disagree on pid kit only.

the full on duino mod is way better for one primary reason. power steam or whatever they call the thing they do with the steamer. it takes the sputtery slow and weak steam wand and makes it actually functional.

also the "adaptive" settings you can do on there let you basically never have to "dial in" a shot. throw any random (still decent q and paired with a good grinder) beans on there and you get a shot thats very drinkable. For lattes and stuff where you are hiding the coffee in milk anyway this is like still better than 90% of what you can get from the coffee shop with the 20k$ big iron and 0 effort. and when you do have that special bag that wants the extra attention and straight espresso you've got all the controls and presets and shot tracking.

if you are gonna try and do home espresso you already have an involved hobby, if you are gonna mod your machine you are already pretty hardcore about your hobby... you might as well go all in at that point

like could you make it aware of the fdm limits and help me avoid them while im building instead of needing the build-slice-refine flow across multiple software?

another nice thing i thought of with enemy block types idea is that you don't need to look anywhere but the board if you get rid of powerups that you just have so your whole interface gets simpler. if you still needed powerups you could have them show up as normal pieces in the chain of pieces.

it def starts to veer into more of a classic tetris how far can you go vibe than maybe the puzzle thing you are going for, but maybe its actually two games. puzzle mode is as now but starts with a fixed set or fixed progression of enemys. you finish the puzzle when you defeat them all. winning then is time or rows cleared or minimum number of pieces even. infinite mode is more like the current. or classic tetris, how far can you go while new enemies spawn in of increasing number and difficulty. winning is how many enemies you clear + lines + time

This comment above about difficulty made me wonder if there are more interesting things to do with the unclear-able blocks that would both let you ramp the difficulty and achieve more of your vision. A few off the cuff ideas:

* enemy blocks that are clearable if you make a row and a column through them * enemy blocks that require to be surrounded by n deep blocks to resolve * enemy blocks that automatically pop into single cell holes * enemy blocks that grow by infecting neighboring blocks over time or the more other rows you clear * enemy blocks that require multiple row clears to resolve

the thought is having a few types with each enemy block needing a different strategy to resolve would give you more levers on how to control difficulty and give you more variation to the strategy and more agency to defeat them. powerups is kinda a deus-ex-machina currently. you dont feel earned satisfaction when you clear an enemy block.

We do have gov. mechanisms for controlling what can be sold as food so it seems plausible, but those only happened after we went through a period of time where companies would literally put poison into bread as a filler, and the whole rotten meat packing industry thing. Maybe we are in that phase now but even so i dont expect there to be enough of a social movement to control these things (and as you say... how is tricky)

still "real food" might not have the reach of mcdonalds, but it does exit and thrive. maybe there is market for a healthy network? based on the comments here and a lot of anecdotes, I suspect there is some latent demand.

I wonder if there is anything to learn from other additive things? like a niccotine gum mode. a social network that starts you off in addictive mode and tapers you down to something better?

*vw buzz fails the good test for no one pedal driving and the price for what you get is outta wack. though lots of the 1st gen ones are still sitting on car lots so maybe that could cross the exception barrier if they go for cheaper.

or in some cases even upgrade to improve capabilities...

I did the gaggiauino mod to my gaggia classic and basically everything in there is just pipes and wires... the most complicated single part on the original is the vibratory pump. I'm pretty sure i could keep that same machine going indefinitely with access to parts.

healthy as in: has real people that you really know. Has no ads or bots or ai slop. Isn't full of dark patterns that are designed to turn you into a doom scrolling zombie? and maybe even has features that actually help you to stay connected in a real way to other people? oh and you are actually the customer and not the product so won't just be a service to gather bulk data on your "consumer preferences" so other places can target ads...

because while the thing you want isn't a technology or a business model I think if you actually wanted it to exist you need both, and we all mostly agree the old model where the social internet is just ad/data supported is not a path to something good. so the very real question is how much would you be willing pay in dues for that social network? how much would your friends pay? if it existed would you push for them to go there?

its hard to imagine a paid service that is basically the web version of kale being popular enough to get to network effects scale vs tiktok's double fudge oreos, but it would need to start somewhere... and some people do choose kale over oreos.

like I can model a table that is the right size and looks like it will not tip over for my game, but I am going to cad that table to run a stress sim and make the plans for building it for real.

though id still call the action of doing the building in the cad software "modeling"... so idk.. language is weird.

so software that lets you work accurately with measurements and real units == cad. (fusion360) software that just makes geometry == modeling. (blender)

but if you wanna go get real confused look at "plasticity" an app targeted at "modeling" but uses a cad engine and sells itself as "cad for artists" it has real scale measurements and everything too.

(yes i know its not as dumb a 90s toyota or whatever, but its the dumbest you can probaby get that is ev* and complies with modern regulations)

*not from some ecovangalist pov but because by almost every measure of what a car needs to do for most people ev is better at that, but thats an argument for another thread.

w.o that (and other agri improvements) we wouldnt have enough spare calories as a species to devote to these other non food production related activities, like say poking rocks with electrons until they can become computers that can run excel. its really hard to visualize how much of human effort across history has just been about food production.