We were wondering if we could encode the STL for a 3d print entirely into a QR code and then put that on the actual printed object - so that any piece you made could be replicated by just scanning the object and printing again.

When looking into it I thought it just was too much data, even looked into multi-colored QR codes. But I didn’t realize you could just make a bigger QR code…

If you have self-employment income, business income, capital gains, 401k distributions, HSAs, 529 plans, etc. it can get complicated but at that point TurboTax honestly doesn't help all that much (unless it's gotten a lot better since I last used it). If you get to the point that your taxes are too complicated to do by hand you probably need an accountant anyway.

It does. I have most the things you have mentioned and it was automated, except for correcting a small situation their OCR messed up by reading an extra blank space from the form.

- Downloading all forms and instructions.

- Downloading all 1099s and W-2 statements.

- Scanning any paper 1099 or W-2 forms I receive (rare now, thankfully).

- Filling out a draft of the forms slowly in pencil. This takes the most time. I have sometimes used spreadsheets for this but I find it is quicker to just use a calculator or even the Python REPL.

- Filling out a "hard copy" of the forms and double checking my math. This takes more time than you think if your state don't have fillable forms, but I have sometimes done it by hand very neatly rather than typing it up.

- And finally going to the post office to mail things. I never just put them in my mailbox.

2024 only took 11 hours in total mostly over 2 weekends. And as I have said in other posts here, I don't stress myself out about and take my time. You can probably do it faster if you want to.

The key is to just read the instructions for each form and follow them mindlessly and mechanically. I will admit that it is difficult at first, but you do get used to it, and despite my tax returns getting much more complicated over the years, the number of hours that I take has stayed the same.

Freetaxusa is the simplest way but really there are a ton of options that're free.

I do think TurboTax or a competitor makes sense when you have a novel-to-you tax situation to deal with. Probably the hardest part of filing taxes is just figuring out which of the supplemental forms are applicable to you. I absolutely would have missed the foreign tax paid one on my own, for example. When your tax situation is the same as the last year just with different numbers I don't see much of a point.

the next year, pretty much the same spreadsheet with whatever minor tax changes had been made for that year.

the 15 hours is mostly spent getting your shit together which you have to do for an online solution too.

I did a better job than my accountants do, they often forget little details that I would keep track of. ("no, I did not owe a penalty, the estimated payments and refund carried forward meant there was enough money on my tab...")

The idea was that paragraphs are naturally how we segment distinct thoughts in text, and would translate well to segmenting long video clips. It actually worked pretty well! It was able to predict the paragraph breaks in many texts that it wasn’t trained on at all.

The problems at the time were around context length and dialog style formatting.

I wanted to try and approach the problem in a less brute force way by maybe using sentence embedding and calculating the probability of a sentence being a “paragraph ending” sentence - which would likely result in a much smaller model.

Anyway this is really cool! I’m excited to dive in further to what you’ve done!

When I first built it, I spent some time trying to tackle the issue of needing to update the entire file (and create an invalidation) if you want to update the database, which might be fine, but closes a lot of doors. I kind of hit a wall on finding a convincing approach to solving it, given the constraints of the setup.

I have never heard of this library before, but it’s going to stick in my head the next time I’m looking for a JS animation lib.

Definitely kinda highlights the importance of first impressions.

For my day job I am currently working for an online education company. I have been learning about the concepts behind knowledge tracing and using knowledge components to get a fine grained perspective on what types of skills someone has acquired throughout their learning path. It is hard because our company hasn't really had any sort of basis to start from, so I have been reading a lot of research papers and trying to understand, from sort of first principles, how to approach this problem. It has been a fun challenge.

So the idea of Knowledge Tracing originated, from my understanding with a paper in 1994: http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/1... this sort of introduced the idea that you could model and understand a students learning as it progresses through a set of materials.

The concept of Knowledge Components was started, I believe, at Carnegie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh with the Learn Lab: https://learnlab.org/learnlab-research/ - in 2012 they authored a paper defining KLI (Knowledge Learning Instruction framework): https://pact.cs.cmu.edu/pubs/KLI-KoedingerCorbettPerfetti201... which provided the groundwork for the concept of Knowledge Components.

This sort of kicked things off with regards to really studying these things on a finer-grained level. They have a Wiki which covers some key concepts: https://learnlab.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page like the Knowledge Component: https://learnlab.org/wiki/index.php?title=Knowledge_componen...

Going forward a few years you have a Stanford paper, Deep Knowledge Tracing (DKT): https://stanford.edu/~cpiech/bio/papers/deepKnowledgeTracing... which delves into utilizing RNN(recurrent neural networks) to aide in the task of modelling student knowledge over time.

Jumping really far forward to 2024 we have another paper from Carnegie Mellon & University of Pittsburgh: Automated Generation and Tagging of Knowledge Components from Multiple-Choice Questions: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.20526 and A very similar paper that I really enjoyed from Switzerland: Using Large Multimodal Models to Extract Knowledge Components for Knowledge Tracing from Multimedia Question Information https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.20167

Overall the concept I've been sort of gathering is that, if you can break down the skills involved in smaller and smaller tasks, you can make much more intelligent decisions about what is best for the student.

The other thing I've been gathering is that Skills Taxonomies are only useful in as much as they help you make decisions about students. If you build a very rigid Taxonomy that is unable to accommodate change, you can't really adapt easily to new course material or to make dynamic decisions about students. So the idea of a rigid Taxonomy is quickly becoming outdated. Large language models are being used to generate fine-grained skills (Knowledge Components) from existing course material to help model a students development based on performance in a way that can be easily updated when materials change.

I have worked through and replicated some of the findings in these later papers using local models, for example using the open Gemma 2 27b models from Google to generate Knowledge components and using Sentence Embedding models and K-means clustering to gather them together and create groups of related Knowledge Components. It's been a really fun project and I've been learning quite a bit.

It's nice to know I'm not the only one thinking about that.

The trick for me is that it's a path in a graph for each student, so even if some component is not as strong for one student, he can fill the gap by taking another route. A good framework would be resilient if it finds many possible paths to reach the same result, and not forcing one path. But then, teaching in this way is more difficult.

My X1C is completely cut off from the internet, it just talks over LAN to my computer and I send it jobs, I never setup any sort of account with Bambu - never really needed anything more than that.

I don’t myself have the same sort of xenophobia towards Chinese products that many other people have, but I do like to buy local when I can. There just aren’t really any American companies (or companies anywhere honestly) producing products at the level that they are for 3d printing. If something comes along, I’d be happy to try it out.

What I really need is fast multi-color printing and I need to scale that up when needed.

To me, the best offering they have right now is the A1-Mini with the AMS-Lite. And that is what I'll be ordering as the next purchase. The AMS-Lite is a completely different design from the AMS sold on the larger printers, and in my opinion, is a much better design. The AMS-Lite holds the filament reels from the center instead of the outer rim (which causes all sorts of issues with non-standard reels with the Original AMS) and it has a very simple filament path directly to the nozzle. This is going to save me a ton of time and wasted filament.

At $389 for the combo of the AMS-Lite and the A1-Mini - I can scale this up as needed without a ton of concern for my bank account.

It is cool that they are incorporating other features into their printers - but I hope they don't stagnate on their core 3d printing features, because it's what's set them apart from others by a long shot and their singularly focused products have become a staple for many small businesses i think.

I'm sad they're being acquired, especially by a FAANG company. This constant consolidation is bad for IT (and the economy in general). I am happy for the employees holding shares though!

https://www.wizconnected.com/en-us

Growing up in NYC, it is was impossible to not remember the "Nobody Beats the Wiz" jingle

I like it too. Don't care much for google buying them, it can only end badly.

Companies like CrowdStrike have copied a lot of what Wiz has been doing (and I'm sure wiz has copied some CrowdStrike features).

This announcement is pretty disappointing to me. I would have more faith in Wiz as an independent company than as part of Google. I expect their innovation to fall off a cliff.