Printer toner indicator says Black is almost full (recently changed as I print mainly b/w), Cyan & Magenta are low, Yellow is empty and the one it complains about when trying to print.

I've continued messing with it for the last hour and even putting the printer into "black and white" mode, and changing the printer options in the OS to "Mono" it still refuses to print. Brothers own help page says it works [0], but I've followed these and it still doesn't print.

I've tried resetting the printer, updating the firmware and drivers, rebooting both printer and computer.

https://help.brother-usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/52457/s...

But no longer. I have a newish Brother HL-L3230CDW, and it refuses to print because one colour cartridge is reporting as low. I've followed the reset instructions here [0] which has worked previously on this printer, but it doesn't any more. I don't know if it's a firmware update, or a limit to the number of resets it allows.

So tonight I'm unable to print a black and white document I need for work tomorrow because my yellow toner cartridge is reporting low. And I'm going to have to buy new colour cartridges despite very rarely printing in colour.

So I revoke any past recommendation of Brother I've ever made. I hope others stop recommending them too, the new ones are no longer functional. These printers are now as useless as the rest.

(Also - I'm looking for recommendations for actually decent colour laser printers)

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pkgak9S1h7U

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43260126

Points: 36

# Comments: 16

Over the next few decades AI is going to take huge numbers of jobs away from humans.

It doesn't need to fully automate a particular role to take jobs away, it just needs to make a human significantly more productive to the point that one human+AI can replace n>1 humans. This is already happening. 20 years ago a supermarket needed 20 cashiers to run 20 tills. Now it needs 2 to oversee 20 self checkouts and maybe 1 or 2 extra for a few regular lanes.

This extra productivity of a single human is not translating to higher wages or more time off, it's translating to more profits for the companies augmenting humans with AI.

We need to start transitioning to an economic model where humans can work less (because AI supplements their productivity) and the individual humans reap the benefits of all this increased AI capability or were going to end up sleepwalking into a world where the majority have been replaced and have no function in society, and the minority of capital owners control the AI, the money and the power.

I wish we could focus on these nearer term problems that have already started instead of the far more distant existential threat of a human/AI war.

It was pretty beefy for the time. A desktop 4790K CPU, 32gb RAM and a GTX 980M. It was a long time ago, but I think I paid around £1500 for it.

Shout out to https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/ for a great long lasting machine that is very open for maintenance, long before Framework was around. I will absolutely buy from them again next time. Removable battery, replaceable hard drive, ram, cpu, graphics card. Easily open-able case (screws, but I've had it open). They sold me a replacement keyboard for something like £30 when I smashed a few keys by dropping my camera on it.

My inner tech geek is keen to buy something new, but this one is still going strong, and I can't justify spending money when this one works so well. It still plays all the latest games. It's only had two problems over the years. 1) Obviously, the original battery doesn't last very long now. 2) The CPU started overheating after about 5 years when pushed, so I popped the cover open, took the heatsink off and reapplied fresh thermal paste. Has worked perfectly since.

I mean honestly, the single threaded CPU performance only seems to be about 50% behind modern chips. I don't really see many machines even today with 32gb ram.

Things it struggles with these days that I suppose would require a new machine if it bothered you: - 4k gaming. - VR games are a bit too choppy unless you turn the settings right down. (HL:Alyx is playable at pretty much lowest settings) - Probably going to struggle with any generative AI stuff given the older GPU, but I've not tried it.

I code on it, but I don't do high intensive stuff like video editing, 3d work, rendering, etc, so perhaps it would struggle with that kind of stuff.

1. Lack of clarity. I've no problems paying a fee I want and use. But when the fees are hidden at point of sale, and then added later it makes comparisons hard or fees I don't want getting added because I didn't know about them in advance so couldn't change behaviour to avoid them.

2. Fees that don't accurately capture the benefit Vs the cost, and are gamed. Things like "2 peices of hand luggage" with no weight specified. I once had an attendant tell my wife her hat she was carrying counted as one peice, so she had to put in her bag to walk past the check-in desk to avoid being charged a fee for extra hand luggage. And then you get the opposite with schemes like wearing vests to carry extra items without it counting in your hand luggage allowance. I once had to move ~2kg from my hold luggage to my hand luggage because one was over and the other under. Why not literally charge a per kg fee regardless where you store it that way everyone pays for exactly what they use, no gaming. The current fee structure tends to incentivise maxing out on hand luggage to avoid hold fees, which means overhead storage gets crammed full. Charging per kg would shift a portion of this to the hold and make the cabin less cramped and better for everyone.

Here's a video of some french trained eagles showing how easy it is.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b8kZupqPbJs

They create their own thing from scratch, and turn it into a job.

The first 5 from that list were open source creations that became big because they met a need at the time and lots of people adopted them. Which is one route into creating your own thing.

I've seen senior engineers who have leveraged lots of domain knowledge to build a prototype of something super useful internally within a company that then grows in adoption and size as people recognise it's value. Projects then start to organically cluster around the core that was built solo.

I'm imagining a future where AIs try social engineering on humans to convince us to give them root access to our devices.

Most non-technical people I know wouldn't have a clue what a .zip was. Windows has hidden file extensions by default now for decades. And having a phishing link in an email that says something.zip but links to somethingelse.com is a basic scammer 101 level technique. Why would it matter if the .zip was a real part of the URL or not.

Don't get me wrong, I dislike all of the generic TLDs, and the registration process behind them. But of all the points to argue on them, this seems like the weakest and least relevant.

If tried to work more you'd find yourself just waiting for jobs a lot of the time and your average hourly rate would drop even lower.

There just wasn't the same number of developers back then.

I can't find good numbers, but according to [1], there were 612,000 developers in the US in 2002, compared to 4.4 million in 2023 in the. It's reasonable to assume that there were probably an order of magnitude less again in 1984. So very little opportunity to become a 60 year old software engineer in 2023.

I'd hazard a guess that in another 40 years there will be a lot more 60 year old developers. (Either that, or zero because ChatGPT 15 has taken over)

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demogra...

* Yes, I know this doesn't quite hold as I'm sure people switched careers. Particularly early on in the computer industry where I imagine many people switched into software from more technical electrical/hardware type roles. But I still think the major point still stands which is the main reason for the lack of older developers now, is just the lack of younger developers 40 years ago.

But more recently what's put me off is many of their listings aren't hotels, they are private landlords letting apartments Airbnb style. I'd like to be able to filter out those types of listings because having had a few bad experiences with AirBnB in the past what I usually want is a hotel. I don't want to deal with a private landlord hassling me, cleaning deposits, and rules, etc.