You know, I finally got into 3D printing after putting it off for years, and I think you’re right. Part of why I was hesitant to start was that all tech is just expensive here in Lebanon, and it’s not always easy to source good filament that hasn’t been slurping moisture in a shop for five years.

I was watching a video by a (seemingly American) channel I wasn’t very familiar with, and he just dropped a “here in Israel, due to the war, we haven’t been able to…” very casually before complaining about something “war-related” that I experience all the time. Maybe electrical blackouts, or interrupted shipping, or lack of parts, or whatever. But he was still showing new products, was still getting free stuff from sponsors… huh. I don’t necessarily have anything against him as a person, but it was weird to see how easy it was for him. Most online shops don’t ship here. I know from some friends who do YouTube as a side thing that even shitty little scam sponsors won’t touch you if you send them wire instructions for a Lebanese bank. So, I don’t know. I frankly don’t think it’s that bad, I haven’t seen too many (vocal) genocide fans. There might just be a proportionally large 3D printing scene there.

Now the crypto bro stuff… That’s a whole thing. Right as crypto was becoming something my parents would ask me about, a lot of non-technical people around me were taking up roles in fintech. Think CS graduates you’d expect to work in technical but not super difficult job. This was in the middle of an economic abyss here so you know people were getting taken advantage of and getting paid in “digital assets” or whatever. And these guys would proudly call themselves Web3 professionals or founders etc. These were the same guys who should know better because they understand what crypto actually is, but they were (or at least pretended to be) drinking the Kool-Aid. And that terrified me - and it also helped me understand the clear distinction between a “tech bro” and an actual “tech person” (and actual “bros” in tech - which do exist and don’t suck ass!)

This was also around the time I started reading a bit of HN, where I also found these tech-related takes that were very different from how I saw the world. The folks around me in tech that I was friends with tended to be more anarchist-flavored. I don’t use HN at all now.

One thing I despise about the 3D printing “scene” now is the huge volume of print farm slop. I’ll be watching a video on YouTube about something basic like how to counteract ringing on my printer. The algorithm then doesn’t just suggest more beginner tuning and cool experimental stuff, oh no. It suggests videos about print farms, often run by people who are clearly not technical/enthusiasts. They just have walls of machines pumping out objects I couldn’t fathom anyone buying. Like I’ve used a commercial 3D printing service before for prototyping, print farms have a place (especially if I want to print in a material that would be risky or hard to print at home), but like generic looking little vases? Why? There’s also all the low quality models people pump out, and apparently maker fairs are having trouble with people selling generic prints and undercutting handmade stuff… Like maybe if you’re there to model stuff for someone, that’s great, but this isn’t it.

This is why I was sure I found the right instance when one of the key things that resonated with me in the signup process was something about not wanting to monetize hobbies. And I think that’s what separates those people from me. I can enjoy things because I enjoy them. My hobbies belong to me.

So fuck the vultures because those people are always going to suck the marrow out of any good tech. The grifters will always be there before you, any time something new becomes useful. I’ve also found that the 3D printing community has also been very diligent in making sure companies contribute to open source ever since the RepRap big bang of modern printing, and that most people you meet tend to be cool folks who print cool stuff. There’s a lot of good, too.

My favorite is the one of him uh hanging out with his friend Mussolini but I’m not sure .world is willing to host that one lol

I think the Raspberry Pi 4 -> Pi 5 is a very clear demonstration of this.

The power requirements went way up, and therefore the needed cooling, after years of the 1->2->3->4 being pretty similar. And most importantly, the prices for those were similar (35 USD MSRP I think, or usually around 60 USD here). The new one is much more expensive than that and that hasn’t gone down without controversy.

Maybe consoles are more visible to most people but the different versions of Pis are much more apples to apples and are designed to be drop-in upgrades.

I think I’ll still be using Pi 4s for a long time personally.

Was actually dragged into watching this with friends. It’s popcorn fodder with a perceptible slop content but it wasn’t as bad as I prepared myself for. For context I followed the Marvel movies on and off until Endgame and just lost interest after that.

I have thoughts on it but I haven’t sat down to formulate all of them. I think one thing that really stuck with me was this point that I’ve heard about the show Severance (which the same friends keep asking me to watch), where it’s kind of taking common sentiments about the lifelessness of corporate (or of life in general in the case of this movie), and turning it into a piece of media - but like the same corporations that brought us here are the ones making said media. Basically trying to jump the gun on being “the good/empathetic company.”

Oh the kids keep whining about mental health? How about a depressed cynical group of misfits for our next heroes?

I did like that the stakes are being brought down though. I think the biggest problem with these movies is that everyone is saving the world four times a year in a neat 130 minute story which really kills any stakes. You know, besides being finite, momentum-fueled movies that categorically will never end on a bad note.

And I don’t know if it’s just me getting more and more cynical or if the writing is just extra lazy compared to the older movies. It’s very likely the writing was always bad but I wasn’t really paying attention back then.

The one on the right seems to be slightly edited into further uncanny valley territory.

Here’s a comment I remember from months ago saying something like “it’s real omg” while replying to it with an unedited (or less edited idk) photo that is clearly different. It’s subtle at a glance.

She still looks like an uncanny caricature in the real one. But yes, people will go into surgery for one niggling insecurity, even people you wouldn’t consider bad looking, and a small number do get hooked on that feeling of “fixing” their appearance, first to diminishing returns, and then to outright becoming uncomfortable to look at.

Thankfully, this is a piece of irredeemable human excrement we’re discussing, and every dollar she spends reinforcing an unscrupulous surgeon’s yacht is one she’s not using to spread her message. Even if I never end up moving to the US, this environment of evil rhetoric has been poisoning a lot of potential places that people like me would want to immigrate to.

EDIT:

That’s enough devil’s advocate from me. I hope she chokes on whatever disgusting creature she starts “gaining rapport” with next.

Yep.

You don’t magically color a square green and have ✨the market✨ suddenly materialize a wholesome high-rise building for you.

You gotta have a supply chain for gravel, concrete, bricks/prefabs, metal (rebar), and electrical stuff, and you should also have the vehicles and manpower (which is bused in) to actually turn all of that into a building. You gotta make sure water is actually pumped there, pipes aren’t magic. Sewers aren’t magic. Electricity requires network planning. It’s great. So long as the road isn’t bottlenecked by your many construction vehicles. You need more roads? Sure! How much asphalt are you producing?

And that’s the easy mode. The “full” experience has you manage the fuel supply chain and maintenance for said construction vehicles, which you can now only buy at the border instead of at the garage. You also have garbage collection, recycling, it’s a full time job that still manages to be more interesting than any job I’ve had lol

There’s an infamous let’s play of the “full” game that basically has the first hour or two completely paused just preparing the start of the game.

There’s hardware made to emulate that too, should you go that route. Not free though.

I’ve almost exclusively played it for the past few months instead of the original, and I still feel like something is not quite right. But I can’t articulate it very well. At launch the new one was atrocious, now it’s just fine. I’d probably play the original even more if it didn’t have some weird little performance issues (such as the music doing little glitches and skips… you know? The paid music DLC that’s actually pretty good? I wish we could play it in CS2 as well, there’s so much of it and a lot of us got it bundled with other stuff.)

I’ve also discovered WRSR since the launch of the second and that’s really moved the goalposts for city management games for me. CS and CS2 are much more laid back. WRSR is almost cruel with how tightly interlocked the many mechanics are, unlike CS/SC which are really more like city painters than city management games.

Huh. The image was very weird to me, but I’ve played some version of this as a kid. Team one makes this structure against a wall, team two send people to jump and crawl forward, the goal being to break the “bridge”. I can’t even remember what we fucking called this game, this was in Lebanon in the late aughts/early tens.

There’s something about how most teenage boys are wired that made it feel exceptionally badass when your team was on the bottom and you didn’t crumple when it was the turn of one of the large gentlemen on the other team to jump.

We might be getting bombed every week but this picture was taken in 1989, a period of civil war so brutal it is itself referred to as a civil war (there was a lull in the previous years).

Houses are not covered in sandbags today. This photo always gets passed around and it’s lost all sentimentality for me. I don’t want us to only be known as permanent victims of war.

These were no less atrocious than current Wojak format comics.

FWIW I liked that people scribbled out their shitty ideas, often with zero artfulness in MS Paint, giving it just enough effort to get the idea across. I’m seeing a lot of lazy AI images being passed around using the Twitter image generator and it’s like there’s no threshold for something to actually be funny before being posted.

It’s called talent, learn it.

Shareware humor, especially of the elusive Actually Funny variety, has a dry je ne sais quoi that I miss dearly.

It’s the complete opposite of shareware but the writing for the original Sims also had that sarcastic, detached, observational quality to it.

Well this just took me back 15 years.

SC4 is a timeless piece of software.

I don’t like that I opened the comments to write this specifically.

Maybe there’s more to the hive mind than I thought.

I don’t know if I’d say Daggerfall to Morrowind was a step backwards. In terms of years they’re not all that far apart. But in terms of capturing the philosophy of their respective eras? I’d call them two different types of maximalism, before things coalesced into the distilled Skyrim experience.

Both of those games were before my time, but the impression I get with Daggerfall is that this was right when PCs started getting enough memory to go crazy and build giant procedurally generated worlds. Morrowind is like that with maximizing graphics and sounds, it’s in that first generation of games that aged differently to everything that came before. As dated as Morrowind looks, it still looks really high effort and (dare I say it) artfully designed. It’s much more of a game, while DF feels to me like a game program. Am I making any sense?

IIRC during the 2019 protests I saw a screenshot of her Instagram where she clearly showed her LF struck Cross tattoo with a caption like “can anyone help me cover this shit up”.

I am not familiar with her politics or her work (or the Instagram platform or tattoos in general), but it’s more than likely that she had that tattoo done without knowing too much about the symbol’s history. She’s in the diaspora and from the postwar generation, so there’s some distance between her and the reality of the symbol.

I’m used to seeing it pop up on walls in poor Christian neighborhoods every time there’s a particularly sectarian mini civil war one-off. And in a few family group chats, unfortunately.

Symbolism is a powerful thing. The struck cross does give me a bit of a hollow oomph, to be completely honest, a symbol of some sort of Christian fighting spirit to stay alive. But I don’t fundamentally believe in a zero sum system, I don’t believe the non Christians are going to murder and eat me, hell, I don’t believe we aren’t still the hegemonic plurality in our sectarian hell system. It’s a symbol borne by people who murdered civilians in their home in 1982 and still feel proud of it in 2025. Especially Palestinian civilians. They even carved these crosses into the chests of a few of their victims. I don’t think she is likely to have supported all of that, again, but it is relevant to the conversation.

Edit:

They said they thought it was great. Surely it can only be one of these two?

Kids are smarter than we give them credit for. It’s like kids dreaming of being actors or singers or athletes.

Even if they think their teachers are good people, they clearly see that they don’t drive fancy cars. Even if their parents are middle income earners, they aren’t as famous or rich as the people babysitting them on screen. It may be more obnoxious and more piped straight into their eyeballs now but it’s hardly new.

Hell I’m a grown ass adult and I think about every once in a while.

Your message is very relieving. After years of busting my ass to prepare to move westward, with Germany always having been an option, I’ve been pretty disgusted by the news coming from there. The US has been more brazen but I’m not nearly as disappointed in them.

A few of my friends in Germany are basically staying mouth shut about any real issues because they’re scared they’ll lose their visas. Hell, one of them has citizenship now and he’s afraid to speak up about anything. Or even order a specific book online for me lest it get him on a list.

And I’m just from Lebanon, I’m not Palestinian or Golani like the guy you mentioned. I’m implicitly associated, but not implicitly guilty by birth. You’d think Germany of all places would know better.