Suck onward
I only had this one day to catch up on all kinds of stuff here in Santa Barbara, and ended up spending half of it trying to get our two printers working. The Brother is a laser printer that only worked on Wi-Fi after I downloaded new drivers and installed them with my wife’s laptop—and then only for that laptop. My laptop only worked when I plugged into the printer with the USB-C to USB-B cable that, by luck, Best Buy had in stock. That round trip took just one of the hours I spent on the whole job. The other printer is an Epson that has new ink but can’t feed a sheet of paper. The rollers are too old and dry, I suppose. Maybe it’ll still scan, but I won’t know until I’m back in a couple of weeks.
Anyway, I’ve been here before. See Printers Suck, which I posted more than ten years ago.
Where and how everything might be wrong
Riley Hughes says we live in an age of default disbelief. As an example of this at work, Phil Windley and I went through the doomscroll-bait in my Facebook feed, and co-decided what was fake and what wasn’t:
Mountain goats doing impossible shit on sheer cliffs? Fake.
Amish farmers with folk remedies? Fake.
Animals doing impossible things? Fake.
Experiment with a dish full of ball bearings? Probably real.
Ads for chair yoga, chair tai chi, gizmo for sensing water movement, phone mounts for cars, weird science facts, stuff about astronomy and geology, health advice, interviews with musicians, countless fruitless takedowns of Trump? Mostly real, probably.
Okay, now: See this comment (effectively an ad) under this post? In what ways might it be real or not?
Learning to tell the difference is the main calling of the Digital Age, so far. And we will, because we’re human and the best AI can do is emulate that.
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