I was having fun recently with the word "surfeiting" from an early 17th century text.
Did a meme with picture of Sean Penn from the end of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" where he's flanked by attractive females, and redefines it as: "Surfeiting is like, when you're hanging 10, and then you screw up, and go from 'tasty' waves to 'tasting' waves."
Words, like code, corrode in the absence of maintenance.
I would have said Prusa a year or two ago but they've reneged a little on their open-ness. That was probably in response to Bambu being fully closed and gaining so much market share.
The Core line of printers seems promising and a big leap towards closing the gap towards Bambu's corexy printers but haven't used one yet and I've been out of the game a little. Bambu though is probably more of a high-end appliance type than Prusas more utilitarian feel.
I splurged a while ago and got a pre-assembled Core One. It worked great right out of the box and is has been worry-free so far. So far, I've treated it very much like an appliance with no tinkering on my part yet.
The machine is still quite hackable. Prusa publishes the firmware and CAD files for their printers, although the CAD files aren't under a fully open license. The support is generally nice to people who tinker with their printers and sometimes even seems to be genuinely invested in seeing tinkering projects succeed.
I am not going to say they are perfect, but I think they have a good balance of ethics, openness, product quality, innovation, availability and price. By that I mean their are the best in none of them, but I don't think of anything better as a combination.
Prusa sat on its haunches for a decade, happy to leave progress on the table as long as their salaries got paid. Bambu actually got non-technical people into the hobby and has always had more bang per buck.
Buy a bambu; use Orcaslicer
Edit: didn't mean to say "held the industry back"; I would categorize my opinion more along the lines of "were happy to get fat on past offerings" or the like.
Prusa is generally like Apple in that regard, in that they wait for the new technology to be tried and true before committing their design(s) to it. CoreXY is the most prominent example.
Prusa was actually the "non-technical" printer company for quite a while though. They would sell to schools and libraries, and still do, and offer(ed) assembled kits.
I don't own a Prusa, I've assembled Vorons and have a highly-modified Ender 3 S1, but if I was in the market to get a user-friendly printer, or recommend one, I'd get a Prusa.
My thing with bambu was always that they polished whatever the industry (and hobbyists) had invented and closed it all off, then also innovating on top of that but never giving back unless they _had_ to. Polish and mechanical design are great but corexy kinematics, input-shaping are imo what made the X1 stand out as the fast+good-qual printer when it launched. A lot of what they added on top was then to build a moat.
This may be a controversial take, but imo it would be Bambu to set the industry back by a decade if they "win" and lock up the market. That's clearly their strategy afaict.
Does anyone remember Bambu patenting existing open inventions as their own? I can't seem to find good links anymore (?!) but there's some details here https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5134/8/6/141
If no one else is willing to give a polished experience, they have no one to blame but themselves. My father doesn't want to be a 3d printer expert or filament researcher; he wants to print things in 3d as a hobby. Looking back at the reprap, ultimaker, and prusa — the big boys of the maker-oriented printers that i remember — none of them made any progress on making the hobby more accessible to someone like my dad. Bambu deserves some recognition for that.
Prusa is also pursuing patents (they say it's because of Bambu but lol), and they are not releasing their firmware sources for recent printers.
Bambu did not close the tech they used to make their printers. Others (including Prusa) are making CoreXY and they 100% also benefit from the RnD that Bambu did (either hardware, or the slicer (without which Orca would not exist in its current form)).
Bambu just made better products for cheaper and Josef got mad. But I'm certain that Prusa could compete had they focused on making price-competitive polished printers, and not focus on $5k monster printers for enterprise.
I didn’t say Prusa held the industry back; I said they sat on their haunches. Even the basic differences in stepper motors between what bambu chose and what prusa or ultimaker chose demonstrates my point.
Edit: whoops! guess i did say they held the industry back... my bad /facepalm.
I did quick search and bambu p2s seems to be 30% faster than prusa mk4s and few hundred cheaper.
Prusa is more accurate, more open and has better spare parts supply.
Bambu doesn't have wifi connection unless I use their cloud?
I’ve always got more consistent and accurate prints out of my x1c versus the prusa mk3 i tolerated. Even just the enclosure makes the bambu experience more much more consistent in my experience
The enclosure is the real added value, hardware-wise; and the H2D has even better environmental control (active heating and cooling of chamber).
While the open-source part of me loves the more open nature of Prusa, the commercial-minded part loves the immediate convenience of the Bambu. But the environmental control is something which Prusa doesn't really do well yet. Heated chamber, as well as filament humidity control is something Bambu has done which Prusa has not, and when it comes to printing with "engineering" filaments like PA6CF, PA6GF and other higher-end lubricating plastics for bearings etc, along with support filaments like PVA which are incredibly hygroscopic, the Bambu is the only contender if you want high-quality prints that don't warp.
IMO this is where Prusa gave up the race and need to catch up. Give me equivalent or better environmental control, and I'll be happy to consider it.
The accessibility to non-experts, and the fact that it just works out of the box without fiddling around optimising settings, is why I have a Bambu family at work and zero Prusas.
I just bought a qidi printer. It arrives in a few days, so I can’t speak to the machine’s quality beyond saying it’s reviewed pretty well - but the software is all open source klipper with no locks preventing you from modifying it. The hardware itself is closed source, but if you want an open hardware machine in 2026 you need to build your own voron.
I have a Prusa MK3S and it has been very very reliable. There's also a ton of mods you can download and print, which modify or extend the printer for specific use cases. They are a bit more expensive then their Chinese counterparts, but in my opinion, it's definitely worth the extra cost for the peace of mind.
Obviously it depends on what you’re doing and what is importante to you. It’s hard to beat Bambi Labs H2D or X2D for versatility, practicality, and price. Engineering filaments are getting a lot cheaper as the market expands so it helps to have a printer than can handle those. Given Bambi Labs is so cheap compared to the alternatives customers would probably be better off putting aside the savings to buy a second printer from a different supplier when one starts to catch up.
As I mentioned in a sibling comment, I bought a qidi q2 because i am gambling that they have caught up in terms of quality. The price is comparable to the bambu p1s, while the specs are closer to the x1c. Reviews seem to put it roughly on par with the p2s, which costs 30% more.
It’s clear nobody’s caught up in terms of ux / user friendliness - but as an experienced printer i don’t need my hand held quite as much - and the openness is worth a lot to me. Being able to define custom klipper macros alone makes it worth it to me to stay away from bambu
Prusa. And my Raise3D E2 has been solid for ~5 years. I can't directly compare it to Bambu, but it was a massive step up from the Creality Ender it replaced. It's a "Just works" machine.
Prusa is the most open of the printer manufacturers. They did have to backtrack a bit because Bambu copied their slicer to use for themselves and undercut them, but they're still as open as you can get in a capitalist economy.
> > If I were to make my own programming language, it would look an awful lot like Python.
> I agree, Python allows anyone to write bad code, but makes up for it by running the code slow enough that it can't do real damage.
In the same sentence you agree with the implied beauty of the syntax of Python and then go on sarcastically about the performance of CPython. Assumably you deliberately mixed language and implementation because you needed a soapbox, so hey, here's my comment to which you can reply and continue your rhetoric.
You say all wrong and then go on about explaining I'm half wrong. I feel there's a pattern (or maybe another joke that whooshed over my head) here but it is obvious to me that I am not your intended stand-up comedy audience and I should ask for my money back. :)
It is absolutely not the case that all problems worth solving are solved already. Programming language development isn't necessarily about being a genius but rather a willingness to put in a monumental amount of work. Writing a language that compiles is easy enough. Getting a language off the ground to an actually useful place is tedious, simply in terms of the sheer amount of work to be done. Specification, implementation, documentation, diagnostics, optimization, configuration, tooling support, and creating a standard library (especially a cross-platform one) are things that will mire you in many hundreds of hours of work.
Those are the easy parts actually. You're thinking of them in terms of time spent, which is not a bottleneck at all. That's an illusion.
You need to be a genius, not in the sense of having a high IQ, but rather a genius in the sense of having great ideas. All your competitors are doing the ecosystem marathon, that's not a differentiating factor since your new language will always have a weaker ecosystem unless your language has concepts or features that negate the value of existing ecosystems.
If you have a programming language that makes people 10% more productive, then people will have to spend 10x the time to use your language than it took you to develop it for it to break even. Increasing the amount of effort spent on the language moves the payoff further away.
Your two key goals are developing a more effective technology and to convince people to use it.
This means that differentiating features are critical here. Differentiating features are not present in the old ecosystem, which turns it into a burden rather than a benefit.
Even the _design_ of languages is a generational project. There are open problems in the PL space that we know need to be fixed but we have no idea how. Once you've got the ‘core ideas’ of the language in some papers somewhere (and proofs that they're coherent, which is usually the meat of the process) it's a pretty quick step to get a toy implementation, but then the path to an implementation that is usable for day-to-day work (especially if performance is important) can take decades, and the path to adoption after that can easily take between 5 and 20 more years.
Then people figure out the thing about your core ideas that gets in the way when writing the kinds of real-world programs they want to write and you get to go back to the drawing board for the next language idea :)
As an example of the kind of time scales involved, linear logic was introduced in 1987. Linear (well, affine) types made it into Rust 1.0 in 2015, which IMO is the first time substructural types have made it to a ‘mainstream’ (albeit still far from ubiquitous) language. And that's a very straightforward language feature that doesn't really challenge the dominant imperative/functional hybrid paradigm or have any inherent effect on performance (since it's ‘just’ a type system feature).
IMHO the next big thing up (assuming LLMs and other AI advancements don't throw everything off-kilter) is probably effect systems, introduced in ~2013, for which we can linearly extrapolate a time frame of about 2041!
But maybe not — one exciting thing that's been happening is that (as Jonathan Blow noted) with the growth of lower-level substrates like LLVM the work to go from a toy to a working and performant language has decreased significantly.
Elastic tabspots everywhere would be ideal. But in the real world I think 'tabs to indent, spaces to align' is the superior way, as every dumb text editor will support it.
> Cassettes are the worst way to listen to music ever invented.
Sea Story:
- Background: US Navy ships go alonside an oiler to refuel and hold a course/speed at restricted maneuvering for a while. Hours, even.
After this nerve-wracking time period, when breaks away from the oiler, then she comes up to flank three and plays a breakaway song over loudspeakers, the 1MC. Totally not meant for music, but that's not the point.
- Story: the CO always wanted "Lowrider", by War, which is an excellent cut, but was well past cliché after so many iterations. The Messenger of the Watch had a boom box, a tape, and the 1MC microphone for the task.
Only, this time, the tape was flipped. Dude hit PLAY on the "Dazed and Confused" soundtrack, and Ted Nugent announced that he had everyone in a stranglehold.
The Old Man was apoplectic, and the cassette was quickly flipped and we got on with life.
While I understand the need to be flexible, and Sun Tzu certainly preached deception as a weapon, ambiguity sucks in politics.
Not a partisan point. The new thing seems to be "say whatever is needful" during the campaign, and then just run amok when sworn in.
It's swell if you agree, and hell if you don't, with the decisions.
No matter how pro-state you are the US National debt, Uncle Sam's prostate, cannot enlarge forever.
Possibly some sobriety will be forced upon us.
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