Does it matter that the intended grifter didn't get paid?

Brand.

It's like Lyft for AirBnB for GitHub.

No arms, no legs, no manipulator I can see in their demo. What does it _do_ but look around?

No. Never, ever use a cotton wool bud (Q-tip) to clean helical scan video heads!

The danger is more than fibers detaching. The likelihood is high that you'll snag the head and make a vertical up-and-down motion, detaching the fragile head from its substrate. It's to be cleaned only in a back-and -forth motion, never up-and-down.

They used to sell plastic head cleaning sticks covered with chamois on the end for the purpose. Not sure what you'd use today if you didn't have one.

Cleaning tapes aren't great, but they eliminate this danger from clueless consumers' cleaning practice.

My brother bought one of those and I've never seen a laptop self-destruct so fast. The kids school Chromebooks are HPs too: a load of junk.

We used to say in the olden days that after the bomb dropped, the only things left would be Cockroaches and HP Calculators.

Not anymore!

Good and general thoughts.

I've come to mine from the position of having at least two prior careers ended by the march of technology. Not bitter about 'em, but they were kind of a scramble (for the first) and frustrating (for the second).

I used to make beautiful and challenging special effects slide work on what has been called variously a "Rostrum Camera", an "Animation Stand" or an "Optical Printer". I'd have held my skills up to anyone else's in my large metro at the time. Then came "Genigraphics" - GE's computer-generated slides. They looked frankly, like crap. Those in my profession thought "OK, but they'll never be so good they'll displace us". But they turned out to be "good enough" for most business people, much faster than what we were doing. And eventually I saw the initial images coming out of Photoshop and realized I had to scramble for a new career.

That career was rich computer-based multimedia (on CD-ROMs in the marketplace, but not exclusively). I took my creative skills, retooled with software for making images and 3D animations and multimedia programming. I worked happily enough in that for maybe another decade before the Web really started pushing on me. "OK, but the web will never be so good it displaces rich multimedia". But in fact, it was obviously good enough for everyone else. And it eventually became media-rich enough that the distinction just doesn't even apply.

In both examples: Speed in the first, and Connectedness in the second, the advantage I didn't completely understand was what undermined my craft as a career. I was just as good on day N as day N+1. But I came to understand that it's vanity to think I couldn't be replaced by something "lesser", even if it had an advantage I didn't.

"Oh sure, but they won't have..." - yes, it may take a while, but eventually, they will.

Just gotten used to my cheese moving (and happily no longer in the workforce during what's bound to be a turbulent t ime).

Worry for my kids, though.

With great respect for your skills and your long tenure as a coder, a couple other ideas here:

1. We're all (me included) looking at this at a moment in time, at "AI", however it's construed, in mid-2025.

Have LLM's and their recent ingestion of the Internet reached the point of diminishing returns and we've reached a stasis? Or are we soon going to see more punctuated equilibrium and AIs that are advanced enough to do the whole thing buglessly from a product description?

I really don't know, and I've seen positions advocated from all over the spectrum. But I do realize that the main constant in the world is change.

2. Can you call someone a "machinist" if they've never performed a taper by hand on a screw-driven lathe, but only fed stock into and programmed a CNC lathe to do the job?

I think that a machinist today probably has to do little machining by hand, or that that specialty is a boutique trade.

So maybe a machinist is someone who knows something about the domain and can use the tools to do productive work.

The world changes around us, and orphans our crafts all the time.

This. Claude is flat out great at the boilerplate. Certainly better than me: it comes up with more thorough solutions than I would ('cuz I'm lazy), and in instances where I'd have to dig into arcane platform docs (multiplatform stuff), it just knows.

Lets me get to the _real_ work of a project far quicker.

Answering my own question: changing the default admin password apparently IS a mitigation for the issue that firmware update cannot fix.

https://support.brother.com/g/...

If simply changing the admin password (as I have) is enough mitigation.

Is it possible to generate a magic password that opens admin access regardless?

I think one of the issues is that the printer can become a platform for creating DDOS attacks, outbound from your network: part of a botnet.

Placing it on your local network is protection from somebody accessing it directly from the Internet, but not from automated attacks from other affected devices on your network.

Actually, Brother printers have traditionally been one of the best responses to the razors-and-blades scam.

Yes, they sell toner (for mine), but there's no vendor lock-in that I've been able to find (unlike HP, which I'll never buy).

They're solid, great value plays, for not much money.

What, are you just not going to have a printer?

Well...yeah!

Didn't know about this. Very cool.

Well, maybe over the network: random as a service.

You of course lose provability, but if true randomness became necessary for some future phone app, you could just ask for and receive one.