> She had no desire to learn the ends and outs of 3d printers. She wanted something easy to use and reliable. The Bambu Labs printer I bought her has been just that.
Where is this coming from? You absolutely need to know the ins and outs of a 3D printer. Nozzles wear out, build plates wear out, components need to be regularly cleaned properly and lubricated, you have to keep filaments dry, certain filaments can only be used with certain components, you constantly tweak slicer and temperature settings, ... The list goes on.
3D printers, including Bambu Lab printers, are definitely not easy to use nor are they reliable. They're maintenance heavy. Sometimes you have to do a print multiple times because it'll fail for a myriad of reasons. Maybe you oriented it wrong, maybe your slicer settings are off, maybe it didn't have proper supports, maybe the filament is messed up, ...
The maintenance needed is minimal, and Bambu make it easy to learn in their wiki. It even sends you reminders to lubricate the Z-axis (the others don't need it). I've never had a clogged nozzle on my bambu printers but that is also clearly documented.
I've been doing 3D printing for 15 years so I've been through all the heavy maintenance printers. But most of that knowledge I don't need anymore. First layers are always perfect as long as the bed is properly grease free. The only knowledge I still really need is the design for 3D printing, like overhang orientations, seams etc.
That hasn't been my experience. Bambu's documentation, including the guides and wiki, is disjointed and inconsistent. You'll often find contradictions between pages or information that isn't appropriately fleshed out. Sometimes bits and pieces on a topic are spread across several wiki pages and guides. You'll also find that there's now an increase in AI slop in some of the introductory guides (e.g., tons of emdashes and sentences that don't seem to make sense).
Having the printer give you reminders to do something doesn't mean that maintenance is minimal.
Outside of Prusa - how would you compare Bambu's documentation against it's competitors?
In my experience, having owned 2-other printers prior to an X1C - there is absolutely NO comparison - EVERYTHING was community, Reddit, forum or random YouTube guidance from non-manufacturers.
The most common failure in my printing experience is just plain old dirty bed, especially when human hands interact with it. That takes operational discipline especially if you're printing lot of models over time.
I'm also in the same boat of regret, but for other reasons. Their support team is beyond awful. I purchased an H2S AMS combo just shy of two months ago (mostly because I saw it being praised by HNers a while back) and found out recently that the AMS they've sent me is defective. It's been truly a bizarre experience trying to deal with customer support. They told me to disassemble the AMS and swap a couple of modules that they mailed me. I did, provided them evidence that I did, and provided evidence that it didn't fix the problem. Their response was to claim that I didn't actually swap the modules and that because of that my warranty no longer applies, and then they said they'd give me a free roll of filament for my troubles (lol). At that point I began the process of invoking the consumer protections afforded to me. Called my credit card company and opened a dispute, invoked Massachusetts law M.G.L. c. 93A, and I'm about to contact my AG.
It's a shame they're going in such an anti-consumer direction, both with their gaslighting customer support and the lawfare against Orca.
The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act is your friend. Furthermore, the idea that you could be expected to perform technical labor to repair something is ridiculous: grandma is protected, too, and this type of service falls far outside the scope of what is reasonable.
Odd - I bought an H2C about a month ago - and the nozzle-swapping Vortek rack just wouldn't calibrate or operate - blocking even calibrating the left-nozzle from proceeeding.
However - yes, they did have me perform multiple disassembly/re-connect steps and document, and then of course every question/answer was at least a 24-hr turnaround (some delays were because I keep my printer at my office and chose to work from home a few times), eventually they sent me an entire new Vortek rack - which, once installed worked perfectly.
I was not looking forward to packing the entire thing up and shipping it back.
hmmm - they never asked for the old one back... (hmmm, harvest the servo motor? drag-chains and rods for other projects? Mount it on the wall and use it to store extra induction nozzles? Ideas?)
I have seen one YouTube video that seemed to indicate a problem with pulling filament was because of a little flap within the new 4-1 PTFE filament adapter. There is a little rubber valve/flap (apparently it is a consumable, because the printer came with extra) - which he found if left in-place would cause filament jams, so he removed it, and no more feed problems. (Unfortunately, I cannot find the exact video - I have seen/bookmarked too many)
I had the same experience with their shitty customer service but for something much smaller. I had red filament from bambu that was constantly getting clogged and they had me go through so many hoops. they had me measure the filament thickness in 10 places WITH CALIPERS and also FILM IT. all this shit was a waste of my time. After they asked for even more steps, I just gave up. I felt it wasn’t worth it for a $16 exchange.
But it left a really bad taste in my mouth about the company.
Consumers are used to stuff like Amazon customer service. I wasn’t expecting to waste all that time to exchange 1kg of filament. I thought they’d send it out no hassle and take back the defective filament to research it themselves.
So now when I recommend Bambu, I say the printers are great but their customer service is horrible. So be very careful.
I was offered to return it or try to fix it myself. In the end the fix was even easier than initially thought and it's working great since. No idea if that's because I am in the EU market and not US. They did take their time to respond but otherwise service was ok.
This is such a strange take. Your words remind me of past crypto hype cycles, where people pushed web3.0 and NFT FOMO hysteria.
Engineering is
the practical application of science and mathematics to solve problems. It sounds like you're maybe describing construction management instead. I'm not denying that there's value here, but what you're espousing seems divorced from reality. Good luck vibecoding a nontrivial actuarial model, then having it to pass the laundry list of reviews and having large firms actually pick it up.
> This is such a strange take. Your words remind me of past crypto hype cycles, where people pushed web3.0 and NFT FOMO hysteria.
Thats a little harsh. I think most everyone would agree we're in a transformative time for engineering. Sure theres hype, but the adoption in our profession (assuming you're an engineer) isn't waning.
I wonder if we'll reach a breaking point with public forges, where they'll simply reject hosting a repo if it isn't from someone with a vetted background or if it detects hallmarks of LLM slop (e.g., many commits over a short period of time or other LLM tells).
GitHub recently added new repository settings to turn off pull requests or limit them to approved contributors. The announcement doesn't mention AI agents, but that's certain relevant.
GH also needs to find a way to stop AI scraping of IP.
(Or not. It might be lucrative to host some novel algorithm on GH under a license permitting its use in generative LLM results, at a reasonable per-impression fee.)
I think there'll be space for curated forges at some point but they're going to live on the margins like most self-hosted repos do.
You could solve it with tech by using ideas from radicle and tangled but the slop is ultimately a social problem, so you just have invite-only forges where the source of the invite is also held accountable (lobsters style).
If you want a high quality internet experience these days you have to step out of the mainstream.
I think that AI will do the vetting of repos - just as humans do that now. Perhaps AI will do a better job. The only way we're gonna fight AI slop is with AI.
I've been a software engineer for over 15 years, working on everything from APIs and financial models to data pipelines and firmware. Beyond the technical stuff, I’ve led small, tightly-knit teams, managed projects, mentored and advocated for colleagues, and spent a lot of time communicating technical concepts to folks who aren't as tech-savvy.
Now that I'm authorized to work for any U.S. employer, I'm hoping to pivot to a smaller company where I can make a stronger impact. I'm open to any field, but particularly drawn to life sciences. It's been an area of interest for me ever since going through a bioinformatics algorithms textbook cover-to-cover, and the hope is that I can continue learning about the life sciences space while providing value with my existing skill set. Like many on HN, I have a heartfelt drive for learning, whether through books, courses, shadowing experts in the field, or jumping head-first into unfamiliar situations.
If you're doing anything in biopharma, computational biology, medical devices, synthetic biology, or anything along those lines, by all means please drop me an email. If you're working in some other unrelated field, still don't hesitate to reach out — I'm always interested to know what folks are working on and if I'd be able to help move things along in any way.
I program in modern C++ as well (C++23). I disagree with both "very safe" and "fun". Even with 23 there are an innumerable number of footguns throughout both the language and the standard library. Debugging code is also a mess. Good luck getting anything done without paying for an IDE, and even then it can be a struggle.
Of all the languages I use C/C++ have the least need for paid tools.
I use emacs(and vim), make and Boost's b2 build system for most of my programming. Although on Windows, Visual Studio is a joy to use. On Linux I use gdb. Works fine. I also use static analysers and valgrind. But I come from a tradition of Unix and living on the command line.
I've tried CLion, because I pay for IntelliJ IDEA for other programming (I also have to write Javascript, and Python) But while its nice, there is nothing there that I couldn't do without.
If you stick to C++ standard libraries, Boost, and turn on all warnings, and are reasonably competent, you won't encounter any bugs that are so serious that your program crashes inexplicably.
I took a crack at explaining the Viterbi algorithm after learning about HMMs from a bioinformatics book I was reading. You may find it helpful, but that's assuming my interpretation of it is correct.
I thought about this and we have a backup problems in place if they don't feel comfortable sharing. The context will be the same, both the candidate and the team member will be working as equals to address the problem. Although, in this case, the team member is already familiar with the problem.
Where is this coming from? You absolutely need to know the ins and outs of a 3D printer. Nozzles wear out, build plates wear out, components need to be regularly cleaned properly and lubricated, you have to keep filaments dry, certain filaments can only be used with certain components, you constantly tweak slicer and temperature settings, ... The list goes on.
3D printers, including Bambu Lab printers, are definitely not easy to use nor are they reliable. They're maintenance heavy. Sometimes you have to do a print multiple times because it'll fail for a myriad of reasons. Maybe you oriented it wrong, maybe your slicer settings are off, maybe it didn't have proper supports, maybe the filament is messed up, ...
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