Anytime I go to east bay I go for BART. I’m not trying to sit in bay bridge traffic. BART gets a bad rap, like every other public transit in the US, but I’ve been using it pretty frequently recently (stopped around beginning of lockdowns) and it’s a great experience.
The popular "just buy this printer" Verge article recommends the Brother HL-L2305W. But Brother appears to have gone the subscription route and replaced that model with the HL-L2405W, which is "Amazon Dash Replenishment Ready" and whose product description says "Requires enrollment in a monthly billed Brother Refresh EZ Print Subscription service plan based on monthly printed page allotments."
The older model is no longer available new from Amazon.
Is Brother still a good recommendation? This subscription pivot gives the company all the wrong incentives.
I'm looking at the Best Buy page for the printer, and I can see where it would be confusing.
> Choose Brother Genuine TN830 Standard or TN830XL High Yield replacement cartridges. And with Refresh EZ Print Subscription Service, you’ll never worry about running out of toner again and you’ll enjoy savings up to 50%. (3) Get started today with a Free Trial. (4)
> (4) Requires enrollment in a monthly billed Brother Refresh EZ Print Subscription service plan based on monthly printed page allotments. Unused pages roll over, limitations apply. Additional page set charges and taxes apply during trial.
It's just saying that the free trial of their subscription requires enrolling in the subscription. The subscription isn't required to use the printer.
Just ditched my HP for a Brother a couple months back, after having continual issues with individual colors running out and eventually it refused to recognize a single color cartridge slot, I never used color anyway. So went to a Brother monochrome. Been smooth since.
another vouch for brother printers. not optimum but i just plopped one connected to wifi only and it can print with minimal config and also scanning through mac's image capture app.
„The venerable “baseload” concept—that grid stability needs gigawatt-scale, steadily operating thermal (steam-raising) power plants—reflects the valid and vital economic practice of dispatching power at least operating cost, so resources with lowest operating costs are run most. This traditional role of giant thermal plants led many people to suppose that such plants are always needed. But now that renewables with no fuel cost are taking over the “baseload” role of being dispatched whenever available, those big thermal plants are relegated to fewer operating hours, making the term “baseload” an obsolete honorific. Thermal plants must now adapt to follow the net load left after cost-effective efficiency, demand response, and real-time “base-cost” renewable supply have been dispatched. Nuclear power’s limited flexibility, and its technical and economic challenges when cycled, have thus become a handicap, complicating least-cost and stable grid operation with a rising share of zero-carbon, least-cost variable renewables. That is why Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) found that early closure of its well running Diablo Canyon reactors would save customers money and, by making the grid more flexible, raise renewables’ share. Those reactors had become cheaper to close than to run: the power systems’ shift to renewables had turned them from an asset to a liability, so they’ll be replaced by competitively procured low-carbon resources, saving both money and carbon.“
Take a look below at how much battery storage discharging (purple) offsets natural gas (maroon) after the sun sets in California on the hourly electricity origin graph. Not much further left to go at current battery deployment trajectories.
Conveniently, Tesla’s Megapack manufacturing facility is in Northern California, speeding deployments in state.
Which would be great if demand didn't vary by time of day and season.
But, it's neat the way that flaw has been rebranded as "baseload". The extra energy you need when people wake up and go to work? That's someone else's problem.
I’m gonna be blunt, that’s a strange position.
I mean, even just math wise/FFT, you can break down a lot of stuff into a dc component plus your variable component.
But the other part is you can absolutely adjust the output of a nuclear reactor, we just don’t because the availability is there. Look up the largest power stations in the us/globally, and sort by capacity factor.
So having a health database, drivers license database, social security, banking etc are all ok but creating a proper national ID system would somehow push it over the edge to where an authoritarian government can come about and take control of our lives?
Your argument boils down to “let’s purposely make our government inefficient because it might one day turn on us”
Which, judging from other countries, is actually the opposite of what happens.
The worst offenders of human rights and government overreach are the ones that don’t have their shit together.
> But for what do a drivers license database, social security numbers exist?
To keep bad drivers off the road? To suspend privileges when you kill someone with your car?
Social security numbers were originally created for linking people to their social security accounts but has now become our national ID because there is an inherit need for one in the modern world. The problem with SSNs is that they were never designed for their current use-case.
> And why should a country/state know your bank account number(s)?
A state will always have access to and the capability of seizing your account funds. This is a necessity for a multitude of reasons that I can list out, but I'll let you use your imagination.
Take a look around the world. Take a look at history. Autocrats don't need an efficient ID system to take control of their citizens. People willingly give up their freedoms and align themselves with autocrats when they use the same propaganda and fear-mongering tactics that have been used for centuries. It has nothing to do with the government amassing a database of their population. Once the autocrats are in control, they will create whatever system they require.
The only way to avoid tyranny is to fight for liberal values at the ballot box. Anything else is bullshit. Your guns won't do shit when your local militia is aligned with the autocrat in control.
> To keep bad drivers off the road? To suspend privileges when you kill someone with your car?
A document is not sufficient for that? Doubt it.
> Social security numbers has now become our national ID because there is an inherit need for one in the modern world.
Why?
> A state will always have access to and the capability of seizing your account funds. This is a necessity for a multitude of reasons that I can list out, but I'll let you use your imagination.
But not one good reason. For law enforcement, there are other possibilities.
> Take a look around the world. Take a look at history. Autocrats don't need an efficient ID system to take control of their citizens.
But pseudo-democracies do.
> The only way to avoid tyranny is to fight for liberal values at the ballot box. Anything else is bullshit. Your guns won't do shit when your local militia is aligned with the autocrat in control.
No. The only way is to send politicians with their political idiocies to hell and establish direct democracies. When the people have to participate in the organisation of a country/state (or better in a cooperation of peoples; is there really a need for geographical limits?), and discuss the distribution of resources, instead of just balloting from time to time for one or another political idiocy, don't you think they could make that way better than the current systems?
It's hilarious just how bad OEM car software is. One of those many moments in my day to day that I realize how bad 90% of software we interact with is absolute trash.
ATM machines, credit card readers, parking meters, TVs, microwaves, ovens (really any appliances), phone trees, any kiosks, etc.
If the device registers my touch within 500ms that's usually enough to impress me at this point.
> One of those many moments in my day to day that I realize how bad 90% of software we interact with is absolute trash.
Yes. My favorite crap area is point-of-sale systems. There's a cafe where, if I present the card too soon, the reader beeps and flashes, but card doesn't complete transaction, and I have to try again. Same at a bookstore. This seems to be a standard Veriphone feature.
There are supermarket card terminals which explicitly tell you to present the card before the system is ready for card info. The point of sale system and the credit card terminal are not properly synchronized, and they lie to the user about it. It's a dark pattern.
The one restaurant that had a really good system, one that had no excess screens and read the credit card correctly every time, replaced it with an inferior system that misreads the card about half the time.
The problem is that you need to architect, build, and maintain that system for years, or decades, to come. That requires an in-house software team that knows what it's doing. Building that first version that "works" is easy. Building that first version that actually works and supports everything you need it to, is quite a bit more difficult.
Building and then maintaining that software, year after year, without slowing to a crawl because of all the tech debt that's piled on (especially so since you have subpar engineers or you're contracting out to cheap workers abroad), is even harder.
And if you want to provide a user experience comparable to what the top software companies in the world are capable of, that's just not gonna happen at these car companies.
Tesla was born from the software industry, that's why they're the only ones that can compete.
Uh… cars don’t really change from year to year. Pretending that an acceptable infotainment system is hard to do, just isn’t so.
The real problem is dumbass “features” (my MDX likes to show an animation of the keyboard typing out all the words a half second a letter, whenever you click autocomplete… for some reason) The real issue is that the infotainment systems are underpowered, because they’re considered an afterthought.
They weren't doing that much either. I doubt an Apple ][ could even stream modern audio codecs via bluetooth, let alone simultaneously run a local search on the GPS database.
Infotainment responsiveness needs to be a NHTSA regulation. The mental load of dealing with laggy and unresponsive radios is surely causing accidents. Even if at worst it adds another $100 to the cost of the car to get a good enough cpu, so what?
I recently bought a property that has a cooling system similar to this. The difference in my case is that there are tunnels underneath the foundation containing rocks. Once the temp inside the house reaches a certain point, there are fans that blow the accumulated hot air in the “greenhouse” through those tunnels. It works, but I’m tearing it all out. It’s an eyesore and I rather have proper temp control.
This is the state of the art type of system for greenhouse heat retention, one that I dream of owning. I can't imagine how an underground system would be an eyesore, the ducts going to the roof?
If your laptop has 3G (or better) radio, it has also positioning bundled in.
However, although the devices might run on ancient stable standard, but that does not mean, that operating system is not playing silly games there. If you had an app that talked to them via serial port, you could throw it away once Microsoft introduced GNSS subsystem.
