It is “news worthy” in that basically every outlet doing printer reveiws/content will mention it. Even fricking Norm on Tested pointed out the problems with bambu and the issues if you want to use the laser cutter on anything other than Windows.
Holy shit. There is so much gatekeeping here that Cerberus themselves would say “Yo dog, take it down a notch”
I think there are two big aspects to this.
The first is that, yes, we are seeing a big push toward locked down ecosystems. Bambu is a great example of this and people are still falling all over each other to talk about how amazing their products are. And, as someone who has been pointing out that AMSes don’t actually do what people think they do for years now, it has been frustrating to watch them take over the cultural zeitgeist even before the current bullshit.
Which leads into the second aspect. FDM printing is very much a “prosumer” hobby. It is about taking industrial/corporate processes and marketing them to hobbyists. Some of that is awesome because it provides a platform to rapidly prototype and iterate on new tech (which benefits the companies more than the users but…) and some of that is miserable because it means we have astroturfing campaigns out there to explain to people why they NEED 24 AMSes chained together for their single printer… because that model works a lot better for print farms.
And, as an aside before I get to the “real” point: We see the same with home cooking. There was a MASSIVE push that everyone should sous vide everything for a couple years. And… that was mostly because we had restaurant chefs talking to The Masses without a Food Network/PBS producer telling them to shut up. So OBVIOUSLY the best steak you will ever eat is the one that spent 11 hours in a hot water bath and was quickly seared to be plated in under 5 minutes. Rather than the understanding that this is a crutch used because a line cook can’t spend 10 minutes butter basting their steak.
And most of that still is incredibly obnoxious and outright wasteful. But it also led to people like J Kenji Lopez-Alt who used that to popularize “reverse sear” cooking.
So, now to the real point. People are gate keeping mother fuckers. They are angry that they had to read twelve different articles to figure out what “the paper trick” was rather than having a printer having an automatic tool that kind of gets you… probably closer than you would have gotten anyway. And countless other pain points that were resolved because… they were pain points.
And people decide THEY are heroes and legends rather than realizing that people like Naomi Wu et al came before them and got it to the point where it was learnable for the hobbyist sickos.
Which… not to shit on the OP TOO much (I would not be surprised if this came out of the LLM pass) but it is why I more than side eye anything that has “Make them great (again)”. Because, invariably, it is a case of people yearning for a time that never actually existed where they are on top and everyone bows before them.
Did they? Or is that still the old hack of “just download the raw file. Your tablet is just a computer”?
Because I didn’t see it advertised on the main web page and a quick google got me to https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin/discussions/364 which is open and abandoned tickets for the ios apps.
https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-offline-downloads?pid=16373#pid16373 suggests it is also in the same boat for android. You can find workarounds but they aren’t using jellyfin.
Which is “fine”. I watched WAY too many movies over the years with VLC on a laptop. But… why are we using a shim to treat a library as a streaming service in that case? Which gets back to Jellyfin just not actually being a Plex alternative for the majority of users.
Yeah.
Jellyfin is spectacular for LAN usage on two computers. Once you start using devices (because, you know, that is what people tend to plug into their TVs…) or going on travel, it rapidly becomes apparent that it just isn’t a competitor.
Hell, a quick google suggests jellyfin STILL doesn’t have caching of media for offline viewing. Plex’s works maybe 40% of the time but… 40% is still higher than 0%.
I have a lifetime pass for Plex and encourage anyone who even kind of cares to get one next time it is on sale (or shortly before the scheduled price hike). I have tried Jellyfin a few times over the years and… it is basically exactly what I hate with FOSS “alternatives”. It isn’t an alternative in the slightest but people insist on talking it up because they want it to be and that just makes people less willing to try genuinely good alternatives.
To put it bluntly, Plex is an “offline netflix” as it were. Jellyfin is a much better version of smbstation and all the other stuff we used to stream porn to our playstations back in the day.
I think this kind of sums up everything. “Well, they are actively trying to lock down the ecosystem and make everything worse but shiny ad!”
As for the industry as a whole: Multi-filament setups have always been a marketing tool. They are useful in lab environments where you want users to be able to switch from prototyping to production filament without ever touching the bowden tube. Actual multi-material prints are INCREDIBLY finicky due to temperature needs and multicolor prints are a novelty that people use for social media clout but stop when they realize it can increase print times by an order of magnitude.
But multi-tool? That DOES start to make (some) multi-material prints viable as you can balance ambient temperature between the filaments and keep both strands near enough to temperature that you can still bond the layers. And multi-color is even easier.
That said? Having both filament in the same printhead/tool is going to have a large impact on what kinds of multi-material prints you can do because it is two differently hot things in the same box. Which is why most existing multi-tool setups are closer to a “real” CNC mill where said tools (think “printheads”) are kept on a shelf in the back of the chamber and the arm swaps them. Both (Will Smith’s Tested’s) Adam Savage and Shane from Stuff Made Here have done great videos demonstrating these and why are so awesome.
I dunno. I am pretty certain that the big thing for 2025/2026 (if chips and supply chains hold) will be multi-tool setups. In large part because CNC Kitchen and a few other channels have been doing deep dives on multi-filament versus multi-tool setups and it is pretty known that Stefan has a lot of industry contacts. I assume it will basically be the same as it was for the multi-filament era: Bambu is early/first to product for a consumer friendly version and all of their poor decisions (massive amounts of filament waste) become industry standard as everyone copies them. But they will have a drastically reduced social media presence this time since most of the major FDM influencers either have ethics or realize they can just get a bigger sack of cash from Prusa and Qidi.
So… I assume that means linus media group are going to do a massive collaboration with Bambu, heh.
Gotta love people who blatantly steal the work of others.
For people who aren’t complete dipshits: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/security