I’ve thought about that, actually. Could you use waste heat from a datacenter to, say, heat water for a laundromat or something?

Prusa was all in on open source for over a decade. All their machines up through the MK3S+ are GPL hardware, firmware and software. What did that get them as a company? A lot of people selling near identical copies of their hardware for lower prices. Prusa’s leaning away from open source hardware because it pretty much meant doing their competitors’ R&D for them. Hell, Bambu Labs relies on code developed at Prusa Research. So their ecosystem is closing up somewhat.

You are right, a big strength of Prusa’s is their mod ecosystem, their community. They are well aware of this, which is why they’ve come out with their OCL license. The Core One isn’t GPL, it’s OCL, source-available. It’s illegal for anyone to start making blatant copies, but the CAD files are there for reference when making mods and accessories.

Prusa’s MMU3 is in several ways superior to Bambu’s AMS: you get 5 spools, not 4. Retract-based tool changes are faster than purge-based ones. Retract-based tool changes are less wasteful than purge-based ones; Prusas don’t poop. And yet, Bambu finished the AMS, Prusa merely got the MMU3 working. Installing an MMU3 requires a fairly invasive modification to the Nextruder and a desk full of tubes and nonsense. I think Prusa’s going to catch up there with the INDX system with the MMU3 as basically a legacy product.

The market for “kinda polished, easy DIY 3d printing” is small and shrinking. I know because I’m in it, and us kit builders are small potatoes to them. Prusa is trying to position themselves in the professional and industrial sector; they’re releasing a “Pro” line of turnkey print farm and industrial solutions, they sell tungsten fill radiation shield filament and certified encrypted USB drives. I believe they are working on a self-hostable version of PrusaConnect, likely aimed at their higher end customers who are more likely to balk at using anyone’s cloud service. To that market, “We’re not Chinese” is Prusa’s biggest selling point.

Yeah I bought a Prusa, and it’s clear they got blindsided by Bambu and they’re still scrambling to catch up. What Prusa used to do well, they still do well, what they used to do badly they now do even worse and what they used to didn’t do they’ve started a token effort at making it look like they do now.

A lot has happened in 5 years; I was working as a maintenance tech for a print farm maintaining Prusa MK3s, that job died of covid, my attention turned elsewhere, I’ve been occasionally 3D printing stuff I need for my shop on my old reprap until I replaced it about a month ago and I’ve had a lot of shit to catch up on.

Prusaslicer can add raised or embossed text on objects now as part of the plating process, I’m sure all of its forks can as well.

That’s okay, you won’t have any rights soon.

Likewise. Don’t expect it from China though.

China has no need for open source because they steal everything anyway.

We don’t cotton to freaks around here.

You know, I think if Stallman had put as much thought into the code of HURD as he did the acronym, Linus Torvalds wouldn’t be where he is today.

Found the microbrain.

Yeah if 4 people uninstalled the program last time, and 6 people uninstalled it this time, that’s a 150% increase from last time.

I accept your reality and add it to my own.

Pixelfed I think? Though it’s developed by the same guy as whatever the Instagram clone is called so it’s been kind of slow to become usable?

I will assert that, again, for most people, instead of computers remaining at the same TDP but increasing vastly in processing power, they would have been fine with the same processing power at vastly decreased TDP. Look at how long people held onto Win 7, and how long they held onto Win XP before that. Because they were fine, possibly better than the new offering, especially since you already owned it. Some time around 2012, anyone who wasn’t a power user ran out of reasons to get excited for new computers.

Don’t we have that?

That tracks.

I’m 100% okay with how my Samsung Galaxy handles it: You access the Developer mode by pressing on the phone info screen in the settings for several seconds, and then there’s a switch that allows execution of random .apk files.

“Yes, do as I say.”

For most people, computers became powerful enough around the year 2005. A machine from late in the Windows XP era could run 3D games, CAD software, edit video, communicate with the entire world through broadband internet. What abilities have PCs taken on since? So much processing power filled up by doing the same tasks less efficiently for no reason.

The dreaded Wii U Fit.