For me, it was the requirement to be nicotine free for a few months around a surgery.

I went the patch route and it was a somewhat difficult 3 months, but it has been a blessing not have to clear-out my through every morning or anxiously anticipating stuff like a long flight or train ride.

I also got the "oh shit, I relapsed" dreams for about a year after I quit.

What you lose is not monetary, it's the ability to iterate quickly. It can be mitigated with next day manufacturing+delivery from local manufacturers... at a cost (IIRC, ~$80).

But frankly, it would be nicer to pluck a blank board in a laser, press burn, and have a good enough board in 10 minutes.

Fiber lasers are kind of capable of doing that, but they are still a bit expensive (~$2000), the result is imperfect (scorched epoxy board), and you can do at most 2 layers... if you are willing to manually tap rivet vias to connect the layers.

But still, I would love to have a way to build PCBs at home and I'm keeping an eye on people (mostly the Opulo/LumenPnp guy) experimenting milling and more recently engraving with fiber & UV lasers.

Plus their machinery is a bit more realistic for a hobbyist.

Knowledge has been assimilated and significant R&D efforts is being put in. If I look at Bambulalab, xTool or Makera, I see genuine designs, significant improvements in quality and price drops way beyond what cheaper labor can explain.

And it's also visible in other spaces: think DJI drones or CATL batteries in cars.

We use to see Japan in the same light by the way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxYjsZr1PwM

But nearly all of them want to make stuff... not make the tool that makes stuff. It's the whole "my hobby is 3d printing" vs "my hobby is 3d printers".

Assembling a Voron is already a one or two week-ends project, building and configuring a custom CNC router can take months and there are class of tools which are simply inaccessible (making multi-layer PCBs, building anything rigid enough for steel machining).

Homebrew machines will always have its aficionados, people still are building Vorons for example, even when it doesn't really make sense financially or in terms of performance. But it's a niche that only grew early-one artificially when it's the only path (ex: reprap & early 3dp days), most people don't actually enjoy this part.

IMHO, having cheap ($500 or less) numerically controlled pre-made tools like 3d printers, laser cutters/engravers and lately maybe desktop CNCs, has been a blessing in the maker space, lowering the barrier to entry and enabling an explosion in the number of people building stuff.

There is a world of difference between a 2019 Creality Ender 3 and a 2023 Bambulab A1 for not that much more money.

Auto-leveling, input shapping, PEI plates, high flow hotends, better build quality... all that have improved reliability significantly while increasing speed by a lot.

It even kind of killed the whole "tips and tricks to have good 3D prints" Youtube niche.

The Ender 3 had a huge role in democratizing 3D printing, but a 20% failure rate was kind of expected. With modern printers, the expectation is bellow 5% failure rate, plus the failures are much less painful since they are ~4 times faster.

It's not quite "press print and it works" but it's pretty damn close.

Data querying for creating marketing campaign audiences or generating some reporting reporting.

Little development for landing pages, forms, or custom integrations.

Multiple channels (SMS, push, email) & message templating.

And many marketing stuff like AB testing/fatigue, etc

Also, mono-tenant architectures is no golden bullet either. Such architecture (often coming from a formerly on-premise product that was SaaS-ified) can easily become hell to operate as it multiplies the integration points (DB parameters, URLs, allowlists, etc).

It's also quite wasteful in terms of resource utilization and hosting costs.

The AI spam is part of the issue, but not only. Maybe it's rose tinted glasses, but it feel like HN posts and comments quality have dropped significantly compared to ~5 to 10 years ago.

It used to have a lot more really technical subjects, with comments from experts on the topic.

Now days it seems to be a lot more of "hot takes with little nuance from people who have read at most half a Wikipedia page on the topic". And the content itself, being more generalist and less specialized, is no longer unique to HN.

Quality posts and comments do still occur, but they fill more and more needle in an haystack.

Cars already are extremely wasteful assets in terms of resource, space and money if you live in a decently served urban area. It already irrational to have one 90% of the times.

An indirect and somewhat hidden cost like insurance is unlikely to move the needle anywhere near significantly.

You want to keep-up appearances and leave some plausible deniability, even if it's generally BS.

The US is still one of the leading CO2 emitters, both per capita and in absolute terms. And for cumulative past emissions, it's not even close.

The expectation is not a mere 18% decrease but something closer to halving emissions just to be on a per capita level comparable to the EU or China.

It doesn't mean China doesn't need to make efforts. China's emissions are yet to be stabilized.

But the US need to make their share, and at least honor and (re-)ratify past climate agreements, if anything to dampen the economic arms race between China and the US.

It just a basic filter based on keywords, but it helps.

Also, having tried my luck recently on an old scanner (Canon 9950f), a word of cautious:

These devices, specially older ones, may not have built-in safety limits in their firmware. In my case, it ended-up only being a few belts rubbing a bit, but it could have been more serious.

Don't let the LLM test stuff unattended, and be ready to pull the plug.

On Twitter, it's mostly the networking effect, you want to be where peoples are, and unless a large chunk move at once, you are stuck there.

On Github, it's the technical cost of migrating, the git part is trivial, but tickets, PR history and CI/Integration are another can of worms.

Projects which moved away, moved away for good, at most only leaving a synchronized mirror.

In my opinion, the moment tech perception flipped from "it's kind of cool" to "I don't trust it" was E. Snowden in 2013.

For more than one decade now, we have progressively switched to treating tech more like a cigarette addiction we should keep in check (even if we don't succeed) rather than the qualify of life improvement, communication & entertainment tool it could be.

And tech companies don't care anymore. We went from Google's "don't be evil" to CEO's clamoring they will maybe make us jobless, and potentially kill us all, with Uber & Amazon's run of the mill human exploitation in the middle for good measure.

And these CEOs have very little to do with creating and improving said companies' products. The repeated outlandish claims kind of definitely broke this illusion.

It's also a system that is unstable in non-booming economies, drifts over time and needs periodic resets (through revolution, debt cancelling or inflation for example).

When dealing with material well-being, it makes much more sense to focus on goods and services and frame things more in the line of "would you trade a bit of wealth (smaller car or home, less Uber Eat, etc) to ensure a few unlucky people have food and roof".

Most western economies, specially one as wasteful as the US, have the luxury to make this choice. Not sharing it is a political & ideological decision, not a materially constrained one.