Daily Archives: 2021-07-29

Running a CNC machine is definitely about sex and should be demonetized

Source: Hacker News

Article note: So, I'm totally onboard that Americans' weird selectively puritanical attitudes are absurd, and having our hegemonic tech firms enforce them is not a good thing. We've been having this fight forever, go read Nabokov's afterword _On a Book Entitled Lolita_ from 1956 and its the same discussion with better language. ...But also, please don't blow smoke up my ass about intentionally overtly sexualized content being anything other than what it is. It's right there in the handle, it's a highly effective strategy to get those engagement dollars, don't be disingenuous. Let's be civil, throw a THOT tag on the things that use sex to drive engagement, and move on. I know the reason why not is ad dollars, advertisers are major perpetrators of the sexual-but-not-pornographic attention grab, if it puts them off, they're full of shit and we can not let them filter on it.
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3D-Printed Tooling Enables DIY Electrochemical Machining

Source: Hack a Day

Article note: Neat! I read some stuff about people trying DIY ECM for internal features like barrel rifling a while back, but this looks markedly more sophisticated, even though there's nothing terribly complicated or inaccessible in the setup.

When it comes to turning a raw block of metal into a useful part, most processes are pretty dramatic. Sharp and tough tools are slammed into raw stock to remove tiny bits at a time, releasing the part trapped within. It doesn’t always have to be quite so violent though, as these experiments in electrochemical machining suggest.

Electrochemical machining, or ECM, is not to be confused with electrical discharge machining, or EDM. While similar, ECM is a much tamer process. Where EDM relies on a powerful electric arc between the tool and the work to erode material in a dielectric fluid, ECM is much more like electrolysis in reverse. In ECM, a workpiece and custom tool are placed in an electrolyte bath and wired to a power source; the workpiece is the anode while the tool is the cathode, and the flow of charged electrolyte through the tool ionizes the workpiece, slowly eroding it.

The trick — and expense — of ECM is generally in making the tooling, which can be extremely complicated. For his experiments, [Amos] took the shortcut of 3D-printing his tool — he chose [Suzanne] the Blender monkey — and then copper plating it, to make it conductive. Attached to the remains of a RepRap for Z-axis control and kitted out with tanks and pumps to keep the electrolyte flowing, the rig worked surprisingly well, leaving a recognizably simian faceprint on a block of steel.

[Amos] admits the setup is far from optimized; the loop controlling the distance between workpiece and tool isn’t closed yet, for instance. Still, for initial experiments, the results are very encouraging, and we like the idea of 3D-printing tools for this process. Given his previous success straightening his own teeth or 3D-printing glass, we expect he’ll get this fully sorted soon enough.

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The Itanic Has Sunk

Source: Hacker News

Article note: They held out for 20 years with it on the market, and another 10 in development before that, for a project so expensive, late, and beset with failure that people debate whether it was a conspiracy to suck the air out of competing high-end architectures, or simply Intel's third sequential utter overestimation of their own ability to produce a viable next-gen architecture (after the iAPX432 and i860/960 stuff). It'll be weird not seeing jokes about it in the tech press, it's been a constant for the entire part of my life where I've been paying attention to the tech industry.
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Amazon has ruined search and Google is in on it

Source: Hacker News

Article note: It's such a bummer that the internet has been so thoroughly overrun by people trying to scam a quick buck. There is a degree of "failure of imagination by early designers," but I'm not even sure what a system robust against motivated scammers, SEO assholes, and their sock-puppets would look like, especially one that isn't extremely, dangerously invasive to its users.
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