Tbh, printing has a large amount of plastic and chemical waste linked to it. One bigger issue is that the printers get bricked too easily and it can sometimes be cheaper, for the consumer, to buy a new printer than get new OEM cartridges.

At home we switched to laser printers exclusively with good 3rd party support for non OEM ink. Does it print as well as the expensive ink, no, but it is close enough.

In the rare cases where we do need to print actual photos, like for passport pictures, we'll just print them as regular prints at the local Walgreens, CVS or Walmart. Prints are always good, and there is no frustration about clogged ink or whatever.

The thing is that a ban need to be careful. Banning single use plastic bags caused an increase in plastic waste as folks just paid for the thicker re-useable ones, and tossed them like the disposable ones. Many re-usable bags were made with plastic that disintegrated in tin of microplastic.

Personally I prefer cotton tote bags or netting style. Lasts for years and years, can be thrown in the wash when needed and cotton will naturally turn into compost if left in wet dirt. It could be made from many other natural fibers.

LG and Samsung have piss poor reputation when it comes to service their products under warranty.

I would much rather buy a low end TV at Costco for a fraction of the cost of a big brand one, slap an Apple TV behind it to do the smart stuff (I have a PS5 that can do that as well, but it don't want to wear the ssd), if you are concerned about the spyware.

We have a 1080p projector with a 120" screen (not used much), a 4K 55" Vizio that is many years out of warranty but looks more than fine. If it goes bad we will probably replace it with the cheapest 75"+ model at Costco. You can get an 85" tv with a 5y warranty from $800. A 75" QLED starts at $550.

I don't know enough about LED vs QLED vs OLED vs mini LED, nor do I really care.

The shame of having bad data would have made them lose face, which is very very bad in Japanese culture. Fabricating facts and manipulation of data is just a normal part of the culture unfortunately.

https://www.ucanews.com/news/w...

One interesting thing is that one of the reasons Japan has such a low official violence and murder rate is that the police will categorize dead bodies discoveries as "abandoned body" rather than declaring a homicide. If they do solve the murder case, then, and only then, will they classify it as a murder case and keep their statistics high on resolving murders. The police is very willing to fabricate false evidence in order to obtain convictions, again, to keep high conviction rates.

https://www.straitstimes.com/a...
https://www.iias.asia/the-news...

They will even condemn innocent mothers. Imagine having your child die in a horrendous fire, then be thrown in jail for murder on top of it.

https://newsonjapan.com/articl...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world...

I was told the pyramids were built by little grey men.

Bitcoin sees a strong use case for illegal transactions.

Some of the rich and powerful like it because it allows them to do transactions with rogue governments such as Iran, Russia, North Korea, to exchange oil, drugs and weapons without using USD.

So overall it is a trading facilitator on black markets where the mighty dollar was bringing too much attention.

What percentage of the bitcoin value is based on the black market? IDK, but I really suspect that is is not negligible.

The only time I tried to get crypto, BTC was $0.10. I was willing to put $100. Unfortunately all the exchanges sites looked very shady so I refrained from sharing my credit card. A pile of 1000 BTC would be nice but at least my conscience is clear. I invested in a house and the stock market instead, and while the could have retired earlier, I have enough for me and my family's needs.

Your CI/CD checks are usually not able to detect that a rogue Dev uploaded the GPL code directly under source control alongside the private code.

Most developers just want to get their assigned features out of the door ASAP. If the CI checks will prevent linking to a GPL library, they can just remove the copyright headers in the files and dump them alongside their changes. They are then promoted for getting stuff done all while the company has now an obfuscated liability.

This is also a big security risk, because the cloned code is usually frozen in time an never get any performance or security updates. If a critical CVE gets disclosed, then the security checks will not able to report the issues.

I've seen this done first hand at different companies.

In one case the dev was working for a competitor while copying the competitor's proprietary code without even removing the copyright headers. When the competitor changed names, the new files came with the updated copyright notice. Upper management pretended to not know and that the competitor's headers were added accidentally.

While I know China is illegally enforcing their human rights violations in the rest of the world, I'm not affiliated with China, do not plan to travel to or through Chinese controlled territories. This mean that China has little to no potential leverage over me.

I can't say the same about US, or European, entities so I find the privacy violations to be a lesser risk with China.

I'm quit conscious that data in China will possibly leak, but I have worked at enough tech companies to know that security breaches are more a 'when' than 'if' questions.

As for Roomba itself, we got one a long time ago, and it is indeed not very good at actually getting floors cleaned, and it takes forever.

Indeed, the companies that were already using docker when I joined them all had hardcoded credentials in the layers, or metadata of the images.

At each one of them one of the first thing I did was to re-implement the image build process to no longer embed credentials, then rotate the credentials. Once you have that add CI checks to scan for the credentials.

The problem comes when you have rogue teams that then decide to build their own CI/CD systems in order to work faster. These teams get rewarded for moving fast even if it jeopardizes the security of the systems, and customer data.

The only way security can be taken more seriously is by giving jail time to higher ups that do not strictly enforce security. I'm not talking about security theatre either, but solid internal enforcements. This means goals and performance reviews should be tied to security practices explicitly.

Any security culture that relies on 'implied' security is doomed to fail. Security goals must be explicit and have more weight than features or they will always be deprioritized for later, which means 'until we get caught'.

As long as CEOs will be able to get away with hiring a Security Officer with zero leverage on the R&D teams, that's just lip service.

Indeed, the one and only time I went to Mexico. I parked my car at the mall on the US side. Walked to revolving bar doors going one way into Mexico and that was it.

Coming back into the US side took much longer and one of the US soldiers yelled at me for taking a picture of a building. That was before the memos saying that public photography of public federal buildings is always ok.

The fact that San Francisco ended up looking worse than Tijuana is sad.

I think one of the reasons the Hollywood establishment is afraid is that Netflix might not follow the "Hollywood accounting" tradition.

Netflix has proven that they can create just as good, as well as shitty, shows and movies as the existing players.

An other thing in Netflix strategy that I have not really seen the incumbents do is to import foreign shows as-is. Things like The magnificent Seven, Three Men and a Baby, True Lies, The Office, ... to name a few, were remade in the US while most of the audience had no clue they were remakes.

Other than mostly animated stuff like the movies from Studio Ghibly I don't remember Disney importing things from overseas. Netflix has exposed the US audiences to many great shows from Europe, Asia and even South America such as Money Heist, Squid Game, ...

Netflix is doing things differently than old Hollywood, and it works. Just like Apple disrupted the music industry where everyone hated the record labels, so is Netflix disrupting the tv and movie industry. Personally I do not miss the Comcastic days of cable tv.

You realize that Netflix was no longer funded by VC money and became publicly traded years before they ever streamed their first video?

The IPO was in 2002, they announced streaming in 2007.

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

AFAIK Netflix did not use Amazon, or pets.com, model to grow through massive losses. They managed their growth in a sustainable manner. Arguably the DVD subscriptions did finance the migration to streaming for a few years but that was without 'VC' money at that point.

Disclaimer: I'm a former employee and a shareholder.

That's one of the things that the pedantic in me is getting a cringe about. Hot glue and other melted things don't usually 'dry'. They either simpl y harden because the temperature is below their melting point or they cure due to a chemical reaction. Even concrete does not harden by drying, the wetness simply enables the chemical reaction to occur.

In the case of that plane modification, if they did use something that cures, it -might- have helped. But please, please, do not fix or modify critical components of planes with JB Weld. Sure you could fix the toilet door with JB weld for all I care (probably illegal), but not anything vital.

I have family members that got almost killed by bad doctors several times, but the doctors did eventually succeed with a few of them.

In one case my grandmother with dementia probably fell down the stairs, and her brain was bleeding. Local hospital was clueless, so my parents drove 1h to an other hospital that immediately diagnosed the issue and scheduled the surgery. A few minutes later they overheard the surgeon getting yelled at for wasting money on an elderly woman (French universal healthcare). Surgery was successful, and she lived several more years until unrelated issues killed her. That story is too long but also caused by poor medical practices.

Also in France, my dad suffered from massive headaches. The local hospital put him in cardiology because they lacked room in neurology. It took days before a doctor bothered to come see him, nurses not being helpful. They could not find anything wrong. Eventually we brought an external Dr and in 5 minutes he diagnosed a non fatal meningitis, easily treatable with antibiotics. The hospital doctors confirmed with a spinal tap. They decided they should do more spinal taps twice daily. My dad took the pills and GTFO. He went back 30y later for an other issue, and left him sitting in the hallway all day long without seeing anyone, a few days later they decided he needed treatment but it was too late and he never recovered.

Personally I suffered from similar symptoms to Chron's disease. I had my wife drive me to the ER a few times after work with me crying in pain. The nurse assumed I wanted opioids, while I wanted to get diagnosed. The ER folks did not really help. I was later diagnosed through an endoscopy, my small intestine was indeed inflamed. It turns out I was somehow allergic to the posh greens served at the Google cafeteria.

If you grew up in the US you will probably remember that most Dr were promoting DARE, which has been debunked as a scam to defraud money (look it up). The food pyramid has also been debunked as made up pseudoscience. in the 1990s margarine would protect your heart, while butter would give you heart attacks; debunked.

From what I have witnessed, Drs are only guesstimating a lot of things, yet they behave as if they are sure of things. A lot of them have a hard time thinking outside the box, and we need to do our own research and advocate for proper diagnosis, even if the Drs do not like it.

They would protect the data against data breaches better if that were their true concern:

https://nypost.com/2025/12/01/...

Revenue comes from the Sales organization.
Missing features are what prevent sales.
Sales then tell Product Managers to prioritize a niche feature to help one potential sale.
Pam then prioritize a proof of concept implementation to be added to the current release cycle, over any other priority.

Rinse and repeat. Work to get the code base to production quality level is almost never reaching the top of the priority queue.

Even google has that issue where promotion committees put a much higher value on customer visible features and little to no value on writing good scalable and stable code. This is similar to how Boeing got an into the quality shit show that killed hundreds.