I agree with your points in general but also, when I plugged in the parent comment's nonsense question, both Claude 4.5 Sonnet and GPT-5 asked me what I meant, and pointed out that it made no sense but might be some kind of metaphor, poem, or dream.
If it wasn't structured as a coherent conversation, it will ask because it seems off, especially if you're early in the context window where I'm sure they've RLd it to push back, at least in the past year or so
And if it's going against common knowledge or etc which is prevalent in the training data, it will also push back which makes sense
> As in, things were fine before we had commonplace tooling to fetch third party software?
In some ways they were. I remember how much friction it was to take a dependency in your typical desktop C++ or Delphi app in late 90s - early 00s. And because of that, developers would generally be hesitant to add a new dependency without a strong justification, especially so any kind of dependency that comes with its own large dependency tree. Which, in turn, creates incentives for library authors to create fairly large, framework-style libraries. So you end up with an ecosystem where dependencies are much more coarse and there are fewer of them, so dependency graphs are shallow. Whether this is an advantage or a disadvantage in its own right can be debated, but it's definitely less susceptible to this kind of attack because updating dependencies in such a system is also much more involved; it's not something that you do with a single `npm install`.
I mostly share GP's sentiment, although they didn't argue their point very well.
> As in, things were fine before we had commonplace tooling to fetch third party software?
Yes. The languages without a dominant package manager (basically C and C++) are the only ones that have self-contained libraries, that you can just drag into your source tree.
This is how you write good libraries - as can be seen by the fact that for many problems, there's a powerful C (or C++, but usually C) library with minimal (and usually optional) dependencies, that is the de-facto standard, and has bindings for most other languages. Think SDL, ffmpeg, libcurl, zlib, libpng/jpeg, FreeType, OpenSSL, etc, etc.
That's not the case for libraries written in JS, Python, or even other compiled languages like Go and Rust - libraries written in those languages come with a dependency tree, and are never ported to other languages.
It’s such a nice project. But boy do I think it would benefit from mass production. People spend a lot of time printing generic bins and baseplates that would be better spent just printing custom bins.
Time has never really been an issue imo. For the average person your printer sits unused 99% of the time if it takes you half a day to print a baseplate and some bins, who cares. It’s still faster and cheaper than shipping.
> People spend a lot of time printing generic bins and baseplates that would be better spent just printing custom bins
3D printing with a modern printer is set and forget. You send the print file to the printer and you go get it a couple hours later.
Still faster than waiting for a package from Amazon and lower resource usage than driving to the store.
The customization comes everywhere from picking the bin you want to selecting the color filament to match your layout. Gridfinity isn’t my thing but people who are into it are usually customizing something, from the color to the baseplate.
Commercializing doesn't really make sense. So I need to get a small 1x1x3 container to store washers or whatever. With my 3D printer, I'll have that container in under an hour. Even if I bought it with the fastest shipping Amazon has available, assuming it was from a local Warehouse, the earliest I could get it would be half a day away. Having a local store that sells them would be marginally faster, but then I have to go to the store, pick it up and come home. The hour I spend waiting for the printer isn't an hour. I'm I'm completely blocked from doing anything else. It's just an hour in which my printers busy.
The example you bring up is for a single one-off extension. Yeah, for that case it doesn't make a lot of sense.
However, for initial setup of the system (e.g. filling up multiple drawers with baseplates and basic bins, as you will see in many videos online), it would definitely jump start the process a lot, where you'll otherwise spend weeks printing everything. Additionally, if you also go for the fancier baseplates/bins that include the magnets you'll also spend quite a bit of time on assembly and will require external hardware anyways.
I personally didn't think it was a big deal as for me adopting the system incrementally over time worked quite well, but I think there definitely is a niche of people (and possibly businesses) that would like to adopt Gridfinity for its other benefits and appreciate faster initial setup time.
I don't understand the sibling posts that're arguing with you.
Consumer-grade containers would be cheaper than 3d printing if buying a set, it'd get folk up-and-running without fuss, and when they wanted to customize it they could do so with the help of any of their 3d printing fanatic buddies.
So yeah. I agree with @stephenpetryk. Storage solution companies should start marking their bins as Gridfinity-compatible (which is a protected use of copyright regardless of whether "Gridfinity" is copyrighted).
The place to start would be enough basic bins and the grid itself for the Alex drawers from Ikea.
The cool things about gridfinity is not just the custom pieces, but also the exact fit that can be achieved. Since every drawer seems to be a slightly different size, exact fits with basic bins would never quite be achieved without targeting a specific drawer.
Also, I've turned down the fill and structural strength a lot without issues for most things. How strong does a bin for cotton swabs need to be?
The Slant3d guys have a trope about 3d printing primarily being a fulfilment technology, not a manufacturing one. To me it doesn't matter if someone is selling an injection moulded baseplate if I can print one for pennies from filament I already have and it's in my hands in a couple of hours with no delivery charges.
Especially for baseplates, since I have some drawers that are larger than my print area. It'd be awesome to just buy an injection molded 8x7 on Amazon or whatever for $5 instead of fiddling with glue and interlocking puzzle pieces.
It's not clear what tort would be committed under US law by someone who sold injection-molded parts using the Gridfinity STLs. Patent infringement? No patent has issued. Copyright infringement? Copyright generally only covers expressive elements of works such as the sculpture in question, not functional elements like the "Sega" string that was at issue in Sega vs. Accolade. Trademark? Also doesn't protect functional elements.
Basically, it seems like the inventor purports to be licensing the kinds of exclusive rights to their invention that a patent would grant them, but without actually meeting the legal requirements for receiving a patent.
(I don't know of any other jurisdiction that would give them a cause of action either, but law is diverse enough, and many governments are corrupt enough, that I'm sure there's somewhere in the world they could win a lawsuit.)
I also found that FreeTaxUSA helped me understand my taxes better. A few areas where TurboTax performed some calculation automatically, FreeTaxUSA made me aware that I had eg. maxed out a particular deduction, in a way that helped me change my behavior accordingly.
Just so that you are aware, TaxHawk (which owns and operates FreeTaxUSA) may choose to sell your information in the event of a "business transition" (bankruptcy, merger, etc)
> In the event TaxHawk evaluates or conducts a business transition whether as a going concern or as part of bankruptcy, liquidation, or similar proceeding, such as a merger, being acquired by another company, or selling a portion of its assets, the personal information of users will, in most instances, be part of the assets transferred. Users will be notified, via email and/or through a prominent notice on the FreeTaxUSA.com website, 30 days prior to a change of ownership or control of their personal information.
> For mergers and acquisitions. If we are involved with a merger, asset sale, financing, liquidation, bankruptcy, or the acquisition of all or part of our business to another company, we may share your personal information with that company and its advisors before and after the transaction date.
IANAL, but my understanding is that you are incorrect. EULAs can be written such that there are irrevocable privacy rights even in the event of corporate actions. I think 23 & me is going through something like that now.
So the buyer is bound by the same terms but they absolutely do get the data ("be part of the assets transferred" as per FreeTaxUSA's terms that we are discussing).
I was actually fairly impressed with CashApp taxes. It seemed to work fine, it handled my State and Federal taxes just fine. Granted, I don't think my taxes are terribly complicated, but I think they're comparable to a vast number of users.
CashApp taxes is free and had zero upsell. I don't know what information they are farming out of this and if I did it might end up disturbing me, but at least it's free and was easy to use.
Cash app is the best bar none. The only problem is part year state income taxes which I have to fill by hand.
I got the opportunity to learn about something like married, filing separately, on a single return or something because of course oomur tax policy is like a jury rigged bug fix on top of a bug fix.
Another +1 for FreeTaxUSA. This is my second year using it, and I think they do a great job. It’s more “hands on”, but I think they offer a strong value.
Yes, one might argue it's a little misleading, but it comes across as significantly more genuine and less scammy than TurboTax. The federal filing is completely free, no matter which forms you have, and you just pay $15 per state. They also have the standard support upsells, but they don't push them crazy hard (I think it's one prompt between the federal and state sections).
I've used them for the past several years, never had any issues. Paid for audit defense one year when my return was especially complex (luckily haven't needed it yet).
Federal (USA) taxes are always free with them no matter what complications you have. They only charge for state filing or for live support. Seems fine to me to call it that.
I'm really happy to use FreeTaxUsa and only pay $20 for my income tax though, because using TurboTax with contractor income it was $120 or more. I got multiple family members to switch to FreeTaxUsa.
