Wild speculation here obviously, but it could be a regulation play--there's a lot of potential legislation that would regulate what you can legally 3D print, which would warrant a system to be the age-verification equivalent for 3D printing.
If this is the angle then I'm even more suspicious that they're secretly pushing for the legislation so when it goes into effect they'll effectively be the only game in town.
This is admittedly a bit tinfoil hat, but they wouldn't be the first company to attempt to legislate away the competition.
I mean, they would not be the first big corporation to pull exactly this move.
They are also subsidized by the Chinese government and are paying for users exclusively hosting on MakerWorld. Their move is obviously complete market capture, not sustainable finances at this point.
There is a lot of things going on. We can only speculate, but it sure ain't going to benefit end users.
Probably regulations, there are a few states trying to make it illegal for felons to own 3D printers by EOY. These things are about to get regulated like firearms, which is wild.
Some of the proposed 3d printer laws will require printers being sold to be capable of evaluating what you are using them for and blocking “bad” usages. I’m not aware of any such legislation around firearms.
I've wondered the same thing because lately I've noticed a bunch of consumer companies forcing cloud-required models where it's not necessary and many/most users have no need for whatever features cloud connectivity may provide. Yet the companies keep insisting on it even when there's significant user blow back and bad brand PR. When they even bother to comment on "why", the answers never make much sense.
When it's companies based in the U.S. or EU, like Chamberlain / LiftMaster garage door openers, it's pretty obvious they plan to monetize some cloud services subscription for upgraded features beyond the free basic tier as well as probably selling consumer data.
However, the China-based companies like Bambu Lab (and many others) are more puzzling because meaningful ongoing subscription revenue seems unlikely. Especially in the case of lower-end consumer tech peripherals where the companies usually invest as little as possible in their websites, ongoing feature updates or direct end-user support. Which makes no sense if they really aspire to build long-term subscription revenue. Here's my theory: the Chinese government is quietly compelling them to require cloud connections to China-based data centers as a long-term strategy.
I'm not even saying the companies are some direct arm of the Chinese government or planting nefarious firmware. I think that's too likely to be caught if done at mass scale and it's not even necessary. As long as the cloud servers are in Chinese data centers, the Chinese government can get consumer IP addresses and usage data just from passive packet sniffing and if things turn icy with some foreign countries, they can cause a lot of turmoil simply by selectively blocking packets at the firewall to brick millions of consumer devices.
I know it maybe sounds paranoid and, to be clear, I'm not claiming Bambu Labs specifically is doing this. I actually came up with this theory before I ever heard of Bambu Labs because I have a lot of inexpensive Chinese home automation devices and was surprised by their bizarre insistence on forcing cloud connectivity despite there being no apparent business model incentive and these smaller-scale Shenzen hardware companies showing zero enthusiasm for making a real business out of cloud services. Their cloud implementations are almost invariably the bare minimum possible and seem woefully underfunded. After all, for a low-margin hardware peripheral, every dollar spent running a no-revenue cloud after the sale is pure overhead in a business that live or dies by pennies. It's almost like requiring a cloud connection is an export tax the company is paying just to be left alone to sell their hardware overseas.
For home automation gear, cloud-connectivity is a non-starter in my book. In some cases, it's literally built into our walls, so I only buy devices which will work on a local-only subnet or on which I can install open source firmware like Tasmota or ESPHome.
This. No conspiracy tin foil hat bs, just money. Everything got cloud because investor story time, just like everything has AI now, in every talk I have with either my boss, potential partners and clients its: “where is the AI”? (Source: i am in China). There are a couple of other things that other can maybe highlight, like how every one is blocking Chinese IP’s and vice versa, maybe something on the legislative side also? Not sure. Something something malice/incompetence
>> I feel closer to where I should be; writing code should still be free. Both free as in free beer, and free as in freedom.
I’m just pleased by the competition, agree with the ideal of free and local but sustainable competition is key: driving $200 p/m down to a much much lower number.
"Brave Origin is a minimalist version of Brave that allows users to disable the revenue-generating features that otherwise support Brave as a business":
* Leo
* News
* Playlist (currently iOS only)
* Rewards (which also disables browser-based Brave Ads)
* Speedreader
* Stats like the daily usage ping, crash logs, and privacy-
preserving product analytics (P3A)
* Talk
* Tor
* VPN
* Wallet (which also disables Web3 domains)
* Wayback Machine
* Web Discovery Project
$59.99 one time purchase for 10 activations (multiple devices), free for linux.
Reminds me of the terminus agent/harness on the terminal-bench coding benchmark - they just send send keystrokes to a tmux session. They score pretty well.
I would be very annoyed if every screenshot I took was saved. I often take dozens of screenshots per day, and I save one maybe once a month. That means my screenshots folder only has meaningful entries. If everything was saved, I'd have to clean it up all the time.
There might be a small misunderstanding regarding the "dialog". Once you've selected an area you're shown the outlines & can still modify them, and the buttons (Accept (for further editing in Spectacle), Save, Save As, Copy, Export) are shown below those outlines.
This approach seems objectively superior to your suggestion.
The meaningful entries get named for later searching while the rest are kept as my computer's little photo journal or something. Comes in handy a few times a year.
> If anything, that's not a typical user user case by far.
The scale may not be typical, but the pattern (many more screenshots copied to clipboard than saved as a file) is something I see across all kinds of users around me, be they technical or even very much non-technical.
Let's not turn the defaults into "The Homer", okay? Allowing the user to choose their preferred action in the same step as allowing them to change the outline doesn't make things unnecessarily confusing, doesn't add unnecessary clicks, or anything else.
It does. If you paste (to slack, email, whatever) after taking a screenshot on Gnome, you will attach your screenshot. It is also saved on ~/Pictures/Screenshots.
For me its the fact a large chunk of my terminal experience is over limited bandwidth connections to laggy servers with varying feature support. I appreciate the eye candy and what they have achieved but I don't need it, I just want TUIs to work everywhere with low latency.
I think the mini is just a better value, all things considered:
First, a 16GB RPi that is in stock and you can actually buy seems to run about $220. Then you need a case, a power supply (they're sensitive, not any USB brick will do), an NVMe. By the time it's all said and done, you're looking at close to $400.
I know HN likes to quote the starting price for the 1GB model and assume that everyone has spare NVMe sticks and RPi cases lying around, but $400 is the realistic price for most users who want to run LLMs.
Second, most of the time you can find Minis on sale for $500 or less. So the price difference is less than $100 for something that comes working out of the box and you don't have to fuss with.
Then you have to consider the ecosystem:
* Accelerated PyTorch works out of the box by simply changing the device from 'cuda' to 'mps'. In the real world, an M5 mini will give you a decent fraction of V100 performance (For reference, M2 Max is about 1/3 the speed of a V100, real-world).
* For less technical users, Ollama just works. It has OpenAI and Anthropic APIs out of the box, so you can point ClaudeCode or OpenCode at it. All of this can be set up from the GUI.
* Apple does a shockingly good job of reducing power consumption, especially idle power consumption. It wouldn't surprise me if a Pi5 has 2x the idle draw of a Mini M5. That matters for a computer running 24/7.
Ehh, not “it” but it’s important if you want an agent to have access to all your “stuff”.
macOS is the only game in town if you want easy access to iMessage, Photos, Reminders, Notes, etc and while Macs are not cheap, the baseline Mac Mini is a great deal. A raspberry Pi is going to run you $100+ when all is said and done and a Mac Mini is $600. So let’s call it. $500 difference. A Mac Mini is infinitely more powerful than a Pi, can run more software, is more useful if you decide to repurpose it, has a higher resale value and is easier to resell, is just more familiar to more people, and it just looks way nicer.
So while iMessage access is very important, I don’t think it comes close to being the only reason, or “it”.
I’d also imagine that it might be easier to have an agent fake being a real person controlling a browser on a Mac verses any Linux-based platform.
Note: I don’t own a Mac Mini nor do I run any Claw-type software currently.
. . .
- claude -p”
This is new right? Previously “-p” drew from subscription usage.
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