They had a huge office in São Paulo back then. For all I know, it's bigger now. A good friend of mine spent so much time in airplanes between São Paulo and Brasilia that his skin was dry as a turtle's.
Nice post, let me build up on the software engineering analogy.
I've had a 3D printer for a while, and I have to say that Bambu has completely changed my perspective on the whole experience.
Before, I treated it mostly as a time-consuming hobby - setting up my own Octopi for remote printing, tinkering with different settings and parts on my Prusa. It was all trial and error, with most prints turning out below average.
Now it feels more like a continuous integration system. It runs mostly unattended, always ready to execute my next batch of prints.
I recently traveled for a week and only needed my wife to refill the filament and remove finished prints, allowing my workflow to continue uninterrupted.
I don't regret my initial experience since I learned a lot, but I really appreciate having a more streamlined process now.
That has been my experience as well. I had a bunch of printers before the X1C, from 3 different countries, and all of them needed various amounts of tweaking and hacking to reach the print quality and ease-of-use I was expecting.
Even the Prusa MK3 (upgraded to MK3S, then MK3S+...) required a Raspberry Pi to be able to print without lugging an SD card from my PC to the printer, and a USB webcam to add print monitoring.
Now when people ask for FDM printer recommendations, I tell them that this hobby has two main paths: One path regards the printer as a tool to create things for other projects; the other path has the printer as the project itself.
An analogy I use is buying a car that's working and ready to drive vs buying a car that doesn't work and repairing it. Are you looking to drive or are you looking to fix/build a car?
Bambu printers are an easy recommendation for a printer which is a tool. The new Prusa CORE One might be a good fit as well, but it's still too early to tell what its quirks are. For printers that are projects, the Ender 3 comes to mind as a very cheap base for countless tinkering and upgrades.
> Now when people ask for FDM printer recommendations, I tell them that this hobby has two main paths: One path regards the printer as a tool to create things for other projects; the other path has the printer as the project itself.
This is undeniably true at the youtube content level.
But at the printer level I think consumers will crash into this far less if buying the latest. Creality’s three new Ender 3 V3 models are all low-tinkering models, even the cheapest. So are the Anycubics. Sovol’s latest machines like the SV06 Ace manage to be both fully open source and also highly tuned out of the box.
As much as I admire the build quality of (most of) the Bambu Lab machines, in real terms what they have actually achieved is making the closed source, closed build, hard to upgrade and repair, RFID-chipped-consumables printer acceptable to the market. They even almost succeeded in making printing dependent on the cloud, until their little distributed industrial accident happened.
Massive +1 - Bambu changed everything for me.
I've been in the hobby for 10 years, built multiple Vorons from source & kit, and heavily modified multiple Prusa machines (Full Bear). Nothing compares to how easy Bambu made everything. My wife, who has seen me print for all that time without being able to figure it out, can now print items without hassle or oversight on the X1C.
Another way I can tell that Bambu changed everything is through second-hand market prices. Before Bambu, I could sell most 3D printers for not much less than I purchased them or more, depending on the mods. I just struggled to sell a Voron 2.4 300 for $800 (near $1800 build price after extras). There is still a market for enthusiast printers, but the leap in user-friendliness is known. What they provided for the cost was a vast market leap.
Likewise, my Bambu X1C changed my 3d Printing experience. Prior to it, I was spending an insane amount of time on fixing my printer, testing my printer, trying to improve my printer. The Bambu just worked. It breaks my heart a little that the machine I use daily isn't open source, doesn't have open parts that I can just replace. But just a little. Because the printer keeps working, really well.
This is the recipe to have 100+ different runtimes.
Don’t forget that In large deployments, you have no idea who is using what, which features are enabled or what’s the flavor of optimization someone pushed to make things work for the customer. You have dozens of engineers and all trying to keep the lights on.
This was the state when I joined Auth0 and it took us a year to migrate every individual customer env to a managed PAAS and another year to migrate our multi tentant environments later.
I tried RMPP for a weekend and decided not to stick with it. Honestly, it doesn't even come close to how good my Note Air 3C* is. Being an Android device allows you to perform customization especially regarding setting accessibility features beyond the basics.
* I understand that some people have concerns about the brand's security practices and affiliations, but I went further and completely locked it down from public cloud features.
I think the remarkable is better because it's not a full tablet.
It's an incredibly good scratchpad and is fine for reading papers. The epub reflow and layout is incredibly slow though, and PDFs suck because you can't resize them.
If I didn't have kids/made more money I'd probably buy the Pro but that's not my life now.
I have a boox note air, and if you use it as a "full tablet" then you're doing it wrong and will not enjoy it. It shines as an ebook reader (it runs kindle and kobo as well as epub readers and calibre companion). I run file sync on it so it always matches my library. I take notes (using the remarkable pen which is better than the boox note one and works great with it). But I don't use it for browsing or anything like that, the slow screen refresh just makes that sort of thing miserable.
"Contempt culture" is one way to put it, definitely had some toxic elements, but it was also actual hacker culture. The nice-ification of tech has come with corporatization and has its own downsides.
It was a gatekeeping strategy. Opening the gates means opening them for the people you like and the people you don't. Ultimately, it's the hackerly thing to do. Knowledge wants to be free.
Strategy? You think a bunch of people sat down and planned a specific set of rules to ensure only the “right sort” (cynical bastards), were allowed in the club?
The BOFH “culture” was the IT admin culture (exaggerated for comic effect); more cynical than anyone because they had to deal with people. It’s probably still like this. IT (or IS as it seems to have been re-branded), sits as a “cost centre”, frequently at the end of a long line of sewage pipes, coping the blame for any number of other peoples mistakes. I suspect the prickly nature is a necessary survival trait.
Cultures develop as they develop. There’s no conspiracy. They also evolve and change, and targeted interventions can push them in certain directions. “Hacker Culture” was never just one thing, and that’s never been more true than today. Certain “clubs” might have been more or less exclusionary at various times, but the scene as a whole has always been a welcoming one.
I think a bunch of people, without explicit coordination, were rude to the sorts of people who weren't seen as belonging. My experience jives with the article GGP linked, and I've played both parts (and for anyone who had to put up with me shit talking PHP, I apologize). It's a tale as old as time; people form cliques and gatekeep, c'est la vie. Rarely is it by explicit coordination (secret societies notwithstanding), but I would still call it a strategy.
Please note, I'm talking about the "contempt culture" specifically and not prickly nerds broadly. Some people are prickly and that's fine. It makes sense to me too that people with a complex and difficult job which is perceived as a cost center might be prickly for entirely different reasons.
You can only deal with stupid (or ‘differently aligned competencies’) for so long before it starts to irk you, and you start assuming that anyone that calls—and anything they want—is stupid
Identity is tricky. Proving who you are depends on a certain level of trust. Whether it's through email, devices, phones, or, in more advanced settings, some sort of digital certificate; you won't have much options.
Unless you're in Germany using a service provided by the Vogons, you might end up getting a letter containing an activation PIN via snail mail or worst having to visit the post office to show your passport.
You're going in the right direction! for the near future, I suggest you to add a cli, connectors, simple symbolic calculation on notebooks (take some inspiration from calca http://calca.io/examples), offline support and fully encrypted namespaces.
That will put you miles away from everyone else in the field :)
You're probably busy with the launch, but you can contact me if you wanna discuss the list above,
- on tab pressing, there's a percussive sound https://www.soundsnap.com/typewriter_electra_xt_old_electron...
- same happens on shift https://www.soundsnap.com/typewriter_erika_model_shift_press...
- same on other keys, like backspace
- once you reach the end of the page on some models, the carriage does't progress so you hit the same position over and over until you CR.