ageitgey

> For a long time after the internet arrived on the scene, a lot of online news stories would reference websites, papers, polls, etc. without linking to them. There are still news sources doing this today.

I agree, this drives me crazy. Ironically, one of my favorite uses for Claude is to ask, "What study is this news article talking about?"

It's pretty good at digging up the source and related sources. And most of the time, if you read the source, the article is nonsense and gets everything wrong.

Cool idea, but why not spend 5 minutes to tell Claude to generate something besides the default AI UI style for your app?

> Despite stated intentions, I think these platforms want to stay small and niche and non mainstream.

I think that's essentially it, whether they are doing it intentionally or not.

Running a social network is like curating a party or conference. Who you do and don't let participate, and who you do and don't promote above others, is essentially the product. And that is a lot of work.

Open protocols don't solve any of these problems, and people who care about open protocols don't tend to be the same people interested in curating giant parties and conferences for a mass audience.

You don't neccesarily have to fallback across models. Both Anthropic and AWS Bedrock provide the same models with the same API at different endpoints and different infra. So if you have a proxy endpoint to point users at, that specific fallback case is pretty easy.

I'm not saying that works in every business or billing scenario, though.

This is not super on topic, but ANW is the US version of the Japanese TV show Sasuke, which is itself inspired by the Adventure Zone segment on Takeshi's Castle. So, yes, it is connected.

> popular culture is much more fractured now into lots of small scenes

That's definitely a big part of it. But popular culture is also set up differently now where a different kind of person breaks through. There are some really great songwriters out there with Dylan-esque bodies of work (John Darnielle, Adrianne Lenker, Josh Ritter, Kristian Matsson are a few one might argue for). But the modern system isn't set up to create new Dylans.

A big part of Dylan's personality is his reclusiveness and mystery. He spun his own story, made up details, and generally just didn't reveal much of his true self in the press, but meanwhile the press constantly talked about him. But in the modern music industry, performers are asked to build an authentic social media presence before they can even get a record deal. If they want to go solo, they have to essentially build a direct marketing company. There's not much space for someone to be a mysterious recluse. It's part of the reason we have very, very few new "movie stars" in the classic sense of larger-than-life personalities.

They are actually selling really well. But sadly, they are selling because you can drill out the 'recording' indicator light and use them to secretly record people to make creepy TikToks.

The article is cool, and it is fun to build a custom version - just sharing a little more info on this.

They've had this feature out of the box on a few Bambu models for quite a while now. It was part of the H2 series, and the A2L is them expanding it to the cheaper models.

The printers come with software to lay out text/drawings, line up the paper with the overhead camera, and run the job. And it comes with a tacky plate to hold the paper in place while drawing. It's all pretty slick - no need to mess with custom g-code or anything. You use the same process whether you are drawing, using a drag knife, or laser cutting.

This is such an interesting case because all sides are talking past each other and it doesn't really fit the pattern of past vendor lock-in / open source scandals. It's nuanced.

Empirically compared to most tech products in 2026, Bambu products have very little lock-in and are relatively open. But they are handling communication so poorly, they are creating their own drama and blowback for no gain while managing to piss off every OSS fan in the world.

Bambu's model is you can either (1) use the product off their cloud and do whatever you want OR (2) you can use their cloud but are locked to remote controlling the printer with their app. That's empirically more open than most home smart tech products (robo vacs, playstations, smart fridges, whatever) which don't give you the first option at all. Bambu literally lets you disable all their cloud and auth features with one click and use open source apps instead.

The issue is that Bambu made their closed cloud too good, so people really want to use it. Their cloud mobile app is way better then any other vendor.

Bambu has never done anything even remotely similar to HP requiring you to use their refills, yet people repeat this myth online like it's inevitable. Meanwhile the very popular eufyMake UV 2.5D printer literally has ink cartridges with lockout chips in them an nobody complains at all.

Where Bambu has totally failed is (1) they changed the cloud access rules after releasing their first products which people absolutely hate and (2) they are terrible at communication, making awkward threats at OSS developers who try to access their cloud without permission.

The funniest part is the only reason the developer was able to access their cloud is because Bambu supports Linux with OSS software. The Linux software isn't notarized, so they couldn't lock access to their cloud to a certificate. The 'hack' was just running the Linux cloud auth code on Mac/Windows.

This creates a situation where the actual details of the dispute are pretty nuanced, some people are vaguely mad at Bambu for things they absolutely aren't doing (like locking out 3rd party filament), and yet Bambu is still creating an army of haters to achieve basically nothing useful for themselves.

The smart move would have been to totally ignore the OSS developer and just lock down their cloud service on the server side. Then there would have been no drama and they would have achieved their goals.

Bambu needs to hire a western PR person who understands what is going on here to clean this up. The whole thing is dumb, avoidable, and pointless. Even if Bambu 'wins', they achieve nothing for the company.

The other nuance though is that Bambu is outselling other brands enormously and their sales this past Christmas were bonkers. No other vendor is even in the same league. HN readers will be buying Prusa or whatever, but Bambu is servicing a different market segment in which Prusa is totally irrelevant and has microscopic sales. But it's worth remembering that this entire drama is over something that literally does not affect 99% of Bambu's user base who happily use their cloud apps and have no reason to try anything else.