I can easily imagine a market for this, because I was in the market for this until last week.
I had a large, bulky, and fragile package I needed to send to Florida from New Jersey. The shipping corps were happy to do it for me for $500+, and no guarantee that it wouldn't arrive as a box of shattered glass.
I ended up finding someone in town who happened to be driving there, and was kind enough to deliver it for me. They still offer no such guarantee, but they also were kind enough not to charge me for this!
> They still offer no such guarantee, but they also were kind enough not to charge me for this!
Sure, but like open source, the dynamics are different when it's a favor without money changing hands. OP's market would want compensation, and then inevitably someone has to deal with the "my package arrived as a pile of shattered glass" claims.
It's a thing in second world countries too. There are small communities that don't get package delivery, so they ship packages to the capital city and then pay someone to drive packages to their community once a week or so. I've heard of people paying $50 a package in places with pretty low incomes.
I have a 3D printer, and I've definitely seen people at local art fairs & such selling 3D printed stuff.
It all looks ... well, it all looks sort of cheap. Unless you're printing at incredibly high quality, you can always tell that it was 3D printed, and half the people selling things don't even bother to do much clean up of the print after the fact - a little sanding would go a long way, but they don't bother.
It ends up just being cheap plastic trinkets that I wouldn't buy even if I didn't have a 3D printer of my own.
Just something to watch out for, should anyone here be inspired; you might think your print looks good, but you need to run it by someone who's willing to tell you to your face that it looks crap.
This is an underrated criticism: plastics get filtered out in certain aesthetic environments: you can't really have a well decorated room with 3D printed parts. Not everyone decorates with plastic, and I've been told this several times by friends and family who were getting printed gifts.
For most 3D printing, there are a couple ways around this: sanding + painting like you mentioned, then also sanding + casting into resin or metal. For a topomap project, I experimented with acetone smoothing, but ultimately used "adaptive" layer lines that made the layers hard to see. Another "print only" option is fuzzy skin, which does a lot to obscure the shiny plastic trinket look. All of these options take extra work, though.
With the card stands, the plastic aesthetic was less of a concern, since it was a vehicle for a vendor to get their logo in every picture/video of trading cards they took for cliens. The two things that helped me make the stands feel less cheap where using plastic with a matte finish (less "shiny plastic"), and adding 2oz worth of weights, so at least when you picked up the card stand it felt heavy.
Where I lean in with my printing now is to focus on things that are so personalized that folks get over the plastic (topography maps from home areas, card stands with their name/logo), and then audiences that don't care: children and pets.
Is it even possible to get into anything resembling such a state? Do managers enter flow state?
I've tried using agentic development for something I understood well, and every time, it's frankly fucking sucked. Even if the output was good - which it usually wasn't - it just didn't feel like the same type of work I actually want to do.
Things like line-completion is fine, though - except comments; I wish I could tell VSCode's Copilot to never write a line of human thought.
Both, the insurer installs this to produced portable evidence that end users can consume. Would mainly be the startups building AI agents that interact with insurers on behalf of hospitals.
If a hospital needs to process 100,000 claims made by agents and verify them, its their records pitted with vendor logs. This lets the vendor hand over a folder the hospital verifies independently with openssl. No vendor trust required.
The incentive: customers (clinics) can process deterministic evidence independent of the vendor or tool (my code) and the vendors agents build up a track record of trust by themselves without engineers spending their time triaging.
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