Be a Maker

This is where I do my my Woody Allen uh you know nothing of my work uh shtick because I I had this novel maker makers in 2009 I haven't read makers yet 2008 it's it's why uh uh brie pettis went out and founded makerbot uh and it's you know credited with like kickstarting the homebrew 3D printed revolution blah blah blah blah and um and it was a very bullish novel about 3D printing I um you know the reality hasn't lived up to the hype yet it may just be that we're in the long trough of despair as the the gartner hype cycle model has it uh but you know I think that the problem with um 3D printing was that uh the patents had been concentrated into the hands of two large firms that had bought all their competitors including makerbot and um when those patents finally expired the big one was the the laser centering of of powder patent expired there just wasn't a big bang and I think it's because the supply chain for it still had a lot of proprietary elements and so producing the the powder and producing the the components that allowed for that uh powder printing remained a very high bar and so we just didn't see the kind of new industry emerge that we would have hoped for and you know it's like seven years since those patents expired or five years since those patent expired now we're seeing a few more of those powder printers you get a lot more like uv cured epoxy printers because those came off patent earlier and they have a less complicated supply chain um but still I mean mostly when we talk about printers we're talking about filament and just filaments just not a great technology it's been pushed in ways that you wouldn't even believe and people have figured out how to do absolutely incredible things with it but it's not it's not something that you would make aerospace components for you know it's it's it's something that you make um novelty dungeons and dragons dice out of yeah which is an important industry to disrupt don't get me wrong but I'm I'm with you I'm with you I can remember paying 30 bucks for a set of dice as a kid and thinking somebody's gotta fix this scam I can I can produce some for christmas Robert thank you garrison and you know now I I own a uh I bought a comic-con a couple of years ago I bought a tiny little d20 made out of meteoric ore oh I have a sky metal d20 oh now that's yeah that's that's classy