Rabbit R1

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The tech world is abuzz with the announcement of the Rabbit R1, a little handheld AI assistant thing that has an interesting goal.

The tl;dr is that it’s a ChatGPT model that will run little AI agents (called “rabbits”) on your behalf to make complex API requests for you. I actually think it’s a pretty cool idea and one of the few things that I don’t hate about the modern AI push (ethics of ChatGPT aside, of course).

At $200 for the hardware it’s obvious that the LLM is running in the cloud somewhere, and it’s not like the other stuff wouldn’t also require cloud to operate anyway, though, and that raises the one big question I have about it: who foots the bill for the actual backend services? Because at $200 it’s probably being sold at-cost or for a small profit, and operating the necessary cloud services ain’t free.

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Fursona origins

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A random conversation tonight awakened a memory in me, namely, back in the 90s, we didn’t refer to fursonas as fursonas, but as “personal furries,” and I had it in my mind that the term “fursona” actually started out as derisive and came from an anti-furry space. Which led me on a bit of a quest.

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Closer in history

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>>> import datetime
>>> apollo = datetime.datetime(1969,7,20,20,17)
>>> delta = datetime.datetime.now() - apollo
>>> apollo + delta / 2
datetime.datetime(1996, 10, 13, 20, 57, 7, 893840)

Anything that happened on or before October 13, 1996 is now closer in history to the Apollo 11 moon landing than it is to today.

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Taking another Mastodon break

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It’s way too easy to get heated while in the thick of things and for bad-faith interpretations to take over from the point anyone’s trying to make, and that is absolutely a two-way street.1

For now I’ve removed Toot! from my phone and DNS-blocked plush.city from my home network, so hopefully any posts I make to Mastodon are just from my automatic crossposter (like this one). I’ll still (eventually) see replies to my blog posts that come in as Webmentions, but hopefully not being Always So Online will be better for my mental health, which hasn’t been great as of late and I’m definitely lashing out at others much more than I would like.

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Slip casting update

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Notes to self:

  • 6 minutes of kick time seems like a lot until you suddenly have to patch your mold because you’ve noticed there’s leaks in it
  • Adding more water after it starts to kick does not slow it down, it just makes it fail entirely
  • 1mm is not enough thickness on your outer shell, either
  • Starting with a 100mm square pot was probably a bit ambitious
  • It’s probably easier to mix the plaster in multiple small batches instead of trying to make it all go at once

Oh well, it was a good learning experience, as long as I actually learned from it.

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Bathroom hopeful conclusion

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Oh yeah, earlier today the original contractor came by to look at things. He’s agreed to do the finishing-up work for free, and also will be reimbursing me for the plumbing expenses, which is very kind of him. When I showed him what his previous plumber had done he was incredibly shocked by it.

Hopefully the work will be finished up sometime in the next month; unfortunately he’s traveling soon and won’t be back for a few weeks, but he said he will hopefully be able to schedule someone to do the patching-up.

Bambu X1C fixed

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Oh yeah, today the replacement heat bed sensor cable arrived. It was a major pain in the ass to replace. I ended up routing it differently than the manufacturer intended because the factory routing is clearly what causes the conductors to wear down and fail, and anyway doing it the right way would have required basically disassembling the entire printer.

But anyway I have a working main printer again and so I’ve resumed my production run. The current thing I’m making has TPU parts on it and that filament needs to print slowly so I’m keeping the old printer busy with it (since it’s not like the X1C can make it go any faster anyway). During the downtime I did do a couple of prints of the main PETG part and got a reminder of just how bad the old printer is at printing PETG (slow, lots of stringing, etc.) but it at least let me validate the correctness of the threaded insert.

I also have all of my plaster slip casting equipment and material now, so tomorrow I’ll probably print a calibration cube to make a slip cast mold of (and I guess that would be fun to fire as well). It’ll be fun to have anoter tool for creating things, and it’s nice that slip casting can go entirely in parallel with 3D printing aside from printing the templates.

Oh except I just realized I never bought plasticine, but I can get that at Target. I also still need to get the oil soap as well (which I can also get there).

Anyway, based on how obnoxious it was to fix the X1C, I think if I get a third printer for my print farm it’ll be the A1. It’s just as fast as the P1P and is WAY easier to maintain. The downside is that being a bed-slinger it’s still prone to some of the more annoying print defects inherent to that (especially ring artifacts). Also its AMS takes up a hell of a lot of desk space, but I wasn’t planning on getting a second AMS anyway. I mostly use my X1C’s as a fancy dry box, and there’s much cheaper dry boxes out there. It does mean that my multimaterial prints can only happen on the X1C, though, unless I go through the hassle of getting the Palette working again.