The answer is so that they can charge different prices per credit. If you buy low amounts, they can charge one price. If you buy in bulk, they can offer a discount. The usage is the same, but they can differentiate price per usage to give people more a favorable price if they are better customers.

Is there anything wrong with that?

So you probably wouldn’t have any clout anyways, like all of the other blog posts.

Same thing it’s always been. Convenience. Including maintenance costs. AI tools have lowered the bar significantly on some things, so SaaS offerings will need to be better, but I don’t want to reinvent every wheel. I want to build the thing I want to build, not the things to build that.

Just like I go to restaurants instead of making every meal myself.

So my question to you is: what the heck are you doing to your salad spinners?

These are the types of things I want to print. My Ender 3 was so finicky, I only got a few out before I gave up.

Yeah, but then they’d be in NC, TN, NV, or FL which, frankly, sounds absolutely miserable. They made the right choice by being in NYC.

Adafruit seems to be doing very well where they are. Why would they want to suffer in such junk states like those with worthless governments when they could continue to be where they are and are happy? They’d also be scraping the bottom of the barrel in those places for talent for the necessary in-person positions. The stars up mentioned sure are cheaper, and they still cost more than they are worth.

It was so easy for me to go back to a cheap drip coffee maker and pre-ground coffee. I realized that I’ll never appreciate the flavors and process as much as the investment would call for.

But PT (sorry, I guess it’s stylized, pt) has written like this for years, long before the recent LLM-based AI revolution (maybe given his position in the tech community he had much earlier insight into what the machines want). It has been one of the reasons his messages always seem aggressive, IMO.

SparkFun filled a very important gap for me during the downfall of RadioShack. Their Free Day was a source of excitement and goodies. Around the same time they realized the legal implications of Free Day and had to cancel it, (but not because of it) I started buying from Adafruit. Since then I’ve spent many thousands on their stuff. Even when I could get it cheaper elsewhere, I was OK spending more there because of their open source work. I even made a pilgrimage to their office when it was by Ground Zero.

I’m not sure I can find them now, but Sparkfun’s Nate has definitely posted public comments over the years that are not friendly to Adafruit, always clearly rooted in jealousy. One that comes to mind was him telling Adafruit to stop pretending they are an underdog and stop preening that they didn’t (at that point) have millions in sales. I totally believe Adafruit’s account of what Sparkfun was doing.

At the same time, Phil has always rubbed me the wrong way to - too aggressive and a bit rude, even in their own forums, including where they provide customer support on orders. The threads shared of his egregious behavior do not shock me in the least.

I guess this is a good of a reason as any to stop supporting both. I’ll save thousands and I won’t have a continuously growing supply of components for projects I’ll never get around to.

This is exactly what I expect out of…

Sorry, got interrupted by an email saying my bank was involved in a security incident.

Dinner time used to be a time of the day where couples and families would have the first chance since breakfast to discuss their day. With all of different available forms of communication today, my partner and I already know what happened during the other’s day and we are doing something like planning the next adventure.

On the flip side, being able to have a primary I never change and a secondary that I swap out for international travel has proven to be extremely valuable to me. So you take the bad with the good.

Wow, they are really going for that human-like behavior aren’t they?