No this isn't rocket science, and there's definitely a vibrant FOSS community actually pioneering this and that is probably the best place to be on the true frontier, but there is productization effort here. Considering people always advocate for Bambu for "making it easy to buy", Prusa also deserves credit when they try. They certainly get knocked when they don't.

As someone deeply embedded into the FOSS community myself, it's sometimes really annoying when we sabotage the better players. It only helps the worse ones.

Somehow people are only upset when Europeans dare to do the same.

Truly: Nothing better than AI tools to brave the challenges and requirements of modern life. "Claude, ride the hype train" is the decisive prompt you need.

?

He was literally rolled out in front of camera as Tesla's AI prodigy at multiple streamed events designed to appeal to techy consumers and dev recruitment. He's definitely been one of AI's public personas for a long time now, and his employers have regularly aided/directed/utilized him accordingly.

On the PC/Linux side I keep an old thermally-constrained i5 Sony Vaio ultrabook with a lowly 4 GB from 2015 around for the same reason.

The main dev box is a Ryzen 9950X3D/128 GB monster, so it's a bit of a difference :)

Automatic filament changes would be nice for sure, I look forward to upgrading to one of their new INDX models.

Prusa.

I'm 40. I have a kid. RHCP are literal Dad Rock now, accept and live it!

Bambu has spent a ton of dough on paid advertising via YouTube shills (it is absolutely rampant in that scene - I like the channel Maker's Muse as a notable exception, who also has some funny videos up where he reads emails from various vendors trying to bribe or intimidate him in various ways), and many in the HN crows were happy to parrot their talking points to justify their purchases. A winning marketing strategy.

To this day you end up encountering a lot of people who are under the impression Bambu printers somehow made 3D printing accessible or are the only ticket to a problem-free experience. And you know, the product might do that, the problem is the message that they're the only game in town, which has never been true and which they largely achieved on the back of work already done by others for them in software, designs and ecosystem development.

To contrast this: You often hear this about Apple, that they didn't necessarily invent the stuff, but they did the last-mile integration really well. It's incomparable. Apple did far more work on their products than Bambu ever did.

The "everyone on the internet is American" stuff in e.g. politics or job market convos is a lot more grating.

My aging Thinkpad P1 (1st Gen) has a great LCD, but it's also the last non-OLED screen in my life, and I don't think I can buy another laptop without it. In fact it would be a purchase decision driver/upgrade incentive for me. This and longer battery life.

Even though I build lots of C++ code, I still don't think I need more than the Xeon in the P1, horse-power wise.

Asus has similar materials in recent models I believe; I rather like it.

https://displate.com/displate/2002057

That said, if you have a 3D printer these days the process of ordering a board with full PCBA from PCBWay/JLCPCB/Aisler and printing the case yourself is pretty easy.

However, it's pretty nice that these days I can also swing a semi-decent PCB, know my way around scopes and logic analyzers quite well, CAD something up for DFM in a number of processes from thermoplastics to machining, taught myself a fair bit of structural engineering, set up a FEM analysis correctly, etc. If only because it lets me bridge worlds and tie software and hardware together more effectively in the projects I'm in.

I cannot do any of these things as well as a seasoned veteran, but it has given me a broader appreciation of engineering overall and the commonalities between it all, to the point where I can also muster up leadership in engineering orgs more broadly and am not as hurt over the prospect that my pure programming skills might get devalued or diluted, or change.

For example, software engineers generally scoff at the perceived crustyness and lack of agility in classical mechanical engineering processes, but on the other hand mechanical engineering is far more experienced at defense-in-depth type approaches, dealing in components that have a failure rate to them and designing with error bars and safety factors, and I find some of that mindset has transferred quite naturally to engineering with our unreliable LLM friends at scale the past two years.

It takes a lot of the sting out if listening to Phish isn't your only move. Well, maybe not a lot, but at least it doesn't get so existential. Don't be a Programmer, be an Engineer. It's a lot easier to feel useful during a time of much doubt.

I have programmer friends in their 40s to 60s who are seriously depressed currently (and 20 year olds worried for theirnl future perspectives, of course). Mental health is not just a young person's game.

I strangely feel quite lucky that I got more and more into electronics and hardware over time as I moved from web and desktop more and more into embedded/consumer electronics and companies who also employ mechanical and EE engineers. When I was younger I used to dumbly worry this meant giving something up (the purity of software approaches, etc.), but instead it made me consider myself an Engineer with a capital E and strive to learn the engineering method more generally, and learn so many other fields of the trade. It turns out this is a much more resilient identity than just Programmer and I recommend that approach.

I ended up buying Pure Wings as mentioned. Also much cheaper than Noctua and seemingly not having those issues.