I’m also on Mastodon
Newer printers have flow rate sensors etc, that makes it much easier to just print what you have without spending much time dialing everything in.
Other than the quality of the plastic itself issues could be filament diameter and pigmentation, and spooling. Cheaper brands tend to have more variation and bad spooling.
I was able to get a used one cheap for under 600€, used it for a while and now have upgraded the hinges, speakers, battery, keyboard and motherboard along with more RAM and a larger SSD. It’s the perfect PC builder’s laptop.
The US and Japan have historically done the same.
See also Germany. Britain required stuff produced in Germany be marked „Made in Germany“, because many imported goods had the marks of British manufacturing and were of poor quality.
At this moment, I am sitting in a Amazon Kiro course. We have spent more than 2 hours and half the tokens of our test account just to fucking connect to an MCP server.
The process is so convoluted and Byzantine it has to be some kind of cult to enjoy this pain.
I‘m with Ed Zitron - the AI hype and especially stuff like this just makes it so obvious that the tech bros are flat out of ideas.
The megacorps can do anything they want with their product. The chef can change the menu anytime and he can refuse you service - it’s his restaurant. Our problem is that it’s a duopoly and there’s nowhere else to go.
The only way out is open standards and platforms, enabling true competition.
Sunday school did it for me. When you read about a guy against wealth, dogmatism and organized religion and realize where you are.
Here, religion is part of the curriculum and we sent our kids to catholic class. After a few years they were like „it’s just silly stories that don’t make sense“