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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Agreed, I have one of the last “good” HP Color LaserJets from a tech recycler and last time I checked it was two model revisions old. This one still has a config option to allow unofficial toner, so I pay like $120 for a set of all four high capacity cartridges now, I think 5k pages black and 3k pages C Y and M. (It’s a MFP m477fdw I think) I think the next model was the first one that took the option away.

    You can still use third party toner with some of the later models, but those are more expensive and come with some kind of jig for transplanting an HP chip into their cartridge.

    I will never buy another HP product again (apart from replacement parts for my current printer), and will jealously guard this one and nurse this one along until it dies.

    But in a general sense, being able to completely ignore the printer for literally months, and then turn it on and get a perfect print, and then ignore it again… really nice. That’s all laser printers. Never buy HP.


  • You’re right to be frustrated. Mine is the same way. It’s ok to be passionate about that, and to value punishing greedy ISPs by not paying extra for a business account. (In many cases you could even need both, if you might worry about occasional denial of service attacks and need to be sure attackers can’t also knock out your ability to work from home, for example.)

    I think there’s a compelling argument in favor of protecting diversity of hosting and preventing a monoculture or a monopoly. It’s not super compelling, but it’s out there.


  • We also need more individuals paying for “business” Internet connections at home. We need self-hosters to be able to feel comfortable running public services from their homes. And so we need a set of practices and recipes to follow, so a self-hoster can feel confident that, if one thing gets broken into, the other few dozen things they’re hosting will stay safe.

    The “family nerd” hosting things for the family needs to be a thing again. Sorry, friends, I know family tech support sucks. It’ll suck so much more when it’s a web site down and nobody can reach their kid’s softball team page, and there’s a game next weekend, etc. But we’ve seen what happens when we abdicate our responsibilities and let for-profit companies handle it for us.

    (I wish so hard that I had a solution ready, a corporate LAN in a box, that someone can just install and use. I’m working on something, but I’m pretty sure I over-complicated it. It doesn’t need to be Fort Knox, it just needs to be pretty good. And I suck at ops stuff.)



  • Yes, I host my own with mspencer.net. Feel free to look at whois info. Your registrar should offer something similar.

    There’s this problem we have with self hosting standard public services. Everything that could be used by a business seems like it’s either a full time job-sized hobby to maintain it or you have to pay a bunch of money to a service provider for them to handle it for you. Nobody takes the time to create an easy recipe for people to follow.

    Luckily, though email was a difficult setup, it’s run worry free since. My emails are delivered because I did the security stuff: opendkim, dnssec, tls, all that. And I get zero spam (apart from exactly two cases where they abused a legitimate sender - whose abuse department responded and handled it) so it’s been lovely. I don’t seem to have time to maintain this so I’m lucky it’s been running well hands-free.

    It’s a project but I would recommend it. Don’t let the big tech companies own all email, too. We have to protect that ability by exercising it.







  • Was it just surging or like a compressor stall or something? FOD like a bird ingestion or something?

    I mean, Boeing has/had quality problems, serious ethical failures, but also birds exist.

    (I’m not good at explaining this, maybe should have found an explanation online somewhere instead.) You know those stages of a combustion engine - intake, compression, ignition, exhaust, all happening in sequence in an engine’s cylinders? Turbine engines do them too, but in a straight line and constantly. The front of the engine is obviously intake, but compressor fans do the compression just using fast and powerful fans, no seals or valves needed. Ignition lights everything up, exhaust can just flow out the back. (It flows over some more fan blades that steal some power from the expanding gases and use it to keep the whole thing spinning.)

    Unless something goes wrong with the compressor fan blades, that is. If compression is too weak and the ignited air/fuel mixture can flow back out the front of the engine, that’s bad. And yeah, it happens sometimes, with any engine. Almost never with both at the same time. (Both engines failing at once low to the ground is like a once in a generation thing, and yeah it’s really really bad. And really really rare.)






  • I think you’re right about style. As a software developer myself, I keep thinking back to early commercial / business software terms that listed all of the exhaustive ways you could not add their work to any “information retrieval system.” And I think, ultimately, computers cannot process style. They can process something, and style feels like the closest thing our brains can come up with.

    This feels trite at first, but computers process data. They don’t have a sense of style. They don’t have independent thought, even if you call it a “<think> tag”. Any work product created by a computer from copyrighted information is a derivative work, in the same way a machine-translated version of a popular fiction book is.

    This act of mass corporate disobedience, putting distillate made from our collective human works behind a paywall needs to be punished.

    . . .

    But it won’t be. That bugs me to no end.

    (I feel like my tone became a bit odd, so if it felt like the I was yelling at the poster I replied to, I apologize. The topic bugs me, but what you said is true and you’re also correct.)