[jvanderbot]

> It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale

No, it never seemed that way to the realists, but it was said to seem that way to the makerspheres.

[imtringued]

I personally wouldn't trust the 3D-printing community. The pre-bambu lab days were pretty bleak.

Print quality is everything when it comes to 3D printing. The printing quality must keep increasing if 3D prints are to be used as finished products. People should stop printing STL artifacts into their prints. Layer lines must fade away into invisibility. Top surfaces must be impeccably smooth without any stepping. New coatings need to be developed for texturing 3d printed parts and the parts need to be ready for coating right from the print bed.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Layer lines must fade away into invisibility.

The layer lines are much less pronounced when you use a 0.25 mm nozzle with an appropriate layer height instead of a 0.4 mm nozzle (the possible quality is even on the brink to satisfy people who use 3D printing for producing miniatures). The prize you need to pay is of course the print time.

> Top surfaces must be impeccably smooth without any stepping.

In the last years there was a lot of progress on ironing features in slicers, which mitigates this issue:

> https://help.prusa3d.com/article/ironing_177488

Another very recent addition to mitigate the perceived problem is the recent addition of "fuzzy skin" features in slicers, which by making the surfaces look "more rough" hides the imperfections of the FDM printing process.

--

Another solution is to simply use resin printing instead of FDM printing for finished products if feasible.

[jajuuka]

Definitely a fantasy land ideal. Much like pitches from the Free Software Foundation of a world without copyright and IP. It's just never going to exist because reality just isn't that way.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Much like pitches from the Free Software Foundation of a world without copyright and IP.

If there exists no copyright, you cannot force an entity to release the source code of their software.

A world without copyright and IP is for sure an interesting thought experiment, but very different from the FSF vision:

In such a world, there would be much more reverse-engineering and monkey-patching of existing (non-open) software that gets copied around very liberally.

On the other hand, because there exists no enforcable copyright, companies would of course invest a lot of ressources into developing hard to crack copy protection schemes. Similarly, freedom-loving hackers would invest serious ressources into cracking such copy protection schemes.

[ceejayoz]

> Much like pitches from the Free Software Foundation of a world without copyright and IP.

Didn't the big AI vendors kinda bring that to fruition?