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.

Hmm, so invest?

I don’t see why not, though they’d probably want a concession like splitting E. WA and E. Oregon into a new state. Regardless, political power tends to change every 2-4 years, a party retaining control over all three houses for more than that is incredibly rare.

Hawaii was 1959, and was the last state.

So far. I still hold out hope for Canada Puerto Rico.