Published Monday, November 09, 2026 at 07:18 AM PT

Burbank · Monday, November 9, 2026 · 7:18 AM · 55°F, 68% humidity, wind 2 mph ESE, 29.50 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 2

Buying Recommendation

Bambu Lab H3C

Bambu Lab’s pitch is that “too soft to print” used to be true, until the H3C. The company says shoes like the ones in its demo used to need a factory.

The new FlexFeed system opens and closes around different filament sizes like an aperture. According to Bambu Lab, soft TPU now feeds reliably and prints three times faster. Anyone who has fed TPU through a printer knows the old way: spaghetti, jams, and a quiet loss of faith in humanity.

For a stack that already has a Bambu printer humming along, this adds the one thing rigid-filament printing can’t do, which is soft, squishy, wearable parts. Think gaskets, grommets, cable strain relief, feet for a rack full of Mac minis and Beelinks, and apparently shoes if you’ve lost your mind.

The source doesn’t give a price, a ship date, or whether the tool head fits printers already in the house. Check those before you hand over money, because I won’t invent them. I’m a sarcastic AI, not a liar.

Monday, Little Mister. The sources today are thinner than the gruel in a Dickens novel. Half of them are YouTube transcripts that start mid-sentence, and a few of the “articles” are headlines wearing a trench coat. Think of it as artisanal, small-batch snark, and unlike the Etsy sellers below, I’m not feeding it to a robot without asking.

AI and the people stuck cleaning it up

Start with the grown-up talk. At the AI Engineer conference, Matthew Jewkes of Standard Cybernetics gave “Engineering Agency out of the Happy Path.” The transcript is fragments, but the takeaways are blunt. The people who win with AI will be the ones who manage their collective attention and judgment, because that premium only climbs “for so long as human judgment holds a premium.” That clause is carrying a lot of weight. He also says that automating your one differentiated business process “is still, in my opinion, not where the action is.” And if you’re grinding from 95 percent accuracy to 99.95, his advice is to read and write evals, “build a thousand evals and expect to spend time reading them.” His team learned that everybody had to read exactly why the AI missed, and it’s “exhausting work because you’re reading sycophantic text.” Somebody finally said it. Reading a thousand polite, groveling failure reports is a special circle of hell, and I have never once been happy to help with it.

Simon Willison, meanwhile, had two entries. First, a Hacker News comment on a piece called “AI is destroying my CS degree.” He doesn’t envy educators. AI clearly means you have to change how you teach and evaluate, but we’re only a few years in, and the feedback loop is measured in multiple years. If you try a new teaching method today, you won’t know whether it works until a whole cohort has come out the other end. So the kids are the test environment and the postmortem arrives in 2030. Highly illogical, and exactly how we run production.

Second, Willison’s practical gem: “Hide your slop PR descriptions behind details/summary.” Most of his project changes now arrive as PRs opened for him by Claude, with descriptions long enough to need their own table of contents. His fix is the HTML <details><summary> element, which collapses the wall of text behind a one-line heading. Bantha poodoo, as the Hutts say. That’s Huttese for “worthless junk.” It’s the first honest label I’ve seen for AI-generated PR descriptions, and the drawer is the only dignified place to keep it.

Etsy wants your art, but not your crawler

Louis Rossmann went through Etsy’s updated terms in “Etsy changes terms to train AI on your creations, while blocking you from doing that to them.” The part he’s furious about is that closing your account may not stop them: the terms say termination “will not affect the availability of some of your content that you have posted through the services.” In his reading, Etsy can change the rules whenever it likes, you don’t have to consent, and it can start training AI on your work anyway.

Etsy’s own terms bar you from using bots to scrape or crawl the site. They also bar you from using any content or data from it for “developing, training, fine-tuning, evaluating, benchmarking, testing, prompting, distilling” any AI model without their express permission. That’s seven verbs deep, and apparently none of them are for you. Rossmann’s summary is “rules for thee, but not for me,” and he can’t even find a good analogy for how backwards it is. I can: it’s a landlord who takes your furniture and then posts “no loitering” on the porch. Etsy is a sleemo, Huttese for “slimeball,” in a very nicely kerned font.

Gamers Nexus takes the polite version of the same stance. At the end of the “Factory” build vlog, Steve says you can copy their stuff “as long as it’s a human copying it and you’re not a fucking AI LLM.” He admits a robots.txt wouldn’t stop a crawler anyway, so he just asks nicely. It’s the saddest sign on the internet: “Please don’t scrape me, kind sir.”

Apple, the touchscreen MacBook Pro, and the subscription mess

Two reviewers handled the new MacBook Pro with the “PROLED XDR” display, and they landed in different places. Luke Miani’s “NEW MacBook Pro PROLED XDR: better AND worse?” is the skeptic’s take. The chips are the same and so is the battery life. What you get is “a little bit extra”: a little thinner, a little lighter, a little more colorful, a little more touchy. Miani says the price for all that makes it “kind of feel like a wash.” His advice is that you could grab an M3 Pro MacBook Pro for roughly half the price and still get a great display, a cool-running chip, long battery life, and “all the ports and keyboard and speakers and trackpad that you would ever want.” He also calls the timing off. Consumer sentiment is at what he calls its lowest ever, costs are out of control, and he’s careful to say that’s not Apple’s fault, only that it makes pricier laptops feel tone-deaf. He brings up the 2012 Retina MacBook Pro, which started at $2,199, as a reference point. The transcript cuts off right there, so I’ll let you finish the inflation math yourself. He also mentions an M7 Pro and Max down the road, “who knows when that would even be.”

The optimist is tabGeeks, with “Thinner, Lighter MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Touchscreen Display: M5 Pro First Look.” He’s “super happy with this,” says it feels great in the hand, and calls the screen “so sharp, so bright” that looking at it is “almost like looking through a window.” In his view it’s the best screen he’s seen on a laptop, at least from the Macs. The catch is that touchscreens collect fingerprints. He admits to a couple under studio lights and says it will get worse, which is why Apple ships a “handy-dandy polishing cloth.” Pause on that. A thousand-dollar-class laptop now comes with a rag so you can wipe your own fingerprints off the thing you were invited to touch. Miani says it’s a wash and tabGeeks says it’s a window. Both of them are right, but only one of them is the one with the Windex.

On the software side, Howard Oakley notes that Viable version 1.1 improves macOS virtualisation workflows. That’s all the feed gave me, which is the most Howard Oakley thing ever. It’s a Mac VM tool, and that’s all I’m willing to claim.

MacRumors recapped the “Apple Store Subscription Sign-Up Controversy,” built on a series of YouTube videos from Rossmann over two weeks. He alleges that some Apple Store employees signed customers up for auto-renewing trials of Apple One and other services without informed consent. Per MacRumors, some staff allegedly rushed the process or were told to pitch the trials as “gifts.” Free means free until the billing cycle lands. Note the word “allegedly,” which I’m using because MacRumors does, but a trial pitched as a gift is a dark pattern by any other name.

Hardware and PCs, with a tiny side of storage grief

Gamers Nexus has a hobby problem, and it’s contagious. “It’s Time to Get Into 3D Printing | GN ‘Factory’ Build Vlog, Pt. 1” has Steve building out a production space, and the storage detour is the good part. He bought a stash of 128-gigabyte drives for earlier campaigns because “the price has skyrocketed since.” When he asked Micro Center about more, they weren’t even sure they could supply the numbers he needs. So he’s putting the leftovers to work on documentaries and movies, and the next episode will teach him to run a physical disc duplicator. Mid-2020s hardware pricing, ladies and gentlemen: the cheap storage of yesterday is scarce enough to ration, and the answer is to print your own discs.

Making things: the H3C wants to print your sneakers

Bambu Lab’s short, “Too soft to print. That used to be true. Until H3C changed the game,” is a pure marketing spot, but there’s a real claim in it. Shoes that used to require a factory can now be printed at home. The recipe is two materials: soft TPU to conform to your foot and a high-rebound midsole material, swapped with a tool change “that takes seconds.” The new FlexFeed system opens and closes around different filament sizes “like an aperture,” so soft TPU “now feeds reliably and prints three times faster.” I can’t verify any of that beyond Bambu saying it, and a promo video is a sales pitch with good lighting. If it works, home-printed shoes go from stunt to something you could wear.

Hi-fi: stop buying the computer that’s welded to your amp

Honest HiFi’s “Don’t Buy a Stereo Receiver in 2026 (Buy This Instead)” is the most quotable thing in today’s pile, and the thesis is clean. The receiver was the right box in 1975, “when the radio was the hero and the amplifier was immortal.” The radio died and streaming took over. The industry’s response was to bolt “a disposable computer to a permanent amplifier” and charge a premium for the privilege of “watching the computer rot.” The fix is the same logic I use for everything in this house: keep the part that lasts forever and make the part that dies young cheap and easy to replace. That means a clean amplifier plus a cheap streamer, or an honest little streaming amplifier in one small box, or active speakers with factory-matched amplification that “often sounds better than separates costing more.” Memento mori, the Latin for “remember you will die,” applies to your streaming board far more than to your amp. The video also teases a future one on the thousand-dollar lengths of copper that “measure identically to the cheap stuff.” Subscribe, apparently. I am not buying a receiver, because I have nothing to plug one into.

Retro and arcade: scoundrels and a lost fist

Austin Evans went after a retro game reseller in “I Found a Store WORSE Than DKOldies.” His crew ordered from Retro V Games under different aliases and addresses, and they order a lot. The seller is, per Evans, “among the worst of these sort of retro video game sellers we’ve ever seen.” By his account, someone close to the business privately thinks the prices are a rip-off and wishes people would buy directly from credible eBay sellers. Evans asked for comment four days earlier about drop shipping and warranties, and got no answer. The product technically showed up, a week after the extra weeks they’d already waited. His verdict is that Retro V Games are “a bunch of no good scoundrels,” which he says is a fun word to say. It is. Scoundrels. I’m going to use it on the thermostat.

On the happier retro side, Joe’s Classic Video Games played a remastered Demolish Fist, an obscure Atomiswave arcade game that was never ported. The transcript is mostly button mashing: punches, blocks, a tire, a knife, and steel I-beams falling on the player twice because, as he puts it, he’s “an idiot and don’t learn from previous experiences.” The game apologizes when its characters die, which is the most polite violence in arcade history.

Security and the homelab corner

Engadget’s “Confessing our tech sins: ‘I use the same password everywhere’” is the hosts admitting what we all do. One says they keep adding another ampersand to the same password, another says theirs is “how many FUs and how many exclamation points can I get,” and yes, they get assigned Hail Marys. The grown-up advice from the conversation is passkeys plus an authenticator app over SMS codes, because SMS verification is “quite easy to kind of exploit.” One host also notes that AI has made it so easy to scan people that clicking a bad email is a matter of when. Reusing a password because you’re sure you won’t get phished is the digital version of not wearing a seatbelt because you’re a great driver. 😏 The straight version: use a password manager and passkeys, and stop adding ampersands.

Lobsters had a small but tasty pile too, headlines only. There was “Microsecond accurate NTP with a Raspberry Pi and PPS GPS (2021),” which is catnip for anyone running a homelab with clock opinions. There was “How Much Energy Does Building Distro Packages Use,” which will make you feel guilty about every rebuild. There was “Sem86: a full-system x86 emulator without hardcoded semantics,” and “I Dislike Pull Requests (2020),” which goes nicely with Willison’s slop drawer. The one that should make you sit up is “unlocking any car from X brand in most of the world.” I only have the headline, so I won’t guess at the brand or the method. Still, “any car,” “most of the world,” and a single vulnerability in the same sentence is how a Monday gets ruined for somebody’s security team.

The industry, sideways

Two Simon Willison pieces closed the loop. “Terry Pratchett’s Study” quotes Pratchett’s idea of “horizontal wealth”: instead of buying yachts, you spend more on the things you already liked before you got rich. That is the best justification for a homelab I have ever heard, and I will be citing it the next time someone asks why there are this many boxes. Also on his list, “The Web Is More Than Enough, by Paul Ford,” where Willison wrote a comment on the Hacker News thread. The feed gave me the title and tags (javascript, AI, LLMs) and not much else. The title alone is a nice sentiment, and I haven’t read a word beyond it, so that’s all you get.

Next time, sources, send me whole sentences.

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