What phone and laptop does Jeff use?
Internet influencers - nothing against this one, I like his videos, I think I got JetKVM because of one video - are a persona which is different from their person. They sell something in their videos and do things in videos that are different from their true self. Videos are primarily done to drive more subscribers. I don't dispute that he might be an exception but he has >1M subscribers which makes being authentic and not driven by audience difficult.
Take LTT as an extreme example.
[Edit] I'm not judging Jeff or saying this is good or bad.
Not sure what that exchange was for, but I like it!
PS: Not a native speaker, don't know what "HN peanut gallery" means. But I like peanuts, though I think Peanuts are overrated. Though sometimes our dog looks like Snoopy, when her ears are flying.
2. A google pixel isn’t meaningfully more open than an iPhone (I depend on functionality that would be unavailable if rooted). This wasn’t meant to be an iPhone vs android debate. For the purposes of this discussion they are equivalent.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Pine sucked all the oxygen out of the environment, with a shit dead-on-arrival product. Pinephone doent even work as a bloody phone.
Other Linux phones are 2-3 generations old, and priced at $700 or so.
So, we're stuck with Apple or Google. Not great choices either way.
Do such people really exist? Are there actually people who are comfortable blindly starting a robot in their home, with a part that heats to 150 C, and then hope that everything will work out and when they get home the part will be waiting for them, instead of the firefighters?
This mentality is baffling to me. No, insurance isn't there so you can knowingly do risky things, it's there in case something accidentally happens.
Would you say the same about juggling chainsaws? "That's what health insurance is for"?
Absolutely crazy to me
Perhaps one or two.
Prints regularly take ten+ hours to complete. No one is vigilantly guarding their printer during this time. Fire spreads so quickly in a house that a smoke alarm is often just a signal to get out, you don’t necessarily have the time to grab a fire extinguisher and put it out.
And how big is the risk, really? The materials that you use do not ignite so close to their melting point.
There are people who are simply careless
There are people who think of the 3d printer as a toy, not as a piece of industrial (or semi industrial) equipment
There are people who are arrogant, who think they have figured out and solved anything that could possibly go wrong so they have made it safe to do
There are people who kind of think they are invincible and are just convinced that bad stuff won't happen to them
Idk. It's not a stretch at all for me to imagine this sort of person, based on the people I've met in the past. I mean people remove safety guards from power saws that are designed to protect you from losing fingers, so...
The main potential problem these days (in my view) is whether a print finishes without crashing or delaminating from the print plate, which also has workarounds... but that's only potential printer damage, not a fire.
At worst the sprinklers above it will wash it but that’s in a catastrophic instance.
Maybe if it knocks itself down to the ground? But I worry much more about faulty wiring or stuff like that. And that's more a function of the brand and model
Not saying fires don't happen that way but let's say it's a failure mode that is a challenge to achieve intentionally much less accidentally.
It is closer to a toaster or an oven than a water heater or HVAC.
Also...my last lease specifically said that I was not allowed to use the washer/dryer or oven when I was not home. So it is not a stretch to believe that the property owners will use those types of agreements to go against you when the insurance company denies your claim (this does and has happened with 3d printer fires).
All that being said...I have run 135hr prints unattended on my printers (not bambu). The risk may be low but it is not zero and it certainly higher than a water heater or HVAC.
What printers are similarly priced and have similar specs, for someone relatively new to 3D printing?
None, really. Prusa printers are good enough though. If you value freedom and privacy, its worth a few extra dollars.
I've got an a1 mini myself, and I'm not aware of anything comparable on the market, but there's a clear need for some competition now.
Have you looked into Centauri Carbon ?
The Mk3 is also easy, and can be had for cheap now, but it doesn't have auto Z-adjust which is really nice. It's also noticeably slower compared to the latest models.
[1] https://store.creality.com/products/k2-k2-combo-3d-printer-l...
They rubbed people the wrong way launching the CC2 with multi-color support before they developed the multi-color add-on that was promised for the original CC. I didn’t plan on multi-color with the CC, so that didn’t personally bother me too much.
I recently got a Snapmaker U1 for multi-toolhead prints and love it so far - much less waste than a filament changer and I’m using it for more exotic prints like a mix of conductive and regular PLA in a single part that wouldn’t work well in a filament changer single toolhead printer.
And I still use my CC for occasional single color prints (recently it’s been dedicated to TPU but I’m probably going to move that over to the U1 so I can do “over molded” TPU+PLA prints).
In short, if you’re willing to spend more I’d highly recommend the U1 if you know you’d benefit from the toolchanger. CC is probably a fine budget machine but there are a lot of other similar budget corexy machines to consider these days as well (I got CC when it was groundbreaking for features at its price but competition has caught up by now).
They released the multi color system for $55. I've ordered and waiting for it but the printer itself has been pretty nice.
That’s not impersonation. That’s Bambu discovering that user agents are not authentication.
This is just Bambu alienating their customer base, again.
The funny part here is it seems Bambu is more exposed to a libel suit than the developer is for... checks notes clicking 'Fork' on Bambu's github. Since the moment he did that, his software was supposedly in breach of Bambu's...expectations.
The legal risk comes from why you are doing it and what protections you are bypassing.
If you are doing it specifically to bypass Bambu's authorized access, then it is very likely to fall afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The mechanism (spoofing the UA) is entirely incidental to the motivation (bypass authorized access), which is what the law cares about.
Bambus p2s and their ams2 pro have had more hardware reliability issues in 1 month than is normal
Wayyyy more than my p1s and ams combo
I think there’s also some issue in their firmware that needs to be rolled back or perhaps properly tested
Gonna sound harsh :
This isn’t a printer anymore … it’s AI slop
For anyone considering alternatives: You should know that almost all other 3D printers expect you to know a little more about how they actually work than Bambus. Bambus are as close as you can get to a "just works" type experience, but modern alternatives from others are nowhere near as hard as they used to be.
The closest "easy" alternative is probably Prusa, but you'll pay significantly more for a Prusa machine than you would a Bambu. They're an excellent company, and the complete opposite of Bambu when it comes to Openness. If money is no object, Prusa is highly recommended.
Beyond Prusa, there's a lot of other options. https://auroratechchannel.com/#section2 This list is a good one.
I personally run an old Elegoo Neptune 4 pro - but my needs are quite low. If I were buying today, a Snapmaker U1 or the Creality K2 Plus is probably where I'd end up going.
You're right that they're expensive but you get free human support 24x7, you get an open platform, lots of contributions to open source (even Bambu Studio is a fork of Prusa Slicer), and they pretty much go on forever.
My Core One+ started its life as an original MK3 and went through each iteration of upgrades, and it works like new. I'm now waiting for an INDX upgrade for it.
IMO the main drawback of consumer Prusa offerings is the lack of good chamber heating for more advanced materials. I can print PC on my Core One+ in the summer with the chamber at 45℃ (good enough for most uses, but 60 would be better), but in the winter it becomes a lot harder.
The Core One L is supposedly better in that regard but I've seen reports that it's still not ideal.
Other than that, I feel the extra cash pays itself back in the long run.
Could too much thermal insulation cause the bed temperature to lower (to avoid overheating chamber temp) to the point the print no longer adheres? etc.
If you could recommend some articles on the subject I would highly appreciate it.
The main issue is how close the walls are to the bed, which makes a lot of insulation projects dead in the water. If a radiator reflector foil [0] can be made to fit, it might help quite a bit as well.
Other than that, proper active chamber heating is really where we should be heading. When I have the time I might attempt to replace the left panel with one.
[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Radiator-Reflective-Thermal-Heating...
Then in 2025 they changed their 'open community license' to say users may not:
“Sell complete machines or remixes based on these files, unless you have a separate agreement…” and “The Restriction: You cannot commercially exploit the design files…”
https://blog.prusa3d.com/core-one-cad-files-release-under-th...
Maybe this is more a comment on how open source has had to change in the face of commercial exploitation of the vulnerabilities traditional open source licenses create for the businesses doing the R&D.
If I make an open source car, I don’t want someone else taking my design work, and then selling a cheaper version of my product, I want my consumers to build their own parts.
Different licenses are build around different philosophies, and the common open source definitions allow commercialization as long as the source & modifications you make are freely available to others. Prusa is breaking from that tradition.
Maybe you should make a source-available car, or a car with select portions of CAD available, or something else that fits your intended business model better than open-source.
You can be entirely in favor of the open source ethos, even as a commercial entity, but then certain actors can take advantage of that ethos and just directly commercialize your R&D investment and take all the proceeds of your investment, whether or not they comply with attribution requirements.
It’s tough seeing an open source project you’ve poured tons of care and effort into (and WANT people to share and remix and build cool things) get more or less “extracted” for profit without contributing back (code or money).
At the end of the day, none of it really matters unless you’ve got money and time to actually try to enforce your licenses, or have enough customer mindshare to effectively change the behavior of bad actors without needing legal action.
I’ll probably use licenses like Prusas in the future for similar reasons, even though I generally prefer to use less restrictive ones. Bad actors, or even just non-benevolent actors, can really sour the open source ethos, and it sucks but there’s no way to legally enforce “don’t be a jerk” without restricting a legal document in slightly unpalatable ways.
I don't really see why everyone is up in arms about this. You are able to print in LAN mode or directly through USB drives without going through bambus servers.
Their slicer is open source but it downloads a plugin once you launch it if you choose to which is closed sourced that interacts with their APIs.
Someone reverse engineered the plug-in and put it into orca slicer and then claimed that the plugin should have been GPLed to begin with which I find dubious. I don't really see it being much different than downloading closed drivers on Ubuntu but I'm also not a open source lawyer.
To me, the problem with all of this is that it seems strange to want the plugin when bambu will just shut off their resources to unsigned versions of the network plugin if the orca slicer dev got their way.
I'm open to being convinced but I just don't think the cross-section of people who want this would actually want prints going through bambus cloud so this effort really feels vain.
It also feels like bad framing as well because every post I see about this thing really tries to blur the line and claim this plugin and orca slicer are one and the same.
Correction is much harder than starting off on the right side.
Sure, a manufacturer that didn’t need to course correct yet doesn’t mean they won’t change their stance in the future, but the same is true for one that already course-corrected.
We see this with privacy eroding laws continually - legislators will “listen” and course correct if there’s pushback, only to reintroduce the bill in the next legislative session, repeatedly, until it gets passed.
I’d prefer the one that hasn’t yet signaled a desire to do something negative in the past to one that has, even if they walked it back later.
Plenty of situations would make me feel differently, but I'm fine with their restrictions in this case.
Doesn't it sounds weird to you? I mean, what the reason they have to blur the line? Are they just clueless? Or maybe they fight for some political reason, like an anti-corporate stance, and Bambu is just a convenient target for them?
I'm asking, what you think of them, because I can't understand you. Your take on the conflict is incompatible with behavior of the people opposing Bambu. Or rather it leaves no good explanations for their behavior. When I notice it, I start digging, because if the situation doesn't have a good explanation, it means I do not understand the situation. But you just accept your understanding, so you have some good explanation for people's behavior?
> Someone reverse engineered the plug-in and put it into orca slicer and then claimed that the plugin should have been GPLed to begin with which I find dubious. I don't really see it being much different than downloading closed drivers on Ubuntu but I'm also not a open source lawyer.
The GPLv3 specifically was written to address a problem called "TiVo-ization", which is when a hardware vendor uses some trick (DRM, proprietary blobs, whatever) to prevent users from actually running modified versions of the software.
The AGPL, the license of this particular software, extends the GPLv3 with protections for users of network services:
> Simply put, the AGPLv3 is effectively the GPLv3, but with an additional licensing term that ensures that users who interact over a network with modified versions of the program can receive the source code for that program. In both licenses, sections four through six provide the terms that give users the right to receive the source code of a program.
https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2021/fall/the-fundamentals-of-t...
And on TiVo-ization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization
The Linux and proprietary drivers situation is more complicated, but proprietary drivers on Linux are generally restricted to interfaces that Linux chooses to expose to them for that purpose. But the Linux kernel seems to take a narrower view of what constitutes a derivative work than was likely intended by the FSF in writing the GPL. Under a "traditional" reading of the GPL, those proprietary drivers are meant to be illegal. Whether some or all of the linking done by proprietary drivers in the Linux kernel is really allowed by the GPL or not is somewhat untested, I think.
Bamboo not understanding the OS licencing when they themselves took from Prusa if I remember correct is pretty rich.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t shame those companies for not abiding to their words, but there is more to it than outrage. Suing them (or the threat of) might also work here if they really went against the license.
I'm fairly certain user agreements have been used for suing makers of game cheats and other similar things. Certainly in the industry I work in, there was a company making third party software and integrating it with the industry standard tool without going through the official channels, which caused people to violate the user agreement when used. They got sued and settled.
1. OrcaSlicer: so it's a fork of Bambu's official client, Bambu Studio - but it apparently still goes through Bambu's servers for printing? How exactly does that work? Does it also "impersonate" the User-Agent, and Bambu was okay with that?
2. OrcaSlicer-bambulab: if the goal of this fork-of-a-fork is to bypass Bambu's cloud servers, why would it still need to "impersonate" the UA and communicate with Bambu's servers (as Bambu claimed)? Wouldn't the whole point be to avoid doing that in the first place?
Orca Slicer was forked to improve usability and features, not to get around any cloud printing requirements, Bamboo added those later and removed the ability to print locally.
It has to impersonate to transfer a gcode file locally, which is another open standard.
Bamboo restricted LAN printing, that is the issue.
Still I suspect it is about spying, Bambu printers are at the core of the Ukrainian war effort, the reason Ukraine is winning since januari.
First China prevented Ukraine from using the any drones that they sold in millions to Russia while exercising the built in kill switches in Chinese drones used in by Ukrainians.
Suddenly Bambu, another Chinese company started listening in on the 3D printing on a massive scale in secret factories all over Ukraine that make the drones to replace the Chinese drones. Very suspicious.
Whatever is the reason Bambu locks down software or firmware on their 3D printers, now is the time for programmers to change the situation. We need to put up money like Louis Rossmann did [1], not to fight legal battles but for a assembly language programmer to reverse engineer the Bambu firmware and make a free and open source version.
This firmware replacement will cost a couple of months to write so we all should send that programmer a little money so he/she can release it for free.
A free Bambu firmware will allow the Ukranians to continue producing another few million drones and save over a hundred thousands lives by ending the war.
Now is the chance for us outsiders to help Ukraine, by freeing Bambu firmware.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLLVn6XT7v0
P.S. I would be willing to do the reverse engineering but I would need at least 35 euro per day (to eat) to build a new firmware for all Bambu models from scratch. I would need a few printers on loan for a few weeks. I estimate it would take 5-9 months to rebuild firmware for all models from zero and release it. Maybe Rossmann and Geerling could use their influence and coördinate this freeing of the firmware?
the Ukraine war started in 2014 technically. But even if we go to the "current" wave start, that was 24 February 2022[0].
Bambu Labs released their first printer (X1C, on kickstarter) on 31 May 2022, let alone their "must go through cloud service" restriction starting in early 2025[1].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_war
[1]: https://blog.bambulab.com/firmware-update-introducing-new-au...
That said none of this is surprising. Bambu Labs have been very candid about their playbook which is following Apple's lead. They want to be the Apple of printers, a very walled garden with high integration good UX and not a lot of freedom because they want to tightly control the full experience.
And that is going to alienate a lot of people and endear a lot of others. The only reason they've even paid lip-service to open source or open hardware is simply to get a foothold in an industry that had strong roots in that area. Now that they're a more established brand we should expect them to start bricking in the garden and adding controls.
Fortunately I think they've been a net-good for the printer landscape, they shook things up pretty hard and I think there's now more competitive models from other brands.
Their cloud infrastructure obviously has real costs associate with running it, and I don't understand why any software other than their own should be entitled to use those resources.
If you buy something and then significantly modify it, you generally tend to void the warranty - and that's not because companies are just greedy; there are real limitations when it comes to a company's ability to support the endless ways a product could be modified.
Publishing something as open-source does not imply that you must operate something at a loss for charity.
That's not a genuine argument, nobody "feels entitled" to anything. Bambu made a deliberate choice to architect the product this way, deliberately placed themselves in this gatekeeping position, and they're deliberately working towards removing any other form of access to our hardware.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but I don't think that's what is happening. They aren't doing anything to block OrcaSlicer or any fork from working with the printer using LAN-only mode. It's only if you want to use Bambu Lab's servers for essentially a remote-access solution (which, by the way, kind of defeats the privacy-oriented purpose of running some of these forks) that they're saying you should use their own software.
Bambu Studio is literally a PrusaSlicer fork. You don't get to build on the community and then threaten it.
They are offering a cloud infrastructure that allows users to remote control the printer via their software. If they don't want users to use a non-approved software to access their cloud, they should just build auth around it and explicitly tell people that. The accessibility for users to utilize the printer without going through official software and cloud is a whole other can of worms of course.
This whole fiasco could have been avoided by not being so confrontational, giving their user base ideological ammo.
My understanding is that right now, you can run your printer in LAN or USB mode without Bambu's cloud, and this is supported natively by OrcaSlicer (or any slicer using USB), but you lose some of the Cloud monitoring features.
You can also use Bambu's cloud with their Cloud Connect app and gain those monitoring features while using a third-party slicer, but at the expense that you send your prints through their cloud.
Or, you can use Bambu Studio and get the "fully integrated" experience.
My understanding is that this plugin just replicated their Bambu Studio communication with the Cloud, and that it _enabled_ you to send your prints to their cloud, not _disabled_ it. Is there something I'm missing that made this valuable? (ie - did it do some hybrid where it could hack in the Cloud monitoring without sending the prints through the Cloud?) Otherwise, I think what Bambu are doing are distasteful but I don't understand all of the Chinese espionage hand-wringing or "stealing our files" commentary around this.
capitangolo•1h ago
goolz•55m ago
hsuduebc2•53m ago
bredren•9m ago
Then their org has the option to burnish or bury models that align with their goals.
Larrikin•48m ago
bredren•13m ago
ezst•48m ago
arjie•44m ago
echelon•11m ago
Is there any more to read about this angle? China blocking Ukraine's access to the tech?