The article mentioned that the use of 'ASCII' within the context of those tools should not be seen as the limited character set ASCII. Personally, I would avoid mentioning ASCII at all.
The title just talks of plain text though, and plain text usually means UTF-8 encoded text these days. Plain, as in conventional, standardised, portable, and editable with any text editor. I would be surprised if someone talked about plain text as being limited to just ASCII.
This whole idea is dead on arrival because of this.
Most nations actively warn their citizens never to carry packages from someone you don't know, and never to carry packages you didn't pack (or saw opened) yourself even for people you do know. And still people agree to carry sealed packages for someone they had a few nice nights with on holiday before boarding the plane back home. That tends to end in a little room on the same airport with security/police grilling you before sending you on to the judicial system where the tough-on-drugs judge will sentence you to a couple of years of extra holiday. In a cell with rats.
There is no way to clear this legally and ethically.
Even across state lines is a big risk but carrying unknown packages into another country is astronomically stupid. You don’t get to play the “I didn’t realize” card, either, when you lie to a customs agent and claim you didn’t accept packages from anyone else.
Yeah, but bringing back a brand new Mac that I personally bought at an Apple Store for a friend won’t ever land me in jail - worst case scenario is that the friend would have to pay me back for whatever import duties the customs officials levy on the computer.
Now, carrying a random package from somebody on the Internet? There are more productive ways to get into jail than this!
A: unpacking and inspecting the packages?
B: The company assuming the risk and liability.
C: The company collecting evidence through KYC and cooperating in the case of crime?
Probably too much hassle to save some bucks when compared to a courier service, though.
A. Maybe. Are you going to ship with someone who is going to open your package and rifle through it, though? I would personally also not feel confident in my ability to check fully for hidden illicit material if I were the courier.
B. No. Absent laws indemnifying the courier, a company saying “I’ll take the heat for those drugs you’re carrying” is not a meaningful act.
C. No. This seems like more of B.
This is all surmountable if the laws allow it. I assume FedEx drivers don’t go to jail of a package unknowingly contains drugs. But I don’t know what needs to be in place for random Joe to be acting as a casual courier without taking on legal liability.
Also if you can get away with it, all drug traffickers would soon have an online order for their package so if stopped they can just say they're an innocent courier.
From a security engineering risk I don't think that would be an issue, because the same mechanism that catches malicious senders would be at play, the sender would have to identify through the app, with a payment provider and to the courier to send a package. The fake courier would have to sign up as a fake sender and be risk-exposed through the sender role.
Courier immunity does not confer much advantage compared to just signing up and having someone else send it. Except, it's true, that a trafficker could play both roles and self serve to avoid courier inspection/risk, there's some implications there for sure, but same as any job right? Pizza delivery guy could be selling drugs. It's not like transport is a niche job that might warrant specialized training and certification, it's like half the economy, tell me a commodity more central to business than oil, it can happen yes, but it isn't the end of the world if it happens on your business it's part of the trade, as long as you can deal with it, comply with the investigation, put preventive measures, and design the system with that in mind, I think it'd be ok.
Obligatory disclaimer. I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, just my personsal opinion on the matter
>Jade’s Instagram account suggests she thought she had been hired for a legitimate job as an “international package shipper,” with a salary of $5,000 per trip.
Her recruiter texted her: “We pay your flights, accommodation, food.”
And yet I know there used to be a business (when the Concorde was flying), where they would offer very cheap tickets on the Concorde from New York to London and back, the hitch being that you agreed to take no luggage, and your luggage allowance was taken up by the brokering company, who provided a rush courier service largely for legal/business documents and the like.
I guess this company is slightly different, I think it could be made legal.
A CNC router is on my list of tools to figure out and own. Routing aluminium, wood, and things like HDPE and being able to make moulds for silicones and resin? Yes please. 3D printing on the other hand never appealed to me.
I would strongly recommend NOT following the general advice of buying a cheap "3018" or something similar. Makera Z1 should be the baseline. Otherwise you're stepping into a world of frustration where you will spend most of your time trying to get your tool to work, rather than getting parts produced.
Unfortunately, reasonably precise and rigid mechanical assemblies do have to cost a certain amount of money.
Agreed. If you want to just make parts and not tinker with a CNC machine, get a Z1.
I had near-zero experience with CNC and got a Cavera Air last year and it mostly "just works" from the hardware side. I just fixture stuff and run my gcode, zero issues with the hardware. The Z1 seems to be even more streamlined w/r/t things like chip evacuation.
But, my god, Makera's firmware/software is fucking garbage. Especially the CAM workbench.
The community firmware and controller software (https://github.com/Carvera-Community) is so much better and feature-filled that it's kind of sad. They also have a tool library and post-processor for the FreeCAD CAM workbench in that repo which will let you make a clean break from Makera's terrible software.
On the upside: Makera apparently won't invalidate your warranty for using the community firmware/controller software, which is nice.
Start with one of the cheap kits on Amazon. A good chunk of the learning curve is software/design/workflows. On the machine side, learning how to properly secure your work pieces, and find the right bits, speeds, and feeds is another art. You can do all of that on a ~$300 3018 CNC kit. Your work output is limited in size, and precision, but that doesn't matter as much when you're just trying to get the hang of things.
I have both, and a manual lathe and mill, and a laser cutter. 95% of everything I do is with the 3D printers. There is no indexing, no work holding, no dealing with shavings or smoke or dust or cutting oil that gets everywhere, no accidentally breaking your last end mill, no screwing up the only one of the thing you're cutting into, no cutting down stock so it fits in your machine, etc. You just press print. Setting up another machine is a right hassle by comparison.
3D printing and plastic parts isn't good for everything, but it is good enough (and easier) for a lot of things.
Yeah same. I’ve done a lot of CNCing but 3D printing isn’t appealing because I don’t care much for making plastic parts. When metal 3D printing becomes hobby tier I’ll be all over it.
Today 3D printing makes a lot of thing possible. Now that multi-toolhead printers are coming, some already available, it's possible to make composite parts. Like hard frame in soft wrapper, conductive lines (resistance still high), etc. I'm still learning, but it's exiting.
As for CNC, some cheap tabletop are available. FreeCAD is useful for design and g-code generation. The problem with cheap they are imprecise and shaky. I'm thinking about using 3d printed frame with metal everything else. Should be light enough to lift with one hand. For precision it'll need calibration from time to time as plastic moves. The goal is to have 3 axis mini CNC mill able to cut soft metals with precision better than 0.1mm.
I don't see how they can get "special treatment", the difference between someone who couldn't hear the bell because they cannot and someone who just wasn't paying enough attention to react in time isn't obvious without questioning them. Cyclists should simply learn to share shared infrastructure and be careful when passing people instead, because they can't know if that person is aware of them in time and going to react in a predictable way.
Sounds like a good name for renaming the President Donald J. Trump Boulevard leading up to Mar-A-Lago when the current bout of totalitarianism over there ends.
> In "The Miller's Tale", Geoffrey Chaucer writes "And prively he caughte hire by the queynte" (and intimately he caught her by her crotch),[14] and the comedy Philotus (1603) mentions "put doun thy hand and graip hir cunt."
It turns out “grab her by the pussy” has surpringly robust precedent.
I am doing leatherworking as well as woodworking. No idea if it is possible to actually make money with this¹, but damned if I'm not giving it a go just to have skills in an area where AI is not a threat for the coming decade. At the very least these crafts allow me to make things which do not exist and cannot be purchased off the shelf.
1: I mean, it is, certainly. I'm just not sure if I can make money by making leather gear.
I feel ya. I've never been accused of using an LLM, fortunately, but depending on the context I do use “smart quotes” (even in „Dutch” or »German«) and the em-dash obviously… (And that ellips fella there. It's just so simple to type with a compose key set up.)
The title just talks of plain text though, and plain text usually means UTF-8 encoded text these days. Plain, as in conventional, standardised, portable, and editable with any text editor. I would be surprised if someone talked about plain text as being limited to just ASCII.
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