NaibofTabr

Why is it often cheaper to buy new than repair old

This may be true in single instances, but long-term it is often cheaper to repair a single device than repeatedly buy new replacements.

The Compact Disc is 43 years old.

Ocarina of Time is 27 years old.

There are people born after 9/11 who are old enough to be worrying about mortgage payments.

The Goron Mines in Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess:

This is one of my favorite locations in the game with all the magnetic boot tricks, including the miniboss fight:

This is a great point. Do the cameras have microphones? Is it a two-party/all-party consent state?

Now you need to get consent from every person who might end up being recorded.

Might also be worth pointing out in an HOA meeting that if this guy buys and configures the cameras himself then he has access to watch everybody. How much does the rest of the community trust this guy to not be creeping on everyone else?

IP cameras here that have local access only

This is the right way.

No proprietary SaaS portals, no cloud uploads, no apps, no external network links.

Hopefully the local connections are encrypted and the devices on the network are segmented into VLANs, otherwise anyone on the local network could just watch the video stream.

Roblox exploits child labor for profit:

Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers

Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper.

The term "hallucinate" is a euphemism being pushed by the AI peddlers.

It's a computer program. It doesn't "hallucinate", it has errors.

In all cases of ML models being sold by companies, what you are actually looking at is poorly tested software that is not fit for purpose, and has far less actual capability then what the marketing promises.

"Hallucination" in the context of LLMs is marketing bullshit designed to deflect from the reality that none of these programs have been properly quality checked and are extremely error prone.

If Excel gave bad answers for calculations 20% of the time it wouldn't be "hallucinating", it would just be broken, buggy software that requires more development time before distribution as a useful product.

These "user-friendly" network cameras are frequently bought and set up by people who have no idea what they're doing, which leads to thousands of them being accessible to anyone on the Internet:

Bitsight Identifies Thousands of Security Cameras Openly Accessible on the Internet

Wyze cameras let some owners see into a stranger’s home — again

Security startup Verkada hack exposes 150,000 security cameras in Tesla factories, jails, and more

Somebody’s Watching: Hackers Breach Ring Home Security Cameras

Even the companies that make and distribute these cameras don't secure them properly.

In some of these cases getting access to the camera barely even qualifies as hacking. If you know the web address of the camera you can just type it into your web browser and get the live video feed because it's just being streamed to the public Internet, no authentication or encryption. That means someone on the other side of the planet or someone in the house next door can just start watching what's going on in your house.

If the HOA insists on installing cameras, you should insist that they hire a professional to install and configure them correctly and maintain them long-term to prevent security breaches. Someone has to keep the firmware/software up to date when the manufacturer releases security patches and bug fixes, not just for the cameras but also for the network they're connected to. This means you don't just need to pay for one-time installation, you need to hire an employee long-term.

I would also ask the pushy neighbor if he was specifically planning on buying Wyze cameras for this. They've had multiple security problems in recent years.

A halfway intelligent thief could just use the camera to see where things worth stealing are kept and what time of day is best for breaking in unnoticed. If this is not done properly it will make the security worse, not better.

I was wondering the other day if it would be possible to convert a typewriter into a printer

This is essentially what early digital printers were: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printing

The letter hammers were rearranged into a circle which would spin to align the character with the page:

Basically the same mechanism as the typewriter, without the keyboard.

This was later replaced with dot-matrix printers, which were similar in that a mechanical striker would whack an ink ribbon into a sheet of paper to make a mark. The dot-matrix replaced the fixed characters of the daisy wheel with a row of pins that could be selectively raised or lowered to make different patterns of dots:

(for words anyway, not pictures)

Well, there's always ASCII...

Congressional maps have always been redrawn by the party in power to ensure that they remain in power. I would expect Democrats to be doing the same thing if we were talking about California.

Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Those who died are justified