TechTakes

That Keeper AI dating app has an admitted pedo running its twitter PR (Hunter Ash - old username was Psikey, the receipts are under that).

Recently stumbled upon an anti-AI mutual aid/activism group that's being set up, I suspect some of you will be interested.

nazi bar owner tinkers with techfash bot trying to vibecode a nazi service on nazi network and gets his crypto stolen https://awful.systems/post/4364989

(this fucker is responsible for soapbox, which is frontend used almost invariably by nazi-packed pleroma instances. among other crimes of similar nature)

Movie script idea:

Idiocracy reboot, but its about ai brainrot instead of eugenics.

So I have two laser printers, a cute little HP one and an old Lexmark. The former works mostly OK, but requires fiddling* to get it working on Linux, and prints things smaller than their actual size. The latter is also good enough to be useful, but leaves streaks on page and is quite low on toner. Replacing the photoconductor and toner is just about expensive enough to justify consideration of buying a new printer altogether instead.

So anyway, I might be in the marker for a new printer, which reminded me of one of the best pieces of tech journalism of this decade . I also noticed it has been followed by sequels for subsequent years. Also a rare example of LLM use I can approve of, even if having to fight fire with fire (or search engines with slop) is a bit saddening.

A little offtopic (or I guess it's almost ontopic for NotAwfulTech), but I found myself considering a color printer and seems that LED printers are the new hotness for that. Since the top results when searching "led vs laser color printer" are mind-numbing slop, I thought I'd ask if anyone here has experience with LED printers. Any typical pitfalls to watch out for? Is Brother still the least worst brand for them?

* For the curious, the printer requires a plugin called HPLIP. My distro has an automated installer for it in its repositories, but the installer's Python code is not compatible with newest Python versions. Thankfully the fix only involves changing a locale.format to locale.format_string in one file and ignoring some warnings about invalid escape sequences. The URL for automatically dowloading the plugin from HP website is also empty, so I had to manually download the .run file from hplip's sourceforge repository. The filename was also slightly different from what the installer was expecting and the cryptographic signature file was also mandatory, though when the installer tried and failed to download the corresponding key from a keyserver, it let me ignore the signature altogether. I can see how proprietary printer drivers made rms what he is, minus the pro child molestation stuff.

Just thinking about how LLMs could never create anything close to Rumours by Fleetwood Mac (specifically Dreams but, uh, you can go your own way, ig)