How is that 9,600 lumens? That looks like barely more than 600 lumens.

I have been obsessed with light for decades now. My own home office has four 4,000 lumen corn lights - for a total of 16,000 lumens - running at 6,000 kelvin of colour. Along with medical-grade whiter-than-white paint, that means I get insanely bright daylight-like conditions.

Unless the photo is badly janked, what you have there barely rates as a 40W incandescent. A 9,600 lumen light should have so much of that light reflecting off of the ceiling that Grogu would be brightly illuminated from the reflection alone. You would have difficulty making out the darker portions of the wall where the light did not directly shine, just from the ceiling-reflected light.

To put it into perspective, that light ought to be the equivalent of 6 traditional 100w light bulbs. And it is nowhere near that brightness. 960 lumens, perhaps. But not 9,600.

My biggest gripe is a lack of low-end phones with massive screens that aren’t high-end.

Both my parents are octogenarians with declining vision. I just want to get them into an iPhone whose screen they can actually see easily, but without going into that low-functionality “assistive access” mode.

Because it doesn’t help if the interface doesn’t allow you to tell apart two different phone numbers for the same person. Like, literally - it just shows the label, not the phone number, and when both numbers have the same label…

Cave bears used to make polar bears look small.

LG products are decent. The first washer+dryer set we had lasted 14 years with only a few minor error codes towards the end, which were trivial to research, fix, and clear on our own. Our current LG set has been running error free for 6 years now, and we honestly expect another decade of use, at minimum. Sure, some limitations are annoying - no tumble config allows me to lower the temp for longer and gentler drying. But it all works well.

Of course, our next set will be Huebsch, which is the Canadian re-badge of Speed Queen. We didn’t get this make because we only found out about this re-badging earlier this year. We had considered importing actual Speed Queen appliances (6 years ago), but went with our current set when we realized that the import costs alone would be gratuitous, and the warranty wouldn’t be applicable outside of America.

If you are in Canada, look into Huebsch, which is the Canadian rebadge of Speed Queen.

And Speed Queen is known to make washers and dryers that last for decades without significant repairs so long as they’re used properly. Plus, IIRC they keep parts for any one model for a minimum of 25 years, and have been known to still have parts for machines more than 75 years old.

And this is why the only Samsung products I have are RAM and SSDs.

And the SSDs are backed up daily.

Samsung should not have gotten into appliances. They seem to be singularly terrible in that field. No-one else comes even close to their level of incompetence.

Get an extra roller kit and fuser kit, and you should be golden for the next two decades. The cartridges aren’t going away any time soon.

Yes but JetDirect is still cheaper and better integrated. There is the issue with outdated certificates and max. TLS 1.2 with the print server, but in a home/SOHO environment this should not be a critical security shortfall.

You know, vintage printers offer much the same.

I have an HP 4050DTN from a good quarter century ago that has no DRM of any kind, no tracking dots, no reporting home to the mothership, is eminently repairable, and can accept overstuffed toner cartridges that are advertised to do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage.

And the toner claim largely bears out. Two degrees later and I’m only on my third cartridge in the machine’s entire life. Last I ran a duty report the sheet count was getting close to 50k. Low 40s, at the very least. So it’s tracking decently close.

Sure, it now needs some parts refreshed. Rollers, fuser, and so forth. After a quarter century of use I would be surprised if something wasn’t starting to go. But parts are still readily available and surprisingly cheap. I mean, I have the parts in, I just haven’t had the time yet to swap them in.

The only downside of kit this old is that networking was an afterthought. Most units will come with USB, DIN-8, serial, and parallel ports, but finding a good JetDirect Ethernet network card - ideally 635n or newer - is difficult and expensive (the 615n bricked itself with distressing regularity, avoid at all costs).

I also have an HP 5000DTN that is of the identical build quality and can do oversized sheets up to 11×17. Beautiful machine in its early-2000s brutalist beigeness.

So if you want HP at their peak of printer glory, long before enshittification set in, hop on over to Wikipedia and consider any LaserJet model first released before 2006-2012.

And yet, “pro life”.

F**king hypocrites.

Ahead of any validation for forms should be input masks at every reasonable step.

Make sure that only numbers can be entered into a phone field, and with the correct pattern. Ensure that postal codes can only have numbers and letters, and the letters come in uppercase even if the user presses a lowercase letter. Have a date picker available, sure, but give people the option of just typing it out, and also make it clear that the format will be ISO-8601.

Well thought out input masks provide proactive correction and can massively help avoid reactive validation that only comes up after the user leaves the field or submits the form.

I’ve been running my own eMail server for almost a quarter century, and I have no clue what all the fuss is about.

Sure, providers are getting very picky about what domains that they will receive eMails from. But that’s why I have gMail, Yahoo, and Microsoft webmail accounts - so I can train their systems by exchanging emails once a quarter.

And yes, you do have to be running whitelists and blacklists and tarpits and have a good Fail2Ban in place. And good geoIP system if you want to cut out regions that you are unlikely to ever have legitimate mail originate from. But that’s just common sense security.

Because capitalists are assholes who steal from both ends of the Working Class: they cram down wages while soaking the consumers for all that they are willing to spend.

And it is this method by which the Parasite Class engineers trickle-up economics to achieve such obscene wealth.

I’ve got 128Gb in my 20c/40t system, and 256Gb in my 44c/88t system.

But then again, I don’t game. I do a lot of data crunching, and let other apps like BOINC do their own thing when I’m not actively working.

Holy fuck that late-80s vibe is going hard, there.

Luigi, where are you?

If you ever have difficulty recording the perfect fart, pureé up a kilogram of the freshest garlic you can find, and get me a travel ticket to wherever the sound booth is. Trust me, I could get you hundreds of the most exquisite farts from even a fraction of that garlic.

Sure, some will be short and wet and of the kind where you’re going to want to ask if I need to wipe afterwards. But most will be long and sonorous and reverberate across the entire room; the kind of farts where you wonder if I’ve got a full bassoon crammed up my kiester.

…When mentally ill people are put in charge of the nation’s government…

and better than me at almost every programming task, with inhumanly-low defect rates.

X - Doubt

Some of the most recent examinations of models - including the paid ones - show a 60-80% hallucination/inaccuracy rate.

That doesn’t get solved overnight, especially when the source of that rate - no answer being “punished” just as negatively as a wrong answer - remains unchanged in all models, due to fundamental trust-based biases that all humans have, and the need to cater to those biases in order to be accepted as a tool.

AI is a solution in search of a problem.

The problem being CEOs asking themselves, “how do we acquire labour without having to pay for said labour, in order to maximize our own profit margins?”

AI was always meant to allow wealth to access labour without allowing labour to access wealth.

I, for one, am designing an entire production line of guillotines for when our capitalist system finally collapses. And for those in bunkers: a way of discovering air exchangers and all emergency exits so they can be filled with cement to turn bunkers into tombs. We need an effective method of culling sociopaths from our civilization, after all.