Trickle Down: When Doing Something Silly Actually Makes Sense

July 12, 2025 by Elliot Williams 10 Comments

One of the tropes of the space race back in the 1960s, which helped justify the spending for the part of the public who thought it wasn’t worth it, was that the technology developed for use in space would help us out here back on earth. The same goes for the astronomical expenses in Formula 1, or even on more pedestrian tech like racing bikes or cinematography cameras. The idea is that the boundaries pushed out in the most extreme situations could nonetheless teach us something applicable to everyday life.

This week, we saw another update from the Minuteman project, which is by itself entirely ridiculous – a 3D printer that aims to print a 3D Benchy in a minute or less. Of course, the Minuteman isn’t alone in this absurd goal: there’s an entire 3D printer enthusiast community that is pushing the speed boundaries of this particular benchmark print, and times below five minutes are competitive these days, although with admittedly varying quality. (For reference, on my printer, a decent-looking Benchy takes about half an hour, but I’m after high quality rather than high speed.)

One could totally be forgiven for scoffing at the Speed Benchy goal in general, the Minuteman, or even The 100, another machine that trades off print volume for extreme speed. But there is definitely trickle-down for the normal printers among us. After all, pressure advance used to be an exotic feature that only people who were using high-end homemade rigs used to care about, and now it’s gone mainstream. Who knows if the Minuteman’s variable temperature or rate smoothing, or the rigid and damped frames of The 100, or its successor The 250, will make normal printers better.

So here’s to the oddball machines, that push boundaries in possibly ridiculous directions, but then share their learnings with those of us who only need to print kinda-fast, but who like to print other things than little plastic boats that don’t even really float. At least in the open-source hardware community, trickle-down is very real.

Dearest C++, Let Me Count The Ways I Love/Hate Thee

July 11, 2025 by Maya Posch 59 Comments

My first encounter with C++ was way back in the 1990s, when it was one of the Real Programming Languages™ that I sometimes heard about as I was still splashing about in the kiddie pool with Visual Basic, PHP and JavaScript. The first formally standardized version of C++ is the ISO 1998 standard, but it had been making headways as a ‘better C’ for decades at that point since Bjarne Stroustrup added that increment operator to C in 1979 and released C++ to the public in 1985.

Why did I pick C++ as my primary programming language? Mainly because it was well supported and with free tooling: a free Borland compiler or g++ on the GCC side. Alternatives like VB, Java, and D felt far too niche compared to established languages, while C++ gave you access to the lingua franca of C while adding many modern features like OOP and a more streamlined syntax in addition to the Standard Template Library (STL) with gobs of useful building blocks.

Years later, as a grizzled senior C++ developer, I have come to embrace the notion that being good at a programming language also means having strong opinions on all that is wrong with the language. True to form, while C++ has many good points, there are still major warts and many heavily neglected aspects that get me and other C++ developers riled up.

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Personal Reflections On Immutable Linux

July 10, 2025 by Tyler August 51 Comments

Immutable distributions are slowly spreading across the Linux world– but should you care? Are they hacker friendly? What does “immutable” mean, anyway?

Immutable means “not subject or susceptible to change” according to Merriam-Webster, which is not 100% accurate in this context, but it’s close enough and the name is there so we’re stuck with it. Immutable distributions are subject to change, it’s just that how you change them is quite a bit different than bog-standard Linux. Will this matter to you? Read on to find out! (Or, if you know the answers already, read on to find out how angry you should be in the comments section.) Continue reading “Personal Reflections On Immutable Linux” →

Ask Hackaday: Are You Wearing 3D Printed Shoes?

July 10, 2025 by Al Williams 50 Comments

We love 3D printing. We’ll print brackets, brackets for brackets, and brackets to hold other brackets in place. Perhaps even a guilty-pleasure Benchy. But 3D printed shoes? That’s where we start to have questions.

Every few months, someone announces a new line of 3D-printed footwear. Do you really want your next pair of sneakers to come out of a nozzle? Most of the shoes are either limited editions or fail to become very popular.

First World Problem

You might be thinking, “Really? Is this a problem that 3D printing is uniquely situated to solve?” You might assume that this is just some funny designs on some of the 3D model download sites. But no. Adidas, Nike, and Puma have shoes that are at least partially 3D printed. We have to ask why.

We are pretty happy with our shoes just the way that they are. But we will admit, if you insist on getting a perfect fitting shoe, maybe having a scan of your foot and a custom or semi-custom shoe printed is a good idea. Zellerfield lets you scan your feet with your phone, for example. [Stefan] at CNC Kitchen had a look at those in a recent video. The company is also in many partnerships, so when you hear that Hugo Boss, Mallet London, and Sean Watherspoon have a 3D-printed shoe, it might actually be their design from Zellerfield.

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Dithering With Quantization To Smooth Things Over

July 9, 2025 by Maya Posch 19 Comments

It should probably come as no surprise to anyone that the images which we look at every day – whether printed or on a display – are simply illusions. That cat picture isn’t actually a cat, but rather a collection of dots that when looked at from far enough away tricks our brain into thinking that we are indeed looking at a two-dimensional cat and happily fills in the blanks. These dots can use the full CMYK color model for prints, RGB(A) for digital images or a limited color space including greyscale.

Perhaps more interesting is the use of dithering to further trick the mind into seeing things that aren’t truly there by adding noise. Simply put, dithering is the process of adding noise to reduce quantization error, which in images shows up as artefacts like color banding. Within the field of digital audio dithering is also used, for similar reasons. Part of the process of going from an analog signal to a digital one involves throwing away data that falls outside the sampling rate and quantization depth.

By adding dithering noise these quantization errors are smoothed out, with the final effect depending on the dithering algorithm used.

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Crunching The News For Fun And Little Profit

July 9, 2025 by Jenny List 8 Comments

Do you ever look at the news, and wonder about the process behind the news cycle? I did, and for the last couple of decades it’s been the subject of one of my projects. The Raspberry Pi on my shelf runs my word trend analysis tool for news content, and since my journey from curious geek to having my own large corpus analysis system has taken twenty years it’s worth a second look.

How Career Turmoil Led To A Two Decade Project

A hanging sign surrounded by ornate metalwork, with the legend "Cyder house". — This is very much a minority spelling. Colin Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0.

In the middle of the 2000s I had come out of the dotcom crash mostly intact, and was working for a small web shop. When they went bust I was casting around as one does, and spent a while as a Google quality rater while I looked for a new permie job. These teams are employed by the search giant through temporary employment agencies, and in loose terms their job is to be the trained monkeys against whom the algorithm is tested. The algorithm chose X, and if the humans also chose X, the algorithm is probably getting it right. Being a quality rater is not in any way a high-profile job, but with the big shiny G on my CV I soon found myself in demand from web companies seeking some white-hat search engine marketing expertise. What I learned mirrored my lesson from a decade earlier in the CD-ROM business, that on the web as in any other electronic publishing medium, good content well presented has priority over any black-hat tricks.

But what makes good content? Forget an obsession with stuffing bogus keywords in the text, and instead talk about the right things, and do it authoritatively. What are the right things in this context? If you are covering a subject, you need to do so using the right language; that which the majority uses rather than language only you use. I can think of a bunch of examples which I probably shouldn’t talk about, but an example close to home for me comes in cider. In the UK, cider is a fermented alcoholic drink made from apples, and as a craft cidermaker of many years standing I have a good grasp of its vocabulary. The accepted spelling is “Cider”, but there’s an alternate spelling of “Cyder” used by some commercial producers of the drink. It doesn’t take long to realise that online, hardly anyone uses cyder with a Y, and thus pages concentrating on that word will do less well than those talking about cider.

A graph of the word football versus the word soccer in British news. — We Brits rarely use the word “soccer” unless there’s a story about the Club World Cup in America.

I started to build software to analyse language around a given topic, with the aim of discerning the metaphorical cider from the cyder. It was a great surprise a few years later to discover that I had invented for myself the already-existing field of computational linguistics, something that would have saved me a lot of time had I known about it when I began. I was taking a corpus of text and computing the frequencies and collocates (words that appear alongside each other) of the words within it, and from that I could quickly see which wording mattered around a subject, and which didn’t. This led seamlessly to an interest in what the same process would look like for news data with a time axis added, so I created a version which harvested its corpus from RSS feeds. Thus began my decades-long project.

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Hackaday Links: July 6, 2025

July 6, 2025 by Dan Maloney 11 Comments

Taking delivery of a new vehicle from a dealership is an emotional mixed bag. On the one hand, you’ve had to endure the sales rep’s hunger to close the deal, the tedious negotiations with the classic “Let me run that by my manager,” and the closer who tries to tack on ridiculous extras like paint sealer and ashtray protection. On the other hand, you’re finally at the end of the process, and now you get to play with the Shiny New Thing in your life while pretending it hasn’t caused your financial ruin. Wouldn’t it be nice to skip all those steps in the run-up and just cut right to the delivery? That’s been Tesla’s pitch for a while now, and they finally made good on the promise with their first self-driving delivery.
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