This paragraph is wild to me:

"The original Adept had six buttons. However, ever since we released the original Adept, the PCBs have contained two unpopulated lands for additional switches. Our intention was always to eventually move to eight buttons. The A+ finally lives up to the ambition that we set for ourselves back in 2023."

So they designed it to have 8 switches from the start - but then hid 2 of them so they'd have a "new version" once the sales of the old one slowed down. I don't know if that's genius or sad capitalism...

This kind of BOM variant stuff happens all the time so you can buy a bunch of bare boards and sit on them. You don't need to do another expensive board run if firmware development catches up or if you decide you want to depopulate some stuff for a cheaper model or populate more stuff for a more expensive model.

It's difficult to see greed being a motivator from a group that literally releases the source code for everything.

This is why I thoroughly enjoyed building my Prusa as a kit. You see little tricks like this, including this exact one. Or how they embed threaded nuts, or how the print is shaped and oriented to be made without supports, etc. Building the prusa saved a bit of money, but was also a crash course in how to design.

Building anything is a good way to learn. It’s the industrial design / manufacturing equivalent of perusing or hacking on a good open source project.

This is the only reason I still want a Voron. I don't need the extra speed, I don't print that much, but building it is a great project.

Making your own tools is a time-honored tradition, partly for this reason.

If this plugs into the house wiring through a single standard 120V plug, only half of the plugs in the house would ever draw energy from the solar panel.

Household wiring actually has 2 separate 120V supply lines, out of phase with each other (This is how you can get 240V outlets (ovens, driers)). The 120V lines connect to only one of these two lines, and which one it connects to is determined by what slot the breaker is plugged into at the breaker box.

I'd love to see an answer to this question..

You'd think the datacenter boom would have happened during COVID when everyone was stuck at home ordering everything online, streaming everything and doing zoom calls all day as they work from home.

But the fact that it's happening now is weird. Everyone I know has cooled on AI, even my most AI loving friends are no longer using it for art, porn or therapy.

So is it all speculative? Companies hoping to get in on the "AI goldrush"?

Could this be nefarious? Instead of one big underground secret military datacenter, distribute a resilient network of regular datacenters all around the country that are also used for civilian purposes.

I'd love to own one of these!

It could fold my laundry while I'm busy working from home as a teleoperator for Weave Robots.

They charge you for the privilege of folding your own laundry. Brilliant.

But you would also be getting paid. Literally arbitrage laundering.

F*ck em - let them have that body shape. Seriously at this point do we need more stratocaster shaped guitars?

There's so many cool companies doing unique body shapes, if you're gonna take the time to build a guitar why not put some thought into the design?

Serious question: Is AI just being hyped and forced so hard because so many people hold stocks in it?

How many people took those MP3s and tried to create a company that would IPO for a trillion dollars?

Then it replaces 3 people's jobs, requiring paying 3 UBI's in this thought experiment.

What un-corrupted person or system is going to perform this assessment?

Cha-Ching! I bet $2000 that this guy was going to get charged.