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znhll

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Just another SWE...

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OpenPrinter 17 days ago

I don't think a single one ever required any serious repairs beyond replacing consumables

I think your experience has been an outlier. I've had several printers from different brands also, and have had some that last a long time, and still print with decent quality even with off-brand ink/toner. However, quite a lot have also failed due to bad capacitors, bad power modules, or the printer or it's firmware just refused to work/print for whatever reason and the manufacturer response was: "buy a new one." There's definitely planned obsolescence built into these machines, and that's why people dislike them, aside from the fact they can be a pain to configure. That's in addition to the ink DRM and other shitty cartel like bs from printer manufacturers.

MS Access was on its way out by the time I started working in software, but the simplest explanation I can give about why the "forms" question is this, let's say you're a business person and...:

  * You have a huge Excel document that's basically a DB. (What Access kinda was)
  * You want users to interact with said data document, i.e add record, find/query record(s), edit records
  * You add a "form" for users to do just that. You can also add a "login" form to give some users more permissions.
It's basically if you could turn a SQlite file into a low-coded desktop app.

Because that seems like a bare minimum to collaborate at all.

Now you're getting a clue why Google had like 3-4 competing communication tools at some point lol

It would take 2 seconds for anyone at Google to confirm this.

Not really... Google is literally too big, and the fact that they've offshored and/or automated support away and compartmentalized it all where no single IC employee could possibly do much.

I had a billing/tax issue come up with my small biz Google Workspace, and I was getting nowhere via the normal support channels... So I asked my brother in-law who literally works at Google (but not in that team) for help. He could not help me as he had no idea who or what department could handle that and neither did his team members, and it would take weeks apparently to find the right person. I'm not the only paying Google customer with that experience. Google products are great, until you run into an issue you need to talk to a human.

I recently started making the switch from docker (and docker compose) to using podman and quadlet, but holy crap is the documentation for podman quadlets a big f-you wall-of-text mandoc that would make Torvalds proud. I've read thru that and am still not quite sure of how to get from point A to point B.

To replace a single docker compose file, sounds like one needs to manually create a number of .container, .volume, .network, .kube files correctly so systemd can spin up a container pod? Is that what I'm reading? Is there nothing that can generate that from a docker-compose.yml?

I've been on a quest to tame the bookmark monster. I have bookmarks (collectively over 10k probably) all spread around in different devices, different browsers on different computers, and event in text messages I sent to myself, via whatsapp/sms, over a period spanning 6-7 years.

While I'm not close done curating (the dead/expired/out-of-date links)... I needed to collect it all in one central place, and [linkding](https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding) is fitting the bill quite nicely. I'm using the tags and description field to annonate and sort the mess of bookmarks. It has a simple to use rest API, uses SQLite, and you can import/export bookmarks using the Netscape bookmarks html format. Best of all, it's OSS you can self-host on a RaspberryPi or even for free on say fly.io.

Sorry for your loss. I know it's hard, and the cold computer-automated world of today will mindlessly still remind you of your loved one in a million different ways. You just gotta be patient, take a break, or perhaps delegate some of those tasks to friends or family.

Many companies don't know how or haven't thought about how to deal with the death of a user or subscriber. As an estate admin, I've had trouble dealing even with established banking institutions who may or may not train all their employees on what to do or who to contact when a customer has passed away.

One thing, I discovered was Hereditas (https://withblue.ink/2019/03/18/what-happens-to-your-digital...), a project that's sort of like a "deadman's switch" which may help the survivors deal with all the digital loose-ends that one's death might leave behind. This, combined with proper estate planning might hopefully make things easier for those we leave behind.

funny, cuz that's what I call VB programmers... lol jk

This is an interesting project, but in my experience with companies that still use VB6 or VB.net (they have no idea about linux nor a desire to learn anything new... hence why they are still on VB6)

There aren't titles of nobility in the US. Supposedly everyone is equal (under law), but as we often are witness to, some people seem to be more "equal" than others (under law) and this spreads to social class. Money and connections are the American titles of nobility.

Huh... hadn't hear of that... from what I understand after a quick search: 2 of the reactions/shots were not genuine thefts, but this was not exactly intentionally faked by Mark Rober, but by the people who he enlisted to help bait the porch pirates. Mark offered a reward if the people he enlisted as porch baiters were able to return the stolen boxes, and they took it upon themselves to make sure the "thieves" would "return" the packages somehow.

While I agree with your points, I'd also point you to the bait Amazon package experiment by Mark Rober (find it on YT) that pretty much caught people that by any objective standards were just a-holes who did it just because it was an easy crime to get away with, and got some sort of thrill out of it.

But yeah, I'm totally for addressing the underlying societal causes of crime (the reasons otherwise decent people are driven by desperation to commit them), rather than just addressing the "symptoms"... enforcement and punishment is reactive and IMO does little to actually deter further/future crime.

A couple years ago as I was finishing my CS degree, I often wondered about this. I knew lots of my classmates were cheating with stuff like this, or even just buying whole zipped archives of past student's work to pass off as their own.

Cheating of this nature is really is getting quite rampant, and you can definitely notice it when you get to higher level CS classes and have to do projects with other students who have basically just cheated, coasted, and freeloaded of off other students for years. I had to do a capstone Software Engineering class project with a student who could barely write anything past a HelloWorld program in Java.

I wrote a very candid evaluation of that student and personally spoke to the professor but nothing came of it. I'm sure he still passed the class, and perhaps even cheated his way to graduation.