WTF-Beta

Funny story ...
As I tried to dismantle the old Dell C2665dnf for recycling, I fixed it.
Good because I bought new toners for it not that long ago; so I can still recoup that "investment."
I don't regret getting the new Brother MFCL3780CDW.
Having a printer/scanner on each floor has its convenience, it's good to have a backup, and it's just a matter of time until FTP becomes totally unsupportable and I have to move all scanning function to SFTP anyway.

@Daniel. said in New Printer, Again (2025):

Do you need a subscription for ink?

No need.

Got the new printer, took a while to set up and work out the kinks.

1. After things are set up right, it works beautifully. (It's only the first days, so fingers crossed.)
2. On my Macs, I install only the driver, none of the printing and scanning software also promoted by the manufacturer. But this being a newer printer, the driver works only with macOS 11 onwards. My older Macs that run OS X 10.x don't get native drivers. But ...
3. AirPrint works pretty well with this new printer. The old Dell C2665dnf from 2014 always printed AirPrint jobs half-toned. But this new Brother printer (released 2023) appears to print AirPrint jobs about as well as those using its native driver.
4. FTP/SFTP support. The Dell machines from 2007 and 2014 could scan to FTP or SMB, but not SFTP. This new Brother MFCL3780CDW supports FTP and SFTP; not only that, when using SFTP it insists on verifying the SFTP server's public key certificate. It insists on having the SFTP server's public cert preloaded into the printer/scanner, suggesting that its public key implementation maybe incomplete; but that's an easy way to support privately generated certificates, an important enterprise use case. Having SFTP support is is good because macOS does not support FTP anymore; FTP is insecure anyway.
5. The new printer/scanner supports other things like scan to email, scan to networked drive (using SMB/CIFS), scan to SharePoint, etc. It can even accept print jobs from email. Other than scan-to-email, I do not expect to use these other features.

The rest comes down to stability, reliability, longevity. The Dell 3115cn printer from 2007 lasted well over 8 years. The Dell C2665dnf from 2014 lasted 11 years. Fingers crossed, I hope this one will last 10+ years.

The large language models powering generative AI chat bots are trained by human speech, yet new studies show how generative AI has come around to influence human speech:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/08/20/chatgpt-claude-chatbots-language/

Researchers found signs of human speech patterns becoming more like AI, and can trace back to certain patterns more prevalent in certain poorer countries where cheaper labor were hired to fine tune AI language models.

Then there is the counter movement where some people who are aware of AI influence to in turn deliberately moderate their own speech to sound less than AI.

This one about how language model is trained to do auxiliary constructions (e.g., draw imaginary lines on diagrams) to solve geometry problems.

Last time I bought a printer was mid-2014. I get a Dell C2665dnf.
All-in-one, color laser, duplex printing, duplex scanning, got Mac support, can network via Ethernet, can scan to email, scan to (S)FTP, can print to "odd sizes" like an envelope via multipurpose paper feeding tray, etc.

Today, that printer broke - some plastic part broke and now I cannot reinsert the paper tray. (And it broke soon after I bought new toner$ too. )

Tried to look for a replacement at Dell, and learnt that Dell got out of the printer business in 2016.

For the new printer, I basically want all the same functionalities that the old one had. (New concern is whether the printer has stringent requirement to force you to use only OEM toner cartridges ... but hard to find a reliable answer for that.)

Settled on a Brothers MFCL3780CDW and placed the order.

Brief research on Amazon.com shows that people are relatively unhappy with their all-in-one printers these days (comparing their satisfaction with other products). Using the 1-to-5 star scale, the MFCL3780CDW appears relatively "very highly rated" at 4.2 stars, with another contender with 4.3 stars that's a monochrome printer. Most other all-in-one printers got 4.0 or fewer stars. The two highest rated brands appear to be Brothers and Cannon. I went with a Brothers because reviews seem to indicate that Brothers supports the macOS better than Canon does.

Wish me luck.

@Steve-Miller said in Ukraine, the next steps:

Blather, bluster, bloviation, rants, raves, and obfuscation?

And where, exactly, are the Epstein files?

@Big_Al said in Why would a party buy a property for 4 times it's assessed value?:

I don't know what assessed value means in Nassua, NH. Here in Pennsylvania, assessed value for property tax purposes is often set at a base year and can differ wildly from current market value. It would be helpful for this discussion to know what the basis for this assessment actually is.

Exactly. I totally get what you're saying here, and I quite share the sentiment. I am just too lazy to research how the "assessed value" was determined in this case. This is not a residential property, so I cannot just go to Zillow and look up the "assessed value."

Yeah, the previous owner STAG Industrial should totally have rejected the offer to buy the warehouse at four times the assessed value, or maybe insist that it be bought at no more than one and one half times of the assessed value.

Op-ed by Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, on why the US Dept. of HHS under the Trump administration pivots away from mRNA vaccines:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/08/12/nih-mrna-vaccines-jay-bhattacharya/

TL;DR : because mRNA failed to earn public trust, and it's Biden's fault.

@Daniel. said in Goodbye, mRNA vaccine funding:

They are gene therapy products, not vaccines, and they were not studied for thirty years. Good lord.

It can be both. Just because it has not been studied 30 years as a method for gene therapy does not mean it has not been studied for 30 years as a method to develop vaccines.

The very sort of music that AI can generate.

Interesting bits that didn't know before:

Basically, when plants are growing, photosynthesis is happening in their cells. And that photosynthesis gives off a very specific wavelength of light. The OCO instruments in space measure that light all over the planet.

"NASA and others have turned this happy accident into an incredibly valuable set of maps of plant photosynthesis around the world," explains Scott Denning, a longtime climate scientist at Colorado State University who worked on the OCO missions and is now retired. "Lo and behold, we also get these lovely, high resolution maps of plant growth," he says. "And that's useful to farmers, useful to rangeland and grazing and drought monitoring and forest mapping and all kinds of things, in addition to the CO2 measurements."

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/04/nx-s1-5453731/nasa-carbon-dioxide-satellite-mission-threatened

Trump administration takes aim at satellite that measures carbon dioxide and crops

The Trump administration has asked NASA employees to draw up plans to end at least two major satellite missions, according to current and former NASA staffers. If the plans are carried out, one of the missions would be permanently terminated, because the satellite would burn up in the atmosphere.

The data the two missions collect is widely used, including by scientists, oil and gas companies and farmers who need detailed information about carbon dioxide and crop health. They are the only two federal satellite missions that were designed and built specifically to monitor planet-warming greenhouse gases.
...
Both missions, known as the Orbiting Carbon Observatories, measure carbon dioxide and plant growth around the globe. They use identical measurement devices, but one device is attached to a stand-alone satellite while the other is attached to the International Space Station. The standalone satellite would burn up in the atmosphere if NASA pursued plans to terminate the mission.

The manifesto:
https://www.spermracing.com/manifesto

The tweets/X posts:

FAQ:
Q: Ax, what were you looking for when you found this?
A: Nothing, was just browsing the news and saw on NYT this op-ed on declining male fertility which has a reference to "tech bro sperm races."

Where will the 15% go?

I'm thinking crypto.
I await being surprised by an even crazier, scarier answer.

This time said by Computer Science graduates.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/technology/coding-ai-jobs-students.html?unlocked_article_code=1.dU8.IJDM.99tnUDRx-M2H

Just like there came a Conservatopedia, there will come an AI large language model that unabashedly skews Conservative Republican MAGA.