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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • Ah HP printer drivers, my favorite form of self-inflicted malware.

    My favorite HP sucks story happened many a year ago. The boss’s shitty HP multi-function POS died, and we got him a nice Brother instead, and then went to uninstall the drivers.

    Somehow, and the reason for this is totally unknown to anyone other than HP engineers, the driver ‘uninstaller’ decided that today’s hilarity would be that it was going to uninstall… everything.

    After about 15 minutes of the drive churning away I got concerned, rebooted it, and found that nearly 75% of everything on it had been deleted by the uninstaller.

    No fucking idea, but that was a fun thing to explain and then fix.


  • I hate to go ‘Boy, I don’t buy it’ but, uh, I kinda don’t?

    This is one of those things that COULD happen, as long as every teacher, every administrator and the state itself were all intentionally trying to make it happen.

    CT has standardized tests that are required to be taken to progress through school, so how can someone who can’t read or write pass those?

    And EVERY teacher she had from first grade on just accepted the fact she clearly was unable to read or write, and thus was almost certainly not doing any work, and just decided that’s a-ok and we’ll just pass her along anyways without doing anything?

    Somehow feels like there’s a lot more to this story than just her side as presented by that article.


  • Uber-like surge pricing on electricity

    We don’t really: that story you heard from a few years ago was the only company that billed like that. The customers made a bet that the pricing averages through the day (lower at night, higher cost during the day) would average out in their favor over fixed-cost billing, and frankly, it did right up until it didn’t.

    They took a risk and got bit by, frankly, not understanding how the system works and basically ate the spikes.

    Everyone else paid $0.09/kwh or so during that whole period, and the electric providers ate the cost because when you’re averaging out spikes across millions of kwh, it won’t lead to bankruptcy.












  • Yeah, for sure. SCSI died when SAS emerged, and that’s been basically 20 years now.

    Any SCSI stuff left laying around is going to be literally a decade+ old and yeah, unless you have a VERY specific need that requires it (which really is just trying to get another few years out of already installed gear), it’s effectively dead and shouldn’t be bought for anything other than paperweights or for a coffee table.


  • nothing of value will be lost

    I’d argue the opposite: there’s actually a lot of stuff out there that’s actually interesting: old-school lets-players who’d have done actual informative playthroughs of games. It’s kind of a dying art, but it’s also exactly the kind of content that’s going to get purged by this kind of action.

    It’s interesting to spend, say, 10 hours watching some guy play Sierra games and actually talk through shit about the game and whatnot, and it’d be a shame to have that vanish.

    But not entirely unexpected since that’s not profitable content in the way that the current morons babbling about bullshit reaction videos, totally-not-camgirls totally not showing their tits, and whatever other brainrot nonsense most of twitch is. (Also alt-right propaganda, but eh.)