IMO, qwen3.6 a3b is smarter seeming but gets stuck way too often, Gemma 4 is stupider, but doesn’t get stuck almost at all. I’m trying to find middle ground, but so far - no luck.

I do, but I am becoming increasingly more disappointed as time goes on. Not just self hosted, llms in general. They sometimes help, but they mislead so many times and waste time that you don’t even notice. I think that’s the trap. When you succeed at a task, you become impressed but don’t notice how many times it failed doing a simple task. And as soon as you scratch the surface, you see how you would have done it differently and perhaps in a better way. Even just googling is bad. It does research for you, but it has no critical thinking and can’t decide what is better from the results it gets (other than google ranking) so it often leads you to think it did as good as you would, when it’s nowhere near as good. Every time I did the googling myself after it did, I did it much better. And I mean MUCH better. Ask it to find the app, it misses the most important ones, hallucinates a bunch, for ex. I found this to be the case with frontier models as well.

Self hosting has its benefits, but seeing how the ecosystem looks right now, concluding this is a huge bubble is inevitable. It reminds me of crypto so much. It looks rich and plentiful, but as soon as you dig a mm under the surface - nobody has tested it, it’s got a critical bug, it is overblown and there are issues with no response. No docs, no info, no nothing. For the biggest thing in technology in history, it is awfully hollow. I don’t mean it in a condescending way, in fact community is enthusiastic and very helpful, it’s just that it doesn’t live up to what most would expect.

A caveat I need to mention is I have not used it for coding - I have an irrational fear and resistance towards it, being a programmer. I just won’t touch it, even if it means the end of my career. I’m trying to be grown-up about it, but so far, I dont want to use it, for good and bad reasons.

No one is arguing that Bambu has the right to keep their sources closed. That is NOBODY’s argument. Instead, you’ve not addressed the main argument and the point stated by Jeff - they threatened the open source developer with lawsuit and asked him to remove the code. The code doesn’t violate anyting. At the same time, THEY based their whole product on opensource software. That makes them hypocrites and shitty people. That’s the argument. Your post is long and doesn’t address it at all.

But let me also push back on some of the things you said.

Bambu spends an enormous amount of money on r&d.

So does Prusa. And Creality. And many others. They were all open source. They are now being very cautious about what they publish. It may not be Bambu’s fault, but they certainly started the trend. It looks a lot like the ol’ microsoft eee tactics again.

The replacement parts are cheap. Comparable to other brands.

They are also non-standard and not accessible to others to make and thus - the only guarantee they will stay cheap is their good word. Which is not worth much IMO. Cause I don’t think they will allow competition to make the replacements without licenses.

Why would you want to on a Bambu. ? It already works optimally.

To customize it for your needs? What if you have no internet access on your print farm for a day and you require Bambu cloud services to work to be able to manage it? What if when you bought the printer, you could use it in LAN mode, but now after an update, you no longer can? Is it your fault still? This really happened already.

if you want a tinker printer than get one that’s open. Most people don’t need that. They just want to print things.

Fair point. But they did change the terms of usage after the sale once before. They’re gonna do it again. This alone makes them shitty and unfit for a new printer purchase for me.

Use a different brand if that’s a problem for you.

I hope most people will. But again, this wasn’t the original argument. Though even without the original argument, there are still reasons not to buy Bambu.

Smelled funny from very early on. I wonder if now all those creators on the bambu payrole will pretend like nothing happened. Channels like CNC kitchen or Tom Sanladerer come to mind. But also 99% of all other channels, bambu seems to be sponsoring a shitton of channels. At least Jeff spoke out immediately. I suspect most will keep quiet.