There certainly is no need to go to university to learn chip design. Watching a few Alan Kay talks [3] or browsing Bitsavers computer designs [4] are good starting points.

We made an easier way (than FPGA) to simulate and convert your gate level design into transistors on a chip (for less than $200 in 2026). We call it Morphle Logic [1].

Eventually you grow into making the largest fastest and cheapest supercomputer wafer scale integration [2].

[1] https://github.com/fiberhood/MorphleLogic/blob/main/README_M...

[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbqKClBwFwI

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1605Zmwek8

[4] http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/xerox/alto/...

It's not really needless complication of there is a reason for the complication. Obvioudsly in this case the need to be backward compatible with an old design made the implemtation more complicated than if they didn't need to do that. There were very, very strong business reasons why backward compatibility was a design requirment.

Still I suspect it is about spying in wartime, Bambu printers are at the core of the Ukrainian war effort, the main reason even Ukraine is winning since januari 2026.

First China prevented Ukraine from using any of the drones that they sold in millions to Russia while exercising the built in kill switches in Chinese drones used in by Ukrainians.

Suddenly Bambu, another Chinese company started listening in on the 3D printing on a massive scale in secret factories all over Ukraine that make the drones to replace the Chinese drones. Very suspicious.

Whatever is the reason Bambu locks down software or firmware on their 3D printers, now is the time for programmers to change the situation. We need to put up money like Louis Rossmann did [1], not to fight legal battles but for a assembly language programmer to reverse engineer the Bambu firmware and make a free and open source version.

This firmware replacement will cost a couple of months to write so we all should send that programmer a little money so he/she can release it for free.

A free Bambu firmware will allow the Ukranians to continue producing another few million drones and save over a hundred thousands lives by ending the war.

Now is the chance for us outsiders to help Ukraine, by freeing Bambu firmware.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLLVn6XT7v0

P.S. I would be willing to do the reverse engineering but I would need at least 35 euro per day (to eat) to build a new firmware for all Bambu models from scratch. I would need a few different models of printers on loan for a few weeks to test the new firmware. I estimate it would take 5-9 months to rebuild firmware for all models from zero and release it. Maybe Rossmann and Geerling could use their influence and coördinate this freeing of the firmware?

I just emailed Rosmann and Geering to see if we together can free the Bambu firmware. Anyone who wants to help, please contact me trough my HN profile.

> A free Bambu firmware will allow the Ukranians to continue producing another few million drones and save over a hundred thousands lives by ending the war.

If that were true, it seems to me, that Ukraine would have already done it if it was somehow standing in their way.

It is not 'standing in their way', it is revealing the secret locations where the Ukranians drones are manufactured. Several of these factories where discovered and Russia bombed them.

> Now is the chance for us outsiders to help Ukraine, by freeing Bambu firmware.

What you write sounds like an invitation to pro-Russia-minded people to sabotage these free Bambu firmware efforts. :-)

https://www.newsweek.com/china-ukraine-russia-war-drone-uav-...

2) It was mentioned in an interview of military in this Dutch documentary https://npo.nl/start/serie/konvooi/afleveringen/seizoen-1

3) Several journalists mentioned it in their news reporting (sorry, I can't locate the links right now).

4) Two soldiers vlogged about it on youtube.

Documentairy in Dutch but the interview is in English

the kill switch is discussed in part 2 https://youtu.be/za62IvbfzXE?t=1061 by the fire department who got the drone donated by the interviewer from "Protrct Ukraine"

Makes fleet management a bit harder but I don’t believe that requires internet access unless I missed some update.

Picking up 3D printers that don't spy on you, modding them or even building custom ones is much easier than designing and building millions of custom drones, so I am sure they solved this long ago.

Like, really - a FDM printer is just a MCU board with a bunch of stepper drivers, a power supply, some frame, motors, thermistors & heating elements.

I didn't correct for inflation but I wanted to buy the Lisa before it was released, it felt around 40000 Dutch guilders, maybe 80 times more expensive than this FPGA?

I did a few more back-of-the-envelope calculations of what I can do with these 2MB SRAMs:

Xerox Alto with Smaltalk-80 and Smalltalk-76 for $4. The Alto was the 1972 machine the Lisa tried to be the sucessor of.

Transputer T414/T800 for $50 but much faster than the original. You would make a supercomputer interconnecting hundreds of Transputers.

Vextrex without display but HDMI output for $50, $8 without the CRT/VGA/Oscilloscope, $100 with the cathode ray tube display built in.

200MB SRAM with 16000 cores 180nm WSI (Wafer Scale Integration) emulating most processors at $1000. It would outperform 2025 Blackwell NVDIA and Apple Silicon M3 Ultra Mac Studio because SRAM is faster than HBM or LPDDR5. It is much cheaper than the 2MB Sram on this Lisa FPGA (it costs around $25 per 2MB (16 Mbit) in batches of 1000 chips).

A M1 MacBook Air will perform virtually identically for most if not all laptop computing class tasks.

Given its RAM size I’m not going to be spinning up VMs, but in terms of general purpose computing it’s more than adequate. And, out of the box, you get a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, video editing, digital audio, web browser, and a bunch of other things. Xcode is free. This is easily a laptop you can buy and use for years in 90% of settings.

The M4 and the neo share the same CPU architecture but the M4 has 4 performance cores at 4.4ghz, while the neo has 2 performance cores at 4ghz.

The neo also does not have any CPU heatsink so it thermal throttles after only a few seconds:

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/MacBo...

The actual code I am using for this is:

    #include <stdio.h>
    #include <sys/time.h>

    int gettimeofday(struct timeval *tp, void *tzp);

    int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
      double xmin, xmax;
      double ymin, ymax;
      double x, y, xs, ys;
      int max_iter;
      int i, px, py;
      int width, height;
      volatile double wx, wy, t;
      double start, now;
      struct timeval tv;
      int count;

      xmin = -2.0;
      ymin = -1.5;
      xmax = 1.0;
      ymax = 1.5;

      max_iter = 1000;
      width = 200;
      height = 200;

      xs = (xmax - xmin) / (double) width;
      ys = (ymax - ymin) / (double) height;

      gettimeofday(&tv, NULL);
      start = (tv.tv_sec * 1000000.0 + tv.tv_usec) / 1000000.0;
      count = 0;
      now = start;
      while (now - start < 10.0 /* && count == 0 */) {
        for (y=ymin, py = 0; py < height; py++, y += ys) {
          for (x=xmin, px = 0; px < width; px++, x += xs) {
            wx = 0.0;
            wy = 0.0;
            for (i=0; i < max_iter && (wx * wx + wy * wy) < 4; i++) {
              t = wx * wx - wy * wy + x;
              wy = 2 * wx * wy + y;
              wx = t;
            }
          }
        }
        gettimeofday(&tv, NULL);
        now = (tv.tv_sec * 1000000.0 + tv.tv_usec) / 1000000.0;
        count ++;
      }
      printf("%d iterations in %.2f seconds.\n", count, now - start);
    }

(If I were building a Jellyfin server today, I'd probably use a MacBook Neo.)

As far as I'm concerned, if I can't work because they have my laptop for a week, especially because I pay for AppleCare and have to leave it with them, it's not much different than an insurance policy that lends me a rental car while mine's in the shop.

Also, there should be some universally accepted way to have access to your data and a secure personal computer in the duration your device is getting repaired.

Yes, exactly. When getting your car repaired there’s loaners or rentals to allow you to keep driving. Why isn’t a loaner computer a standard thing?

Some people occasionally returning products—that they intended to keep or not—is not like all of the energy grid being consumed by data centers, nor is it like all of the wetlands being paved over for suburbs.

Multi-trillion dollar corporation*

Maybe an educational text for the laymen has summarised this recently but I'm not aware of one. Most Biology from your school days have been rewritten.

I will have to re-read Molecular Biology of the Cell, 7th Edition, 2022. I read the 3th edition and it has changed dramatically since.

You can download it on Anna's Archive or order it at the usual suspects https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Molecular+Biology+of+the+Cell%2C+...

Works fine here Version 147.0.7727.101 (Official Build) (64-bit) (.102 is the Mac version)

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