Definitely more leeway there IMO. But the optics aren't ideal as someone mentioned. And unfortunately, optics is more important than it should be sometimes.
USA is as censored as what we believe about China. You will get cancelled by Americans if you use "communist" stuff. That is why hardly any Chinese EVs in USA. Because it is communists stuff. The odd thing is iphone is made in China. So it is more of selective enforcement when convenience. Chinese AI even self host means your will influence by communism. You want McCarthy era back again?
You're referring to a very small subset of the American population. It's ironic because you seem to be claiming Americans are closed-minded here but I think that may actually describe your mindset as well.
Chinese EV policy in the US is about propping up our auto industry despite its best efforts to lose the EV battle. This has nothing to do with "communism", it's a purely economic thing that ties into internal US voting blocs.
Hot take, barring from special edge cases, I find using dumber models (like local Qwen 3.6) to be the best balance. Smart enough to do stuff but dumb enough where I don’t trust it and verify what it’s doing rather than letting it do the third whole code base refactoring of the day. Also forces me to know my code base and ask very descriptive tasks rather than go “something is wrong, fix it”.
It’s wild. Regardless of Deepseek direct pricing, on Openrouter itself, the pricing for Pro is comparable to Haiku. Flash is even cheaper. You get Opus 4.5 and better than Sonnet 4.6 performance.
I was curious just how much of a difference there was, so ran a quick eval comparing them and fwiw DeepSeek is considerably slower but much much ~5x cheaper than Haiku and fwiw ~35x cheaper than Claude Opus 4.7.
If you look at openrouter for Deepseek model providers that does not use your data to train, it’s still significantly cheaper than Anthropic pricing. The Pro and Flash performs closely to Opus 4.5 and Sonnet 4.6 respectively (though no vision capability which is a fair thing another user called out). The pricing of Pro is close to Haiku. The pricing of Flash is 10X cheaper. To put into perspective, you can have Sonnet 4.6 capabilities at 10X cheaper than Haiku even without “Chinese government subsidies”.
Serious question, I have a Bambulab printer now. What is a good next printer option? Prusa is way too expensive without a decent AMS alternative. Flashforge is doing some sketchy stuff with their maker site + AI. Is Creality or QIDI the best next options?
I’ve owned half a dozen printers (Prusa, Bambu, and Creality) and help manage a hackerspace with a print farm of mixed brands, and I won’t personally touch any brand other than Prusa now for actually getting prints done.
There’s plenty of other printers that can do the same or better and/or cheaper if you want “building and managing the printer” to be half the hobby, which is a totally fair thing and can be lots of fun if you’re into tinkering, but for a printer that just prints things as a tool there’s absolutely nothing close to Prusa and they’re worth every cent.
That used to be the case. Less so now - the Chinese brands tend to work right out of the box.
I run an Elegoo Centauri Carbon ar home, and the building and managing process was unscrewing couple transport bolts and clicking "self calibrate" button. From what I've seen, Creality is the same way now too.
Yes, the old Ender 3 I used to have demanded attention every other print. But it's not the norm now.
I'm sure Prusa makes a better product, and it probably starts to make economic sense if you run a print farm. But for home use, a 300€ box that happily melts plastic into whatever shape I need is a sweet deal. It even has a 50€ multi material extension box now, however that's on months long backorder.
As far as I know, Elegoo is offline. It has not asked me to log in anywhere, and while it encourages use of their own orcaslicer skin, it works with others too.
I don't know about other brands or even models, but I can attest that the Bambu A1 Mini "just works".
I precisely wanted to avoid another hobby, of which I have too many already. 3D printing as a hobby doesn't appeal to me, I just wanted something that solved the problem and was relatively cheap. The A1 is this for me, it's as close as a fire and forget appliance as I could find.
Not saying there aren't better alternatives, just that it simply works for me.
The A1 mini has turned out to be a fire hazard as of recently. Some component in the power supply that can explode and in the worst case catch fire. Multiple events during the last year, and shockingly it hasn't been recalled. You probably don't want to run yours while not in the room.
I don't know the last time you used Linux, but I've used it as my main OS for almost 20 years and have never really felt like I was "fighting" it. My system has always done exactly what I told it to do.
I also used Mac OS and macOS on and off for probably 20 years as well, and it freaking sucks in many ways. _That's_ where I feel like I'm fighting the system. And I grew up with it.
We Linux desktop people aren't fighting our desktop anymore. Everything just works and it has for some years now. Linux with Steam + Proton is a better gaming platform than MacOS, by the way.
The Year of the Linux Desktop arrived a while ago and nobody noticed :)
> Everything just works and it has for some years now.
Strange then, that so many people and particularly those who haven't spent years or decades fighting their OS or desktop environment, seem to disagree.
Every time a linux user says "everything just works" there's a massive gotcha. Remove the terminal and try to use a linux system, setting everything up, while properly roleplaying those who haven't spent years to get used to linux's many weird choices and you'll perhaps understand.
Choices are only weird if there's prior experience with something else with significant enough differences. In this case I still remember the effort it took to switch from Windows to Linux, but I used Zorin OS to make that road smoother.
I think the answer is still Prusa. It's mostly Chinese companies undercutting Prusa's price and they probably care as little about free software licenses and users as Bambu.
I saw this mess coming from miles ahead (and it will repeat itself), so when it was time to replace our Ender 3v2, I got a Prusa printer. Yes, it was much more expensive than Bambu, but at some point we have to put our money where our mouth is. We cannot talk all the time about open source, consumer friendliness, the right to repair, etc. and then reward companies that don't give a shit about it. So our money went to Prusa.
Maybe it's because I am in Europe, here it's slightly less than 3x or about 2x when you buy a kit.
European/US products are always going to be substantially more expensive because they pay employees better, have better labor laws, have more strict regulations to deal with (GDPR, etc.), cannot freeload on other people's work while violating open source licenses, don't get state funding to murder Western competitors, etc.
If you buy Bambu, you are supporting AGPL violations. If you buy Prusa, you are supporting development of open source firmware, open source slicers, and a company that is friendly to self repairs and makes it possible print replacement parts for your printer.
I understand that not everyone can afford a Prusa printer. But most people on HN have a lot of disposable income. If you choose to support the greedy, anti-consumer, anti-open source company anyway, don't complain the next time a open source project cannot be sustained even though they are used by large companies, don't complain production is moving away from the west, and don't complain when you get locked into cloud services. You supported these practices.
I am not saying that you are complaining about this, but a lot of people are, but when push comes to shove they don't put their money where their mouth is.
> I get voting with your wallet but not many people want to spend 4x more for a worse product.
Yeah as much as I like Prusa, I really hope they figure out how to cut down their prices because, let's be real, most of the people buying a 3D printer don't give a cent about how "open" it is, and if Prusa continues this trend I'm afraid it'll become obsolete. Having competitors with genuinely good products (like Bambu, despite them not being a good company) is healthy, but not helpful if Prusa doesn't do anything to catch up to their competitor.s
I assume you're into multi-material printing and want a true multi-extruder setup. Then, quality wise your remaining options are: Prusa, Flashforge, and Snapmaker. Snapmaker very recently just shot themselves in the foot in a similar way that Bambu did, so you're left with Prusa and Flashforge. Of the two remaining, I really only trust Prusa.
Yes you pay a lot more, but I guess that's some sense voting with your wallet... I'm personally going to buy a Prusa after I stabilize where I live.
Yeah, I'm curious too because I've been following all 3d printer news lately and only news re: Snapmaker is that they officially hired Ratdoux who came up with the full spectrum printing and they're integrating it into Snapmaker Orca.
Orca really needs a plugin system so that we don't get so many forks. I want full spectrum, wave overhangs, Snapmaker customizations for their printers, Sovol customizations for theirs. I also want the latest Orca nightly. So that's 5 different forks of Orca a good plugin system could replace.
Oops my bad, I mixed up Flashforge and Snapmaker. It was Flashforge that also started closing down their ecosystem. Snapmaker has been having a good track record so far with their open-source Klipper-based firmware and I hope they continue to do so!
INDX is an up and coming option that will probably change how multimaterial printing done, hopefully. I bought the founder edition but it will be a long time coming.
As an aspiring business owner, I am looking to transition to a more open printer as the OCL isn't something I want to rely on.
No. It's easy. I develop tools. Some of which are tools I may want to sell to other. if I am dependent on a platform to make money, I don't want to ask permission to do so.
The thing is, a Prusa will last way longer, and when something breaks it is fully serviceable. All the cheap Chinese brands are at best only partially serviceable. Just the other day I saw a post about a BambuLabs X1C that had to be thrown out because of a pully that was worn out and not replaceable.
Snapmaker (also Chinese) seem to be doing things better at the moment, but only time will tell how the serviceability is.
For me personally, the only viable choices today would be a Prusa Core One (possibly with INDX for multi-material, I don't care about MMU/AMS, those are just for multi-colour and with a lot of waste) or a Voron 2.4. My Prusa Mk3.9s bedslinger is still going strong though, and I don't expect to replace it any time soon.
Is it worth the upgrade to 3.x? I have the mk3s for years now and I love it. No issues at all. Bought it after I finished my freelance job at Ultimaker, as I had to return my S3. I wanted a premium experience, which prusa sure has. Considering upgrading the 3 or buy a new prusa core something something.
Second hand market for prusa printers is decent as well.
Mk3s is indeed great. I tend to swap nozzle often (different sizes, hardened vs brass) and the Nextruder makes that way easier. I also don't have a space where I can print overnight so the additional speed was extremely useful to me.
The Mk3.9 probably isn't a price competitive upgrade though, today I would in your position probably look at selling the Mk3s for 100-200 EUR and buying a Core One instead. But if the Mk3s works for what you are doing, then don't bother. (The Mk3.5 might make some sense if you only want a bit higher speed and network connectivity.)
Personally I don't see myself replacing the Mk3.9s for a long time, though an enclosed printer would be nice and let me print warp-prone materials like PC and ASA.
Thanks!! Speed indeed would be nice. Could go for 3.5 then. the enclosure looks better and keeps dust away from the buildplate. I think i will eventually go with core one then.
I'm not sure if a 3.5 will be as fast as a 3.9. You could enable printers you are interested in in the slicer and slice some typical models of yours.
Because of things like acceleration and flow limits the scaling isn't as simple as a constant factor but also depends on the geometry of the part (sharp corners lead to slowing down) and material (check max volumetric flow in your slicer, will likely be set way too low for your current filament profiles, especially if you switch to a high flow nozzle on the nextruder).
If anyone has a flashforge check out the alternative OS with all the normal goodies without the proprietary crap for the 5m. I adjusted most of the original on printer display code for it back in the first version and I guess it has been improved by now (don't have the printer anymore). Would not recommend to buy one now since they "open source" their code but won't provide the makefile to build it which likely contains a bunch of external references. So you cannot build your own klipper code for it or update it in any way. They raised the "proprietary code" argument of course which is bs on the level of an entire herd.
Depends on your budget but I am extremely happy with Snapmaker U1. I print with ASA, PETG, and TPU. It prints PLA very well by default. It runs klipper, gives you full SSH with root. I installed paxx12's extended firmware using a USB flash drive - https://github.com/paxx12-snapmaker-u1/SnapmakerU1-Extended-... and have been able to get 20+ fps camera feed.
I think that you're just asking for printers that are strictly offline -- and by "offline," I mean: They don't connect to any mothership, ever, nor do they have any facility by which to do so.
There's a ton of printers that are strictly offline. Some are older and some are newer, but there's a ton of them either way. That "offline" part is simple to accomplish.
Can you talk more about what else are you looking to achieve so the field can be pared down a bit?
Is there something that is good to be a “android” server? I want to sign in to this server for all my chat stuff and use beeper to connect to it. I tried using a tablet but the battery keeps dying.
Depends on how real you want your Android to be, but Google Android emulator images and Androidx86 exist. Many of these apps run fine in Waydroid as well. A remote desktop UI on a Linux server/VM may be all you need.
If you have decent soldering skills, there are guides online about how you can replace the battery in devices like these by soldering a resistor and a buck converter to the battery pins so it can run permanently without turning the battery into a lithium bomb. If you set up ADB access you can control the screen remotely using scrcpy, all you'd really need is a cheap second hand phone, 20 bucks worth of parts, and a steady hand.
Hot take, I truly believe the answer for HS is yes. I grew up in a school district where the teachers had to have a master degree in the subject they were teaching. Those teachers strongly shaped me who I am today and I believe their advanced degree helped them become great teachers.
I read through TFA and was impressed at the number of citations they offered. I had assumed (but not strongly) that there'd be a correlation, so this was enlightening.
Do you have any citations apart from your own experience?
What really bothers me with the data center boom is that prior to AI, water and electricity was constrained in a lot ways here in the states. “Our infrastructure cannot support electrification of cars and trucks!” “No watering your lawn or washing your car due to drought!”. But now for AI, we somehow miraculously can handle the amount of water and electricity it uses.
These constraints, at least for electricity, are usually in end distribution networks, not in production. High-powered datacenter would get (and pay for) its own substation/transformer from higher-voltage network, thus avoiding the limitation.
Isn't this how it always works? Not a snarky comment. This is a distinct and pervasive pattern. It also aligns quite well with many elitie globalist double standards.
I often encounter their proposals and briefly see the wisdom there in, but quickly remember it only applies to plebes, not them.
If you look at how oppressed much the population is in the US, it's pretty significant. From unfair taxation, small business hurdles, energy and utility regulation, arbitrary code enforcement regardless of actual quality, etc. And then there seems an unspoken rule enforcing centralization and penalizing anything that attempts otherwise.
It may seem a bit trite, but from my perspective, the public seems managed more as livestock than intelligent beings. I also think the new foisted age of data centers and AI will make this much more evident.
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