Yeah, that’s more due to need than due to technical difficulty.

Even in 2024 it’s still common that you have to print out documents to sign them or tickets for some event or something like that. All these (quite relevant) use cases just don’t work if you don’t have a 2D printer.

As much as I like my 3D printer, and as much as I recommend everyone to have one, is not nearly as necessary.

In regards to how difficult they are to make, consider the price.

2D printers have an advantage due to their much higher sales numbers (economy of scale) and they are subsidized by the manufacturer selling expensive ink. And still, a half-decent inkjet costs €100 or more, and a color laser easily costs €300 or more.

3D printers usually have much lower sales numbers and people usually buy 3rd party filament, so the printer needs to be expensive enough to generate money for the manufacturer. And still you can get a decent Ender 3 for as low as €150.

What’s different? Basically the whole thing.

A 3D printer (talking here about FDM because SLA really shares nothing at all with a 2D printer) is basically a tiny hot glue gun being moved on three axies by stepper motors. Of course, the temperature and extrusion controls are much more accurate than a hot glue gun, but that’s the basic principle. You got a single “printing point” that gets moved around and it only extrudes filament from that single point.

An inkjet printer has one stepper motor that moves the paper and another that moves the print head from left to right. So there too are axies moved on stepper motors. A very simple trait also shared by e.g. CD and disk drives, slot machines, camera lenses and many other things. All these things are as close to a 2D printer as a 3D printer.

The real magic of an inkjet printer is the print head. A print head doesn’t have a single nozzle but an array of many nozzles. This way, a printer cannot only print one dot at a time, but instead a few lines at a time. These nozzles are much tinier that the nozzles on a 3D printer, and they also are much more complicated to operate.

A 3D printer just uses a stepper motor to push filament into the printhead, where it melts and is then pushed out of a hole.

On an inkjet printer, you need to either rapidly boil the ink, so that a single vapor bubble appears that pushes just a tiny drop of ink on the paper, or you have a tiny piezoelectric transducer that creats a vibration that then pushes out ink.

This is orders of magnitude more difficult than a 3D printer, and much tinier. You won’t be DIYing a working 2D printer from scratch, while that isn’t all that hard for a 3D printer. With access to a decent toolshop, you can make all relevant parts of a 3D printer. The same is not true for 2D printers.

To rephrase your question: Why is it that so many people build DIY desktop PCs, but nobody is making a DIY flagship smartphone? What’s the difference?

Basically everything.

Not sure why they even brought it up or reported on it.

I mean, it’s kinda similar to “Streetlights where out of service during road accident”, but it was noon and the lights wouldn’t have been on either way.

Happens in most languages.

Also, many languages have a link between deafness and lacking intelligence, e.g. dumb meaning “not able to speak” and “not intelligent”.

In general, being sensitive to people with disabilities (both physical and mental) is a rather young concept, hence anything that would make someone not be able to be part of society is often also an insult.

That’s also why e.g. terms linked deafness/muteness are often an insult to someone’s intelligence, while e.g. terms linked to blindness are not. Blind people might be unable to perform some things seeing people are able to, but blindness doesn’t necessarily limit someone’s ability to be part of a society unaccomodating to people with disabilities.

Yeah, same here. I was just making a joking advocatus diaboli argument.

The legal requirement seems to be not to have one.

Stuff like that if people who have not a single clue about pregnancy make laws regarding pregnancy.

Put books under it.

I dodged it as a youth, no point starting it now.

No, I am only one man, not more men.

You must be a hardcore alcoholic if you had to abstain for that long.

At least over here (Austria) only biodegradable bags are allowed to be sold in this capacity.

But they are also not comparable to the old single-use plastic bags when it comes to plastic used, but rather comparable to a clingfilm around e.g. a salad.

Python sure has changed since I last used it.

Thanks! Seems to be the same worldwide. Over here the blue ones are for sale, the yellow ones are for use inside the IKEA.

Was the same here before they were banned.

In the EU single use bags cannot be sold anymore, so everyone now has some of what they call “bag for life”. It’s a similar material to the blue IKEA bags (if that’s a thing in the USA).

They last really long and since the material requirements are basic as can be, they are usually made out of 100% recycled plastic.

Actually, it is.

It derives from Latin infans where “in-” is a negation prefix and “fans” is the present participle form of “for”, which translates to “to speak”.

So an infant is a non-speaker (too small to speak).

But my opener was of course a joke, where I purpously misunderstood what “fant” is derived of, by claiming that “fant” must be the opposite of a child, thus an adult.

There are tons of Latin words in the English language and many of them only survived in English in their compounded form (e.g. “in-fant”, where no other version of the actual verb in there survived, except the negated form).

Often the parts of these Latin root words have no meaning at all anymore in English, so that people don’t notice that they are actually using compound words and also the original meaning of the word is forgotten.

Not a lot of people would associate “infant” with “hearing”.

This ladies and gentlemen is an example of people using ai to make kid books. It’s a big thing right now and easy money but could have consequence if kids start reading these they at a young age.

FTFY

Well, political forecasting is like reading tea leaves even for professionals and even when it’s just for the next year.

So it’s safe to say, nobody knows what’s going to happen.

But generally speaking, political tensions like the one currently in the US need some form of release. They build and build until something lets all of this vent.

Historically, these vents have been (civil) wars on their soil, revolts or catastrophies that require the country to be literally rebuilt.

The US hasn’t really had any of these for a very long term. Wars in foreign countries can reduce the temperature a bit, but only until the public’s attention span hasn’t passed.

The US system is also built for polarization, so let’s see what happens.

If they are lucky, some kind of worker’s uprising could be enough. If they are unlucky, they are going to have a dictatorship next year.

But nobody knows what’s going to happen.

You mean, what am I fanting about?

I mean, it worked at least in Austria, Germany and Spain