- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.ml
Great move by Snapmaker. In considering buying a new printer soon I am very annoyed by how difficult it is to know beforehand how much functionality of a printer is locked behind cloud connectivity that can be remotely disabled at any point. I know Bambu is to avoid absolutely thanks to the very public backlash they got but what about the others?
I know Prusa is a shining example of letting their customers own their devices but they are pricy. I didn’t know Snapmaker had the same kind of mentality until now thanks to that move.
You might check out the Consumer Rights Wiki, also started by Rossman. It’s crowd sourced, and lists anti-consumer BS like forced cloud subscriptions for a lot of companies.
Just find a printer, look up the company there, and see how legit they are. There’s even a browser plugin that pops up on any website that has an entry on the wiki.
I don’t agree with everything he does, but he’s right more than he’s wrong and I also have no idea how he walks around with balls the size of watermelons. You GO Louis.
Everyone with a strong sense of justice is a little annoying, they have to be, and we should be grateful for them.
*Dicks fuck Assholes, chuck."
Where fork?
I’m happy with my slightly modded Ender 3 Pro, but if I ever upgrade the Snapmaker U1 looks nice. I’ll only buy from a company that supports open source firmware. Bambu is trash, unfortunately every 3D printing related YouTuber seems to have happily taken a sponsorship from them so they are everywhere now. I hate it.
I’ve been interested in getting a 3d printer for a while now but am not deep into what’s out there, does the ender 3 pro require any cloud or services that I can’t run locally to function?
Edit: same question for the snapmaker U1.
Also, where do you source your fillament from? Any other ongoing maintenance requirements (material-wise)?
I want a 3d printer, not some new relationship with a corporation.
Ender 3 Pro is a completely offline printer. It has a microSD slot and a USB port, that’s it. No network connectivoty at all. It runs Marlin firmware which is a long-standing Arduino-based open source 3D printer firmware. It’s highly customizable and upgradable. I added a CR Touch bed probe to mine and rebuilt the firmware to enable the unified bed leveling features. It’s not the most user friendly but it’s a decent, cheap platform, fully open source, and puts out decent prints.
You can also run klipper on them if you want network connectivity. Granted you need a raspberry pi to run klipper so there is that.
After running klipper on my Ratrigs I can’t even consider Marlin anymore. Modifying a config file and restarting is less painful than having to compile and flash a bin for every modification or update.
As another 3d printing noob, why would I want my 3d printer connected and be in the mercy of some company? Feels like this dependency makes it so you don’t truly own the product.
Klipper wouldn’t do that at all on its own. It basically just uses an external computer to run the printer, rather than purely using the printers microcontroller. So you can connect to the computer remotely/over wifi and control the printer if you set it up to do so. It also makes it easier to add extra stuff like cameras, heaters, power switches, etc. too since it all runs through that computer and knows what the printer is doing.
It looks like Rossman is saying that anyone can post this code because it’s an open source, GPL code. Rossman also posted the code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jhRqgHxEP8&t=2s
not really what the gpl means, but good for him i guess?
The GPL explicitly grants anyone the right to share, distribute, and even modify the source code. So yes, that is exactly what it means. They cannot claim they wrote it, but they can absolutely both share and distribute the source code, and are in fact required to if they do make modifications to it. It’s literally the main thing the license is even about.
Small sidenote: distribution of modified source code of GPLv2/v3 covered projects is only mandatory to those who have access to a binary version of the modified sources.
e.g. if you take a GPLv2 covered project that is a simple HTTP server, and you give the binary nobody, then you’re not required to share the source (if the HTTP server is AGPL covered then you need to provide it to anyone who can access the HTTP service and requests the source).
This is an important distinction, as you can’t demand the source of a GPL project from someone who cloned it and made modifications to their own use without distributing a binary of those changes. If I fork Orca and make some changes, and showcase those as screenshots, you have absolutely no right to demand the source for it. If I were to send you a binary of Orca with my changes, then you’d have the right.
I mean this distinction is obviously not applicable here but I wanted to make sure the GPL summary is fully correct. Which is the best kind of correct.
Exactly what the GPL means, Bambu intern.

There is one thing everyone misses in this pissing contest. Bambu is a Chinese company. So any lawsuit will probably need to take place in China. It ain’t happening in the US or the Europe. So, guess who wins…
Josef Prusa wrote a blog post, recently about this. I have to apologize that I can’t seem to find a link to it right now. But the gist of it is.
Bambu forked Prusa Slicer and had to be threatened to publish the code for the fork by Prusa the company, “stealing” ideas and claiming it your own is just good business in China, because the code is all AGPL.
But Bambu has a problem now. The Chinese government requires access to their technology and cloud. Because one way or another, the Chinese government requires access to any industries tech under “National Security”. So Bambu can’t allow access to 3rd party actors in this case because the government can’t control the access of the outside code, which makes it illegal.
So Bambu has screwed themselves by forking an open source project that requires anyone to have access to the code and be able to use that code and make changes to that code. That the Chinese government doesn’t allow. And Bambu didn’t pay attention and let that little snippet of code that is under contention loose under the AGPL. As I have claimed all along, Bambu does not have the smartest coders on payroll.
But Bambu is pretty sure the Chinese courts have their back in this matter. In the past, Prusa has seriously considered going after Bambu in court. But the Prusa’s lawyers know they can’t win no matter how righteous the case because, well China. And Prusa most likely has access to much better lawyers than Rossmann does. So this ain’t going nowhere.
Josef Prusa is very angry because it’s evident the AGPL means nothing if it can’t be enforced and Bambu is worried that it will get screwed over in the market because they could lose a lot of sales over this. Or even get their products banned in some countries. Or not. Many Bambu fans seem to care very little about it. Because just use “Developer Mode” without understanding the deeper implications. And that it’s not really any protection.
Edit to add: When push comes to shove, just who do you think Bambu is going bend the knee to? Some court 1000s of miles away? Or the Chinese government that’s right outside the door? And yes, if you want to sue a Chinese company about patent, you will need to do it in China.
Can’t you just hide the fact that you used the smell snippet of code?
🥀🥀🥀
Grow up.
What does it mean?
Programming is an art and using LLMs makes you as much of a hack as a visual artist resorting to Stable Diffusion.
Everything matters. From high-level architecture to little details of implementation.
Last time I checked us programmers had preferences for details as small as tabs vs. spaces, or curly bracket placement.
You think I’m going to let a fucking machine make decisions about implementation for me?
Let alone high-level architectual ones?
Everything about your software should have intent, and its impossible for LLMs to actually intend to do something.
So you can fuck right off with that, and while you’re at it, stop poisoning the worlds codebases (and drinking supply.)
Trust me my code aint worthy of being “art”.
If yours is, I totally get where you’re coming from, AI-generated code is pretty bad right now, albeit it does often work.
The way I often do things is have an agent create a rough first implementation according to my own architecture, so I have done all that high-level thinking that it currently struggles with; then I have a dedicated improvement agent come and clear that up substantially, and then I review whatever is left.
The “fuck ai” crowd sounds so much like the “fuck cloud” crowd from 10-15 years ago.
Yes I think if software companies put money into easy to setup home servers that would be better than what’s available to the average consumer.
I might be the sort of person to keep a 24u rack in their closet, but you shouldn’t have to to reap the benefits.
I mean Jesus, even cloud providers know this. Just look at AWS Outposts.
(I admit, I liked the cloud crowd better.)









