I got a Brother INKvestment Tank MFC-J4335DW. I think it was a Wirecutter pick. The ink is supposed to last for up to a year, it's a Brother so there's no fuckery, it does color and b+w, prints, copies, scans and faxes. Since my PC is old (Win7), I had a little difficulty setting it up, but it's worked perfectly ever since.
Pricing on that unit: you can find used and refurbished ones for about $120, but I hate buying used printers. After poking around the Internet a bit, I bought a new one online from Staples for $179.99 (which is MSRP). It's over the minimum limit, so I got free shipping; it showed up at my door the next day.
I have a Staples rewards account; they had an offer where you got 30% of your purchase price back in rewards points (you need to activate the offer first) [this offer is still available]. So they gave me 10680 points for that 30% reward, plus another 178 points for the purchase. I took the ink cartridges out of the old printer and gave them to Staples Recycling for another 100 points each. I also gave them my old printer to recycle (easier than taking it to the towns e-waste event every spring); they gave me another 500 points for that, plus 1000 points because it was my first time recycling tech with them.
In total, I got 12858 points, worth about $64 in store credit. Since I actually do use office supplies, I know I'll use the credit: for example, yesterday, I picked up 4 reams of printer paper for $3.74 each (though I do miss their back-to-school penny-paper week!).
Anyway, that's what I went with: the Brother MFC-J4335DW from Staples. YMMV.
Ubuntu is a good idea to get the new one of the best ones in the world and the other one is a little bit of a lot of people who are like a lot of people who are like that and I don’t know what to do with it but I don’t know what to do with it but I think they are going to be a good day to go to the store.
Because if you can get a program to write a program, that can both a) write it self, and b) improve upon the program in some way, you can put together a feedback where exponential improvement is possible.
Generative AI has allowed us to do some things that we could not do before. A lot of people very foolishly took that to mean it would let us do everything we couldn’t do before.
TL;DR: Yes, but the ways in which it could go wrong if done incorrectly mean it is essentially guaranteed to be deemed never worth the risk.
Microwaves don’t heat food “from the inside” necessarily, but from a depth that the microwaves manage to penetrate into it. In the cases of the microwave frequencies used in domestic appliances, that translates to around 4cm, give or take a small amount. So you would theoretically be able to heat your subject subcutaneously down to that depth. Note that the surface would also get heated in the process. There are fancy formulae to determine what the graph looks like of energy imparted to water (for sake of argument) in what proportion at what depth, but I won’t get into that here. This may or may not be useful for some manner of non-supervillian related purpose, but I can’t think of what that might be off the top of my head.
If the question is, “does exposure to microwaves cause any kind of freaky health effects, cause cancer, or induce mutant superpowers over and above just heating up the subject,” the answer insofar as we can determine is no.
However, it is absolutely possible to cause a wide array of boring old regular injuries up to an including death by, not to put too fine a point on it, cooking people. It’s very easy to bring water and other liquids to a boil by heating via microwave, for instance, and doing that inside the subject’s skin is probably a recipe for disaster. You would have to be able to accurately control the amount of energy imparted on the subject, and you would need some compelling reason why you’d have to do that via microwave versus innumerable more traditional methods many of which are inherently fail-safe, like just immersing them in warm water.
Your skin can (kinda sort of) sense temperature, but what about the muscle, fat and bone that sits below the skin? If those parts get suddenly heated up, would you even notice before it’s too late? If not, this could lead to some serious damage.
One of my grandfathers used to work for Nortel. One of the projects he worked on was the Trans Canada Microwave, which was a microwave relay system built in the '50s to carry television and telephone signals across Canada. The towers were installed all over Canada in remote locations and high elevations. Maintenance on the system could be required even when the weather was bad. My grandfather told me that the engineers who worked on the towers would sometimes stick their hands in front of the microwave emitters to warm them up. It’s anecdotal, but I’m relatively confident that it’s theoretically possible to warm people with microwaves.
Big caveat, though. Those engineers knew how powerful the emitters were, they knew that microwaves are not ionizing radiation and thus posed no cancer risk, they knew roughly what percentage of their hands was composed of water, and thus how much heat energy their hands would absorb from the emitters at a given power level. That’s the only reason they were willing to do it, well that and they were probably the kind of people who got a kick out of doing something that would appear insane to most of the populace.
It seems very unlikely to me that a microwave system could be turned into a safe people-heating system for at least the following reasons:
Feedback loops. All modern HVAC works on feedback loops. Your thermostat detects that the temperate is cold, it fires up your furnace / heat pump / electric baseboard / whatever and produces more heat. When the thermostat detects that the temperature has reached the set-point, it shuts off the heat. Current thermostats would not be able to detect the effect of microwave heating, which prevent the establishment of a feedback control loop.
Uneven heating. Things with more water will heat up a lot faster than things with little water. This is usually fine when microwaving food since most of our food is water, in varying concentrations. If you’re heating up a burger in the microwave, you can put the patty in by itself for a minute, then put the bun in for 15 seconds, then reassemble a burger that doesn’t have a cold patty or a stiff overcooked bun. If you’re heating up a person, you can’t ask them to take out their almost-entirely-water eyeballs to ensure they don’t overheat.
Failure conditions. If your heat gets stuck in the on setting, the maximum result is probably that your house will get sweltering hot but not hot enough to kill you in a moderate timeframe. Depending on power levels, a microwave heating system could internally cook people in their sleep if it entered a failure mode where the heating got stuck in the on setting.
Efficiency. It takes a considerable amount of power to run even a small microwave, and that’s blasting microwaves into a relatively tiny cubic area. Trying to heat people would require microwaving a much larger volume, and said volume would also be moving around. Trying to emit microwaves in even a house-sized volume would probably be prohibitively costly.
Interactions with metal and other objects. Microwaves can create intense electrical fields around metal objects, and those can become intense enough to create plasma and electrical arcs. Hell, you can create plasma in your microwave with two grapes. Blasting microwaves into a large volume with unknown contents would be a great way to create an unexpected fire.
I think there’s a lot of armchair simplification going on here. Easy to call investors dumb but it’s probably a bit more complex.
AI might not get better than where it is now but if it does, it has the power to be a societally transformative tech which means there is a boatload of money to be made. (Consider early investors in Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and even the much derided Bitcoin.)
Then consider that until incredibly recently, the Turing test was the yardstick for intelligence. We now have to move that goalpost after what was preciously unthinkable happened.
And in the limited time with AI, we’ve seen scientific discoveries, terrifying advancements in war and more.
Heck, even if AI gets better at code (not unreasonable, sets of problems with defined goals/outputs etc, even if it gets parts wrong shrinking a dev team of obscenely well paid engineers to maybe a handful of supervisory roles… Well, like Wu Tang said, Cash Rules Everything Around Me.
Tl;dr: huge possibilities, even if there’s a small chance of an almost infinite payout, that’s a risk well worth taking.
When ChatGPT first started to make waves, it was a significant step forward in the ability for AIs to sound like a person. There were new techniques being used to train language models, and it was unclear what the upper limits of these techniques were in terms of how “smart” of an AI they could produce. It may seem overly optimistic in retrospect, but at the time it was not that crazy to wonder whether the tools were on a direct path toward general AI. And so a lot of projects started up, both to leverage the tools as they actually were, and to leverage the speculated potential of what the tools might soon become.
Now we’ve gotten a better sense of what the limitations of these tools actually are. What the upper limits of where these techniques might lead are. But a lot of momentum remains. Projects that started up when the limits were unknown don’t just have the plug pulled the minute it seems like expectations aren’t matching reality. I mean, maybe some do. But most of the projects try to make the best of the tools as they are to keep the promises they made, for better or worse. And of course new ideas keep coming and new entrepreneurs want a piece of the pie.
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