That is indeed a cool trick. I know this argument has been done a million times by now, but I do think modern ISAs have gotten too complex and it would be good if someone made:
1. A simpler ISA that doesn't do all the backward compatible stuff.
2. A LLVM backend targeting the new ISA.
3. For the inevitable complainers who lost the source code 4 decades ago, still haven't gotten around to migrating to a newer system and who positively MUST keep running a binary from the eighties: A recompiler that takes machine code for the older x86(-64) ISA and outputs machine code for the new ISA, possibly with a slight performance penalty.
I bet CPU developers could leverage the circuitry freed up this way quite effectively into more effective branch predictors and bigger caches etc, and the total gains might be worth it even for the recompiled code.
Am I weird in not being too surprised? It don't have experience with wire EDM but every toolpath generator or slicer I've ever used was just local software.
Truly. The slicer is able to generate bugs I've never seen before, in around 6 years of printing with several slicers and firmwares. Cura, Flashprint, Orca, Prusa, using Marlin, Sailfish, Klipper. None of them produced the weird stuff I find with Bambu's pipeline.
When the bugs don't creep up it's absolutely incredible, though.
The slicer even introduces bugs in things that were working perfectly in the software they ripped off.
For the A1 and P1S you're better off backporting the profile to PrusaSlicer or Orca.
And don't get me started on the network plug-in (the lack of transparency there makes me fairly suspicious that something is up) and the lack of directory structure support on the SD cards. Really, how could you mess it up.
It’s a fork of PrusaSlicer, which was a fork of Slic3r. There’s a fork of BambuStudio called OrcaSlicer now.
They didn’t “rip off” an open source project, they forked it just as the parent project forked another project. This is how open source is supposed to work, isn’t it? Why are we shaming them for doing the thing we always encourage and then giving features back to the community which have gone into OrcaSlicer now?
If you’ve got more information then just say it. Being snide and alluding to some information you’re not sharing isn’t helpful at all.
I’m not lecturing anyone. I was trying to leave a helpful comment for the thread to clarify that it’s a fork, just like the fork that it came from, and the other slicer that was forked from it.
They release their stuff, but only under (significant) community pressure, and they try to do it in such a way that interop becomes harder and harder. Some parts they never release, because 'reasons', but are suspected of containing large chunks of FOSS used outside of license. They release breaking updates that lock out other applications from interfacing with their hardware.
Bambu is fantastic hardware but they're doing the exact same thing that DJI did in the drones field. A few more years and Prusa will have gone under, because it is impossible to compete with Chinese state subsidized companies whose sole purpose it is to dominate a market where they take something that has been community built and then embrace and extend it in every way possible to kick the door shut behind them. All of course in your best interests.
Also what's weird is that this project seems to be primarily written in javascript. I can't imagine that's a pleasant user experience for generating tool paths...
it's a combination of JS, WASM, and WebGPU. the JIT engines are so much faster than you would imagine, especially if you tune your code right. workers allow for parallel processing on all of your CPU cores. WebGPU, at least in Chrome, is kind of amazing.
First: Almost anything can be profitable if you have free inputs.
Second: Even solar and wind are not really "free" as the capital costs still depreciate over the lifetime of the plant. You might be getting the power for near-zero or even negative cost for a short while, but the power cost advantage will very quickly be competed away since it's so easy to spend a lot of energy. Even remelting recycled metals would need much less capital investment than even a previous-gen datacentre.
That leaves the GPUs. Even previous gen GPUs will still cost money if you want to buy them at scale, and those too depreciate over time even if you don't use them. So to get the maximum value out of them, you'd want to run them as much as possible, but that contradicts the business idea of utilizing low cost energy from intermittent sources.
Long story short: in might work in very specific circumstances if you can make the numbers work. But the odds are heavily stacked against you because typically energy costs are relatively minor compared to capital costs, especially if you intend to run only a small fraction of the time when electricity is cheap. Do your own math for your own situation of course. If you live in Iceland things might be completely different.
Exactly as you'd expect: they make it possible to run the GPUs more hours in exchange for needing additional capital. Those batteries will have an upfront cost and will depreciate over time. You'll obviously also need more solar panels than before, which also further increases the upfront investment. Also note that now we're already straying away from the initial idea of "consuming free electricity from renewable overprovisioning". If you have solar panels and a battery, you can also just sell energy to the grid instead of trying to make last-gen GPUs profitable by reducing energy costs.
Again: it might work, if the math checks out for your specific source of secondhand GPUs and/or solar panels and/or batteries.
It's not just those two choices though. It could be "6 months in relative comfort" and "10 days begging each minute to die but you can't because you're borderline unconscious". Or anything in between. Just saying.
Medical guidelines are there for a reason and are often, as they say in the military, "written in blood".
> "10 days begging each minute to die but you can't because you're borderline unconscious"
They aren’t going to know if it does that until they give it to a human in the first place. The only difference in giving it now is they lack a control group.
Having seen a family member die absolutely horrifically in a matter of weeks due to late-diagnosed pancreatic cancer, I'd consider suicide if I got the same diagnosis.
Simple counterexample: chess. The rules are simple enough we regularly teach them to young children. There's basically no randomness involved. And yet, the rules taken together form a game complex enough that no human alive can fully comprehend their consequences.
The idea of not compensating for software took hold in the 2000s, both with engineers and consumers (remember when users scoffed at 99 cent apps?)
Big tech companies saw this as an opportunity to build proprietary value-add systems around open source, but not make those systems in turn open. As they scaled, it became impossible to compete. You're not paying Redis for Redis. You're paying AWS or Google.
> The idea of not compensating for software took hold in the 2000s, both with engineers and consumers (remember when users scoffed at 99 cent apps?)
Part of that was that the platform churn costs were a new thing for developers that needed to be priced in now. In the "old world" aka Windows, application developers didn't need to do much, if any at all, work to keep their applications working with new OS versions. DOS applications could be run up until and including Windows 7 x32 - that meant in the most ridiculous case about 42 years of life time (first release of DOS was 1981, end of life for Win 7 ESU was 2023). As an application developer, you could get away with selling a piece of software once and then just provide bug fixes if needed, and it's reasonably possible to maintain extremely old software even on modern Windows - AFAIK (but never tried it), Visual Basic 6 (!!!) still runs on Windows 11 and can be used to compile old software.
In contrast to this, with both major mobile platforms (Android and iOS) as an app developer you have to deal with constant churn that the OS developer forces upon you, and application stores make it impossible to even release bugfixes for platforms older than the OS developer deems worthy to support - for Google Play Store, that's Android 12 (released in 2021) [1], for iOS the situation is a bit better but still a PITA [2].
> As they scaled, it became impossible to compete.
To compete at offering infrastructure maybe, but what I would like is more capability to build solutions.
And I think that today one has much more open-source technologies that one can deploy with modest efforts, so I see progress, even if some big players take advantage of people that don't want or are not capable to make even modest efforts.
It took me way longer than is reasonable to realize that a cog in this context is a type of ship. It does not contain gears of any size, giant or small.
They have the same etymological root, from a Proto-Germanic word for a lump, which is the tooth (cog) on a cogwheel, or the round bulky lump of a cog ship.
It was like that with WeTransfer too. Fine company that had been profitable for years, but with little hope of getting ever 10x bigger again. I used to work there and had already left by the time of the acquisition, but all the old colleagues I've spoken to said the same.
The main business was throwing off gobs of money and there were SO MANY failed projects to try and find new revenue streams. Everyone who was not being pushed by the PE owners could see that they would never account to even 1% of the revenues of the main product. It was only a matter of time before someone came in, said "the main business is fine as is" and fired the people who were involved in the moonshots then sat back and raked in the cash. Sure, it will probably not last forever. But if it brings in millions per year for 15-20 years until the company dies, then that is probably an outcome Bending Spoons is fine with.
For a hosting space like Vimeo, I'd be surprised if this gave them 5 years. And remember, they acquired Vimeo for over a billion dollars.
This isn't like some B2C 5-10 dollar a month service. Video hosting is notoriously expensive and paying clients will quickly see other alternatives if they see smoke. These are already people with specialized needs that the main market leader (Youtube) cannot fulfill. They are "active", so to speak.
> These are already people with specialized needs that the main market leader (Youtube) cannot fulfill.
Isn't this just a bigger reason why these people won't leave? Assuming the acquirer isn't dumb enough to remove the core benefit that comes from their highest paying customers, they will keep providing those, and those customers won't churn. And I think this is a safe assumption, considering it's the primary goal and focus of the people at the acquirer.
My TLDR response here would be this: Vimeo isn't Evernote and people are paying a lot more to expect more. The nature of this means that smaller bits of "product rot" will push them away faster than what a consumer would tolerate. These are already people who needed to deliberately avoid Youtube, so they aren't afraid to migrate again if needed.
There's also a lot more competition with Vimeo than there is with YouTube. So options exist to find.
----
But I'll break down my thoughts further. I'm familiar with the scene (a lot of artists use Vimeo for their portfolios, as well as working with clients on NDA content), but not intimate. So I'd love someone for me to call me out here. But:
There's 2 lenses here. Your lens implies Vimeo is the best service in this niche space, that reducing down the staff count to a skeleton crew will keep it as the most competitive option, and that as long as this isn't disrupted that it'll be business as usual. And we'll be charitable and assume this doesn't enshittify. Those are all valid points. I'm much less charitable, but I can still work in this lens for the sake of argument.
The lens I'm looking in is more at the type of person using Vimeo, not the type of business Vimeo runs. Compare this to Evernote. It's a lot closer to Twitter or Facebook, where remaining users will use it simply because "it's familiar" more than for any competitive edge. It has everything you need, and even if costs rise, we're still talking about one lunch outing per month. It's a "sticky" product benefiting from previous goodwill and marketing.
The people on Vimeo aren't "sticky". They are closer to the type of person who leaves Windows for Linux because Microsoft keeps pissing then off. In fact it's more like they are Linux users who jump around from distro to distro because they already forsook the market leader. They are "actively" on the move and aware of the tools they use. Given that Vimeo is a highly premium service when you use Enterprise, you need to be active. You don't want to be on a sinking ship and have your work crash with it.
So I see two roads here. Some users will stay "stuck" because maybe nothing else does compared to Vimeo. Or because some larger pipeline relies on Vimeo and it's beyond their control. Then some users will be either leaving to another service, or actively keeping an eye out for competitors in the near future. That's what I see as "different" here.
Now, taking my charitable lens off: I do think there will be a lot of small issues pushing people off, and then a few huge ones. Small things like site performance degrading as they scale back server, and worse support as they slash labor. Then the larger things will truly push people, like a price hike, change in monetization models, or failing to honor any deals made pre-bending spoons. Or even a huge data leak. Those things, big and little, break the foundation of a trusted business.
Since Vimeo owns the customer billing relationship in a lot of their whitelabel B2B business, migration would be a pain, especially when compounded by a massive amount of data needing to be re-ingested. I think those customers will tolerate a reasonable amount of rot before starting to move and that the timescales would be long.
>But I don't really see what overall lessons there are here.
So many chains to keep up with. There wasn't really a lesson here. Just "Vimeo is not Evernote"?
My wider lesson unrelated to this chain is that US at will employnent sucks and we need to overhaul it. You don't create a trusting career by treating employees like toys to discard.
The US has enriched a vastly larger number of software engineers through at will employment that Europe has through making it very hard to fire people who aren't adding value.
1. I don't know how that's relevant to my argument at all. This is just "you criticize society, yet you participate in it" dismissal.
2. This is like saying "Asia has better rice because it employs more rice makers than the US". Besides being dubious in truth, that also isn't a good measurement for "enrichment" nor "quality". It's just saying that there's more money being put into the industry in this country than another counry's industry.
3. Even if I took this as truth, this didnt happen overnight. I worry about how Gen Z will be "enriched" in this model, and saying "but millenials/Gen X had great careers" is condescending to Gen Z at best. The rules changed over their careers, and we're still using the old rules to talk about how good we have it. Or had it. Gen Z doesn't know what those rules are anymore, so there's nothing to fall in love with.
That's fine, but different people have different risk tolerances and preferences. There's many people who would never want to emigrate to the USA, and many Americans who emigrate abroad. There's no one country that fits all personalities.
And honestly this is probably fine. If the main business can't grow and there have been a few years of attempts to produce complementary businesses with no success, that's a good sign that the business should be moved into a "return money to owners" model.
Sadly, "return money to owners" ends more like the owner selling off the company and leaving all the workers under them in freefall. And people wonder why loyalty is dead.
The owner got a big pay package from the sale on top of usually being one of the more highly compensated employees at such companies. What do you mean by "the owner didn't get paid"?
>No one wonders why loyalty is dead.
I see you missed the recent narrative of "Gen Z is lazy" and "most managers avoid hiring Gen Z" out there. I assure you many managers are baffled, bit blame the (relative) children instead of seeing how work culture has shifted since they were that age
Yes, the owners were paid by the sale. The argument by other people was that the sale shouldn't happen, or vice versa that the sale should happen only to people who were committed to continuing to spend the company's money on supporting employees who are stipulated to not be adding much value (and, thus, are not willing to pay much for the company).
Guys, I totally get it. Nobody likes to be laid off. I was laid off a month ago. But the money that is being soaked up by employee who are, again, stipulated to be not doing anything productive goes somewhere else. This may be a tragedy for an individual person, but it's good for society overall.
the owners didn't have shares in their company? they weren't paid for their labor? They only get money when they sell off and are working for free out of a labor of love until then?
>The argument by other people was that the sale shouldn't happen...
I guess it wasn't in this chain, but my argument was focused on the human element. I don't care if the owners got a trillion dollars and never shared. I don't think it's right to be able to lie to your employees only to let them go with no notice a few months later.
You're never going to convince me that "it's good for society" to prop up livliehoods on convinient lies and instability. That's how suddenly everyone starts talking less about Star Trek and more about Luigi.
The founders are probably not the owners of a large majority of the business. Most of the owners are not drawing any salary.
Look, lying is bad sure. It would be better if they had been honest in November. But nobody here is actually arguing that the layoffs are fine, they're only mad about the comms.
If they are founders and they chose to leave, that's their freedom to do so. Just like any employee you don't get a salary for leaving just because you used to work there.
if you're an owner who bought in, you already got your money. You got a steady profit from sitting there and operating a business at best. At worst you made a bad business decision. You're not owed profit.
So yes, they are both paid, or gambled and had a bad opportunity cost. That's life. I don't see it as justification for them to "deserve" their sale, even if it's legally their call.
>But nobody here is actually arguing that the layoffs are fine, they're only mad about the comms.
Many people in this discussion are in fact arguing that the layoffs are fine. to paraphrase a few
> "It's obvious if you know who Bending Spoons is"
> "That's at-will employment, it's fair"
> "they have to run a business"
> "most of the owners are not drawing any salary"
So yes, even if it's against their best interests there are still so many beholden to defend billionaires. And that is why I asset seemingly obvious points. What's your argument here again?
No, they just come in and offer a lot of money to the current owners. Bending spoons are ruthless businesspeople but AFAIK they do offer a reasonable price for the businesses they acquire.
(I used to work for WeTransfer and some time after I left it got acquired at about the price it was once considering IPO-ing at. This was apparently such a good offer that it took very little deliberation to agree to the deal.)
but where does the money come from? it seems like a good way to avoid regulatory scrutiny if your acquisition goal is to simply exit a competitor from the market.
The money comes from investors. Private Equity basically works by taking money from investors to buy companies and turn a profit with them, paying back the investors when they do so (it's a very illiquid and risky investment, so the advertised returns tend to be higher, but it does seem like a lot of firms are struggling to actually make it work).
Aye - it’s a simple business model, which seemed to work well in an era of low interest rates. However some of these tech buyouts seem quite myopic, making it almost appear like the goal was to shutdown the company.
You really seem to want to believe Bending Spoons buys companies just to shut them down, for reasons that are not entirely clear unless you believe that they're owned by a secret conspiracy made out of note-taking, file transfer and video hosting companies that is willing to engage in a multi decade plot to very slowly buy out competitors. They then shut down the acquired businesses for no clear benefit, even though they're still profitable and new competitors could easily start up. So this conspiracy (if it exists) would be very slow and not very effective in keeping down competitors, especially compared to all the other things the conspiring companies could be doing.
Each individual company Bending Spoons acquires has a limited lifespan, so if you only look at a single deal it can indeed look myopic. But the whole point of their business model is that they use the cash flow thrown off by the acquired businesses (which are much more profitable for a short while due to firing 75% of personnel) to fund the next acquisitions. This can keep going on indefinitely, or at least until there are no more businesses to acquire.
1. A simpler ISA that doesn't do all the backward compatible stuff.
2. A LLVM backend targeting the new ISA.
3. For the inevitable complainers who lost the source code 4 decades ago, still haven't gotten around to migrating to a newer system and who positively MUST keep running a binary from the eighties: A recompiler that takes machine code for the older x86(-64) ISA and outputs machine code for the new ISA, possibly with a slight performance penalty.
I bet CPU developers could leverage the circuitry freed up this way quite effectively into more effective branch predictors and bigger caches etc, and the total gains might be worth it even for the recompiled code.
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