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Cake day: August 21st, 2023

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  • All plastic can be sanded and polished. Generally, you can follow an autobody like polishing regime. Something like 3M Imperial Wet/Dry 600, 800, 1000, 1500, 2000, 2500, then 3M Perfect-It 2 with a heavy cut pad, depending on the color and material, you may need a soft cut pad and light polish.

    In practice, you might be able to skip 800 or 1000, and maybe 2000, but it really depends on the material properties. You will have a hard time finding an equivalent to Perfect-It 2 outside of an automotive paint supply shop. Stuff available in the consumer space to total crap. You really need power tools like a buffer with very fine speed controls to polish correctly. The pad does the work, the compound is more like a lube and cooling agent. It does some work, but most is the pad. The critical thing is knowing how to wet the pad and manage the temperatures so you don’t overhead and burn the job. Automotive clear coats are a two part catalyzed polyurethane. Overheating a printed part and clear coat is nearly the same effect. I haven’t done UV resin specifically, but I have messed with a lot of similar media, and was a painter and owner of a small body shop for around 6 years. I have polished every type of common FDM material except nylon and TPU. If you are not able to get a decent heavy cut pad and polish, just use an old crew sock with a somewhat course texture and toothpaste. Toothpaste has a fairly consistent heavy cut grit. It won’t work as well or reach the same final gloss, but it will beat any polish you can buy in an auto parts or big box store.



  • RISC V is the first open source Instruction Set Architecture. Everything needed to fab the chip is open source. It is like how Linux dominates the world in enterprise software, RISC V is doing that for chip fabs. ARM is a closed ISA. Making the chips requires paying a royalty to ARM for each chip made. It is a scheme to extract money through manipulation not true competitive innovation or value.

    This is like any other market, as soon as an equivalent open source alternative exists, the incumbent extortionist’s days are numbered. Its only customer base is from convenience or ignorance.



  • I’ve written several python scripts to extend the capabilities of a text to speech AI using an offline Llama2 70B model. It takes enthusiast level hardware to run. The few errors it makes in code snippets it can also correct by pasting the terminal error message and prompting.

    I don’t write python, haven’t had to go online to look up anything about Python syntax, and have a script that can take any text and convert it to speech, convert any wave file into text, or concatenate any wave files.

    It takes larger models and some testing to find a good combination for a task. It also helps to use a model that is not subject to public spotlight and political pressure like GPT or Bard. The tiny models like 7B’s and 13B’s are like talking to children or teenagers.