tal

The tech could represent the end of visual fact — the idea that video could serve as an objective record of reality — as we know it.

We already declared that with the advent of photoshop.

I think that this is “video” as in “moving images”. Photoshop isn’t a fantastic tool for fabricating video (though, given enough time and expense, I suppose that it’d be theoretically possible to do it, frame-by-frame). In the past, the limitations of software have made it much harder to doctor up — not impossible, as Hollywood creates imaginary worlds, but much harder, more expensive, and requiring more expertise — to falsify a video of someone than a single still image of them.

I don’t think that this is the “end of truth”. There was a world before photography and audio recordings. We had ways of dealing with that. Like, we’d have reputable organizations whose role it was to send someone to various events to attest to them, and place their reputation at stake. We can, if need be, return to that.

And it may very well be that we can create new forms of recording that are more-difficult to falsify. A while back, to help deal with widespread printing technology making counterfeiting easier, we rolled out holographic images, for example.

I can imagine an Internet-connected camera — as on a cell phone — that sends a hash of the image to a trusted server and obtains a timestamped, cryptographic signature. That doesn’t stop before-the-fact forgeries, but it does deal with things that are fabricated after-the-fact, stuff like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourist_guy

That depends on how you define the web

Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

The Gopher protocol (/ˈɡoʊfər/ ⓘ) is a communication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.[1]

gopher.floodgap.com is one of the last running Gopher servers, was the one that I usually used as a starting point when firing up a gopher client. It has a Web gateway up:

https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/

Gopher is a well-known information access protocol that predates the World Wide Web, developed at the University of Minnesota during the early 1990s. What is Gopher? (Gopher-hosted, via the Public Proxy)

This proxy is for Gopher resources only – using it to access websites won’t work and is logged!

I questioned Reddit doing so, and now we’ve got it on the Threadiverse. There are privacy issues unless your home instance is proxying images for you.

How many of you out there are browsing the web using Gofer?

Gopher predated the Web.

I do agree that there have been pretty major changes in the way websites worked, though. I’m not hand-coding pages using a very light, Markdown-like syntax with <em></em>, <a href=""></a>, and <h1></h1> anymore, for example.

before they agreed to fix the price at $1 in September.

Probably not going to be enforced, given the context, but I believe that this is illegal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_fixing#United_States

Price fixing is an anticompetitive agreement between participants on the same side in a market to buy or sell a product, service, or commodity only at a fixed price, or maintain the market conditions such that the price is maintained at a given level by controlling supply and demand.

In the United States, price fixing can be prosecuted as a criminal federal offense under Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act.[3]

Criminal prosecutions must be handled by the U.S. Department of Justice, but the Federal Trade Commission also has jurisdiction for civil antitrust violations. Many state attorneys general also bring antitrust cases and have antitrust offices, such as Virginia, New York, and California. Further, where price fixing is used as an artifice to defraud a U.S. government agency into paying more than market value, the U.S. attorney may proceed under the False Claims Act.

Private individuals or organizations may file lawsuits for triple damages for antitrust violations and, depending on the law, recover attorneys fees and costs expended on prosecution of a case.[4][5] If the case at hand also violates the False Claims Act of 1863, in addition to the Sherman Act, private individuals may also bring a civil action in the name of the United States under the Qui Tam provision of The False Claims Act.

Under American law, exchanging prices among competitors can also violate the antitrust laws. That includes exchanging prices with the intent to fix prices or the exchange affecting the prices individual competitors set. Proof that competitors have shared prices can be used as part of the evidence of an illegal price fixing agreement.[5] Experts generally advise that competitors avoid even the appearance of agreeing on price.[5]

I would guess that it’s probably not much by way of change — theoretically, maybe just a single line patch — to cause this check not to take place.

That’s actually a really interesting question.

I understand that Apple takes issue with packages that can themselves “take packages”. But historically, I don’t believe that Google has. Of course, Google also hasn’t done the registration thing historically, either.

I don’t see why it would need to be affected.

The constraint to require a valid signing isn’t something imposed by the license on the Android code. If you want to distribute a version of Android that doesn’t check for a registered signature, that should work fine.

I mean, the Graphene guys could impose that constraint. But they don’t have to do so.

I think that there’s a larger issue of practicality, though. Stuff like F-Droid works in part because you don’t need to install an alternative firmware on your phone — it’s not hard to install an alternate app store with the stock firmware. If suddenly using a package from a developer that isn’t registered with Google requires installing an alternate firmware, that’s going to severely limit the potential userbase for that package.

Even if you can handle installing the alternate firmware, a lot of developers probably just aren’t going to bother trying to develop software without being registered.

I wouldn’t put it entirely outside the realm of possibility, but I think that that’s probably unlikely.

The entire US only has about 161 million people working at the moment. In order for a 97 million shift to happen, you’d have to manage to transition most human-done work in the US to machines, using one particular technology, in 10 years.

Is that technically possible? I mean, theoretically.

I’m pretty sure that to do something like that, you’d need AGI. Then you’d need to build systems that leveraged it. Then you’d need to get it deployed.

What we have today is most-certainly not AGI. And I suspect that we’re still some ways from developing AGI. So we aren’t even at Step 1 on that three-part process, and I would not at all be surprised if AGI is a gradual development process, rather than a “Eureka” moment.

Plotters do (well, ones that feed off a roll rather than using a table). Common if you need to do larger prints.

Supported paper sizes include North American letter, tabloid, European A4, A3, 11-inch-wide rolls, and 27mm-wide rolls.

Here’s 11-inch rolls:

https://buyrolls.com/11-x-150-20-plotter-paper-2-core-8-rolls-case.html

I’ve used pen plotters that feed off a roll like that. One benefit is that you don’t have restrictions on how long your print is — you can make very large continuous images. That can be desirable for certain applications.

The pen plotter I used had a paper cutter that sliced the paper at the end of a print. I don’t know if this thing slices at the end of each page or what.

kagis

Ah. Apparently it also can handle pre-cut sheets, and it additionally has a cutter for the roll:

https://www.hackster.io/news/the-open-printer-is-a-raspberry-pi-zero-w-powered-fully-open-highly-flexible-inkjet-printer-30948a1787cc

The printer’s paper, meanwhile, can be loaded as pre-cut sheets in letter, tabloid, A4, and A3 sizes, or as a continuous roll — with a built-in cutter knife able to trim the latter to the desired size following the completion of each page.

I dunno if they have a paper feeder, or if you have to insert pre-cut sheets one at a time, which I imagine would be obnoxious.

You can get inkjet printers that don’t have restrictions on the ink. They cost more, though.

The reason printer manufacturers are so hell-bent on being a pain in the ass with the ink is because they’re using a razor-and-blades model. They’re selling you the printer at a lower price than they really should, if their price reflected their costs, with the expectation that they’ll make their money back when you buy ink at a higher price than you really should, because people pay more attention to the the initial price of the printer than to the consumable costs.

Same way you can get unlocked cell phones instead of network-locked cell phones with a plan. Gaming PCs instead of consoles. It’s not that they’re unavailable, but you’re gonna have to accept a higher up-front cost, because you’re not getting a subsidy from the manufacturer.

Canon sells a line of inkjet printers that just take ink from a bottle. No hassles with restrictions on ink supply there. The ink is cheap, and there are third-party options that are even cheaper readily available…but you’re going to pay full price for the printer.

https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/printers/megatank-printers

Their lowest-end “MegaTank” printer is $230:

https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/megatank-pixma-g3290

A pack of third-party ink refill bottles is $15, and will print (using Canon’s metrics), about 7,700 color pages and 9,000 black-and-white pages:

https://www.amazon.com/Refill-Compatible-Bottles-MegaTank-4-Pack/dp/B0DSPSS5W7

Compatible GI-21 Black Ink Bottle Up to 9,000 pages, GI-21 Cyan/Magenta/Yellow Ink Bottles Up to 7,700 pages

On the other hand, Canon’s lowest-end “cartridge” printer, where they use the razor-and-blades model, is $55.

https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/pixma-ts3720-wireless-home-all-in-one-printer

But you rapidly pay for it with the ink; It looks like they presently sell a set of replacement cartridges for $91. And that set will print a tiny fraction of the number of pages that the above ink bottles will print.

page yield of 400 Black / 400 Color pages per ink cartridge set and cost of $90.99 for a value pack of PG-285(XL) and CL-286(XL) ink cartridges (using Canon Online Store prices as of June 2025).

So if you really do want to do photo prints with an inkjet without dealing with all the DRM-on-ink stuff, you can do it today. But…you’re going to pay more for the printer.

All that being said, I do think that lasers are awfully nice in that you don’t need to deal with nozzles clogging. You can leave a laser printer for years and it’ll just work when you start it up. If you don’t need photo output, just less hassle.

While I’d personally love to see an open color lazer printer more. (Less wasteful and more rugged)

I use a black-and-white laser printer, but if I were going to use a color laser printer, I’d like to have an open color laser printer simply because I’d like to have a printer that isn’t dumping printer tracking dots into each image I print.

It’s not often that you see a group of four states on a social value issue where Utah and California are in the same group, but there you are.

I’m the other way. I’d rather have battery life on cell phones, and turn the refresh rate down.

On a desktop, where the power usage is basically irrelevant, then sure, I’ll crank the refresh rate way up. One of the most-immediately-noticeable things is the mouse pointer, and that doesn’t exist on touch interfaces.

Not a video game, but since I try to reference relevant Threadiverse communities when I can, if you’re not aware of it, you might enjoy [email protected].

goes to Steam, searches for items with tags “Anime”, “Singleplayer”, and “Shooter”, type “Game” to exclude bundles, sorts by “User Reviews”

https://store.steampowered.com/search?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&tags=4085%2C4182%2C1774&category1=998&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

295 results match your search. 97 titles have been excluded based on your preferences.

That’s not logged in, so I assume that the 97 probably have adult content or something that Valve defaults to not showing, so figure ~400 games.

EDIT: It looks like “Shooter” can also mean stuff like shmups or rail shooters. You may be interested in that, but if not, replacing the “Shooter” tag with the “FPS” (first-person shooter) tag:

https://store.steampowered.com/search?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&tags=4085%2C4182%2C1663&category1=998&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

Or the “Third-person shooter” tag:

https://store.steampowered.com/search?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&tags=4085%2C4182%2C3814&category1=998&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

EDIT2: Apparently and obnoxiously, Valve didn’t make search URL links compatible between the mobile version of the site and the desktop version of the site. The above was from a desktop browser. But if you’re on mobile, you can probably recreate the search by adding the same tags.

Ah, gotcha. Just for the record — though it doesn’t really matter as regards your point, because I was incorrectly assuming that you were using it as an example of with something with Firewire onboard — there are apparently two different products:

The 1010 has a PCI card, but it talks to an external box:

The 1010LT has a PCI card alone, no external box, and then a ton of cables that fan out directly from the card:

Neither appears to have a Firewire interface. IIRC, the 1010LT was less expensive, was the one I was using.

I have a feeling its mostly due to some audio and video hardware that has some real longevity. I’ve got a VHS+minidv player that I am transferring old videos from using FireWire (well, for the minidv. VHS is s-video capture).

Yeah, that’s a thought…though honestly, unless whatever someone is doing requires real-time processing and adding latency is a problem, they can probably pass it through some other old device that can speak both Firewire and something else.

Probably the m-audio delta 1010

That doesn’t have a Firewire interface, does it? I thought I had one of those.

checks

Oh, I’m thinking of the 1010LT, not the 1010. That lives on a PCI card.

If it’s Linux, sounds like it should just work out of box, at least for a while longer.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/linux-to-support-firewire-until-2029

Linux to Support Firewire Until 2029

The ancient connectivity standard still has years of life ahead of it.

Firewire is getting a new lease on life and will have extended support up to 2029 on Linux operating systems. Phoronix reports that a Linux maintainer Takashi Sakamoto has volunteered to oversee the Firewire subsystem for Linux during this time, and will work on Firewire’s core functions and sound drivers for the remaining few that still use the connectivity standard.

Further, Takashi Sakamoto says that his work will help users transition from Firewire to more modern technology standards (like perhaps USB 2.0). Apparently, Firewire still has a dedicated fanbase that is big enough to warrant six more years of support. But we suspect this will be the final stretch for Firewire support, surrounding Linux operating systems. Once 2029 comes around, there’s a good chance Firewire will finally be dropped from the Linux kernel altogether.