But is it a lie?

Here’s what I’ve seen so far:

1. Rossmann reports on claims about Brother blocking third party cartridges on auto-updating firmware, and not providing older firmware
2. Brother denies intentionally blocking third party cartridges

There’s still the claim about the older firmware. If it was available, it would be pretty easy for customers to prove that a change in the firmware caused issues w/ third-party cartridges:

1. cartridge works fine
2. upgrade
3. cartridge doesn’t work
4. downgrade
5. cartridge works fine

That doesn’t prove it was intentional, it just proves it was the firmware update that caused the problem. If users want to stick w/ an older firmware, they should be allowed to, because Brother shouldn’t be able to decide what firmware they use.

The broader point here is certainly valid though, I’m just unconvinced that it’s applicable. Why should we trust Brother on this when they make the way to prove the issue nigh impossible?

Sure, but they don’t need to be proof of anything. Rossmann reported on some users (I think there were multiple?) claiming something to be the case, and provided one bit of verifiable evidence: no access to older firmware.

Brother claims they don’t intentionally brick printers that use third party cartridges, but that’s not verifiable. Brother also didn’t mention anything about why older firmware isn’t available. That’s a significant concern, since that would be a way for customers to prove that the firmware itself is the issue (printer works -> upgrade -> broken -> downgrade -> printer works).

I think it’s 100% fair to raise the concern. It’s certainly not enough to warrant any kind of legal action, but it is enough for customers to investigate the claims for themselves. I think that’s worthwhile.

My main concern here is that they (allegedly, I haven’t confirmed) remove old firmware. If customers want to try out older firmware to see if that fixes their problem, they should be able to. It doesn’t cost much, so why not?

Yeah, voiding a warranty because the customer used something that could cause irreversible damage makes sense. Removing access to older firmware does not.

Mistakes happen. He comes with receipts, and sometimes those receipts are misleading. I don’t think he’s being intentionally wrong here, he took information from various communities reporting negative experiences, and extrapolated that there may be an issue there.

And it’s not clear he’s actually wrong. We have the company claiming they don’t do it, but then what about the accusation that older firmware isn’t available? Surely if they don’t intend to break third party cartridges, they’d keep those available for people who want to downgrade. Maybe there’s a good reason for that too, idk, but my point is that Brother could be hiding something, it’s still unclear and we need more data.

he lives on outrage and the money it generates

I don’t think he makes much from YouTube, and he’s said as much. He just uses it as a platform to push pro-Right to Repair sentiment, and he’s right way more often than he’s not (with a healthy dose of hyperbole most of the time). Any miss here is because he didn’t bother doing a bunch of research, because he doesn’t really have an incentive to do so.

He owns a repair business and works for FUTO, that’s where his money comes from.

Hey, this is a Python project, use underscores.

It is Latvian. It’s also Russian. It’s also Singaporean. It just depends on who you ask and how much you want to look into it.

But yeah, that’s a large part of why I use Collabora instead of OnlyOffice, it’s just a lot less sketchy.

Its distrubuted so you don’t lose your content if something happens to one location.

Right, but you’ll lose your content if enough people lose interest in the network. That’s absolutely a thing in the crypto world where things move fast. Relying on the network effect to secure your data sounds… sketchy.

which is needed in some form if it’s distrubuted

Sure, and the easiest way to do that is w/ public key cryptography, sign your encrypted stuff and you can always prove ownership. A blockchain gives you that, but it’s hardly necessary to have consensus around that.

include credit cards

It probably uses some cryptocurrency. Lots of cryptocurrencies work well for micropayments (e.g. LiteCoin, Monero, or even Bitcoin w/ the lightning network).

I just don’t see the need for a blockchain here. Bittorrent has been doing content-based addressing for ages, and it doesn’t need a blockchain, you just ask for the data at a given hash and you get it. Or you can use IPFS. If everything is properly encrypted, you’re good to go!

What the blockchain does offer is a way to pay for storage. So the more you pay, the more likely your data is to still be there after some time as people leave the network and nodes drop and whatnot. All in all though, it seems really risky to put anything important on it, and you might as well just pay for a storage provider from a legal entity that you can sue if things go poorly (and maybe two, so you’re not screwed if goes bankrupt or whatever).

It’s pretty easy if you use NextCloud with the AIO image, but if you’re doing anything fancier than that, strap in because there aren’t many decent tutorials.

Why distributed? Having your data tied to a blockchain seems unnecessarily complicated, and it essentially puts your data at risk if the bulk of the community moves to the next hot thing.

We really need to decouple storage from the apps themselves. Whether you use distributed storage, local storage, or something commercially backed like S3 should be a choice separate from the app you use to view and edit your data.

I self-host Collabora (online version of LibreOffice; OnlyOffice is another option), and my data lives on my NAS, but it could just as easily live on S3 or some distributed data store.

We just had a town hall with our CEO and they came right out and said we need to simultaneously add AI and not add AI to our products, because customers are both excited and nervous about it. Our competitors are putting “AI” everywhere in their marketing, while we’re just trucking along making a quality product.

Our software works in a very dangerous environment, where mistakes could cost millions in damage and potentially risk human lives. So the end user just sees “AI” as a liability. But the decision makers as to what product to use are removed from conditions on the ground and respond well to marketing BS.

We actually do use AI with some parts of the product (e.g. curve fitting on past data for better predictions), but we need to be very careful about how we advertise that.

It’s dumb. Just pick the product based on what fits your operations best, don’t pick based on buzzwords…

That’s horrendous.

My company supports businesses where any issue that prevents them from completing a task could cost them millions if their operations need to stop. We get super vague bug reports, yet we usually turn around a fix in a day or two.

I just don’t understand how a company could be so blasé about a clear bug report that they’re willing to go back and forth like that.

I’m looking at moving my NAS to it.

I currently use openSUSE Leap, so to prep for the switch, I’m moving everything to podman.

I’ve never had a system update go bad on Leap, but I am being impacted by old system packages but don’t want to jump to Tumbleweed. I’m hoping this will give me a more up to date base and force me to put things into containers properly.

All of those should be fine, the main caveats w/ Linux are:

• anti-cheat games generally don’t work - there are exceptions, and this is a limitation by the developer, not Linux
• Windows-only software can be iffy - e.g. photoshop and whatnot
• using an NTFS drive on Linux can have surprises - don’t mount your game lib on Linux, just redownload

Blender works perfectly fine, gaming on Steam and Heroic works well, emulators work well, and while I don’t know anything about Linux music production, I know there are software options available.

Anyway, I recommend buying a separate disk and trying Linux out. That way you don’t touch your current Windows install while messing w/ stuff.

Presumably, the “algorithm” is based on whatever is most profitable. So probably some combination of most viewers, best ad engagement (click through rate), and best conversion/appeal to Premium subs.

That’s assuming YouTube’s primary goal is to make money, and which it should be as part of a publicly traded company.

My point is that those thumbnails and titles work, so if we want something different, we need to reward better thumbnails and titles and stop engaging w/ poor ones.

Exactly. Following the flow of traffic is more important than following posted speed limit signs, in both directions.

Been messing around w/ podman, and after hours of slamming my head against the wall, I decided Seafile isn’t worth it. :) It launches a bunch of stuff inside one container, and I just couldn’t figure out how to get that to work w/ quadlet (worked fine w/ podman kube play though).

I got forgejo set up and now I’m looking into setting up runners so I can finally migrate off hosted gitlab onto my own forgejo instance.

Some other things I’m planning on doing this week:

• migrate existing services to podman quadlet from docker compose - will make each existing service into a pod and play w/ pod networking
• set up technitium - tested it locally and it worked well, so just need to move it and configure it; hope to use it as the primary DNS for my house
• set up owncloud ocis - there’s a new POSIX FS option, which was my main hangup when I last looked into a nextcloud alternative (I only need storage + collabora)
• probably some kind of dashboard, because the number of services I host is getting a bit long

If I get time, I want to install openSUSE MicroOS onto my NAS and start migrating everything to it (from openSUSE Leap). I really like the idea of an immutable base OS, and my NAS is already 90% containers (pretty much just Samba left). I need to fix some permission issues anyway (keep having to chown my videos so samba and jellyfin can work together), and this should make things a bit more obvious.

I’ll probably also start a blog about my self-hosting journey, because the info around podman is kinda sparse, especially when it comes to quadlet.

Edit: got OCIS working, but it was a bit of a pain. Starting that blog really sounds like a good idea…

I got mine at launch an absolutely love it.

Eh, I’ve had pretty good luck with Verified titles. It’s not perfect, but generally speaking:

• verified - no concerns about compat
• playable - check reasons, and maybe protondb if there’s anything concerning
• unsupported/unknown - check protondb

ProtonDB also isn’t perfect, and there are plenty of “gold” and “platinum” titles that I’ve had (small) issues with.

That sounds horrifying. :)