Maybe you should try using Pi [0] if you care a lot about owning your harness and making sure you're in control of what goes into your system prompt and context?
How is this different from Alipay/WeChat Pay in China? Handling transactions of this volume is an amazing technological feat, kudos to the team! However, I don't think this mobile QR code paying system is anything novel. Alipay rose to popularity much earlier (I can't recall exact when, but it was already super popular in ~2010, and definitely ubiquitous by 2015).
It’s a completely different backend model; as far as I know alipay works just like PayPal where transactions are fully “internal” - the buyer pays Ant Group and the seller cashes out at a later date.
UPI is a real inter-organization payment system more akin to credit card processing, where fund requests flow from the payer, through a payer processor, through a merchant processor, and finally to their end destination, and the actual reconciliation happens through a bank transfer system. It’s a much less centralized system.
UPI is more like a routing/reconciliation layer like VISA that can work across any bank/wallet, and that core is run by a non-profit government org. It doesn't take custody of the funds and doesn't centralize the information into a private corporation. The fee is also minimal and flat-rate with no profit incentive, instead of paying a percentage of the entire countries transaction volume to some private company. I would guess that adds up to a huge amount of money saved overall.
Much of the world doesn’t like having a single entity own and control the process end to end, it’s more efficient but there’s only one point of trust. Multiple institutions that have to check each other means you don’t have to trust a single entity with everything.
The main difference is that the core API is public infrastructure (run by a government authority). The apps are run by different companies but the backbone is interoperable by design
There are still games you simply can't play on Linux, e.g. Valorant/LoL can't be played on Linux because of Riot Game's kernel-level anti-cheat. And as a highly addicted LoL player it's one of the only two reasons I still have Windows taking up 200GB of my precious hard drive space.
They're ultimately employees. Their employers hire them to write the code that the employers want. If they don't write the code, employers just fire them and move on to hire some other people to write code. As much as how ethically questionable it is, it's still very rare that people would give up their jobs to defend their viewpoint.
The practical alternative is sabotage. Write the code poorly, with obvious bugs. Don't sign the full URL so the user can just delete the drm=true parameter.
My reMarkable is still stuck on a super old version (v3.3 I think), precisely because of xochitl being closed source and there's no stable and efficient way of driving the display. It's super sad because I would love to have much more things appearing on my tablet yet I cannot develop reMarkable apps easily. I'm not talking about browsers, but more like my Linear TODO list, calendar, etc., so I don't have to reach for my phone.
I really want to try for further reverse engineering of xochitl now that I've heard those AI tools have gotten so good at doing it.
Man I really wish one day I could run mainline Linux kernel on this tablet with the display just works.
Appload and Xovi open up a range of options. You can build a simple frontend in QT and have a backend in a language of your choice serve as an API. Appload handles the display / xochitl for you. I've built tons of little apps like this - and bigger ones.
> I get voting with your wallet but not many people want to spend 4x more for a worse product.
Yeah as much as I like Prusa, I really hope they figure out how to cut down their prices because, let's be real, most of the people buying a 3D printer don't give a cent about how "open" it is, and if Prusa continues this trend I'm afraid it'll become obsolete. Having competitors with genuinely good products (like Bambu, despite them not being a good company) is healthy, but not helpful if Prusa doesn't do anything to catch up to their competitor.s
I assume you're into multi-material printing and want a true multi-extruder setup. Then, quality wise your remaining options are: Prusa, Flashforge, and Snapmaker. Snapmaker very recently just shot themselves in the foot in a similar way that Bambu did, so you're left with Prusa and Flashforge. Of the two remaining, I really only trust Prusa.
Yes you pay a lot more, but I guess that's some sense voting with your wallet... I'm personally going to buy a Prusa after I stabilize where I live.
Yeah, I'm curious too because I've been following all 3d printer news lately and only news re: Snapmaker is that they officially hired Ratdoux who came up with the full spectrum printing and they're integrating it into Snapmaker Orca.
Orca really needs a plugin system so that we don't get so many forks. I want full spectrum, wave overhangs, Snapmaker customizations for their printers, Sovol customizations for theirs. I also want the latest Orca nightly. So that's 5 different forks of Orca a good plugin system could replace.
Oops my bad, I mixed up Flashforge and Snapmaker. It was Flashforge that also started closing down their ecosystem. Snapmaker has been having a good track record so far with their open-source Klipper-based firmware and I hope they continue to do so!
My understanding is that you got your printer when the firmware was not blocking you from doing all of that. Right now if you want to remote print (and don't want to do it via sending models to Bambu Cloud), you can get away if you enable LAN only and developer mode. However, what if the newer firmware forces you to create an online account and connect to Bambu cloud to do the setup? What if Bambu decides to limit the features you can use if you print using a SD card? It has been quite a worrying trend, and now the company is trying to legally threaten an open-source developer building on top of Bambu's AGPL code trying to make remote print without going through Bambu servers possible. Other ppl more knowledgeable on the issue, please correct me if I'm misunderstanding the situation.
[0]: https://pi.dev
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