• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • My first printer back in 2016 was a FlashForge, which at that time filled a similar role in the market as Bambu is doing now.

    Their designs were initially more open than Bambu is now, but went more proprietary over time - I had a Dreamer which still used a lot of “standard” parts. Despite that I ran into several issues that were either a pain to work around, or impossible, due to Flashforges attempts at keeping bits proprietary. I switched to Prusa after that, and have been happy ever since.

    For me personally that experience was enough that I’ll never by something like Bambu - though for people with less technical abilities who just want a box that works they’re perfectly fine.

    Currently I have a mk4 upgraded from a mk3s as main printer, in the enclosure, with mmu. I’m considering upgrading it to a core one next year, purely because of the lower footprint of the core one in a case compared to the prusa enclosure, and my limited space. My old flashforge was corexy, and was quite annoying about bed leveling - which lead to me avoiding corexy for a while after that. But as far as I can tell the bed mount on modern corexy are way better than on the old flashforge (which had a tendency to bend forward), plus there’s autoleveling now.









  • I’ve been using an Arm notebook with Windows for over a year now (not as main system, but development system for a customer project). I’m running a lot of x86 software (like Emacs) as a gcc port for Windows/Arm is being developed only now - with no problems. It integrates nicely into the native stuff - which is one area where you run into issues on the Mac: If you start a shell in rosetta it’s annoying to make calls to native arm binaries.

    The only issue I ran into were some drivers not available for Arm - emulation layer (unsurprisingly) just is for userland, not kernel drivers. Also x86 emulation isn’t working well if Windows is running in a virtual machine on MacOS - but supposedly that’ll be fixed in the upcoming Windows release.

    All of this only applies to Windows 11 - if for some reason you decide to run Windows 10 on Arm you’re in a world of pain.




  • x230 with x220 keyboard also is pretty nice - but unfortunately no longer suitable as main notebook. As nothing useful came out of lenovo after that, others are even worse, nobody has a decent trackpoint and sensible amount of RAM only exist for macs I ended up with one of those for work few months ago.


  • Pretty much same here - I kept an x230 alive until I had to accept earlier this year that it just is bad for overall productivity, and ended up getting a macbook. None of the newer thinkpads are good - and they’re still one of the less bad manufacturers.

    There’s also enough stuff I don’t like about the mac - but the current keyboard is one of the better notebook keyboards available right now, and if you want long battery life, lots of RAM and a lot of CPU power available in a compact device they’re the only manufacturer currently offering that.


  • I’m not super familiar with MacOS, but do you know if Gatekeeper or XProtect run at ring 0?

    Gatekeeper does mainly signature checking. XProtect does signature checking on an applications first launch. Both of those things would be pretty stupid to implement in ring 0, so I’m pretty sure they are not.

    If they do run at ring 0, would you consider that anticompetitive?

    No, as they’re not doing any active monitoring. They’re pretty much the “you downloaded this file from the internet, do you really want to run it?” of MacOS.

    I’m almost certain Apple will move or did move to depreciate kernel extensions. Which means it would be the same situation Microsoft wanted to force as you described.

    That is indeed the case, but I’m not aware of any Apple products relying on being a kernel extension. Apple is facing action from the EU for locking down devices from device owners, though - mainly applying to phones/tablets. On Macs you can turn pretty much everything off and do whatever you want.

    The other argument with Defender is you could at least have a choice to use it or not.

    Without providing a proper API Defender (both the free one, and the paid one offering more features) would be able to provide more features than 3rd parties. Microsoft also wouldn’t have an incentive to fix the APIs, as bugs don’t impact them.

    The correct way forward here is introducing an API, and moving Defender to it as well - and recent comments from Microsoft point in that direction. If they don’t they’ll probably be forced by the EU in the long run - back then it was just a decision on fair competition, without looking at the technical details: Typically those rulings are just “look, you need to give everybody the same access you have, but we’ll leave it up to you how to do it”. Now we have a lot of damage, so now another department will get active and say “you’ve proven that you can’t make the correct technical decision, so we’ll make it for you”.

    A recent precedent for that would be the USB-C charger cable mandate - originally this was “guys, agree on something, we don’t care what”, which mostly worked - we first had pretty much everything micro USB, and then everything USB-C. But as Apple refused the EU went “look, you had a decade to sort it out, so now we’re just telling you that you have to use USB-C”