Technologies that allow us to do more with less (read: are efficient uses of resources) are the shit, my jam, and cool as hell.
Technologies which seemingly need more and more resources (energy, compute cores, human labor) to do questionable things at best are whack and you shouldn't like them.
Tech is so cool when it's like, a dishwasher, where we invented a box that sprays hot water around for us instead of manually washing.
Tech is lame af when it's something like GANs built off stolen content so tech bros can pretend to be creative.
OS/2 actually reducing their PC requirements as new releases rolled out was revolutionary. If only it didn't have IBM behind it, i wonder how it would've fared as a solid windows competitor
Meh, just simplify tax laws. The US tax code is insane. Then make the tax office calculate them and set it up so you only need to do it yourself if you want to do something extra fiddly. The tax man can then focus on those people who reckon they are due to pay much less than expected
Let's maybe focus on making 1 (one) printer that does its one job 100% of the time immediately upon being directed to do so before we try to figure out how to live on the moon idk
Get a Brother laser printer.
Seriously, just get a basic-ass Brother laser printer. If all you need is the occasional document, it won't let you down and toner doesn't dry out. Plus, they're the least evil when it comes to replacement toner. OEM is reasonable and they don't fuss with generics (yet)
I've got two: an HL-3040CN from 2009 (technically a color LED printer, not laser) which still happily prints whenever I need it to, and a black-and-white one from maybe 2017?
I've never gotten mad at either of them. They just work.
i found a working HP Laserjet 1320 on the curb fifteen years ago and the only problem it has is with paper pickup when the tray gets low, so i just put an old D&D book in the tray under the paper. i got a cruddy little $20 print server so we can print to it over the network and it's basically golden
We’ve got an AIO with double-sided printing and WiFi and all that jazz - but hokey smokes within those parameters, it’s just been a brick in the most positive sense of the word. Years in, and the only “aw hell” moments I have are when I realize that I haven’t kept up and need toner VERY soon.
Had mine since 2015, I sometimes go as long as a year without using it and it fires back up and prints right away when I need it. Only problems I've ever had always turned out to be Windows problems, not printer problems.
I have a brother HL something that's ancient and it happily prints whenever I ask it to. The only bad thing is that it makes the lights flicker when the heater (?) is on and not asleep. I think this is a very known issue that's harmless. My bidet seat also does the same thing so....
That's totally normal, especially with LED lighting. The fuser is a big load and the printer's modulation of its output adds a lot of electrical noise which LED lights will generally be influenced by to the point of flickering.
It’s done it in two different apartment buildings and my house, and there are lots of reports online of people going “wtf” - it really just seems to be the way the fuser is designed.
what is a good option for a color printer that is okay at printing photos? not for any sort of professional use, but, say, for colored charts and inline images in documents? asking on behalf of my mother, her current printer causes a lot of distinct artifacts
Printers are meant to funnel money into the coffers of printer manufacturers, and funnel ink into the... uh... wherever the hell ink goes when it dries up.
Printing pages is just a side-effect at this point.
Gonna make a hot take here:
Electric cars are the latter of the two, and are at best a bandaid to the plague of car-dependency. If you want to use energy efficiently, the "reduce" is firstly proliferation of work-from-home wherever possible, then walkability and public transportation.
Which is why I'm glad EuroNCAP now requires, or will soon require, all key features to be operated with buttons instead of hidden in the menus to achieve five stars.
But roads will remain the least safe form of transportation because roads are populated by amateurs while rails and air are pro-only.
Tell me about it. I doordash on a bicycle in a place where car drivers are openly hostile to each other and to cyclists. A nonzero percent of them got their licenses out of a cracker jack bag.
I'm already contending with my suburb's lame attempt at having bike infrastructure. Look at this bullshit.
You need to look more at European car manufacturers who are moving into electric (like VW) rather than "Ohhh look, an electric car!" manufacturers like Tesla.
Agree that electric cars aren’t the answer but they are a necessary step in the right direction. It’s taken 100 years to build us into our current mess. It’s going to take a long while to fix it.
I mostly agree with you here.
Absolutely we need to prioritise good urban design, walkability & public transport!
Reducing the level of car dependency should be a priority!
But there'll always be some need for personal transport so vehicles that don't belch out pollution are also needed
Mad respect for the effort you put into your channel, btw. I've been watching for years and it's inspiring. I wouldn't feel comfortable disagreeing with you without this baseline of respect.
I appreciate that. Assuming you actually disagree, consider this for a moment:
I can do everything I need to do for my YouTube channel with a PC from 2017. That old beast is chugging along just fine and has plenty of compute power.
General-purpose computing is effectively solved. So what's next?
Regardless of whether Moore's law is starting to break, aside from a few enthusiast communities, more computing power just isn't a thing we strictly need anymore. What's needed is innovation - ways to use that available power more wisely.
But that's not what we're doing right now. At all.
Every stakeholder in the realm of computing - be it selling chips, selling compute time in the cloud, selling server racks, what have you - needs to see continued growth under this system.
How convenient, then, that a very resource-heavy application we don't understand is suddenly all the rage.
I will argue that while large models seem to be unsustainable, small models of the broad idea of "AI" will improve general purpose and application specific computing considerably. Think about how much better productive text on mobile has got, how a new Nintendo Switch could leverage DLSS.
Consider that a 15W device could use DLSS, a local application of AI specific hardware, to pump out apparent resolutions akin to 300W hardware... And how, like, that means AI, applied well, could actually REDUCE out energy consumption. One can hope.
TIL that Switch uses DLSS. I'm not much of a gamer, but I know how much gaming can turn a gamer nerd into a hardware nerd. What's the difference between really god ray reconstruction and really good next-token prediction?
I'm totally on board with this. LLMs have produced an industry-wide bubble on applications that have no business working for a lot of the stuff they're used for. The market will take care of this, much like it did in the dot com bubble.
Correct! And engineers have spent many tireless hours making the available compute power on those servers more efficient. They're also working on ways to decrease the needed storage and bandwidth through efficient video codecs.
That's actually cool innovation. Doing more stuff with fewer resources.
What the kids are calling AI these days is the opposite of that. It's using ridiculous amounts of compute power to provide "answers" which, while often helpful, are also often wrong.
Google Search is degrading quickly now that they're bolting so much "helpful" stuff on it. Is that progress?
So because this new technology isn't perfect we should stop iterating? Your cell phone uses ridiculous amounts of compute power compared to PC's in 2005. Efficiency doesn't arrive overnight.
