Listening to another pitch about how AI can empower workers at various jobs across my industry, I was striken by the comparison in the title

3d printing, just like generative models, have it’s actual niche uses, where it’s obvious downsides are irrelevant and they come handy, e.g. prototyping, replacements, small-series production

Where it comes to the top-down AI promotion trend, it feels not unlike the idea of printing the whole product - a car, or a house, from the smallest details - applying the least effective method, doomed to have a worse than average outcome due to technological limitations

And screws, the thing that we nailed down long before, and that is completely incompatible with that mode of production, is a screaming, growling, shrieking example of how helpful tech can be mispurposed in the most stupid way

  • survirtual@lemmy.world
    32·
    4 days ago

    Aren’t eggs produced at industrial scales from chickens, who super-abundantly exist?

    How is that working out?

    In no universe does the economics of a $1 egg make sense, yet here certain countries are. Did you know you can have chickens in your backyard, and they’ll turn bugs and cheap feed into eggs?

    The less you can offload production to central untrusted parties, the better. When you manufacture something yourself, you get to know all the properties instead of trusting that some people elsewhere (whose primary motivation is money) still considered your interests by making a quality product.

    So when you say “we,” what does “we” mean exactly? It is rhetorical.

    Additionally, you get consistent reproducibility without reliance on large scale logistical networks. There are many other reasons I can think of off the top of my head beyond this.

    If we lived in a more cooperative world, with ironclad democratically owned logistics networks and manufacturing, centralized manufacturing would make sense in the way you say. But the reality is, we do not live in that world, and more and more, we are all increasingly feeling what that means.

    • LaLuzDelSol@lemmy.world
      3·
      4 days ago

      I’d just like to comment that keeping your own chickens is not economical unless you are basically willing to convert your yard into a chicken farm and slaughter your chickens once they stop laying eggs after a couple years, and even then its gonna take you a while to recoup (ha) the cost off the chicken coop, feed, etc, not to mention the time it takes to take care of them. What you’re really paying for with the cost of $1 (or really, 50 cents or less for most people) an egg is the convenience of eggs in the quantity you want them, with guaranteed quality, whenever you want them. Same with buying screws from the hardware store.

    • Windex007@lemmy.world
      41·
      4 days ago

      Edit: I’d originally written a response that matched your tone, and realized after a smoke that it’s needlessly confrontational and snarky, so I’m going to take another shot.

      I don’t mean to imply that it’s imperative that you don’t make your own screws.

      If you wanna make your own screws, go ahead, but I still don’t think you should 3D print them. There are existing tools to do that which are cheap, simple, and will produce vastly superior screws. Also cheaper. A tap and die set is your answer there.

      Also, if you want to leverage your 3D printer, use it for what it is actually good at which is creating complex bespoke geometries. Design your components with interlocking geometries such that you don’t NEED screws.

      Screws exist as the convenient solution to a manufacturing problem, being that it’s often easier to create complex geometries by producing a set of simpler geometries and then fastening them together. The underlying problem goes away if you can print arbitrarily complex components.

      If you think you gotta 3D print screws, you’re probably not even actually leveraging the new technology to its fullest extent anyways, you’re still designing with an old paradigm despite having new options.