I think there are a lot of great things about Mercury - I've used them for a few companies and think they are leading the way on an innovative feature set. It's very easy to create unlimited debit cards and limit them in a variety of ways to name just one small feature. Very handy.
That said, they lost a $250,000 incoming wire critical to my business and I couldn't get a hold of anyone until I started tweeting about it a week later and the CEO responded. The money showed up with no explanation, ever. We stopped using them for critical money flows after that.
I am a massive caffeine drinker. Like many of us, I monitor my sleep religiously so I have an anecdote. Late afternoon espresso or hot coffee is usually quite sleep effecting.
However - I have found that cold brew does not bother my sleep! At least the brand that I drink. Very strange, but awesome. Cold brew does not have the acidity of hot coffee which is a double bonus if you get acid reflux at night from poor eating or drinking habits. Give it a whirl.
I think it will wildly vary depending on how regular your life cycle is.
As an anecdote I also tried tracking my sleep, only to realize:
- consumer trackers are wildly inaccurate (best we can do is compare them to a "medical grade" reference tracker, which might be accurate or not, who knows)
- there was so many other things going on every day, pinning it down to even two or three factors was just impossible (e.g. I drink more coffee when I have more time to make it, which is related to my stress level and work volume etc.)
- watch data were a PITA to export and analyze separately. I did it twice or thrice and didn't bother after that.
I've spent a lot of time in NOLA over the past 5 years as I have some investments here. The quality/price of housing and quality of life in the Uptown and Audubon Park areas is fantastic. I'm very surprised more remote engineers/workers haven't discovered it. Yes, hurricanes are a thing.
I would consider raising a family in those areas as well. Beautiful and walkable.
I live here part time now. I tell people New Orleans is a different country - has to be experienced.
New Orleans has been a "different place" for a long time...
My great-great-uncle told me about driving there with a buddy during college--in the 1920s.
I think one of the early Harriet Potter books included the reference to a man who spent a year there in his youth and had the indiscretion to have experimented with alcohol.
Just a very different place from the rest of the US South, and AFAICT, different from any other place in the US
Here's a heretical thought: Remote hiring is a massive achilles heel.
I've been duped simply by hiring a great engineering candidate who then farmed out the actual work to remote workers in Pakistan and India. We caught on fairly quickly thanks to one of them forgetting to login to one of our backend systems via vpn a few times. No idea how many companies he was "working for" but I'd bet we were one of many.
Remote work has amazing upsides and tremendous security implications.
So that's probably a sign that your team culture and management isn't the best... Healthy teams communicate a lot and really get to know each other, whether in person or remote. Ideally with regular in-person meetups to reinforce those working relationships.
If you're just throwing work over the fence and it takes network analysis to figure out who's doing it...then maybe you should just be hiring a contractor anyway.
I have worked in places where this would work...all terrible places that usually had someone with a "maverick" view of how organizations worked derived from reading Warhammer books or something.
Yep. It started with COVID where understandably 100% of interviews were remote.
But now with COVID a thing of the past, for "fairness" reasons (DEI?) we still do 100% remote interviews, but now have the ludicrous situation where we're asking interviewers to do absurd things like look for the reflections in the candidates' eyes/glasses to see if they're using ChatGPT, ask the candidate to swing the webcam around to make sure there are not other people in the room, ask them to hold their hands up to the camera to show they're not typing a prompt (which is even more stupid than it sounds because voice recognition is amazing these days), or ask them not to look away from the camera when answering questions (so not reading answers from another monitor) and other stupid things. How ridiculous.
The sooner we get back to in-person interviews the better. Get them to come to the office (which they'll need to do one day if they get the job) and sit next to them while they code on a work laptop).
Sorry to all those folks who want 100% remote, but this is why we can't have nice things.
And similarly forbid them from using AIs while they code on that work laptop in person? Are employees forbidden from using AIs for work? If not, why require that during evaluation? If it's not required during evaluation in person, why require it remotely?
(I don't know the answers to how to interview in this brave new world, but I'm increasingly skeptical of forbidding tools that people will be using for the job.)
I think the best interview question, and really the only one you need to determine technical ability is ask someone to describe a http request in as much detail as possible.
To write code (even with the benefit of AI) effectively you need a mental model of the systems you work with, reading the chatGPT response doesn't prove you have that.
Yes, technical interview questions should be relevant to the job field. What's your point?
The hard part is selecting good questions that act as reliable predictors of actual job performance. Very few hiring managers can do that reliably, although many fool themselves into believing that they can.
The point is that someone gave a specific example of the much more general concept of probing for mental model by way of detailed explanation of a process he ought to be familiar with. You objected to the specific details - knowledge of HTTP. That's not an indictment of the general approach.
That said ML models have gotten to the point where I'd have to disagree with OP that this approach will necessarily filter their use. However there are plenty of available mitigations, from latency of response to requiring a video feed that fully covers the candidate, his screen, and his keyboard.
The "what happens when I enter facebook.com in the browser and hit enter" is/was a well-known FAANG question a few years back so I would expect that all the LLMs are well versed in it, as will be NK infiltrators
My suspicion is that it's purely monetary and driven by the finance people.
a) Don't have to pay to fly candidates out, pay for their hotel, etc.
b) Don't have to pay relocation
c) Get access to a larger pool of candidates, so can price the wages lower than local wages would require
My last company there was a top down directive that in-person interviews were straight up not allowed, everything had to be over Zoom. Even for local candidates, for a job that was supposed to be in-person! Completely crazy IMO.
The advantage of a larger pool of candidates is not mostly a financial benefit, IMO. The benefit is mostly the ability to hire from a larger pool of people especially with a specialized skillset, and also to have less of an echo chamber.
But yes, that directive to interview local candidates over zoom does seem very silly.
My experience is that yes it opens up the wider pool, but it makes the filtering process much more difficult in trade.
Opening up the wider pool without the in person interview is where things hit the wall since the filtering criteria everyone learned over their careers went out the door thanks to the online interview process. And the online interview process is much more subject to cheating--not exactly a huge concern in-person.
If you want a software engineer silicone valley you can stay all local. There are companies in remote small towns who need a software engineer - they have to open up to non-local candidates as there are zero people in town who could do the job that don't work for them. There is always someone from elsewhere excited to move to a small town, but finding those people is hard. (and for those people finding a company that wants them is hard)
I'm in a tech hub so the local pool is wide and deep. But I was flown up for an interview, and I've known other people who were flown out, were hired, and have become locals.
I agree that there's a trade-off in filtering, but I really just don't resonate with this "cheating" issue.
I haven't run into this thing where I'm talking to a video AI, but maybe I'll sing a different tune if that ever happens and is high fidelity enough to trick me.
If "cheating" just means using AI assistants to answer my interview questions, honestly I think I've done a poor job structuring the question and interview.
I do recognize this as a giant challenge right now, to structure interviews in a way that provides real signal, while allowing candidates to use the tools they'll actually be using for the job. But I don't think the challenge is significantly different between remote and in-person.
Yeah after a disastrous remote hire I started requiring in-person 2nd round interviews. Company policy is that all future hires are hybrid only (not that we or anyone else is hiring these days...) so it just makes sense.
For developers I share my screen on MS Teams so everyone can watch, then hand them my laptop with Visual Studio. They've got 90 minutes to complete a small assignment while we look at them code - Google is allowed, so is copying and pasting from Stack Overflow, and we'll probably allow Copilot as well. The code needs to run and return the expected results. One candidate said, "this was great, it felt like real work".
For cloud admins, our Devops lead creates a new resource group, hands over his laptop, and we ask them to create a few resources and do the network and authentication to make them talk to each other. Most candidates can't do that anymore - we're finding they've become Terraform operators that don't know how the underlying technology works.
Different species, you can't generalize like that. It's pretty unclear what actually happened with H1N1. Scientists were able to resurrect the more virulent strain in the lab two decades ago and it was just as potent in lab animals...
Two possibilities are that it did in fact mutate to become "milder" or those strains were already circulating. Either way, H1N1 killed so quickly it ran out of victims and the highly lethal strain went extinct. Another notable aspect of H1N1 is that is mostly didn't kill directly, it made victims weaker to opportunistic lung infections and that's what killed them. Antibiotics have made this kind of attack vector much more difficult for viruses.
Omicron is only loosely analogous to the "flu fairy tale" as the major threat is Long COVID now and it is circulating at high levels. Other viruses have had vastly different natural histories, 1918 is only a single reference point, and a muddy one at that.
After reading this, I am less sure of the claim "most", but it seems that opportunistic infection was an important factor. There were a few unpleasant ways to die...
I had a colleague doing this in 2006, and he wasn't remote. He would just sit playing games on his phone all day yet he would check in code. I could never figure it out, so I just asked him and he showed me the chat window to his friend back in the Czech Republic that he paid 25% of his wages to each month.
I'm not sure I'm really against this! --IF-- the company is happy with the results and code being delivered, and the compensation they are paying for that code, what is the actual, meaningful business difference between whether your colleague wrote it or the Czech guy wrote it?
I'm not asking what the moral or ethical difference is. They're paying for engineering output, and if they are getting that output, why does it really matter whose fingers are typing it in?
I can think of a few reasons, most obviously that it's a security nightmare - you've got a non-employee accessing and modifying your company's code and possibly having access to customer data. Some shops might not care about this, but it's ridiculously irresponsible in principle.
What if, instead, the guy was 100% honest and up front about it, and offered to enroll the Czech guy in all security checks that any other contractor would get, and treat them legally as any contractor would be treated?
I wouldn't see anything wrong with this, but I would be willing to bet that 99% of companies would not go along with it--for reasons I'm not sure I understand.
If they were ok with doing the work to bring in the overseas person in the first place why should they hire their onshore cutout? To do it legally would be a whole mess of getting involved in business in a new country.
The main problem is at that point the US guy is operating outside the model of being a direct employee of the company. He's operating as a contracting vendor.
There's legal aspects to the employer-employee relationship that are different than the company-vendor relationship.
Even reporting the pay to the IRS as personal income would probably be legally problematic, because from a legal aspect a vendor is being paid for a service not an individual receiving income from an employer.
Typically, employers expect more in return for your salary than engineering output - they pay for employees to be engaged with the business, learn it, become subject matter experts, so that their value over time increases and they deliver more than just the engineering. When all your need is engineering output, you hire contractors.
At the same time, you are correct that it doesn't matter who is typing it. One of my favorite setups I've worked under is where throwing it over the fence is explicit - where a small team of employees each has their own small team of contractors. The management doesn't care who does what, as long as the work gets done, so we were free to parcel work out to our contractors as we saw fit, and that the institutional knowledge stayed baked into our heads.
Ironically if he told management that he's able to manage a remote team which provides the same amount of work for 25% cost there's a good chance they give him a raise and promotion to outsourcing manager /s
I don't think this has anything to do with remote vs. onsite work. It has more to do with remote vs. onsite interviews. A thorough onsite interview should catch all of these fake candidates. Companies should be doing at least one onsite interview regardless of whether the role itself is remote or onsite.
Only if they are 100% fake as opposed to farming out work to someone else. I can turn up to an interview in person no problem. When hired I just have the person in India use my name/picture and do the work.
Of course if they hire me as opposed to that person in India directly there is likely a reason they wanted someone in the US. Often those reasons are legal and somewhere a law is being broken.
By the time someone gets to the on-site interview, the job should be "theirs to lose." You wouldn't be spending the cost of an on-site trip for every candidate that shows some promise during the distance interviews--you'd do it for those very few you're ready to give offers to already, but just want to double check a few in-person soft-skills things (and now, want to double check that he is who he says he is).
Totally agreed. The number of "engineers" who try to cheat their way through interviews, juggle multiple jobs without disclosing them makes it a total nightmare.
I've heard through the grapevine of some designers (one who worked at Shopify) getting caught using Fiverr (or something similar) to farm out all of their work.
Despite all the weird crazy dog and pony show and jumping through hoops that most companies do now, most companies are abysmal at hiring.
What can you do during the hiring process to know that this amazing person, who aces every part of the interview, will farm out their work to cheap subcontractors?
Nothing I guess? Except that they will continue to be vetted after being hired for the quality of their work.
just spitballing but even if someone has a remote computer after getting hired, and is onboarded they should not have access to sensitive systems. So while you can't completely prevent the possibility of hiring a malicious actor security should not simply be on/off. The register article mentioned how after these devs were hired they were immediately able to kick off their plans. I think security is not structured properly if that is the case.
It's hard. I mentioned in another comment I had a work colleague in 2006 who farmed out all his work. He was capable of doing the job, but it was simply more enjoyable for him to play video games all day while someone else did the work for 25% of his salary.
The thing I'm always curious about with this is: What is the actual bad thing happening here?
Is the subcontracted work not good enough? Well, then the problem is that the work is not good enough.
Is the person not contributing in other ways that you want them to contribute because they have other jobs? (eg. chat conversations, meetings, team building, etc.) Well, then the problem is that they aren't making those contributions.
Or is it just that you're paying them more than you would have to pay the subcontractors if you found and managed them yourself? Well, then you are totally free to skip the middleman and do that yourself. But there is, actually, value in finding and managing freelance work. I certainly don't want to do that myself! If someone is good at doing that, and the quality of the work they are managing is acceptable to me, then it seems like they might be earning their paycheck?
I do get that the dishonesty element is bad in and of itself, but I honestly wonder whether, if this is a problem a firm is having, they should consider hiring the work out to subcontractors, without any subterfuge.
Yeah I hear that. My underlying point here is: Maybe you don't actually need a full time employee doing this job, if someone can successfully do it by spending a little time farming out to subcontractors.
The funny part is that in these stories about fake candidates using a whole team of people, it sounds like they are actually successful in doing the work, something that had not been achieved in software dev outsourcing before
It's only "successful" because there's an alternative, presumably-nefarious funding stream from a third party who wants to gain access to IP/user data/influential functionality.
It's essentially a subsidy heavily distorting a very specific market.
Are they? I suspect someone I used to work with was outsourcing. They did great on the interview but their on the job performance wasn't nearly as good.
Some people did this with in-office too I think, some years ago. Some people actually had two jobs, both sort of in-office. It's still possible to pull the tricks.
How do weekly 1:1 meetings with a manager not catch this very quickly? Okay, maybe the original suave interviewer comes back for those… Still feels like a good EM would pick up on discrepancies between work done and how the suave person talks about it.
It depresses me, but you’re probably right about in-office work being the only guarantee against this type of scam. I wish we could just have nice things.
This isn't necessarily the issue here -- this attempt seemed to be fairly motivated and had access to resources (AI, coaches, ...) to help them get through the process.
IF they can get such a 'candidate' hired... whats to say they couldn't continue the sham. One could imagine a team of hackers could easily pass of work that a single IC could reasonably have produced.
If their goal is exfiltration (or some other hack) of a {bitcoin exchange, govt, ...} actually putting in {weeks/months/year[s]} of actual work to insert someone into the right position at the right company is insanely worth it.
Sure I guess someone could physically turned up to an office to collect a laptop, be onboarded, get ID checked, then dial in to a few hours of meetings a week, muddle through any questions, rely on the team back at base helping, turn up in person to team get togethers every few months and manage to bluff their way through. It's not unprecedented - Frank Abagnale was running that type of con decades ago, Russia had the "Illegals" program of deep cover spies.
Those regular calls is what limits how many places you can work for. You full time job becomes holding those calls, plus knowing just enough about the problem to sound intelligent. You can probably work 4 jobs this way.
I also can’t imagine this not getting caught if not in the interview process surely during every day work. Maybe this says more about their work culture and not actually connecting with co workers. Perhaps the manager was just garbage who knows.
On their first day, they will get a lot of accounts, if they syphon data and m set up backdoors quickly, one day could be enough to cause a good chunk of the damage.
Saddens me a bit. I like to trust hires and give them pretty wide access to everything. For my own company, I've so far only hired people I worked with in the past, but when hiring strangers remotely, I'll probably have to rethink my trust-first model.
True, personally I have never gotten much of my access the first day, week or even month but it's certainly possible. Not sure though if syphoning data is the main goal here though as opposed to 1) syphoning money to NK or 2) planting backdoors.
Hate to be that guy, but.. what’s the problem? The work is getting done for the price you agreed on. You care how it’s done suddenly?
If AI does it, it’s the best thing since sliced bread.
I’m sorry but capitalists that want to have it both ways annoy me. Agree on what gets delivered for how much and get out of the way. The “employer” mindset doesn’t jive with capitalism ya’ll are so fond of.
An arrangement like that is probably violating data protection rules that everybody agreed on. In my company, customer data must not leave company systems, let alone the country.
Ah, now suddenly you not only need to deliver work but you need to behave in a certain non-specified way. The contract then should arrange for that and perhaps pay extra because it’s a sign of dysfunction.
I'm reading a lot of complaints here but let's recognize some interesting aspects that Sahil is talking about: 1. It's the 5th largest rails codebase open to AI ingestion. 2. They are offering bounties for issues. Not large bounties but whatever, it's something.
I personally like rails and would love to see AI tools improve with it. No idea if this code base will really help that, and when but it can't hurt. In my experience I can get next apps up in a jiffy but rails is much more of a struggle. If anyone has any tips here, please post.
I'm always curious about how well bounties work especially now in an AI age. I wonder what the arbitrage on AI spend vs. bounty will be for people that take a run at them.
I run a bounties platform (https://algora.io) and I've seen people who create bounties try to use some AI like Devin to solve them (@seveibar livestreamed trying it) just for fun and in all cases AI failed to solve the bounties.
A Rust project that rewarded 300+ bounties ($37k) is now building an AI coding agent with the aim to solve bounties on Algora - it's an interesting benchmark I guess.
Curious myself what the next years might look like, but from everything I've seen so far we're definitely not there yet.
Saw this gem of a gem on reddit earlier today and there were some trollish comments about no one using ruby anymore blah blah blah which quietly bummed me out. Surprised and Delighted to see it as #1 here on HN tonight!
There’s a lot of folks who get immense schadenfreude talking about things they know nothing about to strangers on the internet who also don’t know anything.
Ruby, specially with Rails, is particularly suited for AI coding, because of how mature it is and convention over configuration: Most of the important stuff is up to date in the model, and the entire thing comes with a fairy comprehensive set of ideas of how to to be used cohesively to built entire apps.
> It's worth remembering that the trolls that complain about Ruby do so because they care about it.
I don't think so. I mean there are complains about stuff you care about like people complaining about Healthcare. (edit: there are other forms of caring, see my grandchild comment)
Dissing on Ruby is definitely not this, they are not Ruby users wanting Ruby to be better. They don't even know Ruby apart from dissing on it is socially accepted, and makes them feel good.
Usually people get huffed up about stuff they care about. Caring doesn’t mean wanting it to be better, it could also mean get worked up about.
Surely a one-off comment about nobody using Ruby doesn’t mean you “care”, but if it is true that it is the same people who keep commenting, they obviously care.
Is it because they are jealous of the beauty of Ruby/Rails, as a Rubyist I’d think so, but who is to say really. Maybe they worked at a company where they replaced whatever their favourite stack is with Rails and they have hated Ruby ever since. It could be anything.
You wouldn’t keep responding to stuff you don’t care about at some level.
Equating caring and wanting it to be better was a mistake on my part. It made my comment not true, and it made you worked-up. Sorry for that.
All in all, I don't think that other forms of caring apply either. I think that parroting "Ruby is dead" doesn't mean that they care about Ruby, it's just a thing people like to parrot, without the meaning realizing in their heads. A form of bonding, a form of distraction, a form of opening to a social interaction, a form of self-reassurance etc. It is lot of things, and caring about Ruby at all is usually not among those (IMO).
I agree. Parroting some meme isn’t caring per se. But I was working under the assumption that the statement that it was the same names who keep doing it. If you say “Ruby is dead” 5 times a year it isn’t necessarily “caring” if it becomes 100 times a year there is something else at play.
I'm not sure what your point is. I care about Ruby and want it to die because I have worked on the Gitlab codebase, which is written in Ruby. It's a bad language and it stopped me being able to understand behaviours and fix bugs.
In contrast I have also worked on VSCode which is similarly huge but written in Typescript. Faaaar easier to work with, enough that I've been able to contribute a couple of medium sized features and several bug fixes.
So when people say "yeay Ruby" I try to discourage them because I don't want more Ruby code in the world that I might have the misfortune of having to interact with in future.
I think you are confusing the beauty and elegance of the language with the crap thatpeople write.
My experience is that the sort of folks who misuse Ruby's powerful features are the sort of idiotes who dont realise that because a thing can be done, doesn't mean that it should be done. These are the sort of people who are capable of misusing most languages.
Was it really idiomatic ruby that "stopped you from being unable to understand behaviors"? Or was it unorganized monkey patching?
I'm having a hard time thinking that ruby is difficult to understand, particularly compared to its opposites lisp, erlang, Haskell, e.g. languages that are extremely simple to the point where the burden of complexity is shoved into code space.
IIRC Github was originally written in Ruby as well.
Now that they use something "far easier to work with", the UX gets to suffer accordingly.
I've never been in a situation where making the customer happy was synonymous with applying best practices to the tech stack or otherwise making it so everyone and their dog can contribute.
It ranks right after Shell (#8) and C (#9). Ruby is still a mainstream language, and it's fairly easy to find a Ruby job. Compare that to Clojure or Haskell.
It's dropped in relative popularity, but the demand feels like it's still increasing to me (been doing Ruby professionally since 2006), just not as fast as some of the other languages.
Keep in mind the number of developers overall is rising rapidly still.
Compare that to Rust. For all the hype it has, very few companies are shipping products with it. There are a few, but nowhere near as many as are using Ruby.
I get your point but it's a case of right tool for the job. Every copy of Ruby now includes YJIT written in Rust because Rust is the right tool for that task.
It's easy to forget though that number of lines of code required to do something is also a valid metric and Ruby beats Rust on that.
So if you're shipping CRUD web apps that might be a more important metric than say memory usage or CPU time.
Different job, different tool. More people want to ship web apps than write their own JITs.
That's probably true, but also a poor measure of success. I bet there are more companies using Ruby than there are companies using C++, too. They fill different niches, and different types of companies deliver very different products using those languages.
The ratio of people who can code in Python or Ruby to people who can code in Rust or C++ is very high.
I don’t know why “number of companies using language X” is a metric that is used here. Wordpress is serving 43% of websites on the internet as of 2025, so we should all be learning PHP!
That's very nice, but not in itself a good argument for language use. If you count using a system written in a language, then almost every programmer uses Ruby daily as both Github and Gitlab are written in Ruby. Similarly you probably interact quite frequently with (banking) systems written in COBOL, but nobody would call COBOL a popular language.
Ruby will always have a special place in my heart. I cut my teeth as a young programmer on that language, and I learnt its value (as well as the value of using something else) along the way.
Ruby code can be downright poetic, for better or worse. There's a certain kind of magic to the kind of code it enables. That's not always good, but it _is_ beautiful.
I encourage everybody to read the venerable "Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby" [1] to see what I'm talking about.
I wish Ruby was cross-platform. It still only works on Windows using the MSYS2 emulation layer, and the only reason as far as I can tell is that it committed hard and early to `fork()` as the main way to use multiple cores.
Over the last 10 years the number of programmers has grown enormously. So ruby dropping in position does not necessarily imply the absolute number of ruby programmers went down.
It doesn't take too many for new stuff. HN has voting ring protection, so I think if enough unrelated people vote on new stuff, it can make the front page. I've made it on the front page with 6 points before. But if it can't get more points at an acceptable rate while on the front page, it drops pretty quickly.
Sometimes, interested things are boosted by dang. This doesn't seem interesting enough, so I doubt it was.
This is a guess based on personal experience and old HN comments, but I think HN boosts potentially promising links based on how quickly they're getting upvoted (i.e., momentum). If the link doesn't keep gaining momentum after the boost, it'll quickly fall off the front page.
If we only consider what you get today, nobody is beating Bambu yet. At least not if you want a printer that doesn't focus on customization and just does the right thing out of the box.
Prusa's Core One could be a better option for print farms because Prusa is great at building printers for that kind of constant abuse. But for everyone else it's just a worse version of the Bambu X1C.
However Bambu has gotten a lot of flak for their recent software changes. They have promised not to do anything evil with the currently released printers and to give customers escape hatches. But they are certainly at a moment where consumer trust is justifiably low, and it will take some time to grow that trust back
Pretty much just go buy a Bambu X1C and be done with it. I've been through a bunch of 3d printers, all of which required constant tinkering and babysitting. The Bambu just works, you click print and it prints, and fast.
There's some drama now around them closing up the ecosystem and locking out third party firmware, etc. but I honestly could care less so long as it stays good at being a printer.
What, precisely, does a voron 2.4 offer over a Bambu X1C (or, more fairly, a P1P) that is worth the additional price (double a P1P) and the fact you have to assemble it yourself (which takes days)?
I’m all for building something that offers an advantage, but it seems neither cheaper nor offering any better quality (and, if you build it poorly or use a poor quality kit, it’ll have substantially worse quality).
I don't get this take. Criticizing Bambu for being very proprietary is fair. But how are they a Prusa rip-off? Prusa has been selling various evolutions of their Mk3 bedslinger for years, while Bambu entered the market with CoreXY printers. And not only is their design different, the entire philosophy is different: Prusa is selling to enthusiasts who want to tinker with their printer, Bambu is selling an out-of-the-box experience that "just works". Basically the Apple among the printers, if Apple was cheaper than the competition and sold replacement parts.
Bambu has a very detailed wiki, and replacement parts are readily available and cheap. I've replaced numerous parts across my small batch of Bambu printers.
> Bambu if you want to pay less for a proprietary rip-off of Prusa and totally trust them to always repair it for you, and with access to your network.
Uhm, how could it be a ripoff if X1 cameout a year earlier than Prusa XL, the only CoreXY printer Prusa had until recently. Entirely different approach to multi-material printer (to both XL and MMU). Core One btw still has no mount solution for MMU3 that doesn't require you removing top lid.
If one want to fund an actual open innovation then it should be something Voron related. You know...fully open-source printer.
Right now Prusa is playing catch up: Mk4 was shipped with incomplete firmware.
You get youself a Prusa if you're running a busy print farm or if you want to see what it was like to 3d printer 5 years ago and how user interfaces looked 15 years ago.
BambuLab has fair share of controversies, but none of them were about printer perfomance.
That said, they lost a $250,000 incoming wire critical to my business and I couldn't get a hold of anyone until I started tweeting about it a week later and the CEO responded. The money showed up with no explanation, ever. We stopped using them for critical money flows after that.