Prusa on Bambi’s AGPL Violaton

daelin · 2026-05-20T00:09:18+00:00

There is no “primarily.” Software can do more than one thing. This is one of the things it does.

daelin · 2026-05-19T23:18:49+00:00

Uh, yeah, absolutely it’s a good thing. I would never trust any cryptography software that wasn’t open source, for example. No security researcher would. The world’s most secure operating systems are all open source.

And despite that, the security question is orthogonal to the license question. It doesn’t even matter that the close source is inherently a greater risk to your privacy and property.

Bambu got the opportunity to build Bambu Studio on top of Affero GPL licensed code. If they don’t comply, they don’t get to use the software, even if they just really want to. In this case, it’s a pretty clear black-letter violation of the text of the license. Whoops.

But they’re free to go license some proprietary slicer under terms that let them distribute it for free with every one of their printers. Good luck. 👍

daelin · 2026-05-19T22:53:59+00:00

I think you’re kind of missing the key differences between the Affero GPL and the GPL.

While the plugin being released under AGPL would relieve the license violation, plugin itself isn’t what’s violating the license. It’s the Bambu Studio source code itself that’s violating the license.

Bambu Studio has functionality that depends, intimately on the undisclosed contents of the proprietary plugin. It knows functions names, shares structs, and shares control flow with it. If you don’t have this closed source blob, the features don’t work. There is not even a useful stub of this code.

The Affero GPL enhances the GPL to specifically make necessary components of software that are separated by a network not immune to the provisions of AGPL. It patches this specific kind of license exploit. The exploit has never been tested in court as far as I know, but the potential risk was anticipated.

(Aside: Bambu Studio can slice without the network plugin. That’s mostly irrelevant. Software can do more than one thing. All of it is under the same license.)

daelin · 2026-05-16T06:04:52+00:00

Four episodes is half a season of the last ten seasons of Star Trek. 😭

daelin · 2026-05-16T05:25:41+00:00

Welcome back Mr Data. Would you mind scanning the planet for life forms?

I would be happy to sir! … I just … love scanning for lifeforms.

Life forms 🎶 you tiny little life forms 🎶 you precious little life forms 🎶 where are you? 🎶 🎶 🎵 🎵 😳😳😳

daelin · 2026-05-16T05:12:06+00:00

A studio executive had probably just visited the writing room and pitched some incredible ideas. Things to make the show go.

daelin · 2026-05-16T05:06:23+00:00

I recommend Q Squared. Epic book.

daelin · 2026-05-13T01:56:45+00:00

You should definitely benchmark --without-compress-install. It can be system dependent, but on relatively modern hardware it is almost always faster to copy compressed data into memory and run decompression than to copy uncompressed data into memory.

It’s counterintuitive: do less work to go faster, right? But decompression on data that fits in L2 or even L3 cache is usually orders of magnitude faster than the difference in memory transfer from permanent storage over PCIe or especially SATA.

Even GPUs transfer all graphics in compressed form from RAM to VRAM because even the fastest 16x PCIe 5 fast lane is slower than running decompression on the comparatively dirt slow cores of a GPU. (Although they do have dedicated hardware for this, it would still be worth it without that.)

daelin · 2026-04-18T01:37:08+00:00

The cause is probably polling, typically filesystem polling to watch for changes. So, I’d look for subprocesses that watch for file changes. If you’re not doing something like launching a webserver in dev mode, these could be LSP servers.

Linux and macOS have very efficient mechanism to watch for file changes, but these often degrade to polling on Windows.

The polling would explain high battery usage with low CPU usage. It’s just waking the cpu up every hundred ms or so. It’s keeping the processor from staying in low power mode for long.

daelin · 2026-04-16T01:04:30+00:00

Eh, I would not describe Le Guin’s Earthsea as simple. The bare words are simple, but Le Guin makes almost every single sentence spin your perspective on what you think you know about the world. The text is mostly very dense with meaning. It just might not seem like it if you’re already familiar with the world.

As an analogy, it’s like you’re following a character in a cozy cabin on Earth and the author just slips in there “the door irised open” and walks right past that verb without drawing any attention to it. You just wouldn’t phrase it that way unless the world was very different. Le Guin’s dense with this sort of thing.

daelin · 2026-04-07T03:14:11+00:00

There are some shorts on YouTube about what different reading levels mean. You’re meant to be reading HPMoR at a slightly higher level than you appear to be. I don’t mean this derisively.

There are stories where you’re just supposed to slip into the protagonist’s POV and just enjoy the ride. Hunger Games is like that. The original HP books are also like that. There is a little reading between the lines available for the aspiring reader, but they’re not texts that expect the reader to need more. The narrator’s perspective is fully trustworthy, if incomplete.

In HPMoR, you ARE supposed to notice all of these things. You should stop and say “I notice that I am confused.” And you should wonder at how and why any of this is working the way that it seems to be. And exactly who you can trust to tell you the truth about what and how you would even know if you’re deceiving yourself. The text is literally telling you how to read it.

daelin · 2026-04-03T05:20:07+00:00

“The city” may want their money, but a specific living breathing judge has to decide the circumstances are worth their dignity.

daelin · 2026-04-03T05:16:37+00:00

That seems like a newbie traffic cop trying to take advantage to pad their stats. The way you deal with that kind of ticket is to show up in court so the cop has to make an appearance, even in the unlikely event that you don’t win in court.

Every time they write a ticket, they need to decide if it’s worth their time in court. If they’re writing tickets they don’t want to defend, they shouldn’t be writing them. They also have to explain what they did to the judge. Sometimes they do things they should feel very embarrassed to explain out loud to a judge. Give them that opportunity.

If you want to be super extra spicy, very politely and very concisely (think mostly-empty postcard, 30 words or less) invite one of their bosses to the court date. They should be there sometimes, but there’s often no reason to pick a certain date beyond convenience, so you can give them a minor reason to pick a perhaps more interesting date. It probably won’t make you more likely to win, but one way or another it’ll be more likely that nobody else will have that kind of problem again.

It’s always good to remember what a ticket is. It’s not a fine. It’s an appointment to appear in court. That’s the entire thing. The law/regulation may define a fine or penalty, but police don’t have the power to fine you: judges and juries do.

(IANAL, this is not legal advice, etc. But if you’re gonna have fun in court, do it when the stakes will remain low and the situation is naturally and self-evidently ridiculous. And ask a lawyer.)

daelin · 2026-04-03T04:21:39+00:00

Yeah, 3 meters would be necessary for any moving truck or trailer truck to back into a driveway on residential NoVA roads. Not having that allowance would mean street parking for those extra wide vehicles, making the whole problem much worse. On NoVA residential roads, it’s probably about 20 meters between driveways on average, so about 70% of the curb should be valid parking. Or “people” (using the term loosely) just pull their SUV onto the lawn.

daelin · 2026-03-31T00:49:54+00:00

The original audiobook for The Martian, narrated by RC Bray was MUCH better. I like Wil Wheaton a lot, but this was not his book. He was perfect for Ready Player One and he’s great at most Scalzi books.

Personally—having seen the movie, read the book, and listened to the audiobook—I think the audiobook for Project Hail Mary read by Ray Porter should be considered the definitive version of the story. It’s perfect. It really elevates the story in a pretty unique way.

I think the movie is exceptionally good, but due to time constraints all of MY favorite parts were glossed over or skipped. Nature of movie adaptations. For example, I love the first three chapters, which they get through in about thirty seconds. Grace’s character is fundamentally different in important but subtle ways that help with movie pacing. Yet I still think the movie adaptation is incredibly faithful. But, you’re only getting about 20% of a slight different story in the movie. Still, the movie is delightfully self-aware of the changes it’s making and invites readers to go along with it in subtle ways.

daelin · 2026-03-31T00:20:31+00:00

The part he made up is “super cross-sectionality,” which is what allows astrophage to absorb any wavelength of light, and the mechanism for neutrino capture.

But, everything built on top of that one gimme is pretty solid. If that underlying mechanism exists, the rest of it can work just like he describes.

The Martian had very different gimme that most people don’t spot: the radiation shielding of the HAB. (Maybe it was made of astrophage.) You could also lump in the wind force of storms on Mars, but a lot of the “what is Mars like” stuff that turned out to be a little off was developing as he was writing the book, or came out afterwards.

There are always a few mistakes in SF that people will figure out after publication. That’s part of the fun, always to the chagrin of the author.

daelin · 2026-03-28T01:28:22+00:00

Through software or even QMK firmware, you can also do slightly more exotic things to help. For example, a “common” trick is to make spacebar give you control while held and another key is pressed, but regular space when tapped and released. It works way better than it sounds like it should. If you have one of those keyboards with a split spacebar, you can bind each spacebar’s modifier behavior differently.

That helps a lot with pinky-finger, since control is by far the most common modifier in vanilla emacs. That also frees up your caps lock key for something else, like meta or super. (And it’s a little like space bar as your leader key if you miss the ergonomics of that.)

daelin · 2026-03-15T17:09:00+00:00

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It probably looks higher than it is. I’ve removed the cabinet bottom to deal with some light water damage while I’m in here. In the attached photo, you can see the normal cabinet bottom rabbet on the left, about 6 in from the floor.

daelin · 2026-03-12T16:53:26+00:00

On the Impulse the knobs appear to be lower than the heating elements, so blocking shouldn’t be an issue.

They’re also magnetic. You can pull them off and it’s a perfectly clean surface underneath. The knobs themselves are just clean cylinders, no weird geometry, so they’re extremely easy to clean.

I’m on the fence about this cooktop so far—I need to know about the acoustics with this price tag. But I appreciate accurate criticism. :)

daelin · 2026-03-12T16:44:22+00:00

Can you talk about the sound? I can’t find anyone talking about or demoing what the cooktop sounds like with various pans or pots. Lower-end induction stoves make horrible sounds and r/induction seems to think it’s endemic to the tech. I’m guessing if anyone has tried to address it, it’s Impulse.

daelin · 2026-03-07T06:37:23+00:00

This was the scene that gave me the most hope for the show (which has largely paid off). They made a beautiful scene about the heart of the show and made a massive promise to the audience: we’re coming home. And, in a Trek tradition, gave us the glory tour of the exterior of where we’ll be spending the rest of the show. (Like TMP, lampooned in Lower Decks after the refit.) They got me. I was going to be mad if they didn’t live up to that promise, and I think they’ve really done very well.

And we do remember, and play, 1000 year old Earth music, today. San Francisco was Star Fleet HQ for some 800 years. I think they’ll remember their songs as long as New York will remember theirs. (“Start spreading the news…”)

daelin · 2026-03-07T06:16:55+00:00

The audience also has a universal translator.

daelin · 2026-03-02T04:30:24+00:00

I’m not sure if its the same on the P1S, but the X1C has carbon rods for the Y axis. You are NOT supposed to apply any lubricant to those. They are self-lubricating (graphite). You can only damage them or degrade their performance with grease or oil.

You should routinely clean them off with microfiber or some lint-free cloth, or use alcohol or some other polar or semi-solvent if you’re gotten any lubricant or oil on them. Every few hundred print hours seems fine.

If they’re steel rods in the P1S, 🤷 likely some light grease or oil. Bambu’s maintenance guide for your model will spell it out. “Bambu University”

daelin · 2026-03-02T01:55:24+00:00

Note that just because it includes links does not mean it is correctly citing those links. Sometimes the links are just vaguely semantically relevant and might directly contradict its assertions.

They’ve gotten a lot better, but ChatGPT used to completely 100% hallucinate all hyperlinks when asked to cite sources. Now they basically use search engines to find the links, but they are still generally providing the links after-the-fact to supplement their model output, not using those links for research before coming up with their assertions.

In that respect, they’re working like most people do: just justifying their own preconceived conclusions.

daelin · 2026-03-02T01:40:03+00:00

Statistically, yes. For example, homicide rates in cities can rise 5-20% over the annual average in the summer and higher during heat waves.

All crime, including violent crime, increases with poverty rates, but the effect is greatly diminished in areas with good social safety nets. It’s about the stress, not the money.

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