ageitgey

popular culture is much more fractured now into lots of small scenes

That's definitely a big part of it. But popular culture is also set up differently now where a different kind of person breaks through. There are some really great songwriters out there with Dylan-esque bodies of work (John Darnielle, Adrianne Lenker, Josh Ritter, Kristian Matsson are a few one might argue for). But the modern system isn't set up to create new Dylans.

A big part of Dylan's personality is his reclusiveness and mystery. He spun his own story, made up details, and generally just didn't reveal much of his true self in the press, but meanwhile the press constantly talked about him. But in the modern music industry, performers are asked to build an authentic social media presence before they can even get a record deal. If they want to go solo, they have to essentially build a direct marketing company. There's not much space for someone to be a mysterious recluse. It's part of the reason we have very, very few new "movie stars" in the classic sense of larger-than-life personalities.

They are actually selling really well. But sadly, they are selling because you can drill out the 'recording' indicator light and use them to secretly record people to make creepy TikToks.

The article is cool, and it is fun to build a custom version - just sharing a little more info on this.

They've had this feature out of the box on a few Bambu models for quite a while now. It was part of the H2 series, and the A2L is them expanding it to the cheaper models.

The printers come with software to lay out text/drawings, line up the paper with the overhead camera, and run the job. And it comes with a tacky plate to hold the paper in place while drawing. It's all pretty slick - no need to mess with custom g-code or anything. You use the same process whether you are drawing, using a drag knife, or laser cutting.

Anthropic's own frontend-design skill attempts to do that. You can install it in Claude Code, or you can tweak it to be closer to your own style:

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...

But what I find works best is to point Claude at a design system documentation website (your own company's or another public source) and tell it to use that design style. It usually does OK, and the results are usually much more in line with that style and not as Claude-y.

This is such an interesting case because all sides are talking past each other and it doesn't really fit the pattern of past vendor lock-in / open source scandals. It's nuanced.

Empirically compared to most tech products in 2026, Bambu products have very little lock-in and are relatively open. But they are handling communication so poorly, they are creating their own drama and blowback for no gain while managing to piss off every OSS fan in the world.

Bambu's model is you can either (1) use the product off their cloud and do whatever you want OR (2) you can use their cloud but are locked to remote controlling the printer with their app. That's empirically more open than most home smart tech products (robo vacs, playstations, smart fridges, whatever) which don't give you the first option at all. Bambu literally lets you disable all their cloud and auth features with one click and use open source apps instead.

The issue is that Bambu made their closed cloud too good, so people really want to use it. Their cloud mobile app is way better then any other vendor.

Bambu has never done anything even remotely similar to HP requiring you to use their refills, yet people repeat this myth online like it's inevitable. Meanwhile the very popular eufyMake UV 2.5D printer literally has ink cartridges with lockout chips in them an nobody complains at all.

Where Bambu has totally failed is (1) they changed the cloud access rules after releasing their first products which people absolutely hate and (2) they are terrible at communication, making awkward threats at OSS developers who try to access their cloud without permission.

The funniest part is the only reason the developer was able to access their cloud is because Bambu supports Linux with OSS software. The Linux software isn't notarized, so they couldn't lock access to their cloud to a certificate. The 'hack' was just running the Linux cloud auth code on Mac/Windows.

This creates a situation where the actual details of the dispute are pretty nuanced, some people are vaguely mad at Bambu for things they absolutely aren't doing (like locking out 3rd party filament), and yet Bambu is still creating an army of haters to achieve basically nothing useful for themselves.

The smart move would have been to totally ignore the OSS developer and just lock down their cloud service on the server side. Then there would have been no drama and they would have achieved their goals.

Bambu needs to hire a western PR person who understands what is going on here to clean this up. The whole thing is dumb, avoidable, and pointless. Even if Bambu 'wins', they achieve nothing for the company.

The other nuance though is that Bambu is outselling other brands enormously and their sales this past Christmas were bonkers. No other vendor is even in the same league. HN readers will be buying Prusa or whatever, but Bambu is servicing a different market segment in which Prusa is totally irrelevant and has microscopic sales. But it's worth remembering that this entire drama is over something that literally does not affect 99% of Bambu's user base who happily use their cloud apps and have no reason to try anything else.

I looked into it seriously at one point.

Essentially, you are adding another zero to the cost to have hidden solar. A 20k solar install becomes a 200k+ solar roof install.

Even if the final result is great, the economics shrink the possible customer base. Basic solar has gotten so cheap that people aren't worrying if the investment increases the value of the house itself. But very few people are willing to pay 10x for a thing that will never pay itself back in energy or home value. It's like putting a pool in your house - a few buyers will want it, but a lot will run from it because they don't know what to do with it.

So as a result, the target market ends up being super rich dudes in gated communities - the same kind of people buying custom 100k hifi systems and home cinema rooms. It becomes an upsell for people with unlimited budgets.

It's just not a mass market product when the competition is 10x cheaper and dropping daily.

every interaction is now laced with ulterior motives like op trying to pitch himself as ai expert to sell his courses or whatever. He is apparently going around blowing executives minds with claude cowork. so ridiculous.

With all due respect, I have no idea what you are talking about. I'm saying that I've observed friends and associates (who are executives, because I'm old and work in business) pick up and adopt a specific tool at rates faster than any other tool I can think of, which seems interesting to me. Do with that information whatever you want. It's just an anecdote from a random person on the internet. I'm sorry that this observation makes you angry.

I'm not selling or pitching you (or anyone else) anything. I haven't taught any programming courses since the 2010s (pre-ChatGPT).

On the same topic but from a slightly different angle - as SOTA models get more capable, the 'quality' and 'feel' of the experience they provide in each domain is heavily dependent on the reinforcement learning the vendor does for that specific domain. After all, many fields have 100 flavors of "good answers," but the model has to pick one answer.

Benchmarks are not very good at capturing this yet. But it could be the case that DeepSeek v4 Pro is 100% as good as Claude Opus 4.7 at scaffolding a basic Rails app, but absolutely terrible at creating a credible business plan that another businessperson would think is real. That's a made-up example, but you get the point.

The end result will be a lot of people arguing about which model is "better," but "better" depends heavily on the task and how that model was trained to interact with the user for that task. Two users may have very different qualitative experiences using the exact same model, despite the benchmarks.

Have you tried the latest DeepSeek v4 Pro inside of the Claude Code harness? It's not listed in that site.

It definitely 'feels like' it is as good as Claude for many regular web app coding tasks (though I don't have real benchmarks). And it is comically cheap.

I'm not suggesting it is better than the latest Claude or codex models, but it seems 'good enough' for a lot of use cases in my limited real world testing.

You are assuming like 12 things that aren't true in this response.

I don't know, there's been some pretty bad software mistakes, possibly bigger than a PR to convert an app to Rust:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

These are largely friends and peers, so they ultimately own their own risks. But I'm not saying it is good or bad. I'm just telling you what is happening in the real world. Every senior person I know, whether a high tech exec or a solo coffee bean importer, is vibing to some degree. Some will be more successful than others.

I've been working in tech since the late 90s. This is the biggest and most sudden change in company behavior I've ever seen. The only thing that comes close was the web 1.0 world in the 90s where everything suddenly became websites.

That creates tons of risks and opportunities. Good and bad. Maybe a great time to start a security company. But maybe a terrible time to be a small time web app developer when your clients can get 'good enough' in minutes for dollars on their own.

that makes claude code or codex accessible to the average user

That's what they aim Claude Cowork at. Every executive/leader I've shown Claude Cowork to has gone from 'what is AI' to 'vibecoding whole apps' in weeks. Then when Claude is down for an hour, they get visibly angry and don't remember how to do anything pre-Claude :)

I understand the impulse to provide a UI to manage codebases, etc. But my observation is that these people just ask Claude to do whatever it is they need done. Codebase needs managing? They just ask Claude to do it. No idea how to deploy an app? They just ask Claude to do it.

Any app built on top of this stack to 'make it easier' is competing with 'I don't care what's happening, just ask Claude to do it'.

It's weird to read an article about how AI is ruining Lake Tahoe, with a map illustrating the problem, when the map itself has the world's most generic "100% generated by Claude" UI ever.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the article using the Claude map. It's just deeply funny somehow.

All these companies want to make money eventually to justify their "technology company" valuations, show growth to keep expensive employees excited about stock options, etc. But the truth is that there just isn't any real reason for any of these companies to own text-based article hosting in the long term. There isn't enough of a network effect with blog posts like there is with traditional social media.

Medium started squeezing everyone, so everyone left for Substack. Now Substack is doing it, so everyone is leaving for the next thing.

Whoever owns the next thing may be the most benevolent people in the world, but given enough time and money, distant future owners will probably do the same thing.

The only long-term solution is to own your own site or pay sustainable (chunky) fees to a service that makes money from hosting you, not from being a 'social platform'.

Maybe it makes sense to start on one of these social platforms to grow an initial audience, but any platform will eventually need to juice you for it's own growth when the VC money runs out. It's just the economics of it.

Sorry if I wasn't as specific as possible:

The dollar's global value has also weakened noticeably since (checks notes) the global financial world reordering that happened in early 2025, which in finance circles is often referred to collectively by the shorthand 'Liberation Day', i.e. April 2nd, 2025, during which the US currency became significantly weaker relative to other major currencies, a situation which persists until the present moment

it's a far worse idea when you're a lesser economic power

Exactly. Japan has held its interest rates at almost zero for years (currently 0.75%) while the US is at 3.5% and has been roughly there or higher since late 2022. Having a negative 3% interest rate gap with the world's largest economy for over 3 years is going to cause currency weakness.

Right, it started dropping when the current administration was inaugurated, directly because of the party's promise to enact immediate tariffs. And it continued to drop sharply leading up to and through the tariff announcement.

I'm not trying to say anything spicy here. You can argue whether a strong currency is good or bad. But it would be silly not to acknowledge the cause. It was one of the largest global financial shocks in recent years.

First, Japan doesn't make the Switch in Japan. They are made in Vietnam and China. So having a weak local currency isn't super helpful.

Second, the largest price increase is for the local Japanese market (and they are increasing the already-underpriced special 'Japan-only' model that they won't allow to be sold in other markets).

DRAM prices increase everywhere, so it should affect the worldwide market in the same way. But Nintendo is raising prices mostly in Japan.

Japan's local currency devaluation is more about US vs Japan differences in central bank policy and interest rates (and a million other issues) and is mostly separate from DRAM prices.

This is a large price rise in domestic (Japanese) markets, with a small rise in other countries. This is impacting Japanese consumers the most.

Nintendo is a very Japanese-centric, proud company. For those not aware, Nintendo has been avoiding repricing domestically until now by selling a "Japanese-only Switch" locked to Japan in order to prevent foreign arbitrage. But the currency pressure is too strong.

Check out the US dollar index on a 5-year view: https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/quote/DX-Y.NYB/

Inflation is just one factor and is not limited to one country. This shows the US dollar vs other currencies.

The value of the yen compared to other currencies has fallen through the floor since 2022, so this isn't unexpected - Nintendo had to do something to equalize prices somewhat. The dollar's global value has also weakened noticeably since (checks notes) April 2, 2025 and Canada has had currency struggles as well the last few years.

Anthropic has a very "interesting" business model where you get subscription pricing as long as you are under 150 employees. When you hit 151, you have to start paying API prices overnight for everyone, and your total bill instantly multiplies.

They are getting you hooked on cheaper tokens, then raking you in when you get scale. I'm sure Uber gets a break on list price, but I doubt they are anywhere near <150 employee subscription pricing.

It's easier to ship a Windows binary and have it run reliably everywhere on Linux then a Linux binary right now.

I think you might be mixing up Super Micro Computer and MicroStrategy. They are different crazy companies (crazy for different reasons).

No, they are 3.5kW - 5kW standard EV chargers. But it's probably easy to install them using the existing power run.

But you are right that standard wall charging is much more viable in a 230V system here than in the US. Some people just run a cable from inside to their car if they don't have a 'real' charger yet.

It's improving.

There might not be much of a market for true EV supercars, but that market is so small as to be inconsequential anyway, with many models selling 10s of units and many of these cars never actually being driven significantly.

In the 'high performance but actually driveable' toy zone, there are plenty of Porsche Taycan 'company cars' around London. But sports cars are niche. Lots of rich people drive SUVs, and there are plenty of Porsche / Audi / BMW, etc, SUV EVs around outer London.

EVs will keep getting cheaper as China puts pressure on the market and as the number of EVs on the roads increases. In the UK, you can already get a second-hand VW ID.3, a great EV, for well under £15. And new cars from BYD and MG are available at ever more reasonable prices.

In my (generally affluent) zone 4 neighborhood in London, the number of green plate EVs had multiplied like rabbits over the past few years, but few houses have off-street parking. A huge percentage of the cars parked on street are EVs.

But since you can plug in to charge at many street lamp posts and since most people don't drive their cars much on a day to day basis, it all works fine even without off-street parking. There are also several reserved medium-speed charging spots around the neighborhood and lots of fast chargers at the local large grocery store.

It's very smart of them to recognize that.

The world is full of these weird business cases where people aren't aware of the actual product, like how Starbucks US morphed from a coffee shop into an iced dessert drinks company that also incidentally sells hot coffee.

Edit:

Other fun examples -

In the mid-2000s, Porsche was an incredibly successful hedge fund that also sold cars who tried to acquire VW using a short squeeze.

Most US airlines are profitable frequently flier points companies that also operate airplanes to justify the program.

Target US is a real estate company that operates also (profitable) stores.