Birth rates have been falling worldwide, regardless of the level of government support. It's much more a matter of attitudes about having children.
> The economic costs of having children at a replacement rate are simply too high
Nope. My wife and I have 4 children, on a lower-middle-class income in the US. Your lifestyle choices matter a lot. If you want to have children, you can find a way to afford them.
The worse the primary-caregiver's job prospects are, the cheaper the opportunity costs are to have kids. My wife quickly realized she didn't want to be an English teacher, and couldn't do a whole lot of other things with that degree, so her staying home to raise our 4 kids was very affordable for us. If she had been a software developer, the opportunity costs would have been higher.
> It's much more a matter of attitudes about having children.
That is the story right there. We as a society spent decades upon decades demonizing having children at a young-ish age. "Your career is more important", they said. We got shows like "16 and Pregnant" to dissuade viewers from having children. People have become genuinely afraid of having kids.
Not until you are in your 30s does the social messaging shift from "only failures have children" to "why haven't you had a child yet?" That change in social pressure often compels one to start to change their mind, but at that point one becomes biologically limited in how many children they can reasonably birth.
Sounds more like it's a matter of attitudes about personal economics than attitudes about having children. If you want to wallow in poverty (and don't mind if your children do as well), then of course you can "find a way."
As per usual arrangement, the internet can't stand a nuanced opinion, but instead jumps straight to extreme conclusions. Nowhere did I say anything about wallowing in poverty.
Of course, "If you want to have children, you can find a way to afford them." is a very nuanced statement for you to have made.
4 kids on a lower-middle-class income in the US makes me picture poverty, as someone on a lower-middle-class income whose girlfriend is legally in poverty (and with that being the primary reason we haven't gotten married and had kids yet). If you disagree, feel free to describe your circumstances in more nuanced detail. I wonder if it will really end up being a description of lower-middle-class.
I once submitted a PR to Ladybird, but even in early AI days there were so many open PRs that mine got lost in the noise. I don't really blame the maintainers here. Once the open PRs get to a certain point, it becomes unmanageable.
3D printing is still very much an enthusiast, techie driver market. The degree to which Bambu has done their best to alienate that market is beyond astonishing.
I really like Bambu's machines. Their quality and prices are both excellent. But they no longer have an edge feature and speed wise. I can get pretty much the same product from Creality, so why would I even entertain a user-hostile company like Bambu?
Anecdotally, I'm in the market for a new 3d printer and have been heavily considering a few Bambu models. All this drama, of which I'm not well informed on, is making me consider other vendors.
Without these issues, I would have already bought a Bambu printer. Now, I'm investigating all competitors.
You'd do well to avoid them if you want to own your printer forever.
I have 3 different Prusa printers, few of which have gone through several upgrades, and I love working with them (and not on them, as I'mnot the tinkering type).
If you haven't already, you might want to read the twitter thread at the root of this HN discussion. It essentially postulates that all Chinese 3D Printer manufacturers are incentivised to follow in the steps of BambuLabs (being members of the state apparatus and subject to the same rules), while suffocating the competition outside of China (by benefitting from unfair advantages under the umbrella of a nationalistic development plan).
Yeah Bambu's "moat" was mostly in the fact that spent a bit more time considering consumer usability, they spent a shitload of money on advertising (like, the common refrain "I didn't want a 3d printer hobby" is straight out of their YT sponsor spots) and hit the market with a CoreXY printer that naturally beat bed-slingers in reliability.
That does not a moat make. Everyone has caught up. Go buy a Prusa (I'm currently hovering over the buy button on a Core One L, I really don't have the space but...). Go buy a Qidi. Go buy a Snapmaker. Hell, even the Elegoo Centuri is an excellent printer for the price. They have tons of competition and offer little above them aside from questionable ethics and a bad attitude.
Do other budget brands really print as well as Bambu out of the box with no tinkering?
Going from an old Prusa MK3s to a Bambu P1P+AMS was a huge upgrade. Mostly speed, reliable bed adhesion, and easy material swapping, it’s made printing as a hobby much more fun, and at this point I’m more interested in designing things to print than tinkering with the printer itself.
I’ve followed the online drama, but so far, not regretting the purchase. Would avoid Bambu if printing comercially/at scale, but the ‘user hostility’ doesn’t have much real world impact on hobbyists with 1-2 printers. Yet.
Going from a bedslinger to a CoreXY is why you felt the Bambu P1 was a big upgrade. Bambu didn't invent printers with those kinematics, they were just the first major ones on the market and marketed the hell out of it.
I think if anyone can get away with it, it's bambu though. They are the apple of the 3d printing market and most people don't care. They just hit print and hope it works
If you don't care about ink quality, then aftermarket ink is fine.
However, if you want your pictures to last 10+ years under the sun, or being able to read what you have printed after some time, getting the genuine ink is the way.
People think ink is simple. It is not.
Anybody thinking otherwise, some points of pondering:
- Why Xerox and HP run their own toner/ink labs to formulate their own ink down to molecule level?
- Look at your standard disposable pens. Gel, liquid, dye, pigment, alcohol/water/oil based, UV resistant or not... It's a hard chemical problem.
- Similarly even something bland like fountain pen ink has hundreds of different formulations. Not colors, formulations. Washable to cellulose reactive and everything in between...
It's not dyed drinking water.
Lastly, I'm not against people using 3rd party ink at any level. I just want to point out that not every ink cartridge is created equal.
Then why don't they allow it, perhaps with warnings?
They don't block after market ink because of quality concerns, though they might claim so, they block it because they want to make more money from you themselves through ink sales. The common response here is “but they make a loss on selling the hardware!”, to which my response is “their bad pricing decision is not my problem”.
My roomba had warning in its guide that third party accessories may not properly work with the device. I was like pshaw you're just nickel and diming me!
But indeed, the third party brush caused the robot to have all types of errors. Some third party parts did work, just not the brushes. I guess there's some sort of strict size tolerance and the third party ones were a bit too big or small.
I agree that "making loss on the hardware and using ink to offset that" is a very bad business decision. I have an 10+ year old HP Deskjet 4515 Ink Advantage which had a high initial price but cheap refills (black ink is pigment, but color cartridge is dye, but is UV resistant if printed on good photo paper), and that thing never created any problems for me hardware or software wise.
I can still use any print I got from it even after a decade. Ink's that stable on these.
From my perspective, 3rd party ink or toner is a support nightmare, esp. if it's bottom of the barrel. Again, from my perspective you should be able to take the responsibility and use these if you really want, but any ink or toner related damage might be out of warranty then (HP's genuine cartridges come with their own guarantees).
So, I can speculate that makers both offset the price and don't want to handle support tickets related to 3rd party ink damage for lower end devices, and buyers of higher end models are either using 1st party ink, or fine with paying the repair costs if their 3rd party installations go haywire.
Also, it's possible that kits for higher end inkjet systems (large format/plotter systems) tend to be higher quality since these models cater to professional shops which needs high quality supplies.
Lastly, I talked with someone who said that they buy the cheapest paper and cheapest ink because the printouts are disposable for them, and I find that point entirely fair, too.
My main point was underlining the fact that ink is not something simple in formulation. I don't defend banning 3rd party ink, but just pointing out some facts. I believe everybody can carry out their own fafo procedure.
That does not mean I cannot use the ink I want in a tool that I own.
Yes, your ink might be better. Market it that way and make it known. No problem with that. But prevent me from using my tool using DRM and firmware updates? That is customer hostile.
Printing a family picture on 4"x6" photo paper, framing it and putting in a living room exposes it to copious amount of UV light over a decade.
It's one of the exact reasons inkjet printers and blank, inkjet-compatible photo paper exists. HP was bundling them with their printers when I last opened mine.
A "bog standard inkjet" with pigment inks is not inferior to photo printing. "Photo lab processed photos" degrade equally badly when not displayed behind UV filtering glass.
Even my "bogger standard" inkjet with dye-based colors hold up extremely well. Heck, the photo is taking at dusk with a very dark-blue background, and it's still equally dark. Maybe the paper coating has UV resistance. IDK.
> We have documented incidents of service outages caused precisely by spikes in unauthorized traffic - overwhelming the servers, causing service disruptions affecting everyone. The cost was instability felt by all users.
So it's a problem that their printers are popular, and they can't be bothered to scale their infra, so let's gate everything based on USER AGENT STRING! This is so crazy of an excuse that I don't believe it.
"We forced every user of every printer, worldwide, to interact with their printer through our centralized servers. This caused service disruptions affecting everyone. The cost was instability felt by all users."
There, I fixed it for you Bambu. You may use it under Creative Commons.
Seems like making the slicer only able to talk to the printer via the cloud was a bad way to do things, where any issue results in “instability felt by all users.”
This is false. After the authorization-related firmware changes last year LAN mode doesn't allow 3rd party slicers to connect.
LAN mode is also abandonware with numerous issues and missing features that they've had no interest in fixing. Orca slicer has had to rely on hacky workarounds in Bambu's buggy networking plugin just to be able to connect to printers in a different subnet.
https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/issues/4512
> I can connect to my P2S in LAN mode with OrcaSlicer just fine (currently using the latest 2.4.0 nightly).
You either haven't updated the firmware or you also enabled "Developer mode" which has its own issues.
> This is a separate issue, I think even Bambu Studio can't connect to printers in LAN mode on a different subnet.
It's not a separate issue, it's a long-standing bug in their proprietary networking plugin that they refuse to fix. Orca slicer has implemented a hacky workaround so it actually works there.
> This is a separate issue, I think even Bambu Studio can't connect to printers in LAN mode on a different subnet.
Yes, that's the point. The nerworking is broken. The issue isn't unique to a specific slicer, their software sucks. Orca ran into the issue because they wanted to make a basic feature that works on every other printer on the market work on a bambu.
A conspiracy-theory steelmanning interpretation of that statement is that Bambu thinks that some unscrupulous Chinese manufacturer is performing DDoS attacks against them, but can't fully and publicly admit to that for legal reasons.
Or a vm per container, if you insist on containers. I've have a couple of relaxed weeks recently due to running everything on VMs rather than some random Kubernetes service.
Birth rates have been falling worldwide, regardless of the level of government support. It's much more a matter of attitudes about having children.
> The economic costs of having children at a replacement rate are simply too high
Nope. My wife and I have 4 children, on a lower-middle-class income in the US. Your lifestyle choices matter a lot. If you want to have children, you can find a way to afford them.
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