Got it. By the way, next time you are setting up a camera, make sure to use Frigate so that you can turn it off in case a kid enters your bathroom.

I am providing respectful advice.

The implication that people are just leaving these running and never checking in on anything is a pretty big accusation.

Similarly, it is also a stupid one. Because if the feeder stops working? Then you literally just have a really expensive food dish.

ALSO: Many of the gravity based ones with battery backups are designed to fail open rather than fail closed. The idea being that if a sufficiently low battery level is detected the gravity hopper just opens up and your furry friend eats until they vomit.

There is a way to point out flaws. Something like “Hey, be careful with the rotary kind. If they fail, your pet can’t even force open the latch to get more food”. Which still has implications of neglect, but is a much more polite version than

If this is something that you’re wanting to use for long-term unattended food needs, I think you might want to reconsider.

which is an accusation of neglect that also fundamentally misunderstands how these devices even work (or what their capacities are).

And while I will tolerate a lot of stupidity and ad hominem accusations of lying if someone thinks differently: I draw the line at being accused of animal neglect.

Then maybe, just maybe, you don’t need to pop into a thread (on a board about home automation solutions) about someone asking for recommendations for a product that you don’t like? I don’t go into threads about crocs and tell people they are bad shoes. And I especially don’t then imply that they are bad parents if they haven’t had their children checked out by a podiatrist to see if they need additional support before even considering getting them a pair of shitty plastic clogs.

And if you still need to make sure your voice and “wisdom” is heard: Maybe don’t instantly assume everyone is a neglectful asshole? Because that mostly just speaks to your personal thought process.

You are the one who rolled up and accused someone of being a neglectful pet owner because they are looking for a quality of life improvement for their companion.

And you did that in the context of “What happens if this all fails and you just have a food bowl?” as though it were actually an argument.

Also: Not all animals are good at portion control. Some animals, particularly a lot of rescues, will hoover up that extra food bowl the moment they see it and get sick. That is WHY people get automated feeders. Same with portion control. Rather than dealing with a little fur baby climbing me while I am using the scales, I can just check to make sure there is food in the bowl a few minutes after feeding time and know that “close enough to” the appropriate portion has been dispensed.

Also: I know from experience that it is a lot better when a friend says “hey, can you check in on Fluffy in the evenings? Make sure it looks like she had food in her bowl and clean her box” rather than “Okay, dinner time is at 6 and if she doesn’t get that she will destroy the house. Also, she doesn’t like to eat when people are in the room so make sure you feed her, go downstairs to clean her other box, and then wait until she is done before you clean her main box”.

But hey, good to know you don’t like automation. That means you don’t have to respond to this thread. Rather than come in, throw shade, accuse others of being neglectful, etc.

If the power goes out (and you have no UPSes or similar backups) or your entire infrastructure falls over, there is really no difference between having nothing. Same with if you decide to never refill the food hopper because you are an asshole.

Whereas, if things work, you have a nice tool to cover nights when you might not be home for whatever reason or to make things easier on friends checking in on your little buddy while you are out of town.

But hey, thanks for responding to a question about autoamted feeders with your misunderstanding of how animals are fed or what they are used for.

Also, the model you specifically looked at has a battery backup for exactly that reason

Let me give you a quick life lesson. Think of it as 3d printing a better personality

The response to ". " is not “How dare you insult me. I have never been insulted before in my life and I will not stand for it now!”

It is either understanding that you are not an incel and it is not referring to you. Or, if you aren’t that confident, you say “oh shit. just to make it clear, I am not an incel. I just genuinely had no idea who she was but still felt the need to go out of my way to enforce gatekeeping on this random message board”

The former makes you look like a deranged lunatic and… makes me increasingly sure that you felt attacked for a reason. The latter is how a normal human being acknowledges they accidentally did something shitty, from ignorance, but have learned from it.

I would probably say that if you aren’t already deeply aware of the build workflow that you probably should not buy one. Without a proper enclosure, a lot of shelf space, etc, Resin adds a considerable health hazard without much benefit. If you DO have a proper workshop set up with a proper enclosure fume hood, curing station, etc, it can be awesome.

But whereas you can get away with a filament printer with or without an enclosure (since the particles are pretty minimal), resin is a different beast. And if you don’t have a proper curing station set up you are going to get crap “prints”.

Filament is 100% the kind of thing you put on a filing cabinet at home. Resin is where you want a proper workshop or, preferably, to make friends with a local “maker space”.

It isn’t GOOD. But if you aren’t leaving your printer running 24/7 (which you shouldn’t, if only for power reasons), it isn’t a massive issue in practice so long as the conveniences outweigh the risks.

I WOULD be concerned with the window between a print finishing and waking up though.

If you set up octoprint (or any form of networked printing) and don’t mind the horrors of potentially killing an OS (that you can easily reflash and that won’t have an issue if it isn’t a knockoff sd card): I love that my anycubic and its pi running octoprint both just go through a smart plug. When I want to do a print I turn it on from my phone/HA, wait like a minute, and I am good to go with a camera pointed at the print bed for monitoring. And then turn it off when I am done.

Yup. Naomi is generally one of the (modern) OGs of “maker” culture. And folk like her, Simone Giertz, and Xyla Foxlin are very much doing massive stem outreach “offline” while occasionally also doing some awesome on social media/youtube. Kind of fun to see even folk like Alan Pan act almost reverent to her when they do collabs.

That said, incels REALLY hate Naomi for whatever reason.

If you think that is a 2007 tech demo then… You clearly don’t remember 2007

But yeah. It isn’t a flagship use of ray tracing (… actually, it is, but that speaks more to the general lack of ray tracing in gaming). But it is a really cool nod to history (since quake 2 was one of the earlier games to have dynamic lighting) that does a good job of making quake 2 look like what we remembered quake 2 looking like (same as you remember 2007 looking like that).

The dynamic lighting never looked ANYWHERE near that good but… in our minds it did.

And it also kind of became a weird time capsule of what ray tracing was. When the two big early examples of RTX were… Minecraft and Quake 2 (Control existed but the specs were already high enough for most folk before you popped the toggle).

Mostly it is just a bit disappointing that something that exists and was mostly official isn’t part of the re-release. But I suspect there are some shenanigans with how nvidia licensed that and so forth.

And as an add-on. Yeah, the RTX is gonna look shit in the outdoor maps. Mostly because of how those were lit, relative to the indoor ones. Most people never got past the first level (or really, first room or two) in Q2RTX and those were some of the best. Because they were meant to show off the dynamic lighting back in the 90s so all light came from sources that had corresponding texture and geometry. So switching to ray tracing makes those lights look a LOT better. Whereas external areas still involved a lot of ambient lighting and multiple fake sources to represent the sun.

It is similarly why stuff like Control and Cyberpunk… didn’t look all that amazing. Because most scenes were not lit solely with “real” lights. Yes, you had the overhead fluorescent and that desk lamp. But you also had ambient lighting to get the right “vibe”. So once you switch from (largely) pre-baked lighting to ray tracing… all of those ambient lights and false sources are now making things look washed out or like they “glow” in the wrong way. Because now you do have realistic ray tracing of the light from the overhead and you might even have the right materials on the walls to get the diffusion of some shitty taupe paint over drywall. But you also now have the light from those “fake” lights being traced too.

I am not up to date on how modern level design works. But if you are really interested? Go look up a few editor tutorials for Unreal Tournament or Quake 3. UT in particular is really easy to see all the lights that get put in the scene before you bake them in. You obviously want to put a light source on the desk lamp mesh. But… you also probably need a few in the hallway to mimic the diffusion that comes from said desk lamp’s light reflecting off the walls.

So basically three quarters of all variants of Yugioh?

Bit disappointed that it doesn’t include the RTX functionality, but still really excited. Always loved the first three quakes (even if Unreal is better) and this has been a great opportunity to run through the game again while waiting for AC6.

The specific gags (satanism, bisexuality) are generally more “left” but the polygamy* and downright stupidity are pretty par for the course. Every single time he says a variant of “I will fight for your freedom” it is followed up with “And here is a deviant thing I do”

Which has always kind of been the reality. The “Conservative Freedom Fighter” is basically just your bog standard Libertarian and has always been demonstrated to not actually care about freedom so much as the freedom to do whatever they want. The actual “I will fight for your right to be a piece of shit” has always been a byproduct of separation of church and state, etc. So… Liberals (and so is some of the stupidity…).

This was VERY early 00s and we had just had a decade of libertarian propaganda (seriously, look up MTV. It is frigging insane. And South Park was largely at its peak), so there was less outright calling people on their bullshit and identifying where “freedom” stops for them. But that is how conservatives have always justified their bullshit and, aside from changing what counts as being “deviant”, the gag works just as well today because it is still the same gag.

*: There is an argument for polygamy being related to ethical nonmonogamy, polyamory, etc. But at the time it would have very much been a Mormon gag. And… there are still arguments that the ENM movement has largely been compromised by misogynists and right wing lunatics. True ENM is still very much about social justice and accepting people for who they are, but it has also kind of become a bit of a red flag in social interactions.

Just going off the titles and what I vaguely recall of the first season (time for a rewatch?!?!?!)

• The pilot, Space Pilot 3000, is about y2k
• I, Robot was about living with Bender and had a bunch of sitcom references, if memory serves
• Fear of a Bot Planet is about racism, but in the “fun” way that only the 90s would try to do
• I thought A Fishful of Dollars was one of the western episodes and was going to make jokes about spaghetti westerns, but I am glad I actually clicked the summary for that one. It is the anchovy episode where Fry buys a crapton of 20th century memorabilia. That is nothing BUT pop culture references
• A Big Piece of Garbage is a reference to all the acknowledgmets that pollution is bad and we should reduce, reuse, and recycle. And now I am depressed again. Also, the plot is one giant reference to Ben Afleck’s Armageddon
• Hell Is Other Robots: Introduces robot hell, robot Jessie Jackson, mockery of scientology, etc.
• A Flight to Remember: Had to click again since I didn’t remember and knew there was no way it could be a joke about the Mandy Moore movie. This is a Titanic spoof
• Mars University: Animal House/Revenge of the Nerds/all the 80s college movies before we acknowledged those movies were nothing but sexual assault. Oh the 90s
• When Aliens Attack: Ally McBeal, bitches
• Fry and the Slurm Factory: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory parody, references to how messed up it was that Bud Light had an animal mascot, and even reference to the efforts to get people to drink less toxic waste soda

So… I guess you consider the first revival to have been the first published episode?

Pretty much the only animated show that does real time commentary is south park and that is because their art style is “intentionally shitty” to allow for rapid turnaround… and even they have mostly shifted to trying to have a lot of episodes in the can. The rest tend to operate on often times an almost one year delay. And it is the same reason video games usually reference memes from three or four years before release.

Which, again, was the same with theatre. Sure there were playwrights who would make edits to scripts the morning of to reflect what the royal nonce was doing. Same as there are today. But it was always minor tweaks because you need to make sure your actors can learn their lines. The vast majority was written weeks, if not months, prior.

As for changing social values: Again, that is any media you look at. I recently rewatched The Venture Bros in preparation for the finale and was amused at how ridiculously racist, ableist, and homophobic the first season was… and that they were still using ableist slurs as of the last one (which, to be fair, was like 4 years ago). But, at the same time, being gay stopped being a joke and more just became a thing (except Shore Leave who is a treasure and more a joke about camp gay than just being gay… and is a straight up badass). And while 2/3 (probably 3/3 but she never has enough screen time) of them are complete monsters, it is kind of sweet that Action Man, Sean Connery, and Billy’s Mom are heavily implied to have become a throuple with no jokes made about it at all.

You can see the same with The Simpsons in terms of what gags they think are safe or not. And even Family Guy and South Park in terms of what gags they think are “edgy” and not.

As an aside. The fantasy trope of “we need to put on a play to start a war or find our friend” maps much more to modern improv or even stand up comedy than theatre. The cliche talking puppets is basically The Daily Show or even Last Week Tonight. But having Dandelion get on stage and say “So what’s the deal with airline food?”… would actually have been amazing. What was my point again?

I don’t usually shit on media articles because it is almost always a case of “Here is prompt X. Money goes to whatever contractor writes the most provocative version” but… holy crap that is a bad article that is actually contributing toward the widespread media illiteracy of the current world.

No shit? Futurama is very much a “current events” commentary/borderline satire. That inherently is going to reflect current events. And if you go back a decade later, it is going to seem a bit different/“off”. Same with Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park, and so forth.

What most high school kids (and adults…) don’t realize is that Shakespeare is very much in the same boat. So much of Billy’s characters and even plot points are references or commentaries on contemporary events. We are just far enough out that nobody actually cares what some dipshit was rambling about when A Midsummer Night’s Dream was written.

Hell, even something as banal as Call of Duty reflects this. Mostly along the lines of what western (mostly US) military propaganda is and is not cool with.

This is up there with the same stupidity that has led to any form of foreshadowing or implied plot points being “plot holes” or whatever the reaction channels call them this week.

One of the biggest reasons for the SAG strike is because of AI/DL generated footage of actors and actresses. We have seen bits of it in various Star Wars and the like, but tech is only getting better.

The current (arguably intentionally egregious) drama is the revelation/accusation that “Hollywood” are more or less telling performers that they want the rights to use them in all perpetuity. So Vin Diesel does one movie and then that studio can have an AI come on screen and say “family” for thousands of years. And this obviously resonates well with the Futurama gag

That said, the reality is a lot closer to what we have already seen. There is not a lot of value in owning the rights to an actor or actress because they will always “look off” no matter how photorealistic it gets. What “hollywood” instead wants is a training data database. Make your female actresses an amalgamation of all the most attractive features in human history but blended to be “imperfect” so that people believe it. Male actors who can combine Hugh Laurie’s eyes with Hugh Jackman’s body and so forth.

This was sort of tried in the early 2000s with Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within where the big deal was that the lead actress’s 3d model would become a real actress in her own right (even if she was voiced by Ming-Na Wen). It bombed for a lot of reasons, obviously. But, sticking with Final Fantasy, just look at how THIRSTY the internet got over trying to figure out who Jenny (or whatever lady ecoterrorist was called) was modeled after and the realization that she was likely a body morph of a bunch of actresses and models.

During the age wars (because that is somehow a thing…) this comes up all the time.

The reality is that most millenials also have absolutely zero understanding of problem solving. They want "a script I can follow’ just as much as boomers and genx and all the other fairly arbitrary demarcations.

Zoomers benefit from having very intuitive interfaces. We aren’t going to go backwards on that. Hell, we can already start to see the shift between “I intuitively know to swipe these menus” becoming “I just ask the voice assistant which connects to an LLM to interpret what I want it to do”. And that is a good thing.

The Internet likes to pretend millenials are all tech gods. As someone who has supported, worked with, and managed millenial, boomer, and increasingly zoomer people in even “computer science” levels of “tech”: We very much aren’t. Some people (self included) had a passion for it growing up and continue to learn how to do new stuff. Other people are basically Jen from the IT Crowd who understand enough to sound competent to complete idiots. And other people will stop work for a month if you move one of their shortcuts or get rid of python in favor of python3.

And we can very much see this with the shift to fediverse apps. Plenty of folk STILL insist that Mastodon is too complicated because… it is basically email levels of domains after your username. And those are the same people who are bragging about how they love their steam deck because they can install so many plugins and change so many settings.