I went immediately “they started making opensource print heads… since that is huge effort”… Oh it is just a carrier assembly for HP inkcartridges. Sure hack refillable ones, but still the main printing part is from big corporate. Waiting for the moment of “HP implemented backward DRM on their cartridge. HP cartridge only works, if it hears correct attestation from the printer.”
This all is based on them hacking a corporate part and that is newer sustainable open hardware route.
Using a print head a maker sells as just “We make printheads, what you do with it after is your business. We exactly sell these as industrial parts from people to build printer around (or whatever other device you have use for ink depositing thingie in)” fine. That is normal.
But “hey we made open inkjet printer”. “So you figured the vast tasks of designing and manufacturing inkjet print heads?” “No” “You found a suitable standard industrial part to build around, less amazing, but still okay?” “No” “So what did you figure out or provide to table?” “We hacked HPs part”. Soooo everyone using this is still paying HP tax and who knows HP might shut this whole thing down one way or another.
edit: Not to mention it is not like it is some impossible task to get inkjet printheads, like all legit and so on. One web search later leads for example to KonicaMinolta industrials website for their catalog of “Here we sell just the Inkjet heads, incase you want to make a printer. Here is the spec sheet how to run it.”
Well point 1is classic salesman ship. “Investors, get in on the ground floor, this thing is going to the moon”.
Also in labour relations “Unions, workers accept this worse deal for you or swear on my grandma’s grave we replace you with soon to be super powerful AI”.
There is no way of knowing will or will not LLMs radically improve and lead to radical change. Since we have no way of knowing does someone say resolve the hallucinating and being confidently wrong issues. Not atleast with current probability models, since that random number throw (that is necessary for the whole thing to work) has that chance to land bad. There is no way without fundamentally different base model to give hard orders like “never do that”. There is always the chance 1% and 0,1% throws happen.