But if you build on them you should have read them. I don't know about the specifics and I don't know if Schmidhuber is out of line or not, and citations and impact factors are a terrible mess, but generally speaking, you are responsible for finding and reading and citing any related work that needs to be cited, and if you work on neural networks in an academic context you probably have been forced to read that particular one at some point. Citation obligations don't just disappear because you don't want to do the research.

From a hobbyist perspective, I find it's a much better designed machine than a friend's Bambu that recently broke down and turned out pretty much unfixable. Performance is at least on par, but the entire Prusa can be taken apart with basic hex and torx keys, it's highly serviceable and repairable, lots of fairly standard parts, not very highly integrated. I consider that a feature, but that will cause higher sourcing and assembly costs. It's built like a tank, lots of attention to detail, I expect it to last for a long time with minimal servicing.

That also means it's not targeting the same niche as Bambu's printers. That's not a personal insult, that's just a consequence of how things are right now. No European company is going to undercut a ultra high scale Chinese market dominiation vehicle, that's just not happening. Prusa is doing lots of R&D on much lower sales, they don't have the kind of access to Chinese industry that Bambu has, obviously the Bambu will be cheaper even if Prusa tried to compete in the same segment. But once the market domination thing is far enough along I expect Bambu will disallow non-chipped filament, lock everything into their cloud and jack up their prices. That's how these schemes usually end if they work out, but if they did that now, companies like Prusa would see record sales, so they don't do that just yet.

I'm pretty happy we still have some trace amounts of viable B2C tech industry in Europe. Companies like Prusa provide insane social value too by keeping skills and production in the EU. That's something we sorely need more of (not that companies are to blame, but we still do). Not sure how things will play out, and I'm not too optimistic, but perhaps with everyone else going all-in on dark patterns and pumping out disposable low cost crap, there is an emerging niche for reasonably open high-quality products that serve the owner first and don't data mine them for every last private detail.

The greatest part of the rest, however, appears to be true. I find I'm feeling much better overall, not worse, if I take the bike somewhere even in uncomfortable weather, and it turns out it's more fun as well, more often than not. Low-processed food makes my digestive system measurably happier, walking lots makes me unreasonably healthier, being among trees and mountains calms me to a crazy degree.

But then we did spend like 98% of our evolutionary history since the last big speciation event as hunter-gatherers, and we gotta be as adapted to that as any critter is to their lifestyle.

At this point I kind of expect to find perversions the social patterns and structures of hunter-gatherer groups embedded in the dark patterns that make social media so insidious, much like exploiting our built-in craving for scarce energy-dense nutrition made Coca Cola etc. the economic giants they are. I just don't know enough about the social structures of the deep past to spot these things yet. There doesn't seem to be a lot of literature on that either, so I'm not sure how I'll get there, but I'd like to.