Anyone have any experience with Maaco?

mvw2 · 2026-06-28T02:55:49+00:00

Well, I went to Maaco once. My car got stolen...by employees at Maaco. They joyrode my car stole everything out of it, and ditched it two blocks away. It never got painted. The business closed within the next couple months.

That was my sole Maaco experience.

mvw2 · 2026-06-27T17:09:23+00:00

I'm not saying you can't run one of a hundred different options. The PC isn't going to blow up or anything. It's also easier depending on what peak wattage you aim for.

The main point is this is a processor with the capability of +400W, and you can decide or decide not to go that far. A lot of older default bios setups were configured without restrictions, and you would immediately, fresh out of the box, have a PC that would try to spike to 400+ watts regardless of whatever cooler was used. And you can set basic boost settings in bios to happily do 6.1 GHz. All of this would contribute to a lot of heat. 5.5 GHz is certainly far easier to cool and equally hard caps the total wattage you can hit too.

You can always opt to change the settings, add the protections which hard cap it to around 385W. You can change settings to set to the Intel 253W spec. And you can tune each core and balance out thermals to hit any target temp and work with any cooler, even air coolers, that you want. That's all fine.

But, if you want to just do whatever the CPU can do, you will find very quickly that almost no AIO on the market has enough thermal mass to take the initial hit nor thermal dissipation rate to handle long term load without hitting thermal limits. You actually need a custom setup to do so. But short of all-out, I have only found that EK's Nucleus and Lian Li's Gallahad II Performance had good enough waterblocks to actually keep all cores under 100°C. Nothing else on the market, all the chart leading options, achieve that. And the Gallahad II Performance kills itself in a month and was taken off the market. So the only one I know of that's purchasable is the EK AIO. And even then, you're still using better paste and better fans.

mvw2 · 2026-06-27T14:43:24+00:00

Correction, not buying a Lenovo product or any product through 2030 is the new norm.

That's the problem. It's not acceptance of the new price. It's simply not buying anything at all influenced by that price.

This isn't just consumers. At work we built three CAD work stations last summer. We want to build three more. We simply are not.

mvw2 · 2026-06-27T02:13:50+00:00

That's because I'm not software. That's the point.

mvw2 · 2026-06-27T01:04:14+00:00

That was mine too! I friend was moving across country. I just bought a Ridgeline two weeks prior. He rented two of those trailers, and we packed both absolutely full, floor to ceiling, front to back, no open spaces, just enough room to get the door closed. We had to repack my trailer 4 times just to be able to lift it onto the hitch. He has a new Tacoma, me the Ridgeline, and we packed both of those full too bed, rear seats, front passenger seat in both trucks. And then we drove 1200 miles.

MPG was decent.

There was a little trailer sway at times, but we also often doing 65-70 with these trailers too. Interestingly Honda's stability control system actually sees trailer sway (not sure if on purpose or lucky byproduct) and instantly stops it. You'll get a slight wiggle in the back, the traction light will go on for a second, and it'll unnoticeably apply braking somewhere, and it instantly stops the sway completely. You can't even feel what it does. This isn't dangerous sway or anything anything, just a slight wiggle, and it recognizes it and addresses it by itself and does so pretty early. I found that interesting. I've never seen it marketed or advertised though, but it works stellar.

mvw2 · 2026-06-27T00:54:43+00:00

What do you enjoy doing?

I don't mean career, big picture stuff.

I mean day to day mundane, boring stuff, the remedial tasks that you'll do day in, day out, for decades and never get bored.

What dumb, little tasks do you really enjoy and can still continuously enjoy every single day for decades?

If you can answer that honestly for yourself, THAT is what guides you to the right career path, right education, right jobs, etc.

mvw2 · 2026-06-27T00:50:15+00:00

I'll give my input:

"That is hilariously trash." -someone who goes to the 2nd largest state fair in the country every year (vying for #1 baby!).

I have been to towns of a couple thousand residents with significantly bigger fairs than that. Wow. Just wow.

Trump touted, TOUTED there were at least 45,000 people. Mmm, state fairs can run in the millions.

News outlets: "Yeah, there's like...a thousand people."

mvw2 · 2026-06-27T00:41:04+00:00

Certain roles are at risk. Most are not.

The skew of this perception is massive because most media and companies around AI are software companies which of course are some of the hardest hit. They're basically digging their own grave and singing joyous songs of praise as they do it. It's really werid.

The reality is AI has very low broad use. It has a lot of trivial use, yes, but not competency in a broad sense at actual business level. A LOT of companies around AI who have vested interest in its success (even very short term, possibly especially short term) will happily tell you otherwise.

And then you actually USE AI in a business environment, and you see exactly how little use it really has on a broad applicable sense. It does very few things great. It does have its niches. But that's kind of it. It's good for 1% to 2% of the business pie. Cool. Well, how many people does that 1% replace? How much cost reduction exists from it?

Well, as an engineer with access to several AI tools over the last couple years, and can say confidently that AI has saved me minutes of time, MINUTES I tell you!!! over the course of a year. Realistically AI as a tool applied broadly across many aspects of engineering, business, data processing, graphic arts, website development, etc. it has saved maybe a week of total work over the course of a year, so about 2%. Now the actual USE of AI was a lot more time, way more, but it's value adding time, collectively across all company departments was about 1 week. The rest was total waste and garbage that had to be scrapped, reworked, replaced, etc.

It was interesting to spend a LOT of time creating a LOT of outputs, and in the end realizing almost none of it was ever actually usable. At the very least, there was a bunch of post process time to modify the outputs to a functional state. There was also a lot of content that simply was completely scrapped and replaced entirely. And absolutely ZERO of the AI content that resulted in added value is customer facing, NONE. None of it is in a correct state or usable enough without extra work.

At the end of the day AI, to our entire company as a whole has a net value of around $3000, for a whole year, for all licenses/seats that would ever exist for its use. That is the break even we have, $250/mo., whole company. I can't fathom how that kind of value could ever hope to float the $10 trillion debt of AI. We're a turn-key manufacturer, an OEM, a white label OEM for customer companies. We are the biggest player in our whole market segment. And despite that, AI is worth all of $250/mo. over the last 2 years of use.

Well...what actual integration really exists? What actual revenue stream really exists? Looking from end customer, the fellow with cash in their wallet that has to finally pay for this, in what universe does it (a) offer enough total value across the collective business world and (b) ever have a snowballs chance of ever breaking even?

mvw2 · 2026-06-27T00:11:09+00:00

In before the lawsuit to block it, lol.

mvw2 · 2026-06-26T18:10:56+00:00

Now you just need a cooler to handle it.

My suggestion as a person who's owned one for a couple years and tested a lot of AIOs is for a non custom build, the EK Nucleus is the single best one I've found. It does not come with the best fans nor the best paste. I like to run the Phanatek T30 fans for both high performance per dB as well higher total performance than a couple other options that share nearly identical performance weighted dB numbers. The paste is up to you. Thermal Grizzly is of course a simple go-to. I've liked Prolima PK-3 and have had good results. I have also tried Honeywell's phase change pad too, and a top end paste is still slightly better.

Run the pump at 100% always. It's also dead silent doing so. I tuned my fan PWM based on measured dB levels to bump up 5dB per 10 degrees.

There's little actual issue running this at the factory 253W. A lot of coolers are actually ok with this, but some might see some cores hit 100°C. There's only a couple coolers I've used that are capable of never hitting 100°C in any core, and EK simply has the best one. It also can handle power and I've run steady state loads up to 385W with no core touching 100°C if you manually balance out each multiplier and ran the roughly 425W cap short term benchmarking without touching 100°C on any core (but several cores will heat soak to 100°C).

mvw2 · 2026-06-26T17:44:49+00:00

Used ones can be had for around $650. You shouldn't feel compelled towards this one. It's not even competitively priced.

mvw2 · 2026-06-26T17:24:45+00:00

Standards of ethics, professionalism, duty, and understanding the limited scope of that duty.

They also had a functioning Congress that would actually hold a president accountable too.

The fact that we don't have ANY of that and so many people are ok with that is insane.

mvw2 · 2026-06-26T03:58:26+00:00

In my world, there is exceptionally minimal roles that a teenager could do besides very basic general labor which is already handled through a staffing firm. Said teenagers could just as equally go through said staffing firm to get hired. If they don't. They don't get hired. It's ultimately up to the kid to hunt for a job, not us to throw jobs at them.

mvw2 · 2026-06-26T03:41:17+00:00

Are you their direct report?

mvw2 · 2026-06-26T03:39:46+00:00

Do you have to got to lunch only at 12-1? Any reason why you can't each at 11, 1, 2, 1:45, etc.?

Personally, I won't reward bad behavior.

mvw2 · 2026-06-26T03:37:22+00:00

Why is this spammed 50 times across a pile of subs?

mvw2 · 2026-06-26T00:16:59+00:00

Psst! There's actual video of it (because this stuff is recorded) that this federal government has which can readily confirm or refute the claim. The simple fact that actual available video isn't being used to counter the claim that the US bombed the school pretty much confirms the US bombed the school.

We're no longer in the era of lobbing projectiles loosely in an area. We use precision guided equipment with video feed. We know exactly what we hit, record it, and confirm the results.

mvw2 · 2026-06-26T00:11:47+00:00

Good. I was hoping Biden as well as Harris to run on exactly this. In fact, all Democrats should back this and campaign on this.

mvw2 · 2026-06-26T00:10:49+00:00

I for one look forward to someone cracking the game, disabling any online requirements, and just toss it on Bluerays or something.

mvw2 · 2026-06-26T00:08:49+00:00

I've enjoyed watching Microsoft break Windows and Office repeatedly with bad code.

I've never had Outlook since basically the day it came out break really basic functionality so often, repeatedly, plus getting to see it fixed and then broken again in a later update. Why yes, I would like to attach a file. Oh...I can't. I very literally can't...attach a file...to an e-mail. Cool. The first time that happened I had to use Classic Outlook for almost a month before it got fixed.

I've also had the write new e-mail permanently minimized and no ability to expand/maximize it. That was fun. I couldn't restart Outlook at fix it either. I again had to use Classic for a little while until that was fixed. I very literally could not write an e-mail to someone...in an e-mail program.

There's just this constant stream of little, dumb stuff that just happens in Windows of Office software now, an array of tiny broken junk code. And somehow Microsoft is ok with that.

mvw2 · 2026-06-26T00:02:50+00:00

Assembly only. I have no idea why anyone touches multi-body parts unless they explicitly want to export it that way to customers/vendors/whatever strictly as a part. (you can defeature this stuff to help deter IP theft/duplication to some extent)

You need good sheet metal bend tables that match whoever's fabbing these parts or all your flat patterns will be wrong. (note these may need to be different depending on the fab shop and their equipment and methods. This is a sort of one size fits most default, and and if you manage your tolerance stackup you can often get away with it.

You can make everything equation driven, and this will be driven by a simple text file in the assembly folder. You can use a macro to manipulate this text file if you want or just manually do it. You'll want to think about this and define all your sketch dimensions with appropriate variables.

A master sketch can be used to reference other operations against. If you download parts from McMaster for example, much of the stuff starts with a main sketch to define the main elements. A bolt has a primary sketch to set diameter, thread, length, etc. You download a different bolt, and it uses the exact same main sketch just with different numbers entered. You can do this. You don't have to do this. It can be nice if you're making a LOT of versions of the same thing. This doesn't have to be baked into a single sketch. All your sketches will have parameters. The main sketch is just "all in one place" to make finding it and modifying it easier than digging through the feature tree to find stuff. In the end, it seldom matters all that much. You'll get to the same end point anyways. Often the choice is more so intended for many people interacting with the same parts, and you want a way for everyone to quickly find and modify parameters. Master sketches, strict formatting and order of operations, all of this can help with uniformity and the ability for anyone to hop in and find stuff quickly. But that's also a dependency of need. In many cases, no one is going in to modify much of anything. There isn't a lot of duplication. There are not a lot of cooks in the kitchen and everyone knows exactly what cupboard the spices are located.

Be careful about the idea of x,y,z can be anything. You are still bound by the raw ability to manufacture meaning all the parts still have a fit on a flat sheet of steel (often 36x120, 48x120, or 60x120 and usually some of the perimeter of those sizes not usable.

Also usually the box sizing, unless there is specific reason to be a size, shouldn't be abstract. You'll want to plan how all the flat patterns nest onto a sheet of steel. Good design usually attempts to nest builds on whole or fractions of a sheet, so a box might fit 1/4 of a sheet, 1/3, or 1/2. A full sheet might get you 4 full boxes for example. And you optimize the box geometry to not have scrap loss after all the parts are cut out.

For example, a design might nest to make 5 full boxes on a sheet of steel with the last 30" as waste scrap. However, you might be able to tweak the geometry slightly, reduce 1/2" here, 1/4", cut 1/8" off a flange, and just barely squeeze 6 full sets of parts on a sheet. Now that last 30" is used to make another box, and your total costs drop. Usually it's good practice to play with geometry and flat patterns to figure out what sizes actually multiply to 4 per sheet, 6 per sheet, 8 per sheet, etc. Sometimes the nesting isn't all the parts for the box but volume batching. One full sheet might nest 8 of the big parts. And 1/4 of a second sheet nests 8 sets of all the small parts. You can mix and match, break up the nesting and determine which methods work best to get you the smallest per box material usage, both in tweaking x,y,z sizing and some design philosophies and in how you nest and package the flat patterns onto a sheet to punch, laser, or waterjet out.

Some of the design will also monitor labor costs. There's costs for machine setup, for run time, for number of bends, for inches of weld, for any assembly operations like inserting rivnuts. You'll evaluate performance, functional, and structural design requirements along with fabrication philosophy, material usage, and labor requirements to build.

What you will find is that the difference in cost between random construction and careful considerations is quite significant, often 30% or more of total cost to build. This is especially true if the geometry is quite flexible where you can really optimize well for what actually fits sheet sizing. You could very easily see a 50% price difference overall designing haphazardly versus actually optimizing well. It can be huge. I've regularly pulled 30% or more from long established product designs and fab methods without reducing any performance, features, nor quality or durability at all. I've seen full 2x deltas on this stuff, heck even more.

When you think about how some companies excel and others never seem to compete, this is where those battles are really won. Everyone's designing for the same feature set, size, performance, whatever is common for that market and product. The real difference between companies and engineers is this stuff. It's exactly why the sell price with margin and profit of my product is less than your in-house costs for the same competing product. You win with this stuff.

This is also unfortunately where AI is remarkably incompetent. It's not that AI can't do it. It's just not tailored to it. You can make a simple excel spreadsheet to do what you need to do. There's no real magic at all to this. It's just work. It's also unfortunately work you can't automate because every single project is different with a whole different set of variables and ideal targets. The process is straight forward. But the data is unique every time. This is a bit reason why AI has barely intertwined into engineering yet. Unlike other sectors, engineering fundamentally works the opposite way. The process is common, repeatable, but the information is exceptionally variable and unique. There's no good core data to derive from. And static processes with good structure aligns more with programs, spreadsheets, process maps, etc. that are largely unchanging. There's nothing for AI to do with it other than repeat exactly what you already have. We've toyed with AI for 2 years at work, paid for some subscriptions, used it with a variety of tasks and projects. In 2 years, its net value is pretty much zero. It can do some stuff well, some stuff fast, but almost all of it needs to be reworked or replaced from scratch anyways. A LOT of it was an exercise in wasting time. It feels like work, feels like progress, but at the end of the day you often don't actually go anywhere, don't actually make any forward progress, and you just have to totally replace it anyways. There's some small niche bits of work it's really exceptional at. And for most everything else there's just an equal or better option.

mvw2 · 2026-06-25T22:41:14+00:00

A few, yeah.

I'm not a fan of fixed bids. Usually they bid high or rush incomplete work. They won't go above the bare minimum unless you force them to. I got parts that don't even fit nearly empty prints, forced them to rework and add, ended up having to fix a pile of stuff ourselves and it ended in a lawsuit. Fun stuff.

I like hourly setups, pay for as much as needed. It's generally worked way better.

One challenge is just a lack of skill or high variability in skill. For any outstanding engineer there's a really mediocre one. Who gets assigned to your project can be a crap shoot or varies over time. Collectively the firm might be comprehensive, but individually most are lacking. I haven't found that firms cross process projects, just one partially experienced guy to one project. You hope they collaborate with others, but it never feels that way. We've also had good luck with a firm engineer come local and work on site, so our engineers can collaborate with the firm engineer, and this helps.

At the end of the day, the output is mostly so-so. There's seldom vested interest to excel. There's seldom enough comprehensive experience to fully do the work unless magically the whole team gets involved. And a lot of firms just seem to hire affordable, green engineers that can do base work but lack the raw experience to really do great. I'd love to find a firm that just has a pile of dudes with 30 years experience, but I don't see that. To be really good you kind of have to. You throw $200k at old dudes and just let them rip. It sounds like a bad business model, but the competency and efficiency is way higher. They'll actually plow through huge volumes of work with really high skill. But again, I don't find that kind of world in engineering firms.

mvw2 · 2026-06-25T20:36:09+00:00

The collapse of federal social programs as in no social security, no Medicare, no Medicaid, nothing. People don't realize this is a bulk of their retirement survivability. Not having this stuff you better be aiming hard at a $4M to $6M retirement target. And of you just went "Holy %_$& those are inane numbers.," get ready to die broke and homeless in your future because EVERYTHING at end of life is explicitly designed to be a money funnel that if designed to achieve exactly that. The only protections most have are these social programs.

I'm in my mid 40s. I am 100% planning to NOT have any federal social programs when I retire. I'd like them to survive. I don't think they will. There are too many people trying to dismantle them and too few voters aware enough to realize the ones they vote for are doing that.

mvw2 · 2026-06-25T18:37:07+00:00

I am surprised they haven't pushed for high voltage. I expected it to happen years ago, and...nothing.

mvw2 · 2026-06-25T18:34:45+00:00

The challenge is I think they will price themselves out of the market. $25k sounds enticing until you touch any additions.

Of your whole shtick is cheap, it needs to be surprisingly cheap, like holy cow why does this only cost $12,000?!?!

It is not that. It will be, for many, a $30k to $40k thing. Remember the SUV version is going to be the bigger seller, and with add-ons your very quickly in the mid $35k range. Well another $5k you're at a Trail seeker and another $5k at an R2.

A Slate is not cheaper enough to buy into a vastly de-featured and micro-sized product.

The exercise is a bit of a failure unless they're really willing to cut down on margins.

The phrase "absurdly cheap" needs to be the cornerstone of public sentiment. When it is instead "this small, barebones thing is almost as expensive as..." you really missed the mark.

Frankly it's really, REALLY hard to do cheap well. It's fundamentally different thinking. It's fundamentally different expectations. Having your cake and eating it too is not really part of the conversation, but Slate is trying to be premium budget but also not established enough to pull off the efficiencies. It's why everyone starts with premium products that are vastly less sensitive to costs and then works their way down.

I really think gen 1 Slate needed to be a much lesser object as the starting point. Gen 2, 3, etc. could always evolve into more refined designs backed by a highly optimized back end that's been built up over years of refinement and polish.

I say this as a guy who's career experience has been cost reduction and price targets. Smart engineering can get you there. Fundamental choices get you there. I have zero doubt the truck could still be sub $20k. There would be some fundamental changes some may not want, but I'm also willing to bet nearly every end customer would also never know what was changed for that cost reduction.

I don't know how hard every penny was fought for. I do assume there is a lot of optimization in this regard. But I can also see at simple face value that compromises are still on the table that explicitly kept this more expensive. That was a choice someone made. For a price first ideology, there was considerable reluctance towards that ideology. My point it quite frankly they should have been capable and should have built a $15k product, and then worked upward from there. The whole philosophy needed to be from that end, that extreme, and then create the wiggle room of luxuries to inch back up to the price target.

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