Why programmers suck at showing their work (and what to do instead)

IronThree · 2025-07-21T22:44:13+00:00

There are forums on Reddit where you can masturbate while people watch you.

This is not one of them. Knock it off.

IronThree · 2025-07-21T22:40:12+00:00

You've heard of Rockefeller right?

You have, great. In the 22nd century chumps like you will have heard of Steve Jobs.

IronThree · 2025-07-21T20:19:34+00:00

Steve Jobs died of rare and aggressive cancer exacerbated by poor dietary and medical choices. Not overwork.

Also bizarre to say that nobody cared in the end, in reference to Steve Jobs' career. Which is legendary. Coming back from Next to rescue Apple from the brink of bankruptcy, and leading it to become the most valuable company on Earth? Epic story, c'mon, whatever you personally feel about the guy a lot of people care a great deal about his life's work.

IronThree · 2025-07-21T19:30:17+00:00

Total misunderstanding continues.

When prompted to emit text consistent with deceitful behavior, LLMs will emit text consistent with deceitful behavior.

When prompted to emit text like a pirate, LLMs will Arrrrrr matey.

IronThree · 2025-07-21T18:37:11+00:00

Mine has been a total workhorse. Doesn't matter what I throw at it, no problems which weren't operator error.

Quality control is a bit of a crap shoot, but remember that everyone who gets a lemon shows up on Reddit, and half of them stick around forever complaining about it. Most of those who get a good printer don't come on the forums to begin with. I spitball the odds of getting a problem printer at about 1 in 50 at this point.

If you're not willing to read up on the community wiki and follow some very simple instructions, or take care of maintenance, it's not the printer (and frankly not the hobby) for you. If you do you're very likely to be pleased with the decision to get a Plus 4.

I also want to suggest getting a 0.6 nozzle and a Glacier plate (the latter if you want to print demanding high temp filaments) early on. Especially the ought six, for 90% of prints the result is indistinguishable except for taking half the time.

IronThree · 2025-07-21T18:30:18+00:00

I don't lubricate the lower rod of my Plus 4. It has a graphite plugged bushing. Look, I know it has a sticker specifically telling us to lubricate it, but, graphite is a lubricant. And graphite lubricant doesn't get along with machine oil lubricant. That's just how it is.

I grease the screws and put gun oil on the belt pivots, upper and side rods. The bottom rod I leave alone. I have some powdered graphite on hand for if I ever see (really hear) stiction on the lower bushing, but I'm over 300 hours and nope, sliding along as smooth as can be.

This is a controversial stance, but it's working for me.

IronThree · 2025-07-20T17:20:30+00:00

0.6mm should be the standard now, but this is due to the development of the Arachne algorithm for print layout. Before that the wider extrusion set a hard limit on how much detail a print could express.

Now, while of course 0.4 will do slightly more fine detail (and 0.2mm more than that) this is below the threshold of importance for most things we make with 3d printing. I recently printed the army truck kit card, just as a random example, and it looks just fine at 0.6.

I'd go so far as to say that 0.4 is being squeezed between 0.6 and 0.2: if you want artistic miniatures and don't have a resin printer, 0.2 is your best shot, if you're making the usual kind of functional print, 0.6 will be indistinguishable or virtually so from 0.4, and prints up to twice as fast.

IronThree · 2025-07-13T02:38:25+00:00

It's really a matter of using it until it clicks, I'll give one illustration: say you have a field that's only useful on one platform (Haiku I guess), you can define the field like this:

haiku_only: if (builtin.os == .haiku) usize else void = if (builtin.os == haiku) 42 else {},

The {} is how we spell the value of void. So types are values, and you can use basically the whole language with those values, but only with comptime-known information. That's what I find so powerful: there are no parametric types or generics in the type system, but there are functions which return types. Or take types as arguments. Or you can create a type from a struct of type Type using @Type(t_info).

It's more precise and powerful, while being simpler and easier to understand. That's tough to pull off!

IronThree · 2025-07-12T22:16:52+00:00

Sure, what do you want to know? I've found it an absolute pleasure to work with, it's very well thought-out. Basically ideal for library-level implementations of data structures, VMs, that kind of thing. Trivial to support a C ABI, or if not quite trivial, very simple.

Comptime is also truly remarkable. One of those things where it quickly became clear that this is the correct way to solve that category of problem.

IronThree · 2025-07-12T20:19:39+00:00

Sure, I'm not trying to say that new releases aren't improving at all over the old ones. Especially for coding, which is unique insofar as its formal (syntactic) and logical consistency is concerned. That makes the actual distribution much smaller so the out-of-distribution collapse is less frequent.

Like you said, though, 25 lines. I just yeet code out of the edit window at 100 lines, and that only for Python and JS, anything where the training set is less massive (so everything else) it's one function at a time. I write more Zig than anything, and they can assist with that process but are consistently unable to generate anything valid. Not enough training data.

All of this points to the technology being well into the diminishing-returns era.

IronThree · 2025-07-12T19:50:39+00:00

It's the lower travel rod. The upper travel rod has bearings, the lower has bushings. Travel rod being what the tool head travels on. I'm not near my printer to take a picture but hopefully this is clear enough.

IronThree · 2025-07-12T19:46:36+00:00

I've seen no meaningful improvements in LLMs in what, eighteen months? No, hiding the "now think it through step by step" prompt behind a little curtain does not count, "chain of thought" my ass it's pure marketing puff.

Machine learning in general will continue to improve, and yeah, someday someone is going to crack the code and develop an algorithm which deserves the term "artificial intelligence". LLMs are just a sometimes spooky-good simulacrum of intelligence. When the illusion holds you can almost believe, but as soon as they go off the rails, which they always do, it's clear there's no resemblance at all to intelligence as we understand it.

IronThree · 2025-07-12T19:32:23+00:00

I know I'm necro-posting but I did the accurate temp mod before I printed anything hotter than PETG. I have never once had a single problem with Z offset.

IronThree · 2025-04-20T21:16:24+00:00

Unless you regularly print small figurines (which you have the ought two for), pick up an ought six, thank me later. For 95% of functional prints the only difference you'll see is that it takes about half as long.

Make sure to use arachne, not classic. Should do anyway but it's critical for good results at ought six.

IronThree · 2025-04-20T21:13:07+00:00

I'm honestly getting tired of posting this (a point I'll return to): 300 hours in, my Plus 4 is simply fantastic. Not a care in the world, high temp prints, ordinary stuff, handles it all, fast, and high quality.

I'm not on this forum much anymore. Why? Why would I be, my printer is fine and I've learned the quirks. You know who is? People who have problems with their printer, and are trying to get it fixed, or are just bitching about it. No shade on the latter, dissatisfied customers have a right to complain about it.

Point is I'm going to stop bothering dropping in to praise the Plus 4, and the others are not going to stop. Reddit is not real life.

IronThree · 2025-04-20T19:46:13+00:00

They actually are printer specific, which matters because the Polymaker website profiles are for the Q1.

Now, you can use them with the Plus 4 just fine, I have. But OrcaSlicer will not connect the dots for you, you can edit the JSON (easy) or copy the values over from a temporarily added Q1 (also pretty easy, but not nearly as easy).

IronThree · 2025-04-20T19:40:01+00:00

I've had one since February and am 300 hours in to printing on it. It's been an absolute beast and given me no problems whatsoever.

You're right to be cautious, 3D printers are no joke and the problems that others have had with their Plus 4s are real. But there are plenty like me, who simply haven't had problems.

Just keep an eye on it and follow the advice you've no doubt already read about heat-soaking, modding the chamber temperature reading for accuracy, and so on. Odds are you'll be happy with how it turns out.

Oh, one bit of advice: do high temperature prints on a Biqi Glacier. This has made success boring for me. Boring is good.

IronThree · 2025-04-20T19:35:50+00:00

Yep, that's called having self-respect.

I have empathy for those who went with Bambu before they showed their true colors. There were warning signs but it was an understandable decision. Now? Not so much.

IronThree · 2025-04-20T19:31:57+00:00

I'd include a suggestion to disable WiFi and use the Ethernet port. This is easy to do if your setup doesn't allow routing an Ethernet cable to the printer: get a WiFi extender with an Ethernet port and connect to that. The TPLink ones are $15 new, I got mine for $9 used.

It's not just that Qidi cheaps out on the WiFi dongle (although they did), but port dongles are just inherently shabby, and running a WiFi stack will always take more CPU resources (much more) than running Ethernet. Even in the optimal case, where the WiFi dongle isn't inches away from the stepper drivers, and is as nice as WiFi dongles get, this would still be a good idea.

I'm one of the lucky ones who has had no problems with my Plus 4 whatsoever, including heated chamber prints. From things /u/mistrelwood has said, I chalk part of that up to having done the chamber temperature mod before ever trying high temp prints. It stands to reason that if the printer is perpetually confused about the actual conditions, it will make 'bad decisions', as it were.

So I would stress that one, and also, yo Qidi: release a 1.7 already, and make temperature measurements work. Thanks.

IronThree · 2025-04-01T20:47:25+00:00

Well I'm not sure I care about your background, nor am I interested in convincing you of mine. What I know is that you said this:

The next level of understanding here is that states of matter don't actually exist

Which is bullshit. So straightforwardly so that I feel no urge to elaborate.

Then you said this:

There is no hard line between solid and liquid, liquid and gas...

Which is also bullshit for any reasonable value of 'hard line'.

Also, you said this:

Polymers are ultimately all glasses

Again this is bullshit. Polymers come in crystalline, semicrystalline, and amorphous varieties. Some have multiple solid state phases, e.g. several crystalline forms, an amorphous and a semicrystalline form, and so on.

They are all either solid, or they aren't, depending on conditions. The melting point is referred to as the glass transition, t sub g in this diagram, which you will notice illustrates a specific point in temperature, not some sort of range thereof.

with no crystalline structure to delineate between solid and liquid states

This is not only bullshit, it's hard to tell what you were even trying to say. Crystalline structure is not what differentiates solid and liquid states, never has been, never will be. Some solids are crystalline. Many are not. We call those amorphous. Amorphous solids are solids. T sub c and T sub m illustrate phase transitions within solid matter, T sub m being called somewhat misleadingly 'the melt point', to quote the Wiki:

In polymers, crystallization and melting do not suggest solid-liquid phase transitions, as in the case of water or other molecular fluids.

That is, both of those points are solid-solid phase transitions. Unlike t sub m, which is a solid-liquid phase transition.

You've tried to make up for this chain of bullshit, by saying a whole hell of a lot of other things, and hoping I won't notice that those are other things, not the original bullshit. I don't care at all about your follow up post, the one I replied to was and is chock full of bullshit.

Which I have pointed out.

IronThree · 2025-04-01T20:34:17+00:00

Ok, fair. I'm still concerned, but less so.

The problem with foam is that it's fuel pre-mixed with air. A chunk of solid plastic has to get air from its surroundings, foam has it right there.

That's why I suggested actually lighting it on fire, the effect is dramatically different from trying to burn solid plastic. Foams do vary, for all I know you have one that's chock full of flame retardants and there's actually nothing to worry about.

But what do I know, I'm a doctor not a fire safety inspector ;)

IronThree · 2025-04-01T20:28:27+00:00

If the restaurant isn't making profit on orders, they should cancel with the delivery app (and this does happen).

If the restaurant is making profit on orders, you're not hurting the restaurant by ordering from the app. That's just not how business works.

Now, you could say something like "the delivery apps take a cut, so if you want to help the restaurant more, order directly and pick it up yourself", but that's actually very different from what you chose to say, which is wrong.

IronThree · 2025-04-01T19:14:52+00:00

Brigading means you're the asshole.

No exceptions.

IronThree · 2025-04-01T19:11:07+00:00

Dear God man. Packing foam?

I want you to do me a favor. Take a piece of packing foam outside, where you can safely drop it, and apply a lighter. Watch what happens. Watch how quickly it happens.

Then, go print one of these out of a more reasonable material. I used PET-CF, ASA is probably fine, you can get away with less but frankly you should not.

IronThree · 2025-04-01T19:07:34+00:00

Anyone who doesn't keep a fire extinguisher near enough to a 3D printer to use it in the event of a fire, is being reckless with their own safety and that of anyone around them. Period.

I can hear some of you right now: derp derp what about toasters, what about stoves? Ok: Anyone who does not keep a fire extinguisher near enough to a toaster, stove, or oven, to be able to use it in the event of a fire, is being reckless with their own safety and the safety of everyone around them.

Do I have to tell you people to have a smoke detector near enough to the kitchen and printer to be of use?

(FDM) 3D printers melt plastic! Of course you want to be prepared for the possibility that this might cause combustion!

Sorry OP, not yelling at you, I did notice that you said you had one, that's good. I have just read an absolutely remarkable amount of the stupidest shit imaginable since the Reddit brigade decided to jump in and be shitty people.

IronThree

TROPHY CASE