nyan

Because modest returns don't attract investment, so whoever set it up would have to fund the startup out of pocket and never go public or sell the company off. Not quite impossible, but very unlikely (unless the world changes and investors start getting more sensible about profits).

All technically true, but how many man-hours would it take to calculate the set of holes necessary to print each layer of a non-trivial object (say, a Benchy) without electronic assistance? I'm sure it could be done, but most people couldn't do it in a practical timeframe. Taking presliced gcode and translating it via an automatic or even a manual system should be doable, but you still need a computer to slice the model into gcode.

Jacquard looms are a whole other crottle of greeps. Each warp position gets either raised or lowered, so it's in essence a binary model rather than full analog—conceptually much simpler than this printer, whose punch language is going to have to include slots for longer motor moves. I'd guess that, in the old days, Jacquard patterns were set up for manual punching by drawing up a diagram (which would look like a piece of black-and-white pixel art) and transferring the information one row at a time to the punch. That doesn't seem like it would work for this printer.

Interesting, but not terribly useful unless you have a separate, likely electronics-driven, machine to punch plastic sheets for it (or have a pre-existing sheet defining something you want to replicate a bazillion of). It's an ingenious but very niche machine.

What % of its GDP does the Netherlands have to put into international aid to make seventh place?!

Maybe not. Maybe every attempt to tamper with the timeline brought in unforeseen complications that made everything worse, and that's how we ended up where we are.

It seems like an interesting piece of kit. (Not $1500USD of interesting for me in the current economic climate, though, especially with no indication of Linux support.) Would be nice to know the cost of the consumables beyond the "starter ink bundle". Would also be nice to know more about how the prints are expected to hold up long-term, and what the "nearly" part of "nearly any surface" implies—are there common substances it won't print to?

Or a white box. Or a purple-and-pink gradient box. It was always the most reliable method anyway, since it ensures that there's no real information within the bounds of the box to be recovered. As far as I can see, the only reason for the popularity of the filters is that they look a bit less jarring.

If so, it's a fitting way for them to die.

Not a lot, maybe, but in cases where someone else is paying for the flight, there may be some. And there are a fair number of older people who may be able to afford the plane ticket, but carry a dumb flip phone because that's what they understand and can operate.

Does that mean it might be possible to trick Musk and company into investing in steak sauce instead of AI? Even if we end up with a whole bunch of unwanted condiments we then have to destroy, that strikes me as a win.

You're assuming they'll ever release you.

Some people are uncomfortable with it being closed-source. It's more of a philosophical objection than a criticism of the browser's functionality.