage "more dangerous" but it's always right there, across two opposite phase 120V lines. We're just not allowed to use it, except for large electrical appliances like air conditioners and clothes dryers. It's frustrating.