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Sad.

Is there a free alternative to this ideally community owned and open source?


I'm not sure what you are hoping from "free", "community owned", and "open source".

They make mills and lathes. They are really nice little machines, great for hobby use. We have one lathe from them in our hackspace for example, and it is a delight. Of course you have to understand the limitations of the tool, but that is true for every machine.

That being said, it is just a lathe. There is nothing particularly complicated about it. At least not at their complexity level. If you can manufacture machine tools you can make one very easily. If you don't have the manufacturing capability you won't.

The reason i'm saying this is because "free as in freedom" and "open source" are properties of plans / source code. If you happen to have a lathe factory, the lack of a lathe plan is not going to stop you. You are just going to design one for yourself. And if you don't have a factory which can make a lathe, then why do you care about plans for a lathe being open source?

I guess the factory itself could be "community owned". If you have a business plan, or a large pile of cash, now is the time to approach them that you want to buy everything from them. But I'm not sure how "community owned" would even work for this use case.

Basically what I'm saying this is hardware, not software. The terms you use don't make much sense in this case.


the sherline designs aren't particularly notable, and they're pretty easy to replicate if you have working machine tools that are larger. any machinist could make a sherline mill or lathe, but without that floorspace and capex and skill, one really can't.

I spent overly long trying to learn on sherline tools and once I gave up and bought a Bridgeport and an old Logan, I realized that I was just banging my head against the limitations of the tools.

the value they had was that they were cheaper than the smaller version of the standard toolroom machines, and they were a way to bootstrap yourself without having the heavy power and the floorspace. so pretty much the storefront, not the IP. I still have their 4" rotary, and its actually not bad. the mill had a huge amount of flex in the column that made it pretty unusable for me unless you took really really tiny passes.

I had an old Unimat for a couple years, and while that was even _more_ dodgy than the sherline the fact that it was all steel and a combined mill/lathe made it a lot more interesting. would rather see some community standards for tooling on a platform like that. maybe a 50% larger so setup isn't so fiddly.


100% They were fine for what they were, but once you use a big tool you just can’t go back.

I think there is plenty of room for innovation in hobby machines, but IME, hobbiest value work envelope maybe even more than pros.


Given that the Gingery books folks are shutting down as well: https://gingerybookstore.com/

one wonders what the other alternatives are.

I mentioned Taig elsethread, and the Unimat is still available at https://thecooltool.com/en/ --- for opensource there are a couple of options:

- https://www.lathes.co.uk/multimachine/

- https://www.printables.com/model/89657-3d-printed-wood-lathe...

and I've been debating on getting a small Grizzly G0745: https://www.grizzly.com/products/grizzly-4-x-6-variable-spee...

Are there other notable approaches/options?


If I was in the market for a lathe that small, I’d probably just buy a slightly larger mill and work on rotating parts vertically, TBH.

If you were committed to wanting a small lathe and CNC, I’d just put linear rails on some of the larger 8020 profiles and rig a spindle from a cartridge spindle. Honestly, though, an 8x16 lathe is kinda bare minimum for steel parts unless you are working VERY slowly. The 7x14 I had worked, but at that scale, I’d be working hard to implement a clough42 ELS conversion so that threading didn’t suck so bad.

If this is genuinely something you want advice/help with, feel free to email me.


EDIT: I don't really have room for a manual mill which would be large enough for this sort of thing to make the parts I want(the Grizzly would be really pushing its limits).

It's more idle speculation at this point in time --- I did save the electric motor from replacing the garbage disposal recently (cracked housing) and I also have a key duplicator I fished out of a dumpster (working!) and really, it should be workable to fabricate something given the tools I have.

If you did a writeup on making a lathe w/ 8020 profiles and a cartridge spindle (source?) I'd be interested --- what would the total landed cost be?


I wish ads never existed.

The future is open source, no subscriptions, no purchases, 100% free and community supported.

The sooner software gets to this point, the world will be a much more better place rather than everything being a subscription.


“I want someone to work for me but I don’t want to pay them” is exactly the kind of mindset that led to ads everywhere.


Only a society which doesn't want anything, needs nothing, demands nothing can do without ads. While privacy invading ad tech is obviously a bad thing, ads - namely the thing used to introduce you and others like you to a new idea - is a good thing.


Needlessly reductionist take that doesn't steelman what the OP is after, nor do they need a lesson in definition of the word ad.

Ads in their current form are predominantly a nuisance and malware. Only incidentally do they help the person actually find what they are looking for. This has to change.


So you want software from people for free, hope you share also your work power with others for free.

I the end someone pays for open source and often it's some developer with his spare time.

Yes to open source, but yes to money for the developers.


ChatGPT is already free to use? What, do you expect them to keep providing this without any return?

Besides, who will pay for the compute of LLMs in your utopian future?


Are there other instances available? X can't ban them all.

I wish legal issues wouldn’t exist for this project and X would stop attacking projects that provide information for free.

Privacy is important more than ever as many of us don't want to login into X.


There's plenty of other instances running on nitter, some secret/invite only (and as such more chance to fly under the radar). The code is open source: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter albeit X DMCA'd the repo.


> X DMCA'd the repo.

No they didn't, or you'd see the text "Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown." and wouldn't have access to the repo at all. Instead you have full access to it, its author having merely archived it out of caution.

No reference to nitter in https://github.com/github/dmca/


Seems you're right. They have done this in the past though, so wouldn't exactly be a surprise.

Here is what the "free speech" platform have censored previously on GitHub:

> X Corp. employs various technical protection measures to control access to its copyrighted works, including those at issue here (API schemas and platform content): e.g., official X Corp. API key/OAuth authentication, rate-limiting mechanisms, proprietary behavioral pattern detection, TLS fingerprint validation, and x-clienttransaction-id checks. The repository referenced above appears specifically designed to circumvent these measures using browser cookies, curl_cffi TLS impersonation, fake headers, request jitter, and reverse-engineered GraphQL queries.

https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/b2c88bad7dd771dc7d1842ff...


I thought the US courts decided that APIs aren’t copyrightable, and the rest of it is not their content.


Does things like that even matter anymore? Lots of things shouldn't be what they are, and vice-versa, yet no one seem to do anything. If Microsoft listens to the demands of XCorp, then that's the reality, regardless of what courts say.


>Are there other instances available?

It's been discussed before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49571634 ("Nitter has more working instances than before the takedowns")


https://status.d402.de/ and many other index pages

Consider running your own to spread out the HN/Slashdot effect.



yes, sorry


> How well do you think their terminal works if they couldn't even spend the time to clean up their vibe coded website?

Your website is literally down.

https://i.postimg.cc/YCdkwZZq/image.png

And I don't think their website is that bad.


> And I don't think their website is that bad.

The download button doesn't even work properly.

Clicking download in the top right gives me a .dmg, the other download button in the hero gives me the .exe, the one in the footer gives me a .dmg

Docs give me a 404, blog is empty


> The download button doesn't even work properly. Clicking download in the top right gives me a .dmg, the other download button in the hero gives me the .exe, the one in the footer gives me a .dmg

I mean, it works for me?

The site is clearly not ready and maybe they didn't expect people to find it, but that doesn't mean the site is bad.

It is just a work in progress.

I'm not even interested in the site anyway the software and the source interests me more.

https://github.com/gloom-sh/gloomberb


> I mean, it works for me?

Doesn't invalidate my experience.

> and maybe they didn't expect people to find it

What do you mean? It's linked on the Github repo.

> but that doesn't mean the site is bad.

I think a site that doesn't work properly is a bad one. That's just my opinion.


> What do you mean? It's linked on the Github repo...I think a site that doesn't work properly is a bad one. That's just my opinion.

I mean isn't this the point of open source?

You can fork the repo and fix the problem instead of complaining?


You can still give constructive criticism of an open source project though, right?


Never said you can't.

You can fix it though or open an issue.


So, volunteer time for free for someone else?

>I mean isn't this the point of open source?

Only if you just found what open source is.

In actuality, successful open source projects recruit developers by providing value to them. If there's a failure before you even install the product, there's 0 reason for someone to start contributing right away, why not start their own project at that point? Contributing 1 to something that has 0 value is a donation in exchange for nothing, not how Open Source usually works.


> So, volunteer time for free for someone else?

Yes.

You know the project is OSS, you found the problem, you can fix it or open and issue instead of complaining to me about it.

Problem solved.

That benefits everyone rather than forking a project and starting all over again and wasting effort.

I cannot reproduce the problem, so I can't fix it.

But since you're complaining about it and you have the right skills, you can!


Curious what you consider those that aren't 100% 'slop', aside from the common ones.

Because I'm starting to see the word 'slop' as a synonym for:

"This person may or may not have used AI to build software and I don't like it"


Slop is slop when the author could not have done it without the AI.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan#:~:text=%E2%80...


Right but it doesn't answer my question about what you don't consider a slop TUI though.

> Slop is slop when the author could not have done it without the AI.

For Vim (1.) and Linux's AI adoption policies, there are some contributors who couldn't have made a PR / patch without AI. Are Vim and Linux now considered slop because they allow AI contributions?

(1.) https://github.com/vim/vim/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#using...


I would say this is a fair question, and that slop can be laundered when there are multiple collaborators and at least one of them knows what they are doing. Whereas a monograph written entirely by Claude is always just slop.


> I would say this is a fair question, and that slop can be laundered when there are multiple collaborators and at least one of them knows what they are doing.

Sounds like you consider Vim and Linux to be slop by your definition. As an example:

https://github.com/vim/vim/commits/master/?since=2026-08-02&...

Claude's contributions are littered around the vim's C codebase, so surely Vim is now a 100% slop TUI?

So my question still remains, what tool do you think isn't a 100% slop TUI?


It is almost like they want to be ripped off, the massive amount of gatekeeping is bizzare.

Financial information should be free for everyone.


The very fact that it isn't is what makes it so valuable.


This is what is wrong with the world today.


It is, after its value has been exploited.


Yesterday's data is much cheaper and often free ;)


This is what is wrong with the world today.


They're too busy dealing with their fake life problems to think about their impact on the world.


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