Jake

All plastic can be sanded and polished. Generally, you can follow an autobody like polishing regime. Something like 3M Imperial Wet/Dry 600, 800, 1000, 1500, 2000, 2500, then 3M Perfect-It 2 with a heavy cut pad, depending on the color and material, you may need a soft cut pad and light polish.

In practice, you might be able to skip 800 or 1000, and maybe 2000, but it really depends on the material properties. You will have a hard time finding an equivalent to Perfect-It 2 outside of an automotive paint supply shop. Stuff available in the consumer space to total crap. You really need power tools like a buffer with very fine speed controls to polish correctly. The pad does the work, the compound is more like a lube and cooling agent. It does some work, but most is the pad. The critical thing is knowing how to wet the pad and manage the temperatures so you don’t overhead and burn the job. Automotive clear coats are a two part catalyzed polyurethane. Overheating a printed part and clear coat is nearly the same effect. I haven’t done UV resin specifically, but I have messed with a lot of similar media, and was a painter and owner of a small body shop for around 6 years. I have polished every type of common FDM material except nylon and TPU. If you are not able to get a decent heavy cut pad and polish, just use an old crew sock with a somewhat course texture and toothpaste. Toothpaste has a fairly consistent heavy cut grit. It won’t work as well or reach the same final gloss, but it will beat any polish you can buy in an auto parts or big box store.

The one thing Apple has always been really good at is picking dying architecture for their hardware. If Apple uses it, the hardware is practically doomed. (6502/68k/power PC/ARM)

Yeah, it’s technically complicated. The “5” in RISC V kinda denotes the history involved in this (IIRC). I’ve seen a bunch of stuff on this, but it has been awhile and my attempt to focus may misconstrue the blur in my mind. So don’t take this as gospel. The previous attempts at a completely open ISA were failures in that they weren’t compatible with the foundry toolchains or peripheral business licenses and tech. They tried to do too much or force change tenured elements that have no open source replacement. RISC V was the first to be practical and garner support from industry and academia. There was a major hurtle that it had to overcome early on. As soon as this happened, the sale of ARM was announced shortly thereafter. I forget the details. It was in a conference talk on YT IIRC. I just recall thinking, that the timing of the sale of ARM spoke volumes about what RISC V is in the grand scheme of things. In 10 years time, I think everything will be RISC V. It will dominate in every sector from small microcontrollers all the way to the largest data centers and everything in between. It will be the final blow to x86, ARM, and anyone that fails to migrate quickly. This is Linux for hardware and fixes a lot of problems that are unaddressed with this proprietary crap designed in closed rooms by a few hundred people. No company or group is smarter than the whole world with unrestricted access.

RISC V is the first open source Instruction Set Architecture. Everything needed to fab the chip is open source. It is like how Linux dominates the world in enterprise software, RISC V is doing that for chip fabs. ARM is a closed ISA. Making the chips requires paying a royalty to ARM for each chip made. It is a scheme to extract money through manipulation not true competitive innovation or value.

This is like any other market, as soon as an equivalent open source alternative exists, the incumbent extortionist’s days are numbered. Its only customer base is from convenience or ignorance.

Lol. ARM is a sinking ship because of RISC V. Calling it UK is quite disingenuous. It is owned by Softbank in Japan with major stakeholders in China. The only benefit to arm is with proprietary nonsense.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-36822806

https://www.wsj.com/articles/softbank-agrees-to-buy-arm-holdings-for-more-than-32-billion-1468808434

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_(company)

I’ve written several python scripts to extend the capabilities of a text to speech AI using an offline Llama2 70B model. It takes enthusiast level hardware to run. The few errors it makes in code snippets it can also correct by pasting the terminal error message and prompting.

I don’t write python, haven’t had to go online to look up anything about Python syntax, and have a script that can take any text and convert it to speech, convert any wave file into text, or concatenate any wave files.

It takes larger models and some testing to find a good combination for a task. It also helps to use a model that is not subject to public spotlight and political pressure like GPT or Bard. The tiny models like 7B’s and 13B’s are like talking to children or teenagers.