Every tool increases efficiency at the expense of labor, but when it was the power loom and sewing machine the unemployed seamstresses and weavers couldn't afford to buy one.
This time everyone gets a power loom, though. So... what happens to the value of woven goods? And if we apply this to all modern knowledge work, what happens to the overall economy?
> Then it was a lot of “self replicating printers” for quite a while, which never has been a real thing.
3D-printed 3D printers got quite far; the reason why this topic got out of perception by people who are not 3D printing nerds is rather that for mass production of 3D printers there exist much better processes.
What was realized was that up to a certain amount of parts, 3D printing these parts on a 3D printer works really well. You can find a lot of designs of such 3D printers on the internet.
Concerning the progress here, also observe that over the last years, home 3D printers got a lot better with respect to handling "engineering materials". These materials are very useful if you want to (partly) 3D-print a 3D printer, but this development is often not associated with "3D-printing 3D printers". :-)
Then you get to parts which can be printed on a 3D printer, but these parts will not be of the same quality as parts that can easily be bought, such as belts etc. The Mulbot is a design that takes this approach very far:
And then you get to parts that are nearly impossible to print on a 3D printer ...
So, after there was a consensus where the boundaries lie how much a 3D printer can sensibly be 3D-printed, people started looking at other manufacturing techniques that exist for producing parts of 3D printers, and started considering
1. could and how far could a machine for this process be 3D-printed (or produced on a 3D-printed machine)?
2. could we bring such a machine to home manufacturing, too (so that people can easily build such a machine at home)?
Machines that were considered for this were, for example, CNC mill (3, 4 and 5 axis), CNC lathe, pick and place machines (for producing PCBs), ...
There do exist partial implementations of such machines, just to give some examples:
- lots of designs of CNC mills that use 3D-printed parts. I won't give a list here, but just want to mention that the "Voron Cascade" project wants to do for home 3 axis CNC milling what the Voron did for 3D printing. Rumors on the internet say that the Voron Cascade is well on the way, but had quite a lot of delays with respect to announced release dates.
Thus: I hope I could give evidence that in the last years there still were a lot of developments towards the far goal of "self-replicating 3D printers", but these developments were rather silent, impressive developments instead of loud, obtrusive marketing stunts.
I think the severity of this is wildly overblown in an effort to make it fit the thesis.
Like… if the maker thing was less of an insane cult that died out than genuine excitement about things that actually did matter… well the whole thing falls apart.
We’re just not required to accept the (false, I think) premise this depends on, even if we’re inclined to agree with what it says about vibecoding.
Pay for the service.
Then pay more to remove ads.
But then a massive amount of their catalog remains “only with ads.”
And then they pack half the usable screen with media that must be bought and titles that require add-on subscriptions.
It’s a real cesspool.
Hulu does a lot of this garbage too, but not quite as obnoxiously.
I feel like the less tolerance I have for ads (as time goes on), the more desperate they get in trying increasingly aggressive ways of making you watch ads. I'm never watching ads again, ever! I'm willing to pay, but not with my time for your terrible, horrendous, bullshit ads!
I want to know how you can be a trillion dollar tech company with unlimited access to all the best minds and AI tools and whatever… and still have a busted-ass mobile app fronting their store. For YEARS.
I never thought I would say this, but Walmart is worlds better than Amazon for buying regular stuff. Their logistics are better, you have to wade through a lot less no-name trash to find the thing you wanted, and their Prime-like membership works across shopping and grocery. Also, it’s cheaper.
I don’t see 70 million Americans transitioning from white collar “knowledge worker” to plumbers and electricians in the 18 months the hype men are quoting. Many don’t even have the physical capabilities for it.
I'm not seeing that either. I rather thought of white collar work being devalued rather than disappearing. By "end of white collar dream" I meant that you won't be making good money with it, because it would be commoditized with all workers being pretty much the same as far as employers concerned - but there will not necessarily be less work to do. And you will probably be able to afford food, clothes and shelter.
But also it says: "Raw markdown. No preview pane. That's the point."
So I guess it's intentionally more primitive than notepad, if that's a thing you want?
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