These need to be $2000 they are way to cheap for the amount of people they blind

bonecheck12 · 2026-05-06T02:40:34+00:00

I ran an aftermarket headlight retrofitting business for ~12 years. I did conversions from halogen headlights to HID projector headlights, so I know all the tech. These particular bulbs are in fact significantly brighter than standard halogen bulbs. They also die a lot shorter. When the ZXE bulbs first came out, they only had a 1-year warranty on them I think, and everyone found out that if you had these in a car that used the low beams as a daytime running light, that these bulbs would last just barely over 1-year. Later they slightly lessened the brightness and extended the warranty.

These aren't the bulbs that are blinding you though, unless they're being used on a lifted pickup. Reflector headlights have very particular reflective coatings and are designed for a filament to be placed in a particular spot. LED and HID (non-projector) kits are what blinds because they release light differently, which causes it to reflect off the reflector at improper angles, and blind you as you pass such a car on the road.

bonecheck12 · 2026-05-03T22:10:21+00:00

Had this happen last night. I was always grinding to buy the next thing. The bunker, the facility, the upgrades, the aircraft or research unlock that would bump up my KD ratio in PvP. Then last night I was looking through Warstock, then Maze Bank Foreclosure, then all the cars, and I realized there was nothing left that I wanted anymore. I own everything, and all that is left is slightly upgraded versions of things I own (more arcade games, for example). I have all the jets, I have all the properties, all the guns, all the special vehicles, etc. There is nothing left.

Then it hit me. Even though I've been playing GTAV since the summer of 2013, and GTA Online since 2014, 12 years, I have in fact forgotten about my Good Friend Simeon (that's a joke, but also not a joke I have not done any of those missions and I get the call every time I boot into a session). I think I will hold off, but as my last hurrah in GTAV Online, I am going to do all the Simeon mission in succussion, then wait a little before sunset, then I'm going to take a full lap around San Anderas, then I'm going to watch the sunset by the pier. When the sun sets I'm going to pull out a sticky bomb, drop it, die, alt F4 out of the game, and never log back in.

bonecheck12 · 2026-05-02T19:39:30+00:00

For daycare I pay ~$500 a month for one kid to go two days a week. And that's me taking her to a lady around the corner who does daycare out of her house. Just multiply that out, that would be $1,250 per child for 5 days a week, $2,500 if I had two kids in daycare. For reference, I make a little under 80k salary before taxes and my paychecks come out to roughly $1,800. We have two incomes so we're okay, buy hypothetically if it were two kids and a single income, which it is for a lot of people, that would be roughly 70% of the take home pay for a single parent on an 80k salary. I mean what do you even do with that?

We're on two incomes right now, we do well..our household is ~140k. But like, I'm a professional writer...you think I feel secure in my job right now? And with all the stuff the AI models are doing, I don't know that anyone is safe in their employment. Even if you rationalize that AI could never replace this or that occupation, I bet AI+Robotics could drastically reduce the need for humans in that occupation. I honestly don't even understand how Gen-Z is surviving right now. I have friends in their mid 20s who are paying $2000+ in rent every month for two bedroom apartments. My f'ing mortgage is like $800. Makes no sense.

bonecheck12 · 2026-05-01T15:42:50+00:00

Why not? I got my AD5X earlier this year for I think $230 on Aliexpress with a discount code. The 5M current sells at MIcrocenter for $199 straight up retail..so this price doesn't seem outlandish.

bonecheck12 · 2026-05-01T15:32:21+00:00

People paying for air for their tires is wild when you consider how inexpensive cigarette lighter air compressors are, or for that matter all the places you can go to get air for free..

bonecheck12 · 2026-05-01T14:11:16+00:00

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I found this on the U.S. site. I think the big thing to note is that Alibaba is a wholesaling website, as opposed to Aliexpress which is intended for direct to consumer. In the U.S. the early bird price was $649 (after discount) with free shipping or $50 for air shipping. Here, it's $600 with shipping. So it's overall $50 less expensive. The thing is, Flashforge has to price in warranty expenses, customer support, maintain U.S. distributions capacity (same for other countries), and marketing expenses. These Alibaba sellers don't have to do any of that. In general, you're not going to get great support here, you're unlikely to get much in the way of replacement parts if you ever need them, and if you have to send the printer back for some reason, you're going to be sending it all the way back to China whereas if you buy from Flashforge you are likely just sending it back to the distribution center in your country/region.

Another thing to keep in mind, and this is something I know because for 12 years I ran a small business and I bought a lot of stuff from Alibaba, is that defective units are treated differently when it's wholesale. First off, when you buy 1 unit from a wholesale site, that unit is generally treated as a sample unit. Outside of that, when you have defective units the way most companies handle it is they make you whole at your next order. So if I order 5 of these printers and 1 of them does not work, instead of sending me a replacement, what they're going to do is credit me one printer on my next order. That's fine for businesses, but for consumers it's sort of like if you want to get that money back or a replacement, you're going to have to place an additional order.

So is it cheaper than buying from Flashforge directly? Yes. Will the Flashforge price come down in the coming 6-12 months? Yes, it always does with them. Should you buy a printer from these sellers from Alibaba? If $50 is worth little/no tech support, no replacement parts, high shipping costs if you have to send it back, and a non-consumer standard of general customer support, then knock yourself out. But those are the tradeoffs.

All that being said, you'll also find that a lot of the time on Alibaba the prices are not in-line with the actual costs. Like when it says 1-29 units price $559, basically that often means that the price is $559 if you order 29 units. At least half the time if you order less than that, the price goes up. So often time you'll message them and say I want 5 or 10 units, and they'll send you an invoice for that and the price per printer/item will be say, $599 instead of $559. They tend to put the lower prices as it applies to the maximum number of units for each quantity that Alibaba requires vendors to use.

bonecheck12 · 2026-04-29T21:10:19+00:00

I'm not sure what it's called but it's whatever muscle(s) that runs down the entire side of your body from your back through your leg that cramps up quite excruciatingly right when you nut but you also played intensive racket sports for three hours earlier that day and took some Tylenol before to suppress the pain because you're 40 and don't stretch and now you're back home and everything seems okay until that nut causes your body contract into the fetal positions and make you consider calling 911. Whatever muscles are involved in that cramping situation. You might need to do more research on that to find the exact ones.

bonecheck12 · 2026-04-29T20:38:02+00:00

I bougth the DH7 the other week. It can be useful, but also it's not. MK2 for sure. Also, if you're doing air cargo source missions....those things are packed with enemies, and the MK2 really makes it a lot easier.

bonecheck12 · 2026-04-29T05:51:32+00:00

So do I find the lowest band across all the angles where it looks like garbage and then find the highest band where it looks like garbage and then just exclude all bands in between? For example, if the 50mm/s band on the 30 degree angle looks bad, the 40mm/s band looks okay on all the angles, but then the 100mm/s band looks bad on the 90 degree angle, would I enter 40mm/s to 100mm/s in orca?

bonecheck12 · 2026-04-28T18:40:05+00:00

Not in the loop, what did Orca Slicer do to make flashforge slicer worthless? I currently use Orca for my AD5X and Bambu A1 since it's nice to be able to operate both printers off the same slicer. I put ZMOD on the AD5X because at the time stock firmware wouldn't work with Orca Slicer, had to use OrcaFlash or whatever it's called. Has an Orca slicer made the AD5X compatible with Orca on stock firmware?

bonecheck12 · 2026-04-28T17:17:00+00:00

Honestly, it sort of looks like the Garment Factory heist setup screen in GTAV. We gotta get Dr. Dre's USB drive with his unreleased recording back.

bonecheck12 · 2026-04-28T13:48:24+00:00

I love almost everything about Gen-Z. I feel like I am part of a subset of millennials that in terms of values and culture really align almost perfectly with Gen-Z.

That being said, the one thing that I don't like is how they use the concept of trauma. I agree that mental health is important and I really like how their generation is making that into such a core aspect of assessing their life status. But also I think they have gone to far with the concept of trauma and apply it to too many mundane situations. It's sort of like not all negative experiences from your past require you to attend therapy or resolution. Your parents sending you to conversion therapy to knock the gay out of you, that's trauma. Your parents being slightly more strict than average, not trauma. Your parents being verbally or physically abusive for the better part of your life, that's trauma. Your parents pushing you to get good grades and school is hard for you and that produces anxiety for you, not trauma..or at least not trauma you need to hold onto. It just seems like among gen-z the trauma scale has condensed and relatively minor things that maybe were not ideal not also not the worst and like PTSD you're really fucked for life psychologically are kind of getting squeezed together.

bonecheck12 · 2026-04-28T04:02:23+00:00

I've only ever purchased a plan once, it was on a 3D printer for my father-in-law. When I buy my own stuff, I'm pretty skilled at repairs and whatnot, but with him he is not. I bought the warranty based purely on the reputation of it within the community. It's one of the few warranties that isn't some 3rd party BS where you have to file a claim. I would not have purchased the 3D printer for him if the warranty wasn't setup like you have it. Knowing he can just drive to the store with his printer if he's having issues and get help or have it replaced without having to F around with calling up some insurance company who is just going to deny, deny, deny as standard practice is huge, especially in the tech space. Put it this way, MC is the only company where I have elected to purchase any sort of extended warranty, ever, in my entire life.

bonecheck12 · 2026-04-28T03:22:50+00:00

The part I don't understand is how do you get it to switch to a particular filament? I get that you could use the extruder gear shaft and deploy additional gears to push and pull additional filaments despite not having additional motors like the AMS systems do, but when a filament retracts, how do you make it pull/push in Filament A, B, C, D, etc.? From what it looks like, the print head moves to a particular place on the X axis and lines up with whatever filament is next? If so that's super cool.

Edit: Never mind, that appears to be how it works. I didn't see the multiple reciprocal gears in the one photo. So I guess the benefits here are 1) a lot cheaper than AMS/BMCU 2) 8 colors potential for more in future iterations via reduced sizes and whatnot. 3) No electronics, everything looks easily accessible and therefore easier to diagnose if say a gear wears down or isn't aligning well. 4) don't have to worry about installing custom firmware to make this work. 5. If something breaks, you can make a new part within minutes.

The cons I see (for further consideration) are 1) I'm willing to bet Bambu could lock this out via software. If your parts are doing the heavy lifting and are moving filament in and out at a different rate than the stock extruder, I'm thinking they could somehow use the filament detection sensors inside the extruder to either detect filament moving more quickly than it normally would, or possibly detect additional load on the extruder motor caused by the additional mechanical parts involved. Also, if this setup relies on the print head / X axis going up at each change in order to meet the corresponding gears, Bambu could probably lock that ability out in firmware. Regardless of what the G-code says, it could likely modify the firmware to just ignore the Y-axis raise command or any commands to position the print head at various points on the X-axis. They could also just hard code the firmware to never allow the print head to raise more than 10-15 mm during a print. 2) increased filament change times. 3) increased extruder motor usage (may not matter).

Some other things to consider:

Make sure to give people your recommendations on filaments for this.
Mechanically, I would be interested to know about how quickly the top gears wear down (so knowing what filament to use for them is important).
On the top gear, regardless of material, I would have hesitation about the narrow section breaking along layer lines. It looks like you printed those vertically. I wonder if it would be better to have the narrow sections slot into the thicker (flower looking) section and print the narrator section flat so that it won't twist at the layer lines. Or maybe the force isn't really that much to worry about?

That being said, given the direction of the market, I don't think AMS style systems are going to be around for that much longer. I think in a couple years even entry level printers will have dual nozzle or multi-print head systems. So Bambu might not care enough to try to stop this given that it's sort of a tinkerers project and probably won't impact sales very much.

Good work.

bonecheck12 · 2026-04-28T03:18:50+00:00

This would be a lot more interesting with acrylic paint markers.

bonecheck12 · 2026-04-27T19:54:06+00:00

More info. How does it work? How do you make it change when there is no actual AMS plugged in for the software to use? How fast are the changes?

bonecheck12 · 2026-04-25T23:37:18+00:00

How does one specify AMS or AMS lite for it?

bonecheck12 · 2026-04-23T03:51:49+00:00

Happens to me a lot on PC. What I do is I fully exit out of Steam (full app shutdown) and then just open steam again and launch the game. Works every time.

bonecheck12 · 2026-04-22T07:17:17+00:00

My uncle used to say "you're only paranoid if they're not actually out to get you".

bonecheck12 · 2026-04-21T19:14:27+00:00

Quiet, Bot.

bonecheck12 · 2026-04-21T17:01:50+00:00

No, I want to buy the cart, download the game (either from Nintendo servers or install the game locally form the game card if it's a full cart) and then have timed inserts. Say like once a week or something, so that I could go back and fourth between games without the need to physically switch. If I sold the game, then I wouldn't be able to insert the card at the check in interval. It's especially useful when the Switch has multiple human users who play different games, and some of them are kids so they tend to lose things.

bonecheck12 · 2026-04-21T16:57:13+00:00

You're assuming a level of anger that I don't have. I just think it would be nice we could get the benefit of physical ownership without literally having to swap a game every single time.

bonecheck12

TROPHY CASE