A good example is the removal of the spring & washer used to secure the attachments: they are only a few cents of material, but they greatly increase the life expectancy of the mixer. Now you'll have to get those for $10-$20 from a 3rd party...
I don't think the bar is very high to be a good printing company. Brother is at the top, but that doesn't mean they're excelling, they're maybe not as visibly trying to actively screw their user base.
Our requires its Windows drivers re-installed every while to even print anything (not an issue with Macs tho). Also, Brother is naturally on with the locked down cartridge, can't-print-bw-cause-you-low-on-magenta bandwagon with all other manufacturers.
I saw a fridge that had an app so you could control it from anywhere.
My requirements for a fridge are remarkably simple, to the point the only practical use I could think of an app was alarm that I'd left the door open or something.
(If this particular app did have a door-open alarm, it wasn't on the list of features. It did say you could adjust the temperature from your office. A location I'm often worrying about the fridge.)
I need a printer to print. Ideally at acceptable prices (I know, ink cartrigaes are like razor blades and that won't change ever). Plus points if it can be connected to a network (which is a given today). I don't have to print when not at home (why would I fax something to myself when I am not at home?).
Ideally, as I print photos mainly, I get more then 4 colors and decent color management.
Added bonus for scanning (with or without document feeder).
Not much else there. Pay-per-page subscriptions are ok, by the way, price wise for home office use.
Then it comes down to innovation in the fields of color management, ink mixing and print heads and paper handling. And inks, of course.
Anything else is just pointless, and nothing I would call innovation.
Epson make EcoTank inkjet printers ink tanks that you refill from a bottle, not cartridges. It's vastly better than ink cartridges, there's no comparison on price, convenience or environmental impact. The tanks and bottles hold vastly more ink than a cartridge does. The printers are roughly the same price as any inkjet printer. I do not work for Epson.
I have an ET-8550 at home. Considerably more expensive than a comparable non-tank printer, with a factor of two give or take. Without a deal I got, it would have been out of budget.
Compared to a Canon Pro-200, they break even was somehwere around 300 printed a4 photo mark if I remember my detailed calculation correctly (850 bucks for the Epson and 460 bucks for Canon).
But yes, I love that printer! Because as a person, I do not think like my busoness case, hence with the tank printer I do kot think about print costs, as the purchase price is gone and mentally accounted for.
I never compared the non photo-capable EcoTank and whatever canon calls their tank printers to the cartridge cousins so.
Glad you like your ET-8550! That's quite a high end, expensive printer. I have a much less expensive one, though, on reflection, I agree the initial purchase price is higher than cartridge ink jets.
There are only so many A3+ sized photoprinters on the market. Decent ones that is that don't suck at B/W printing. It, for me at least, came down to either the ET-8550 or the Canon Pro-200. Break-even was somewhere around 300 a4 photos, based on retail price for the printer. So initially, I was inclined to take the Canon one.
Then I got a decent deal on a ET-8550, and the peace of mind to not re-run ink costs everytike you print, plus the Epsons home office printer functions, closed that decision. And the Epson print quality is really good, even B/W, so far, with the right media setting and paper, no colour tints whatsoever (at least that I can see).
They have fewer points of technical failure; they don’t create security attack surface; they save bandwidth; they get you talking to your friends, family or neighbours more; most food waste biodegrades, so it’s not really “waste”.
What litte food is wasted because people buy stuff they alrwady have by forgetting what's in the fridge pales in comparison the necessary effort and resources spent in building and installing cameras un a fridge and run the infrastructure necessary to connect those cameras to a phone over the internet.
for sure I haven't run the numbers, but I think you may be underestimating the impact of food spillage / waste. Not only is spillage huge in the US [1], but one has to take into account where the loss is.
A pepper that you buy, cook and then throw away represents a considerable investment:
* you spent energy cooking it
* your supermarket had to stock / refrigerate 1.x pepper to sell you 1.0, because of spillage
* the pepper had to be transported from the land, to and fro various logistic centers (sometimes 100's of miles)
* the farmer had to grow 2.x or even 3.x peppers to sell 1.0, because of esthetics (unfortunately) .. meaning often esticides, heating, etc
I am generally not in favour of IoT, and am not convinced that a camera will correct this issue. But make no mistake: food spillage has a huge impact.
I like this response a lot, despite it opposing my earlier comment. Good thoughts, thanks.
For me, this highlights issues that I think the IoT solutions paint over. The IoT solutions all require the same kinds of industry you're describing here, but for tech. So when those get deployed you have the food industry and the tech industry, but you still have the problem of the mouldy pepper, and the problem of food deserts, and a few other things.
I still think my "you can throw out the excess/mouldy food" and the "solve the problem by communal cooking" are better approaches than the IoT one. But I accept this is intuition and guesswork, and somewhat politically motivated. I'm sure about the politics here, but I accept I'm light on the data. I think the real problems are elsewhere than either the individual mouldy peppers and the IoT; somewhere around deeper, harder issues to do with supporting towns and cities the way we do.
I understand why that sounds like it should be true, but I'm not convinced that it actually works out; I can get an esp32-cam for <$10 with no effort off the shelf, so if the cost to build the thing in is even vaguely close to that then the real cost is going to be dominated by the internet connectivity and phone client side of the equation. I guess it depends how much food we're talking about throwing out and how much it costs, but that strikes me as plausibly within an order of magnitude.
> If your argument requires saying it's fine to just throw out food, maybe you should reconsider.
You're making some kind of assumption and value judgement here but not articulating it. You're using the assumption as leverage to make an emotional push for me to think differently.
What's the assumption and value judgement? Can you weigh that against the biodegradability comment and share more of your thoughts?
Opening the door wastes energy. And it seems, mindlessly going to the fridge to see what's inside even though you know exactly whats inside, is a thing many people are doing. So there is an argument to be made, that a camera in the fridge is a useful feature. I'm happy without it.
I don't have the ability to experimentally verify, but I would think so? A window is going to be there 24/7 and air doesn't actually have that high of a specific heat, so you'd really have to be constantly opening the door for it to come out in favor in my understanding.
If the budget for the cameras, screens and apps would be spend on extra isolation, the fridge would overall be more ecological. But hey. I understand. Gadgets sell more than quality.
If you want a fridge that’s really efficient, you can’t beat a chest/bunker freezer with a thermostat. Refrigerators lose all their efficiency from the vertically mounted doors which allow all the cold air to fall out instantly when you open the door. A chest freezer door is mounted horizontally so the cold air stays trapped inside, even when you open the door. This makes all the difference in the world!
We were discussing the apps for the fridges, which naturally work well beyond physical proximity. One of the locations they work fine at is grocery stores.
Our fridge is most of the time fairly full so I have a hard time imagining where would I put a camera to get a good overview of its contents. It seems that the best place is about half a meter outside. Even a fisheye would not be able to cover both door and the rest of it.
Genuinely curious.. how well does this really work, with a real fridge? All the photos I've ever seen are of a staged fridge someone clearly spent an hour or two carefully arranging, and usually between 20% and 50% capacity.
Our fridge is often 75-95% full, and things I can picture this maybe being useful for - sour cream, pickles, condiments - are often pushed to the back or on the door. I have a hard time imagining anything besides mostly "oh look, the milk jug/large bowl of last night's leftovers is blocking the camera's view of this entire shelf".
It also doesn't solve the "is that sour cream at least 1/3 full?" or equally important "is it expired?" problem, which is almost worse, because seeing the sour cream container leads to a false positive, which means I don't buy more despite needing it.
This is me too (or more realistically, my fridge is 95-105% full) but there's definitely people out there whose fridges are usually mostly empty and a camera could reasonably capture everything in it.
My dishwasher has a "wifi-button", so I decided to figure out what it does, as it turns out, it's completely useless. The only features you get is "you're out of rinse aid" and "Turn on remotely".
The thing is that turn on remotely is useless, it requires that you've added soap, closed the dishwasher and that it's turned on. At that point you might as well just set a timer.
There are two features I could see being useful: Auto-start during the night, when the electricity cost is lowest and a detailed error report, like heating element is 100% function, or water is leaking. None of those features will ever be available, because that's not why they are adding "smart" features.
We got a new dishwasher a while back and it came with a mobile app - this was a bit of a faff to get working but was mildly useful in that it would send a notification once the cycle was done.
Then after a few weeks the company decided they had to change their authentication scheme to something really complex and I couldn't be bothered - deleted the app and don't really miss it.
Dishwashers aren't very solar-friendly if you don't have net-metering.
They typically have a very powerful 2.5 kilowatt heater they run in bursts - for like 5 mins when prewashing, for like 10 mins when starting the main wash, and like 10 mins again when drying.
In between those times, the machine uses only ~60 watts for pumps.
I have often pondered what a world of machines designed to meet solar output looked like - and for a dishwasher it would involve the heater being modulated to match the solar output (and knowing that sometimes the wash cycle would take longer if a cloud was overhead so heating was delayed by a half hour).
The money efficiency isn't great - if you had control of the design of the dishwasher, simply having a hot block of concrete inside that you heated when there was spare energy would work out far cheaper.
Concrete costs far fewer $$$'s than batteries do, per kwh of heat stored, it also doesn't require inverters, balancing or safety systems, ad lasts millions of cycles rather than thousands.
I can't imagine a scenario where you've got a large enough solar system that you'd want to be running a dishwasher off it, and you don't already have some battery storage elsewhere in that system.
Just have more dishwashers, and use them as storage cabinets: pick from a clean cabinet if you need tableware, deposit in a dirty cabinet when you are done and if you have at least three of them the transition is free to take a lot of time.
I tried to do things like this in my home. It turns out for washers, dryers and dishwashers you should just set a timer to start at noon.
Once you've started an appliance on a cycle it's going to keep running, even if the sun goes behind a cloud. So you don't need to start it when the instantaneous solar power is at its highest, you need to start it when the predicted next two hours of solar power are at their highest.
And it turns out you don't need complex monitoring to figure that out.
That's exactly what I'm using this for. I have a home assistant automation that starts the washing machine when the daily solar peak power (as estimated by a web service for my location) is reached. Of course, I have to prepare everything in the morning. On sunny or even just bright days, no grid power is used.
No, not out of the box. They don't really support any automation, you can build something using Home Assistant or If This Then That, but now we're already past what I care to manage. There isn't even HomeKit integration (which I noticed is a trend, Google Home will be supported, but not HomeKit).
I intentionally bought the dumbest dishwasher I could find. It has two cycles: "Normal" and "Heavy Duty", a "Heat Dry"/"Air Dry" selector, and a start/stop button. I could not find one that was simpler.
"Less to go wrong" is my mantra for appliances. I want to switch them on and forget about them.
I measured the energy consumption of my connected iQ-500 Siemens dishwasher. It used 750 Wh per load total, regardless if I used eco (3h55min) or 40/50 degree standard program (2h15min). I am guessing the "eco" mode only saves water.
There's no money to save on spot price optimization there.
Even a door-open alarm works better as an actual alarm than an app notification. My fridge does that: it beeps if the door is left open, so you can get your ass back in the kitchen and shut it. I don't want to receive a notification from my fridge app while I'm at work because my wife left the fridge door open at home (or vice versa), I want whoever is physically close enough to the fridge to leave the door open to be notified.
I have yet to see a single non-bullshit feature from any "smart" appliance, honestly.
I recently bought a LY washing machine that is smart.
I now get notified when the wash cycle is done, this is actually useful for me as the laundry is not in the house so I can't head a buzzer or chirm. Is it essential? Probably not.
Yup, this is the proper use for connecting an appliance. Our washer and dryer are in the house but from my computer I can't hear the dryer, the washer doesn't even make a noise. (Note that we've had these for more than two decades, they're dumb by modern standards.) I've been wondering why somebody doesn't make a smart plug that can send a notification when it's connected appliance draws power in a specified fashion. (Both would be fine by setting a minimum power to activate, then below it for a specified period. Washer: The threshold would be set below the power the agitator draws. The delay would cover the rinse fill time. Dryer: Threshold for the motor that runs the drum, immediate trigger if it stops.)
>I want whoever is physically close enough to the fridge to leave the door open to be notified.
Same - although I have experienced an interesting extension of this: HomePods now have alarm detection (the intention being to detect a smoke/burglar alarm). It is also triggered when the fridge is left open, leading to everybody in the household getting a critical alert (which ignores silent mode).
A smart stove would let you start the oven preheating before you get home, thus saving a 5-10 minute wait before you can start cooking that frozen pizza you just bought. That is the only justification I've seen for a smart appliance I've seen.
I would like a smart fridge that lets me know what is inside - so I know if I should get milk or a salad on my way home. So far nobody makes that.
> A smart stove would let you start the oven preheating before you get home, thus saving a 5-10 minute wait before you can start cooking that frozen pizza you just bought.
I'm sure this is practically not a real issue, but my OCD paranoia cannot fathom the idea of my oven being on while I'm not at home due to safety / fire concerns.
>A smart stove would let you start the oven preheating before you get home, thus saving a 5-10 minute wait before you can start cooking that frozen pizza you just bought. That is the only justification I've seen for a smart appliance I've seen.
I feel this is a terrible trade-off: a minor convenience, in exchange for a huge attack surface that could allow someone to burn your house down remotely. The folks who build IoT systems have neither the skill nor the economic incentive to keep these things secure for the 15+ year lifespan of a durable good like a cooking range.
That's why govs should enforce standards for protocols/interfaces with a standard plug socket for a "controller". Replace the govs first though, fucking useless parasites.
Would be fun though, appliances can just have a "make me smart socket" with direct connection to hardware. Then it's the smart plug that needs kept updated, but more sustainable since it's used for many products. And if your manufacturer for it dies, can just replace with any other one since they'd be held to a standard.
know what innovation i want? a smart camera inside that can scan a label and remember the expiration date...then later on notice if i've used it or not and remind me to cook it/eat it if nearing expiration
That would be useful, however expiration dates are often printed so badly and in all kinds of locations that it seems difficult to make that work reliably. Also people wouldn’t want photos of their fridge contents being uploaded to a cloud AI all the time.
Because RFID labels are orders of magnitide more expensive than bar codes and printed labels. The groccery margins are simply to small for that. Hence the sarcastic comment of using expensive tech (that had its own hype curve in the early 2000s), to solve the how-do-I-know-whats-in-my-fridge-without-opening-it problem.
IF RFID was useful for other purposes it would be worth the small cost (scale can bring RFID costs down - it would cost more than bar codes, but potentially can bring enough logistical benefits that overall it is cheaper). However so far the logistical benefits can't be realized because you can't be 100% sure you read all the tags in a room.
Sounds like a good idea until I think about our fridge. After the weekly shop the fridge is packed to the brim so much that the light barely makes it into some corners. How would a camera help here?
Towards the end of the week the fridge is empty and I know I need to buy the usual.
Use case dead in my head.
It would be nice if there was a standardized machine-readable format for information like expiration dates. It would be neat to be able to track inventory in the fridge by just scanning a label when you put it in then scan and mark as empty when its done.
My fridge also have an app, with usefull feature - to track when bottle of water is cooled. But. I need to login to app everytime I open this app.
And there is no way to share access to the fridge to anyone else.
We got an air fryer recently, a Cosori brand. Its app tells me when the cook cycle is done. I named the device "PHILLIP J AIRFRY", so getting a notification makes me smile. Yeah it's silly, but sometimes you need a little frivolity in your life.
My fridge has a door open alarm, and I wish it didn’t. I have yet to be like “wow, I’m so glad my fridge is beeping at me while I try to decide if I want chicken or taco leftovers”.
I have some basic laser printer (I think its 5500D) from them and it works like a charm. also added rpi with printer server so that I can print wirelessly from all macs, iphones, windows pc and from my toaster and I couldnt be more happy.
May I ask how the cartridge replacement works with Brother, and Laser printers in General?
I am quite annoyed after "breaking" two Inkjet printers in 5-6 years and want to buy a laser one this time, but am not sure how is the cartridge issue different between laser and inkjet. Do laser cartridges last longer? Is it less problematic to use non-original cartridges?
I have a HL-L2340DW I bought in 2017. I've replaced the toner drum once, in 2021, for $55. You can get cheaper off-brand replacements pretty easily but I didn't bother. The amortized cost of the genuine thing worked fine for me.
I use off brand from amazon, also replacing drum unit occasionally (I think it happened like 2 times in last 7 years?). The whole procedure is 5 minutes long. Its dirt cheap, compared to inkjet
Toner cartridges generally last a few thousand pages and are much more tolerant of infrequent use than ink cartridges. Unlike Ink cartridges, laser cartridges don’t dry out or need to waste ink priming. The image drum does need to be occasionally replaced (not often, 10k+ pages), though if you tolerate defects in prints it can last longer.
How well non-original cartridges work is highly dependent on the printer model. Some have more complex authentication of the cartridges and others it’s a simple page counter.
The main downside is color is a significant increase in cost of the printer as fairly expensive pieces need to be duplicated for each color.
Inkjet cartridges are highly sophisticated devices, it's really where "the magic" happens. They have much complexity, not helped by the fact that the ink is drying on the printing head and so hinders its ability to print.
Laser cartridges are just boxes of fine black dust. You can buy a matching box of fine black dust from somebody else, or refill your (empty) box with a different version of fine black dust, this won't matter much at all.
Having said that, I use a Brother b/w laser for 10+ years, and — with original toner being sold on Amazon at $40 and delivered for free to my door — have never bothered with neither refilling nor using "aftermarket" toner.
Not all inkjet printers require cartridges, of course. Some have ink tanks you just fill from a bottle. They're a bit more expensive than cartridge inkjets, but still affordable.
sorry, I am very bad at this, I basically copypasted some terminal commands from some tutorial (I think it was https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/raspberry-pi-print-serve...) and also spent a lot of time fixing some of the settings (there had to be something done about spooling service) to finally make it work for my windows PC, as mac and iphone started working immediately. But even if a complete noob like me with some lame google-fu skills could do it, I think anyone can.
I have a Dell 1350cnw, which is a rebranded Brother CMYK laser. I bought it in 2009 and it still works perfectly today (except for the fact I have to keep an old computer around as a print server because Dell refuse to release 64 bit drivers for it). I will almost certainly replace it with another Brother printer. I mostly only use it these days to print colouring pages for my kids and the very rare physical letter.
Epson's Linux support for both their printers and scanners is great in my experience, although they don't provide tech support if you can't get it working. They even open sourced the Linux port of Epson Scan 2 (their scanning client software).
I have a Brother printer, which supports plugging in a USB stick with a PDF to print the PDF.
Its PDF parser doesn't seem to support all PDFs, and for some PDFs it will PRINT, on paper, an error message from the PDF parser.
So not only did it not print a perfectly valid PDF, it also wasted paper and ink for it.
You can't know beforehand which PDFs it'll support or not from looking at them, any computer / phone PDF viewer supports those. It could be as simple as a PDF sent by an airline.
They should:
1) use a proper PDF library, not some half baked one
2) if something is wrong with the PDF, show the error on screen, not waste paper for it
i've had a lot of Japanese made printers stumble on PDFs for some reason.
My Brother and Epson have both have trouble with printing old out-of-print machine manuals that used ancient PDF versions. They'd happily accept the job, and then proceed to crash the print spooler and more-or-less break explorer on more than one machine with the same set of drivers.
The problem would go away if I converted the pdf to a newer version or into an entirely different format.
Heh, I would have preferred that to one of my recent experiences with an HP printer. It would simply silently drop the job only for that specific pdf (an ordinary shipping label of which I had printed many on that machine before). I dug around so many menus trying to figure out where my job was going until I by chance clicked print on a different document. At least with the paper error message I would have known right away to apply the hack of screenshot + print png.
Because kids have to print things for school. Lots and lots of things! And schools generally don’t have the budget to let every kid print everything they need, so they push this cost onto the families.
This, and also you print coloring books, math quizzes, puzzles, and everything else. Yes, these things are available on tablets too, but I think working with pencils and paper is also important.
Same thing with school supplies. You get a piece of paper that tells you everything you need for the year. Even 2nd grader needs a box of crayons. How many colors, which brand? What if one parent buys a name brand another buys Walmart brand? How about all the time I need to spend to order it, make sure it's the right one? Thank goodness for Walmart...I can deliver from store w/o fighting all the back to school parents.
Well - now the free market has figured it out! There's a private company who will buy everything for you on the list and deliver it to your classroom.
> So the school hands out exercises that the parents need to print at home?
Yes. COVID saw some of this move to Microsoft Teams at our district, but some teachers are definitely holdouts. Some teachers want essays handed in on paper for marking up, as well.
My Brother printer is one of my better purchases to be honest. I sound like a complete shill, but it's connected to wifi (and it just happily connects even if it's been off for a month or two), and all devices can just connect to it and print. Never need to reconnect or do anything with it. It's a printer that prints. I love it.
If you want color, so far I've been happy with an HLL8260CDW going on almost a year. I previously had HLL8350CDW which I very much liked even though it destroyed a fixing/fusing roller after about 5 years (repaired with ebay parts) and then at about 7 years old some small part inside a mechanism which selects between the toners broke and spares were not available. Although the part numbers are very similar between the two, sadly the toner cartridges are completely not compatible.
For a long time Monoprice sold very good Brother compatible toner for reasonable prices. Sadly, that time has long passed. Brother 1st party toner is not as cheap as I'd like but it's still decently affordable compared to other major brand 1st party toner. I've had horrible luck with non-Monoprice 3rd party Brother toner.
Have had the HL-L2340DW since 2016. Still on the original tonner. Only really use it to print my resume to bring to interviews. Still works like a charm.
I just checked my purchase history and I'm a month short of it being ten years ago. Not bad for a printer.
Brother HL-3140CW. Color laser printer. If you'd have told me it'd still be working ten years later, I wouldn't have believed you. I print so sporadically, but when I do, it just works. Does AirPrint from smartphones, etc.
My only complaint with this model is that it actually has no Ethernet port, so it connects only via WiFi. Seems like a strange trade-off for something like a printer.
Completely agree: it's one of the best purchases I've made.
Printers were a product category that were expensive for what they offered and were always kind of finicky. I can still remember never knowing if my printer was going to work when I needed it to or not.
Since I purchased a Brother printer all of those concerns went away. It works well, requires minimal set up, is reliable, and represents great value for money over a period of years.
I'm on my second printer from them in the last 10 years and wouldn't even consider a competitor unless there's a serious decline in their quality.
Edit:
Since I saw someone ask below my model is MFC-9340CDW
I have over time switched to Brother printers (lived through Epson and HP) because they are the least bad of the bunch. But Windows will still claim they are offline with no way to un-offline them, or print jobs will still get stuck from time to time - but this is probably just the Windows printer queue software staying exactly the same since two decades, with Microsoft giving zero fucks about it (or about anything requested by users, for that matter).
there is an LTT series where they try to daily drive Linux. They complain about a lot of stuff being half-broken, unfriendly or simply not missing. But they are amazed that printing just work out of the box without all the issues they have on Windows.
Until it happens again later today, or tomorrow. Or on wife's computer at work. Or on grandma's. Unless you're from Microsoft, I wouldn't call that "solution".
I had that issue for a while. I solved this issue by ensuring SNMP was allowed on the printer. I never had that issue again after confirming SNMP traffic worked.
I got a brother B+w laser printer 4 years ago, plugged it into a switch and all my macs and iPhones found it, can print to it, and it just sits there waiting for a thing to print. Still on the original toner.
I have a very old (more than 10 years old) Brother HL 2130 that still works like a charm. I changed the toner only twice, I added an RPi behind it to have it network-enabled. Also one of my best purchases !
I bought a brother printer once largely because of the praise I see in HN, but it was a color inkjet printer. It did not work out well. At first it was great, but I don't print much and ink dried on the print head and the 'cleaning' mode used up all the ink and and basically it never worked properly again after that. I ended up tossing it for a POS canon inkjet. I don't print often, but when I do I want color so a BW laserjet isn't a good fit.
TBH my Brother multifunction colour inkjet/scanner is also better than any I've used from any other printer manufacturer. No activation junk or "genuine cartridge" nonsense, it just prints.
Really? I thought Brother started started blocking third-party ink a couple years ago, even pushing firmware updates for older Wi-Fi printers that previously allowed it.
The mastodon post to which this discussion refers to doesn't mention the word laser, nor do most of the recommendations in the rest of this discussion.
A color laser is worth several cheap inkjets. I don't print much so its actually cheaper to use a crappy inkjet and throw it out and get a new crappy inkjet multiple times then get a single color laserjet.
It can, but on the cheap canons the printhead is part of the ink canister, so if you just have to get new ink and problem solved. On the brother they use a higher quality printhead that is part of the printer. Good, unless something happens to that head and you can't fix it.
Definitely consider the outlay for a colour laser printer. I've had one for around 5 years and it has been no trouble and is always ready to print, scan and copy.
I love my color laser, but depending on what you're printing they're either not ideal (photos) or not always possible (sublimation, transfers, some adhesives, most things involving heat; laser-specialized materials might be available but won't work as well).
Inkjet is also typically more viable for non-commercial borderless and supertabloid printing, like large prints and posters.
The best part I like is it provides a unique email address and hosts a server inside it. I can literally just email a pdf and get it printed on back-back pages, no commands, love it!
Someone did that to my old HP printer a couple times, but there were settings to only accept emails from specific addresses that I eventually turned on.
Well you can customise it with the brother printer. Brother itself registers your unique email id against your registered device, hence it has to be globally unique.
Funny how the article seems to be selling this as "not innovating". I was genuinely surprised when I discovered that it was just a social media post and not some ad-entrusted clickbait repackaging that theverge.com article while trying to one-up it with the "no innovation" claim.
"And here’s 275 words about printers I asked ChatGPT to write so this post ranks in search because Google thinks you have to pad out articles in order to demonstrate “authority,” but I am telling you to just buy whatever Brother laser printer is on sale and never think about printers again."
Mine constantly falls into some deep sleep state where it can’t be found on the network and I have to spend ~10 minutes coaxing it out of sleep using an unknown combination of random button jabs and test prints before it can be detected by my devices again and will print.
If anyone knows how to fix this please let me know, I want to love my printer as well.
I used to have this issue on Windows. Enabling SNMP solved it. By default it checks SNMP to see the status of the printer, so if SNMP is off it'll eventually think the whole printer is offline.
Ran into the same issue. I think using ethernet instead of wifi was the solution (and maybe something with disabling ipv6? been a long time since I looked into it).
Mine used to have the problem. Upgrading the firmware and using Ethernet did not fix it.
Observation: disconnecting the printer from the network avoided the un-wake-able "deep sleep" state. Re-connecting the network made it susceptible again. I suspect it's particular network traffic that causes the printer to wedge into a sleep it cannot leave; possibly a Debian box that I've since de-commissioned. The problem no longer occurs despite having the same firmware as before and being connected to the network.
This! It even gets regular firmware updates which (when I notice them) I always say yes to and it always keeps working. They even told me how to reset the low toner warning so I can replace colors when they actually run out.
If anything its connectivity works too well: I first connected it via USB, installed the Brother drivers (i386 only, but whatever, I don't need a 64-bit printer driver really!), and CUPS shared it over the network to all my computers. Then I added an Ethernet connection and it shared itself over the network. So now there are multiple ways to reach it.
I wish that were true for my Brother printer. I bought a basic but decent black and white laser printer of theirs several years ago, and it worked great for maybe 3 years, but then it started refusing to accept print jobs from all inputs (wifi, ethernet, USB, doesn’t matter, neither does the device sending the print job) and factory resets do nothing to help it. So now, it sits in a closet while the Canon inkjet with janky print heads that it replaced is doing print duty.
Apparently this can be fixed be reflashing its firmware but from what I can gather this requires some obscure utility that’s not generally available.
I have a similar experience. Installed and connected my Brother printer 3 years ago, pop in new ink about once per year and that's it. It works and I do not need to worry about it.
Also look at the delicious Windows 2000 style settings interface:
I own a Brother DCP7065DN that I bought nearly a decade ago, and it still works just fine. I've always used third party toner (there was a setting that needed to be toggled to enable this). I can even print and scan from my phone.
All the cloud nonsense is there to enrich the manufacturers, it doesn't actually make these products better. KISS!
I have the same experience - after an initial slightly tough config to get it connected to wifi (understandable given the budget price and older model), it has worked flawlessly - I will always recommend brother printers now
Further, I got mine as a refurb since I wanted it in the throes of the pandemic so I wasn't going to spend big bucks on a printer and needed something for the amazon returns labels primarily...
I have an older brother that only has ethernet, but I share it via my server, so I'm good that way. Every device that needs to print can print to it no matter the OS they're running. In this day, that is amazing. I don't have to have special apps or 4 different printers. I just have the one and it just works. This is as it should be.
> it's connected to wifi (and it just happily connects even if it's been off for a month or two), and all devices can just connect to it and print. Never need to reconnect or do anything with it. It's a printer that prints. I love it.
Wifi is the only "innovation" that I cared about when buying a new printer. My old Brother just had USB, which was fine for 12 years. But my newer (10 years old) Brother has wifi and printing from the couch is great!
WiFi is a nice feature, but instead of buying a new printer, I setup a CUPS server on old raspberry pis and turned both my and my parents’ printers into WiFi capable ones. Now our 5+ and 15+ year old printers are just as good as any new ones today.
This is probably not a popular opinion but that is nothing special. My HP MFP M177fw laser printer has no issues at all, and if I must believe HN it's manufactured by Brother due to its well behaviour.
Brother (printers and sewing machines) feels like Zoom (audio recorders): a bit conservative but they are very well made and long lasting. And consistent. A USP in today's world of crap-loaded, buggy short living throw away products.
We could use an international magazine or media channel that focuses solely on tools that have prooven to be robust and reliable. And on trustworthy companies with good value for money ratio. I'd love to spend double for some things, if I'd be able to know it lasts way longer and works better.
TBH, flaky sewing machine would be a disaster, you cannot just go and restart it. Apps working like a sewing machine is something from the imagination nowadays.
Some could argue that Brother printers adhere to the POSIX / UNIX philosophy: Solve one problem only, and solve it well.
In the end it somewhat boils down to pure greed. Instead of stabilizing production costs and/or reusing generic components to ease up manufacturing and repair - HP, Epson, Canon, Dell, Samsung, Kyocera and others try to hype their products with whatever tech stack is currently in trend. "growth hacking" is literally their job description.
There eventually will be a ChatGPT printer on the market. It's inevitable due to what kind of people manage a printer business: It's not the type of people that know how to build printers anymore.
"As a language model I don't think this is the tone you should take in a letter to your printer manufacturer. Instead of the long string of expletives, here is a suggested letter of praise for your printers reliability, and an order for more toner instead:
But that was at least a bug, and a somewhat understandable one (though still stupid). I did my MSc on doing statistical methods to reduce error rates in OCR, and one of the methods that actually worked very well was various nearest neighbour variations over small windows of the pixel data. As part of that I did a literature review, of course, and there has been quite a lot of work on various algorithms for cleaning up images by trying to replace patches of pixels with presumed "clean" samples (sometimes from a known font, but more often by applying various clustering methods to patches from the image itself). Get that wrong and you'd very easily end up with something like this.
My own methods would also have easily produced this kind of error if you set the threshold for what to consider identical when clustering high enough. But for OCR the risk is somewhat mitigated by people not trusting it to be error-free, and so it can be an acceptable tradeoff if it reduces the overall error rate, but if you're outputting the raw pixel data and let people think it's an unmanipulated image you're begging for trouble.
I unfortunately discovered that my brand new Brother printer can only communicate over 2.4 GHz wifi, which conflicts with the 5 GHz my phone requires (my router can only do one at a time, and there's no way I'm switching as needed). So USB it is.
It's one of their cheapest inkjets (MFC-1010DW), but I selected it for features more than price. Wish I had read the documentation. I would have purchased the next model up.
Nicely compact compared to the ~10 year old Canon that died recently.
This is going to become a bigger problem over time. A lot of the embedded chips that provide WiFi only supported 2.4GHz. There’s a whole bunch of devices that just aren’t going to work.
> my router can only do one at a time, and there's no way I'm switching as needed
That's abysmal! Every 5GHz Wifi AP I've ever come across lets you run both PHYs at the same time.
Please, on my behalf, sternly talk down to your router.
Even ignoring the massive issue of device compatibility: 5GHz and its protocols do not have anywhere the range and penetrating power of 2.4GHz. When I walk outside my house I can keep watching videos, but my laptop does this by transitioning to the 2GHz radio link modes.
oh, I actually needed to check routers recently.
Prices like 5 years ago but specs for cheaper models are "slightly broken". Like 2.4+5 router, but only 100MBit ethernet (and full AC speed for wireless). So, you kinda have "cheap" models, but to get a real usable router you have to pay the full price. Marketing.
It's an 8 year old SBG6580-2 with radio button selection for 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz on the web interface. I bought the cheapest one guaranteed to work with Xfinity to save on the rental costs. I'll upgrade when they force a move from DOCSIS 3.0. Just like I'll upgrade my cheapest smart phone with a replaceable battery when they force a move from 4G (or finally make a workable phone with a physical keyboard again).
In a lot of places 2.4ghz is unusable because of the density of networks transmitting in the space. I live in a SFH in a lower-tier metro and only 5ghz is performant
Most cheap wifi modules are all 2.4ghz, so printers, iot stuff, etc will almost certainly be 2.4ghz. Like 1$ cheap.
> only 5ghz is performant
Most of these barely need any bandwidth. A printer is possibly on the higher end of bandwidth, but I think the number of printers that support 5GHZ is possibly still single digits.
I think that 2.4GHz having longer range is a myth. When I worked on WiFi for Google Fiber we tested it pretty extensively and didn't see any common building materials that attenuated 2.4GHz more than 5GHz. Historically, the problem was that routers often selected low-power channels for 5GHz. If you use a channel where the maximum power is permitted, 5GHz is just as good.
The 5GHz band plan is kind of complicated. You will want to ensure that you get a 160MHz channel. How you accomplish that varies by region, unfortunately.
Oddly the C6 was announced before the C5 I think is only now making it's way onto devkits.
> When I worked on WiFi for Google Fiber we tested it pretty extensively and didn't see any common building materials that attenuated 2.4GHz more than 5GHz.
Huh interesting, I might have to play with that at some point (I'm hoping either ubiquiti or openwrt will let me do that).
It’s pretty typical for printers (and a huge amount of iot devices) to only support 2.4GHz. I’m a little impressed that this is the first device you found this incompatibility with.
There’s some standalone dual-band access points on sale this weekend for <$40 right now which would solve your problem.
> I’m a little impressed that this is the first device you found this incompatibility with.
Don't be. A comprehensive list of our WiFi-capable devices are two smartphone models, the printer, and two laptops that are plugged in to wired connections.
Edit: Forgot about the two wireless work laptops.
For our purposes the 10 foot USB cable solves the problem fine.
I got one of the Brother laser types a couple years ago, hooked it up to a single PC using the USB cable, then shared that PC's printer with the rest of the network.
Since Wifi on the printer was not in use at this point, it was then possible to simultaneously connect an additional wireless PC when needed, directly to the printer using the printer's Wifi-Direct alternative.
Interestingly, the printer was connected to the USB socket of a Windows XP client, but I had also ended up adding some Windows 8, 10, & 11 PC's to the network through time.
IT was not optimistic since the new printers have no drivers for Windows XP, plus this was a discontinued model havng no drivers newer than Windows 8 either.
Windows 7 drivers worked fine for XP, Windows 8 drivers worked for Windows 10, so everything was good.
When Windows 11 came out, there was a notice on the Brother website advising that you would need to wait over 30 days before they would be posting compatible drivers.
When they did post the W11 drivers, they were the exact same files that had already been released for W10 years earlier. Apparently the factory only needed to confirm there were no show-stoppers when installed in W11, with no modification of the drivers needed.
Brother and Canon are both really good examples of long-term thinking in Japanese companies, along with Nintendo.
All these companies still have their original core competency: Canon still makes optics, Brother still makes home equipment like sewing machines, and Nintendo to this day has not discontinued their playing card products.
Yes, you can buy Nintendo playing cards. I have several sets both modern and older and they’re very good.
These companies think in terms of decades and half-centuries. They may fall trap to occasional trends, but they’re not the ones who rush into a market to innovate; Canon started making a clone of a Leica camera and happened into doing the first indirect X-ray system in Japan, as a single example.
And it’s not just Japanese companies that manage to pull that off. Some others have managed to do the same. See: Lego, for example. They branched out into movies, games, and parks, but their primary and core product remains bricks.
Lego has had issues for years, and has faced bankruptcy[1] through to several years ago just going "Whoops we made too many bricks..."[2]
Lego's original core competency was toys, but not plastic ones. The original Lego toys were nearly all wooden, but they gained success with the plastic bricks.
It's unfortunate how many spinoffs they've had that failed.
Well let's not overdo it. Right now if you search the Brother knowledge base to troubleshoot something you'll be surprised to see that the questions are there, but each and every answer says "the page you requested was removed". It works as long it works but in the end, it's the same garbage company.
I got years of use out of a second-hand Brother 2350 printer and then eventually some of the electronics failed. I needed a new printer and I still owned a couple unused Brother toner cartridges. Imagine my joy when I discovered that Brother would sell me a new model that still used the same toner system.
Sticking with the same spartan feature set was fine by me. It's all I need. I didn't even bother looking at the other makers' low-end offerings. Brother's approach of treating printing as a solved problem (Build once; sell often) is so much simpler and more cost-efficient than the super-frisky alternative (Build many times; sell once)
I'm pretty sure mine came with some OCR PDF-generating software. It has Fax functions I never use, Copy functions that come in handy several times a year, and Scan I've used a few times. The web admin interface seems to have a lot of options.
But all that stuff doesn't get in the way of the core feature, network laser printing.
I never got actual Postscript to we work on Linux and my Brother. It looks like the ripping runs on the host side, and what gets printed is bitmaps. Works fine on Mac and windows though.
I'm amazed that there is still no legislation to control this. E.g. consumers should have the option to choose between a cheap printer with vendor ink lock-in, or a more expensive one but with free choice of ink.
It seems like something that the EU could make itself useful with, for instance.
I‘m asking this obvious question as well from time to time, and indeed some insights were given here: Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786721
Yeah that printer model is my favorite for home printing needs. In the rare case I want to print photos, I’d rather pay a little markup and have them printed at a local pharmacy where I won’t have to deal with the BS that consumer inkjet printers do (+ maintenance is someone else’s problem).
It’s like $50 now and the toner lasts for soooo many pages it’s basically free. In other words, for the price of an inkjet cartridge that lasts maybe a year, this thing lasts forever.
I have 2 Brother laser printers - BW and Color. BW works like charm, always. The Color one can’t print multiple copies of the same page without re-uploading it from MacBook for every copy. This gets aggravated that the data transfer speed looks slower for the Color printer (it may be the same speed, but maybe Color printer has to send more data) - so the effective print speed is many times lower than the max speed.
Buying a black/white only brother laser printer solved all my printing problems.
Cartridges last for thousand of pages; no strange cloud requirements; the FritzBox registers the printer immediately and all devices in the local net can print.
Non of this was the case for my previous HP or Epson printers…
It worked surprisingly well for my Epson so. Connect to WiFi, all devices find it, including Linux ones, without additional drivers or software.
Additional software is needed for photo prints (color management and stuff like that) and (maybe?) scanning. I didn't try scanning without additional software, as I installed it with the photo print software. And since that software inly works under Windows anyway, I never bothered with scanning under Linux.
GNOME ships a scanner app that can scan from many (newish) networked scanners without a driver. The UI is, ahem, about as minimal as you would expect from a GNOME app, but it works.
(Seriously, GNOME, whether to scan one side or two sides is actually important and the desired mode changes all the time. Would it kill you to dedicate some screen real estate to it, instead of filling everything with empty post-modern white space?)
I think people forget that ink is a liquid which dries up and leaves a sticky mess. They think of the printer as a magic technology box that somehow is supposed to deal with that mess perfectly, without issues or waste.
Well it doesn’t work! Ink needs to be flushed to keep the lines clear. Inkjet printers need to print regularly for optimal performance and low waste. If you need a printer to sit on the shelf for 4 months between print jobs, laser is the only game in town. Toner is a solid powder and it lasts forever without issues. No clogging, no mess.
You could make one that doesn't have an air hole. Put a membrane between the air and the ink. Consider a standard reverse osmosis water tank--inside there's basically a big bag, pressurized air on the outside, water on the inside. The outside should stay dry, the inside shouldn't contact the air.
You still have the problem at the print head, though.
The only problem with these ancient and durable HP Lasterjets - I used to use a 4L - is that they were slow. My modernish Brother HL2270DW - which I got for free at a garage sale because the toner cartridge was missing so they couldn't test it - is much faster and can print double-sided. And has a $20 aftermarket toner cartridge in it.
I used to maintain/repair a couple of LaserJet IIIs (circa 1990), up until about 2010, when I got tired of the printer's footprint being so large, and retired my last computer with a parallel port. The LaserJet III was the VW Bug of laser printers in terms of being easy to repair.
We used old HP Laserjets in a warehouse up until about a year ago. Towards the end, we had to repair and replace them with increasing frequency due to the beige plastic becoming very brittle. As a result, the printers became hard to service and more prone to damage during regular use. Replaced with a cheap Brother laser.
I bought a black and white laser printer (Brother HL-L2350DW) because paying a little extra for laser up front results in much total lower cost of ownership due to the cartridges lasting much longer than ink jet. I have had it almost 5 years and I've only replaced the cartridge once.
My exact experience. It just works and it's fast. In the rare occasion I need a fancy color print, there's a store close by where I can order some nice prints with a few clicks.
Had an HP color inkjet before that. With that I felt like I did not have a printer.
The growth mindset is incredible for expanding when your product is in its early ages. But there should be a "sustain" mindset at some point. First you push to grow the market, or your market share. When returns on your efforts become diminishing, you push to improve how much you earn of each customer/each sale. At some point there should be a mindset that our company is worth X dollars, and we should sustain that.
What happens instead is companies keep rewarding executives by increases in revenue, they keep rewarding product managers similarly, and product managers selectively choose metrics that optimize immediate revenue, at the expense of brand loyalty. This is happening to almost every tech company, and the exceptions are rare gems.
In android, if I click on a link in facebook messenger that takes me to facebook, the back button takes me "back" to facebook's home screen instead of to the messenger app. Tapping back button again does nothing. I have to switch back to messenger manually. That's 5-6 taps/swipes instead of 1, because a product manager's bonus in FB depends on how well they beg for more engagement. As a result, I rarely use any of these products. I used to spend some time in Instagram/FB. I close LinkedIn immediately after an important interaction for similar reasons.
I made a mistake of buying another Samsung product after years. Never again. I made a mistake of buying another HP product, never again. I might still consider Dell only because of how well they supported me with their monitor flicker.
None of these products have a defect that's caused by poor design, programming, or manufacturing. They all suffer from growth-obsessed mindset.
Brother is what it is, not because of lack of innovation, but because of deliberate evasion of short-sighted greed.
Stock buybacks are good for the economy because they allocate money to where it can be used more efficiently, which is usually not in existing big corporations.
The alternative to stock buybacks is that the corporation make stupid acquisitions and try to integrate them into their processes, thereby killing them.
Shouldn’t the money be used more efficiently for society’s benefit or not concentrated by the share holders? Share holders will only further their own interests and not society’s interests.
How do you accomplish that? Historically "shareholders" as a group have been quite effective (often but obviously not always) have been quite effective at using at their money for society’s benefit.
In fact every society which tried to take all of their money away and eliminate them as a class (more or less violently) has failed economically. Turns out when it works properly free market competition is strongest force for economic and technological progress that has ever existed.
Now that you link stock buybavks to growing salaries, I cannot ignore it anymore.
Stock buybacks only benefit shareholders and companies, not the economie. Trickle down and all that doesn't work, stock buybacks reduce a companies tax burden, especially when leveraged which they often are, do not lead to more investment. And they make the rich even richer.
Stock buybacks are not “trickle down” economics. It’s returning money to investors who then have to rebalance their portfolios and find something new to invest in. This is what is good for the economy.
I believe the parent commenter's point was exactly this. Giving money to the investor class and expecting it to benefit everyone is the definition of trickle-down economics.
The comparison is leaving it with the company and hoping something good comes out of it. That’s also trickle down economics by that moronic definition.
In theory (and sometimes/often in reality) it results in more effective allocation of capital. It's not about "trickle down "econonomics"" but about those investors using that money to invest into more productive businesses.
> And salaries rise, primarily, through labour organization and collective bargaining.
No. Supply and demand is and pretty much always was a much stronger force.
If I get RSUs quarterly and my company additionally buys back 10% of stock. My post vest RSUs should also be worth 10% more. This is effectively a bonus and my tax obligation would be lower than cash.
The cost of buybacks is affected by timing, unlike dividends.
Dividends are cleaner and affect the price in well understood ways: you set a date for the elegibility, and if you bought before that you get the dividend, if you buy after you don't.
Stock buybacks are less transparent (you don't buy them all at once).
Yes, it concentrate/centralize power. If you want a new aristocracy, continue buybacks until a share is worth so much, people will start to buy share fractions, with all the shit and overhead that'll bring.
How is that better? With buybacks if I want to reinvest I don't have to pay taxes on them and if I want to realize the gains I can decide when to do that myself (of course seem more like an issue in Europe and with companies which only payout yearly).
Because it encourages longer-term ownership, and gives shareholders a stake in the future cash flows of the business.
Like I said, it's the tax treatment that basically stopped growth companies giving dividends. I think that we should change said tax treatment and also make buybacks illegal but that's a bit more controversial.
In any case, for both G and FB, they'd need to do buybacks anyway because of their employee share programs.
Buybacks have the same effect of encouraging long-term ownership.
Given a certain amount of money, spending it on stock buybacks vs spending it on dividends returns the same amount of money to each HOLDING shareholder.
In one case, they receive a small sum. In the other case, the value of their stock goes up.
How are they good? Companies are killing their inventory / safety / rnd / experienced headcount to do buy backs and in the slightest economy disruption they are forcing us to bail them out. Look at finance, airlines, oil, manufacturing for very recent examples.
That’s why they don’t just hand out dividends. If you want to take money out of the business just sell some shares. Long term capital gains in the US isn’t bad.
Plus dividends are independent from the stupid market valuations. Everyone benefits the same, not just the folks who will sell after the uptick of price
They are good for the stock. There is no evidence they are good for the company, its workers, or the economy.
Stock buybacks have destroyed companies like GE and Boeing.
This is very well covered in the book about Boeing - Flying Blind. A bunch of Jack Welch mentees did the same trick, selling the company for parts and buying back the stock - until there was nothing left to sell. It was very "profitable" for a while, though!
It's not a tool for company growth - it's an accounting trick to make the wealthy ultra-wealthy.
There is a reason why buybacks at these levels were illegal (or at least very hard) until the early 80s, but there were multiple pro-big-business "reforms" that took root under Reagan which are now wrecking sensible Capitalism.
> This is very well covered in the book about Boeing - Flying Blind. A bunch of Jack Welch mentees did the same trick, selling the company for parts and buying back the stock - until there was nothing left to sell. It was very "profitable" for a while, though!
Ooh nice, TIL and thanks! I really liked "Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric" about the failure of GE and was looking for something similar.
On the topic of buybacks and dividends, it's part of the short term quarter-oriented thinking. Spinning off subdivisions and doing stock buybacks and dividends are very popular and look good on the balance sheet in the short term... but if you think about a quarter or two ahead, it's crippling. But it doesn't matter, stock go up, bonus go up, everyone happy for now, kicking the can down the road until it's someone else's problem.
And then they kill them, most of the time. Sometimes intentionally, usually unintentionally.
The money in the pockets of shareholders is more effective at finding good investment opportunities than the innovation department of big ol’ corporate.
But yes, there is an argument to be made, that acquiring small companies can be a valid strategy for big companies. Overall, I think this is bad for the economy though, therefore I am glad that antitrust is pushing back on this.
I am not quite sure what you mean, can you elaborate? In my mental model, money in the pockets of shareholders is much more effective than money in the pockets of big corporates.
In my mind, big corporates tend to be large corporations of wealth controlled by few people. And shareholders on average are the same. And therefore neither ought to be considered likely to be particularly effective.
Best would be if the company increased salaries, then their employees could invest themselves in stuff that actually benefit them, boosting the real economy.
Only because there is under-supply of housing at the moment. If we built more houses then landlords wouldn't be able to charge higher rent just because people had more money.
To be clear, I think that we need to address both of these issues: general wealth distribution and lack of affordable housing.
A majority of the population's landlord is the bank that holds their mortgage, and they don't just raise your mortgage payment because your income increases.
Define "effective." A company spends its money on people and other inputs to productivity. To my mind that's a lot more "effective" than giving it to the investor class that "spends" it on other investments (by buying it from other people in the investment class).
Most of the money returned to shareholders isn't going to be pumped back into the economy as money spent on goods and services. It just goes into the casino we call stock and bond markets where it provides some liquidity for some investment into companies, but most of it is just spinning around creating no value.
If you think about it the growth mindset is quite psychotic.
Imagine a human being with a growth mindset. He optimises his bodyfat to the point of anorexia. He optimises conversations by extracting knowledge then moving on. His diet is pure protein shakes and broccoli. Every morning he does six Leetcode Hards. If you met him you'd think he was deranged.
This growth ideology means every company we interact with behaves like Bob. Soon enough this Bobism filters into people through the labour market and professional values. (Like the Leetcoders). It's alienating and the only purpose it serves is an investment based economy with unclear benefits to society at large
It creates a very strange world where we have computers acting like people and people acting like machines
Regardless of where you got it, the analogy makes perfect sense and I'm sure others have come to the exact same conclusion. Growth will always be capped somehow and the sooner companies realize that you can only grow forever at the expense of everybody else the better. It's in a way amazing that whole industries can be so utterly divorced from reality that they'll wreck a good chunk of the planet just to prove the obvious.
What about a state with a growth mindset? I feel it's a decent parallel to the behaviour of states as described by realism, or even to the Red Queen hypothesis where if you stop running you lose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis
Growth for a nation has changed. 500 years ago there wasn't much ability for a state to grow except by expanding their borders. Your farmers couldn't produce enough food to feed more people (they would on a good year, but then the extra starve in a bad year), and so you could expand your economy only by growing your borders. Thus a noble (read rich) would build an army and go to war - this at best adds more land they control and thus more taxes, but even in the worst case destroyed a lot of people who then didn't eat freeing up more food for the rest. The limit was land not labor, so if you killed a lot of men (women were ignored) those left could work a little more and produce just as much food.
However starting 200-300 years ago the industrial revolution and various innovations have made other growth possible. Today war destroys far more than it gains you need a large industrial base to build a lot of equipment that you destroy (bombs are not cheap), plus all the equipment the enemy destroys. If you don't go to war you can instead use your industry to build more luxury goods (vacations are a valid luxury good for this discussion though we don't normally think of them that way!)
Note, war above is entirely from the attackers point of view, and it is - as attackers are - optimistic about the chances of winning a war. The defender has other considerations.
> He optimises his bodyfat to the point of anorexia. He optimises conversations by extracting knowledge then moving on. His diet is pure protein shakes and broccoli. Every morning he does six Leetcode Hards. If you met him you'd think he was deranged.
This was my life 2-3 years ago! Almost exactly. Definitely was deranged, no argument there. But I got in shape for the first time in my life (-90lbs), found a romantic partner, and got a ridiculously well paying job, all within a year. So, yeah, definitely worth it!
Not to minimize your argument because at the core i entirely agree. I have come to understand that most of the reasons for the growth in so many of our beloved tech come from who is at the helm, and more specifically their personality types. Dominantly open-minded and creative people are extremely valuable in so many edge cases but when you have a group dominated by them nothing is stable. The culture has by now stabilized to reward and seek their input so we are all circling the drain waiting for the next best thing.
This is not to say low-creative types make a better company. I've worked with completely different sets and it makes for polar opposites. What I find interesting is that companies/groups tend to cluster leaning towards ones which push for innovation or either shun it, again determined by their core member personality makeup. I wish there was some more tendancy for them to balance out somewhat, but it is definatey a phenomenon.
This is a really great point I hadn’t considered. I also think it’s worth considering software itself as one of the issues here. It’s much easier to continuously modify software than to continuously modify (for example) the supply chain or assembly line for vehicles or other manufactured goods. Of course these supply chains and assembly lines _are_ modified, and may even be helmed by people with a purely growth mindset. But, there are just physical realities slowing some of these more traditional companies down which don’t necessarily affect tech companies. Sometimes it just feels like the tech companies are on fast-forward. They start, they get huge, they get stagnant, and die, all much quicker than an old-fashioned company.
Your argument is proving too much [1]: Every attitude will lead to absurd results when followed to absurd lengths. It's like claiming that the advice to drink water is "quite psychotic", because drinking 50 liters of water will rupture your stomach and kill you.
No, it proves just enough: because growth is followed to absurd lengths regularly and you will be hard pressed to find many other attitudes that are followed to those lengths in quantities that make that much difference to everybody alive today.
The three month stock market cycle coupled with capitalism and advertising are at the root of a ton of societal problems that we are incapable of solving within that framework. Between those three we are all just lemons to be squeezed.
Not necessarily an entirely bad thing. Companies have lifecycles. Sure, a mature company might become largely profit focused, and stop innovating like they used to. But this generates surplus to return to investors, and creates opportunities for new innovative startups to fill the gaps that the incumbent is neglecting!
As long as they aren’t acting in a way that excessively blocks/restricts competition, I don’t really see a problem with this. Old companies get boring, and eventually if they get too boring they get disrupted … maybe disrupted to death.
Companies have life cycles, but it is especially those companies that were successful early on whose drive to keep growing causes damage. That's when you get into patent portfolios, IP milking, M&A and squeezing competitors by cross subsidizing products.
Growth for growth's sake is simply wrong. It is always growth at the expense of something larger.
I feel like you have presented a straw man argument for what a growth mindset is when it comes to individual people. You have taken extreme behaviours and ascribed them to a growth mindset, which I would disagree with.
I would expect a growth mindset as applied to health and fitness would recognise short term versus long term benefits. Maintaining a healthy bodyweight decreases the risk of all cause mortality. Losing weight to the point of anorexia would cause numerous potential problems, and quickly be recognised as not ideal and a different approach applied.
Optimising conversations only for maximum knowledge extraction is not a valid approach within the broader goal of optimising social interactions to maintain a healthy group of friends and family who you enjoy spending time with and can depend upon for years to come.
A diet of pure protein shakes and broccoli is clearly not in line with any reasonable approach to a healthy diet which instead should aim to have a broad a varied source of nutrients, again with the goal of maintaining long term health and supporting whatever sports/training/activities the person takes part in.
A programmer/software engineer who is serious about improving their craft would be much better served by taking a holistic view of their role and expanding their knowledge and expertise to a much broader set of skills than just algorithms and data structures.
Your hypothetical deranged person I would argue is operating under the exact opposite of a growth mindset.
I think you are hung up on some careless phrasing on my part.
I'm lambasting the "growth strategy" that leads companies to release worse products via over-optimisation. I am pointing out how this sort of 'growth strategy' would lead to absurd behaviours if a human applied the same logic.
I think the problem here is that "growth mindset" has a more specific meaning to many readers that is not at all synonymous with "growth strategy", and there's some crossing of streams going on.
Well they do call it viral growth unironically. I think the ambivalent moral motivation behind it would be a little better surfaced by calling it the cancer cell mindset.
I would say someone like David Goggins probably fits the bill. Some people find his level of drive inspirational, I find it deranged. Ultimately I suppose the outcomes are good. Great health (probably) and a great fitness influencer brand, but the desire for suffering that fuels it all and the incredible levels of self criticism and even hatred involved, make it seem far more like some kind of fitness anorexia than self care.
I think it would be reasonable to class his mode of being as that of individual growth mindset.
It's an analogy, if it were perfect it would cease to be an analogy and be the thing itself.
Analogy is a literary device for conveying an idea. You obviously understood the idea being conveyed, thus, the analogy did exactly what it was meant to do.
I live in the American Gardens Building on W. 81st Street on the 11th floor. My name is Patrick Bateman. I'm 27 years old. I believe in taking care of myself and a balanced diet and rigorous exercise routine. In the morning if my face is a little puffy I'll put on an ice pack while doing stomach crunches. I can do 1000 now. After I remove the ice pack I use a deep pore cleanser lotion. In the shower I use a water activated gel cleanser, then a honey almond body scrub, and on the face an exfoliating gel scrub. Then I apply an herb-mint facial mask which I leave on for 10 minutes while I prepare the rest of my routine. I always use an after shave lotion with little or no alcohol, because alcohol dries your face out and makes you look older. Then moisturizer, then an anti-aging eye balm followed by a final moisturizing protective lotion.
You are assuming a growth mindset has identified the correct ways to measure growth, and is capable of recognizing when it has missed the mark and why. I think the wreckage of products all around us that have grown dramatically – from exciting starts into miserable current-states – shows that anorexia is closer than you think.
You're missing the point which is that growth mindsets, while well intentioned, may optimize for the wrong things and cause not only suboptimal outcomes but even inhuman ones.
The point isn't that the particular strategy for health and fitness is right or wrong, it's that the growth mindset causes the person (Bob?) to over-focus on that aspect of their life to the detriment of more important but less obvious ones, like personal relationships, being kind to others, or enjoying fallen leaves in autumn.
Bob spends his 20s trying to improve his bodyfat percentage, max his bench, get a Porsche, and build his 401k.
He misses out on his niece's early childhood, loses his highschool friendships, and breaks up with his girlfriend for a job opportunity in a different city.
This is like the printer company focusing on revenue instead of brand loyalty or its reputation.
I agree with you that the "phychotic" phenomenon you describe exists, and it is sometimes called the growth mindset.
But there seems to exist another phenomenon that is described in the book The Mindset, where the term originates, which is quite different.
Let's take some examples from partner dancing which I am very familiar with.
In some dance cultures, it is customary for the leader to try to maximize the area on the dance floor that is occupied (or "owned") by the couple. This is done, so you can dance more freely, do whatever you please. Such leaders may use many methods, such as intimidation and even physical force to push "weaker" leaders away from the area they consider their own.
There are other dance cultures, where the leaders try to co-operate. For them, the area on the dance floor is shared. I feel where the other leaders are going, in a way I dance with the other leaders as well. We will try to harmonize our movements so that we can all share the area. The leaders who are able to effectively use the space are highly valued in such cultures. Beginners are given a little bit more slack, of course, but at the same time, non-cooperating leaders may be pushed out by the co-operating leaders.
I once participated in an Argentine tango dance event (called a milonga) in Buenos Aires, which was for locals only. Many milongas are filled with tourists, so the locals try to keep the tourists out from certain events they consider their own.
I was invited to the event by a friend, a follower, who knows many locals and so is accepted member of that event. But even knowing my friend did not give me any slack, but my co-operation was put into a rough test from the beginning.
Many leaders intentionally surrounded me on the dance floor, and pressured me from all sides. As I am quite experienced in dancing in small spaces, I did not hesitate and was able to continue my dancing and keep co-operating with the other leaders although they were putting me into this test. After I had passed this test, I was accepted, and the testing stopped.
I have also been invited into events where one key requirement to even get allowed to apply is that the organisers know your dancing, and they especially need to know that you will co-operate. These are lovely events, because the level of co-operation is very high.
I think one key part of the real growth mindset is co-operation. You give up on fighting for some resource (in this case, the area you occupy on the dance floor), and you will gain something more valuable -- co-operation with the peers -- and through this co-operation you will have enough of the resource you need -- in this case you will always have enough space for your dancing.
Another part of the real growth mindset appears to be the attitude of anti-fragility. If I accept the challenge of trying to learn to dance without aggressively trying to occupy space -- even though I would be skilled enough to do it -- that pressure will eventually teach me to become an even better dancer. It is not easy, however, it may take years of persistent effort to overcome this hurdle. But without this pressure I would have never learned.
The growth mindset is utterly idiotic. It presumes an endlessly growing market with endless resources and endless GDP growth. Everything has a natural growth stop: it's called adulthood. And after that you are supposed to take responsibility and act your age, rather than that you keep on demanding more like some angry toddler.
> And I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of glad the healthcare industry has a growth mindset that “what we have is good enough”.
No, you really don't know about me. But there is plenty of innovation in healthcare, and not all of it is super costly (though some of it is). Like every other industry it is a confusing mixture of regulatory capture, people that really care, people that only care about their income stream or bottom line and people that wished they could do even better. The difference between say 'big pharma' and your average nurse of doctor is massive and to lump them all into one giant heap is not very productive.
> It’s how humans advance. If cavemen thought “well this is good enough” well, we’d still be living in caves.
The 'this is good enough' is a strawman. There are plenty of things that really are good enough, and which have turned into pathways that are borderline extortionist.
And there is plenty of innovation that is not cancerous.
But do deny the reality that short term stock market driven goals of eternal growth are incompatible with a sustainable and healthy society is a non-starter for me, it is so incredibly clear that to ignore it is almost wilful at this stage. "After me, the deluge".
But do deny the reality that short term stock market driven goals of eternal growth are incompatible with a sustainable and healthy society is a non-starter for me, it is so incredibly clear that to ignore it is almost wilful at this stage. "After me, the deluge".
Yet here we are - with the most prosperous and healthy nations all based on a model around, what you call, “short-term stock market driven goals”.
May you have give an example? Because I look around and don’t see what you see.
That's because we're looking at different things. I'm looking at the state of the world in general, the number of people that have to deal with the fall out of all that wealth in terms of climate and pollution. That welfare comes with a massive cost.
If breathing 21% oxygen is good for you, then breathing 100% oxygen is better!...
The problem with reality is it is not clean or simple. For example having chlorinated water keeps you from getting any number of terrible diseases when you get a drink. At the same time it's a deadly chemical that takes huge amounts of industrial processing to make, and if not treated right is a source of pollution.
Not any different then the 'forever chemicals' we've made. They were highly stable and did their jobs well. They also are terrible cancer causing bioaccumulators that have caused tons of misery.
Open ended problems do not have simple solutions. They have trade offs. It's a good idea to fully understand the trades you're making.
Growth is probably the only thing that will save the environment. If we stopped technological growth with 1900 dirty coal power plants, we would be far worse off.
Growth mindset is the _personal_ belief that _your own_ abilities are not fixed and can grow. It provides psychological benefit when faced with difficult problems and improves grit. It is not the classic HN over-optimized self. It says nothing about _requiring_ growth.
But for this conversation, the point is made well enough, I just hoped we could avoid a viral pushback against a perfectly reasonable thing.
I am referring to the "growth mindset" as it applies to companies, and then pointing out how absurd it would be for a human to act the same way. The context is how the "continuous growth strategy" leads companies to release inferior products
I understand your point, but you do keep using a phrase that means something else than what you're describing. "growth mindset" is a phrase used a lot in psychology, from Carol Dweck.
I used the term only twice, directly replying to a comment about growth strategy. If I could edit I would, but still I think it makes sense in context.
I like how you phrased that as the positive result of a (personal) growth mindset. For non-native English speakers, the word "grit" might be interesting to learn about. Aside from the other common meaning of "coarse grains as of sand or stone"..
> In psychology, grit is a positive, non-cognitive trait based on a person's perseverance of effort combined with their passion for a particular long-term goal or end state (a powerful motivation to achieve an objective).
> This perseverance of effort helps people overcome obstacles or challenges to accomplishment and drives people to achieve.
> Distinct but commonly associated concepts within the field of psychology include "perseverance", "hardiness", "resilience", "ambition", "need for achievement", and "conscientiousness".
It reminds me of a similar term, "gumption".
> gumption - Boldness of enterprise; initiative or aggressiveness.
I think a lot of this thread is really confusing 'personal growth' to 'market share growth'.
You can have ordinary well functioning products that just do their one thing and do them well, and thus grow market share.
There is nothing about 'growth' that says your product must add and add features until it is un-usable, which it seems like people are saying is 'growth' as in 'personal growth'.
Just build good products and 'grow' market share.
Printers have failed this by making their products bad by growing features, and thus Brother is winning because it can simply print. A printer that can just print, and not wash your car.
> If you think about it the growth mindset is quite psychotic.
But it's absolutely crucial to VC funded businesses. Current VC groupthink isn't "how can we create businesses that deliver value", it's "how can we create businesses that we can convince other investors to see as valuable before we cash out and move on?"
That's why we have things like "increasing headcount" as a goal, because increasing the number of people a business employs increases its perceived value. It doesn't matter if it destroys team dynamics, increases the burn rate, etc. It's a tool used to make a company seem more valuable before the VCs exit.
>"how can we create businesses that we can convince other investors to see as valuable before we cash out and move on?"
"How can we steal a man's shirt while convincing him he only lost it[1] instead?"
If there's only so many shirts to go around, and they have to come from someone else, maybe we just load a bag full of rocks, lie and tell people it's full of their laundry, and then leave the laundromat before they notice. When they do notice, they will blame themselves. "Why oh why," they lament, "did I not immediately recognize it was a bag of rocks all along!"
The Bob you described sounds like he's mostly targeting fixed set points. E.g. body fat percentage is bounced below, he's doing a fixed number of leetcode problems, etc.
That sounds more like a sustained model with unhealthy targets.
I'd think a growth model would be more like uncontrolled addiction, where the goal dosage continually increases and stays out of reach.
I think a better example of personal growth mindset would be your career. Eventually you'll cap out being a programmer for example. You've mastered the highest paying technology, you've moved to the highest paying location, etc. Your options are to go independent and start your own company, move to a startup with equity, or start cheating people. Cheating people would be to over bill your hours, take on 2-3 jobs and half ass them all, etc. I would argue it's not so much the growth mindset, but the lack of ethics people apply when chasing money once their growth is capped out.
Growth is good, but it will eventually cap out. It's what people do when that happens that really matters.
Growth doesn't cap out, but it becomes only a slight upward. I'm a C++ programmer I can become better by using C++23, or I can learn rust. Both would be paths to growth, but since I'm already good at programming the difference will be minimal. Both would be worth doing, but the difference would not be very significant.
I was specifically referencing income growth via programming career. I didn't make that clear. I referenced it here but not in the opening statement. Personal growth for the sake of personal growth is boundless.
>You've mastered the highest paying technology, you've moved to the highest paying location, etc.
Depends on how you define society. Is society a machine for producing high achievers who accomplish tasks? Is society a blade for lopping off tall poppies? Is society an organism with its own fitness functions outside of the individuals that compose it?
If you've studied artificial life and see societies as mechanisms for executing the genetic algorithm, you see the faults with the growth ideology you've criticized. It's a plateau-making machine: it will tend to reward what's working right now, and starve out the genetic pool of anything else, leaving the resultant society unable to adapt.
Computers acting like people and people acting like machines is a bad trade-off. It's not at all focussing on the strengths of each. There's a reason societies (such as big cities) that seemingly focus over-much on caring for useless and suboptimal people (compared to the darwinism of the wild frontier), end up burgeoning and becoming hotbeds of accomplishment. If you treat people not as machines, but as the genes of the genetic algorithm, it suddenly makes a lot more sense to be humanist: you'll get unexpected wins out of unexpected traits being cultivated until they can be useful in their own right.
indeed there's a notion of quality in innovation and development, and also market rhythm fit..
as a kid, waiting 3-5 years to see the next version of photoshop or office was long but good, when the web came, you could get a near direct line with the devs.. instant download, constant updates.. and it quickly felt like a disease, this growth is just instability under disguise
What are you talking about? Sounds like a typical Hackernews, right down to the protein shakes and broccoli. You've probably conversed with many such people on this site.
> It creates a very strange world where we have computers acting like people and people acting like machines.
Of course people here are getting hung up on your analogy. It's no surprise. But what you've written here is a very real consequence of our growth economy because humans are merely inputs into hoarding monetary capital. All other capital, including people, with the exclusion pf land and some selective niceties are expendable towards that end.
The thing is, there is a ceiling with SaaS products. You can usually hit it within 5 years of starting. That ceiling is entirely controlled by churn, with 0% churn, you go to the moon, but nobody has 0% churn.
Once you hit that ceiling, the only reasonable thing is to focus on churn, not growth (as it will have the most impact). But that is like explaining that a "circular line on a map is actually a straight line" they say they get it, but they still see a circular line.
That seems absurd. People often have no idea that a product would be useful or desirable beforehand. Perhaps our current level of consumer choice is somewhat absurd, but that brings you to a Soviet style system.
It's fascinating that this was downvoted. What the comment above is suggesting is literally a planned economy.
How would these "consumer groups" even work? Would they be democratically elected? Appointed by governments? How would they be insulated from pressure from companies trying to suppress competition? It would inevitably lead to a thoroughly inefficient and corrupt system...
People who come up with these ideas think that the 'groups' would be filled with like minded people like themselves when in reality it would be the opposite.
> In android, if I click on a link in facebook messenger that takes me to facebook, the back button takes me "back" to facebook's home screen instead of to the messenger app. Tapping back button again does nothing. I have to switch back to messenger manually. That's 5-6 taps/swipes instead of 1, because a product manager's bonus in FB depends on how well they beg for more engagement. As a result, I rarely use any of these products. I used to spend some time in Instagram/FB. I close LinkedIn immediately after an important interaction for similar reasons.
This! Each and every time I see an Instagram link I avoid clicking on it for the same click/login capture nonsense. If they opened it up for views only with out logging in, I'd probably actually end up using the service. Short-term protectionist strategies like these will be etched into the gravestone of Meta/Facebook.
Details like these go through extensive A/B testing. Clearly, Meta has found that gating their content behind a login prompt leads to greater engagement and revenue growth. For what it's worth, I eventually created an Instagram account because of these prompts. The strategy works.
it's just artificial growth, though. You're not generating any more engagement than if they'd just show you the content as a guest. Unless you also started using the app as a result of creating an account.
The growth may be artificial and not sustainable, but the money it brings is real, and can be invested (or consumed) sooner than later. Opportunity cost is a real thing :-\",
Additionally the infrastrucutre is not free either. Even without ads (which is fine by me), serving up the full suite of tools to logged out users is very expensive and much harder to control
At our company we're trying to do the same thing now, supporting logged out users is just too expensive and not worth it.
I would argue it’s actually easier to serve content to logged out users as you can cache the whole response and serve it at the edge. Then it “just” becomes a cache expiration problem.
Correct, we push static assets to the edge. However not all SASS products are the same, there is a spectrum of features that can be pushed to the edge and some cannot. The engineering comes from cost, usability, reliability, etc...
tbh, that's how a lot of apps do it, and it's wrong. The "Up" button in the navigation bar should always bring you to the hierarchically higher point in the app's own nav graph, while the back button in the device's navigation bar at the bottom should always bring you to the historically previous page.
Any app that does something other than that is wrong and should not have been approved.
I've been noticing this type of bullshit with Netflix recently. Every time I watch something I'm prompted to rate it. Every. Single. Time. And it's not like a gentle suggestion, it's a pop-up that has to he dismissed to be able to interact with the rest of the interface.
Makes sense, yes the growth mindset makes sense until you or a company get product market fit. When stagnation sets in and things stop working then a growth mindset makes sense again. Of course you also need to make sure that you don’t get blindsided by new changes in society or tech, but those things just need you to be open minded to new things
> The growth mindset is incredible for expanding when your product is in its early ages. But there should be a "sustain" mindset at some point. First you push to grow the market, or your market share. When returns on your efforts become diminishing, you push to improve how much you earn of each customer/each sale. At some point there should be a mindset that our company is worth X dollars, and we should sustain that.
Kent Beck calls this the Explore and Extract phases (with the middle phase being Expand). I'm not sure if you had this talk in mind as you were writing your comment, but if not I think it'll resonate with you.
YouTube on android does something similar. Eventually if you back-button enough you get back when you started. But the amount of presses required increases every few months or so. But hey, engagement and retention goes up!
> The growth mindset is incredible for expanding when your product is in its early ages. But there should be a "sustain" mindset at some point. First you push to grow the market, or your market share. When returns on your efforts become diminishing, you push to improve how much you earn of each customer/each sale. At some point there should be a mindset that our company is worth X dollars, and we should sustain that.
The worst part is that when companies MUST switch must switch to "sustain" because they can't squeeze out any more growth or their efforts to squeeze out more growth become counter productive, they instead switch to enshitification and drain their user base, and the company, of all the value they can, essentially running into the ground for a few more quarters of profit and bonuses.
As an aside, I'm sad that "growth mindset" has been hijacked to mean "grow at all costs" when it originally meant "the belief that a person's capacities and talents can be improved over time". It was originally a term of nurturing, not of exploitation and infinite capitalism.
It's not just a "growth" mindset; it's "this quarter's growth" mindset. Short-term goals that give short-term results while making long-term results predictably worse. Not a problem for a particular executive: they will move on to work on something else, and are not going to be hurt by the fallout.
But if this strategy underperforms as badly as we as customers feel it does, it will eventually drive its perpetrators from the market. If they think that their positions are unassailable, let them remember how the unassailable GMC and Ford felt in 2000s.
You really need to balance both at a company. Some segments need innovation / growth at different times. You also might want to release / invest in competitors to ensure you maintain your market share which is taken via innovation.
Google kind of did this for a time with Inbox and similar products. Apple had multiple phone lines (less like this, but a tad). Facebook has multiple social media platforms. Block has square and cash app (among other things).
I agree with you completely. The endless growth mindset (resembling cancer) is driven by investors who want passive income in the form of returns. Investment returns in a company necessitate its market cap growing, not merely being sustained. A "sustain" mindset is incompatible with this. It requires ownership to be simple and unanimously content with not having endless return on their capital.
There's an interesting cultural element to this, and I think Brother being a Japanese company is not a coincidence. I see the same mindset applied widely here in the German Mittelstand.
The American growth at all costs mindset (particularly quarterly) is excellent during the technology exploration phase. It spurs radical innovation, but as a technology matures it becomes impossible to meet growth expectations. In response to this the spiral of Enshittification kicks off and eventually the company and it's products fade into irrelevance. Stability in such an environment is impossible (the gain knob is cranked to the max).
The German Mittelstand are different, typically they are much slower to innovate during the technology exploration phase (I think mostly due to the German economy not really rewarding early stage innovation). However as a technology matures the Mittelstand's strength in stable, gradual evolution and refinement really shines. They focus on being the best in their niche and grow by expanding to new markets, opening adjacent product lines etc. Enshittification is the last thing on their minds (the system is critically/over damped).
I think your phrasing is wrong, 'growth mindset' is the idea that you can improve yourself with effort, education, etc, instead of just 'I'm inherently bad at maths' or whatever.
What you are referring to is simply Capitalism.
Capitalism is where 'capital', aka money, ultimately, owns the 'means of production'. And it also innovates, and creates the means of production, by deploying money to uncertain ventures; building a new factory or whatever.
The problem is that deployed capital needs to earn a return, else why bother. In other words, everything needs to grow. The system just doesn't work without growth.
'Growth' can be, people doing more things, or, more people doing things, or, making more money from the things people do (though I'm not sure that's actual growth). We've come a long way in the last century with the first two, and now the focus seems to be on that third option.
IMHO the current system is past, or at least fast approaching, it's expiry date, and we really should have researched, and have at least a vague idea of a plausible future replacement, by now, otherwise we might be doomed to recycle the 20th C.
> What happens instead is companies keep rewarding executives by increases in revenue, they keep rewarding product managers similarly, and product managers selectively choose metrics that optimize immediate revenue, at the expense of brand loyalty.
While I'm not advocating for the growth mindset, you seem to be neglecting why, exactly, most executive incentive packages so frequently include stock options. They are directly intended to defer the rewards over a defined vestment period to align their incentives for the long term success of the company.
I've worked in several support organization that sincerely prioritized providing good support to customers. They paid good tech's good salaries, hired good managers, and we provided great support. Sales team members would come to me and say they were selling support contracts with ease because of the support provided, "easiest money I ever made" was a common refrain.
But eventually at every company customer / tech support eventually is viewed as a cost, an annoyance. After all when customers complain what do they complain about? Even the best customer's can't praise support enough for companies to avoid eventually seeing it as an annoyance and eventually cost that is easily cut. Good managers see it coming and jump ship, support for support teams starts to erode and the culture changes.
I worked one company where the engineering team would secretly invite some of the support staff over to their building when they had a team lunch ... because they liked us and knew that our team lunches (low cost pizza) had been cancelled.
It happens time and again ... :(
Eventually I moved on and learned to code. Maintenance is hard and not valued.
> The growth mindset is incredible for expanding when your product is in its early ages. But there should be a "sustain" mindset at some point.
This is OK if management is paid and get bonuses by the money they make by selling products. If they make money and get bonuses by selling their shares or increasing their value, they cross the line between industry and finance. Finance doesn't give a f** about industry. They'll eat one after another like we eat cherries. Unsustainable growth and enshittyfication are two tools to squeeze the most money from a company and if it dies in the process they move to the next one.
Somewhat pedantic comment: the phrase "growth mindset" is also psychology jargon that refers to the fact that many skills are more learnable than most people realize. It contrasts with a "fixed mindset" where people assume you have to work with what you've got.
Just wanted to point that out so people don't get confused between the healthy idea of being able to grow and the idea you're addressing, which is more like a compulsion for businesses to grow economically.
The same observation works for the psychology definition too, they are similar. If you insist on getting better and better on the stuff you already excel, you will hit a wall and will have to sacrifice a lot for small improvements.
As the OP said, for companies that don't have a lot of fitness, it's great too.
The one overwhelmingly large difference is that the professionals that deal with it on the context of people are well trained and know not to push it over the point it becomes harmful. But that detracts nothing from the point.
However, investors aren’t interest in buying stock in a company with poor returns. They have other options with better returns. It comes with accessing capital in the public markets.
The other issue is that a sustainable business quickly becomes a dying business when competitors innovate and you don’t.
I honestly can’t think of any business that just prints cash without a daily struggle to keep the company growing.
> Brother is what it is, not because of lack of innovation, but because of deliberate evasion of short-sighted greed.
Exactly. We have two new Brother multifunction printers at work and they're pretty great. They're exactly like printers, you tell your computer to print a document, that's where it comes out. No hassle.
All this other BS that HP, Epson etc. are pulling isn't innovation, it's extortion. "Just be a printer that isn't shit" is innovation in this environment.
This idea about sustain-mode resonates with me! It almost feels like we need different kind of "product" people to do this; the typical incentives for product is to innovate innovate innovate.
> At some point there should be a mindset that our company is worth X dollars, and we should sustain that
Yes! What I see instead is a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot mindset. Its everywhere I see. I wish there was a way to see and fix this before its too late.
The right way to treat your loyal customers is also micro-intangible, hard to show clear numbers and so does not bear any rewards for a manager taking this approach. Instead, the opposite of screwing loyal customers for new ones is rampant, easy to cook up numbers and so amply rewarded not just limited to tech companies.
Unless the same management chain is responsible for new customers and leaving ones, this is an internal conflict of interest and its effects only show at the macro level.
I've seen many once-popular restaurants go this route, losing long time repeat customers who prefer well priced, familiar drinks and dishes over hit or miss exotic overpriced ones. They don't complain, they just stop coming back.
Car manufacturers, Appliance manufacturers, Food chains, Internet Service Providers, Telcos, tech startups are all guilty of this. Factions at MS, Goog, AAPL too are guilty.
Exceptions here are really really rare. I've never bought a brother printer, but it will be my next.
I bought a Brother laser printer a while back but it set itself up by default using the WSD protocol. After some time it stopped responding to the network and I could use it only after reinstalling the driver every time I wanted to print.
Only after I set it up with the TCP/IP protocol, it works fine and is available every time.
Among all the praises, well, there are still things they could fix/upgrade. Some of my printers don't wake up from sleep in certain networks and clients report them as offline (a widespread problem if you search for it). Also it'd be nice if they'd support wifi beyond N (this is sadly common among wifi devices in general).
I've bought at least five brother laser printers because I wanted one everywhere I go. They've all worked great except for the last one (HL-L2390DW). That sleep problem has caused me to consider other brands instead of just buying my default.
I'm betting lots of people haven't experienced this, because their old printers are still working great.
I have a Brother DCP L2530DW: black and white laster, wi-fi, with scanner. Works perfectly for my use case (scanning invoices, printing tickets and mail), no need for a specific app be it on Android, Windows or Linux.
I'm only using the Brother Windows app for scanning purposes, as the OCR works well for my needs.
It's been 2.5 years, no issues whatsoever, just needed one toner change after a while.
I've recently bought the same one. Only thing that surprised me was the double-line dot-matrix LCD from ~30 years ago. In terms of usability this isn't great (entering the WiFi password was no fun), but most of the time it's used with a second device anyway.
I might be one of the very few ro see it like that, but for low print volume withoutbany speciap needa regarding print quality and size, I'd propably go for one Canons or Epsons pay-per-page subscription models. Costs oer page are dirt cheap, printers aren't very expensive neither and there models with decent document scanning.
There is a reason laser printers usually have their own room or remote corner in offices, they aren't really great for air quality.
I don’t think 2 pages a day is going to be base for most rooms in the home with decent ventilation. Like if you live in a city I suspect you breathe in more particulates from tire wear in the air.
As for price, a hl-2140 is $50 and will last you for 10k pages if not more. I don’t think inkjet pricing economics ever win here even with the pay per use the latest “pricing innovation” the inkjet companies have invented. I love that my laser printer has 0 maintenance aside from filling the paper tray and I never have to think about it. It ran out toner after like 7 years of very occasional printing and there was lots of advance warning. The printer itself just works with no issues.
Epson's cheapest plan (printer + 1,250 pager per month) seems to be $14.99/mo. Not if that's a great deal if you only print 60 pages on average unless you need to buy a new printer each year for some reason.
Seems like the subscription might be a decent deal if you actually print quite a lot, though.
Eh. My Canon G3060 ink tank printer is great. No cartridges, no DRM, CUPS and scanner support on Linux out of the box. Only downsides are no document feeder for scanning and no double-sided printing (really Canon?). Other good printers do still exist.
But where are brother printers though? TFA basically just say “they are what tech people recommend for printers”, and while becoming a favorite amongst tech people isn’t a bad goal, I’m not sure it’s a great yard stick for business success.
I wonder what their yard sticks are because their sales process sucks.
I was just on Brother’s website thinking I would get a printer and 20 minutes later I’ve given up. Their website is really bad. In my first five minutes I think I closed the pop up advertising their Refresh ink program five times.
They have a soooo many models but thankfully there’s a help-me-choose button. I went through that and at the end it recommended something that had everything I need. But there’s no buy button at the end. The more information button says I need to contact a dealer for pricing.
I think checking duplex-copying pushed me into their business line (even though I chose home at the start). So I started over and skipped that option and at the end I got a different recommendation but again, no buy button and the only listed retailer was Walmart. I searched for it on Google and I think it might be a discontinued model.
Their help—me-choose function didn’t help much because my number one feature is that it not have DRM’d cartridges (ie accepts third party cartridges) and that’s not something you can filter by.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 337 ms ] threadIf you mean the gearbox, contrary to amateur opinion, nylon is probably a superior material to the cheap metal ones they replaced.
Because their mixers are still made in the US, labor saving cuts are much more worthwhile to them than materials.
(Their non-mixer offshored lineup is overpriced crap though).
A good example is the removal of the spring & washer used to secure the attachments: they are only a few cents of material, but they greatly increase the life expectancy of the mixer. Now you'll have to get those for $10-$20 from a 3rd party...
Oops. Do they? I ripped mine off years ago. It makes a bit more clatter at low speeds but I haven't noticed any damage.
I saw a fridge that had an app so you could control it from anywhere.
My requirements for a fridge are remarkably simple, to the point the only practical use I could think of an app was alarm that I'd left the door open or something.
(If this particular app did have a door-open alarm, it wasn't on the list of features. It did say you could adjust the temperature from your office. A location I'm often worrying about the fridge.)
Who decided to call useless ideas an "innovation" is beyond my understanding.
Ideally, as I print photos mainly, I get more then 4 colors and decent color management.
Added bonus for scanning (with or without document feeder).
Not much else there. Pay-per-page subscriptions are ok, by the way, price wise for home office use.
Then it comes down to innovation in the fields of color management, ink mixing and print heads and paper handling. And inks, of course.
Anything else is just pointless, and nothing I would call innovation.
Compared to a Canon Pro-200, they break even was somehwere around 300 printed a4 photo mark if I remember my detailed calculation correctly (850 bucks for the Epson and 460 bucks for Canon).
But yes, I love that printer! Because as a person, I do not think like my busoness case, hence with the tank printer I do kot think about print costs, as the purchase price is gone and mentally accounted for.
I never compared the non photo-capable EcoTank and whatever canon calls their tank printers to the cartridge cousins so.
Then I got a decent deal on a ET-8550, and the peace of mind to not re-run ink costs everytike you print, plus the Epsons home office printer functions, closed that decision. And the Epson print quality is really good, even B/W, so far, with the right media setting and paper, no colour tints whatsoever (at least that I can see).
- make something else
- buy more regardless and make a larger batch
They have fewer points of technical failure; they don’t create security attack surface; they save bandwidth; they get you talking to your friends, family or neighbours more; most food waste biodegrades, so it’s not really “waste”.
If your argument requires saying it's fine to just throw out food, maybe you should reconsider.
A pepper that you buy, cook and then throw away represents a considerable investment:
I am generally not in favour of IoT, and am not convinced that a camera will correct this issue. But make no mistake: food spillage has a huge impact.1 : https://www.fao.org/3/bt300e/bt300e.pdf
For me, this highlights issues that I think the IoT solutions paint over. The IoT solutions all require the same kinds of industry you're describing here, but for tech. So when those get deployed you have the food industry and the tech industry, but you still have the problem of the mouldy pepper, and the problem of food deserts, and a few other things.
I still think my "you can throw out the excess/mouldy food" and the "solve the problem by communal cooking" are better approaches than the IoT one. But I accept this is intuition and guesswork, and somewhat politically motivated. I'm sure about the politics here, but I accept I'm light on the data. I think the real problems are elsewhere than either the individual mouldy peppers and the IoT; somewhere around deeper, harder issues to do with supporting towns and cities the way we do.
You're making some kind of assumption and value judgement here but not articulating it. You're using the assumption as leverage to make an emotional push for me to think differently.
What's the assumption and value judgement? Can you weigh that against the biodegradability comment and share more of your thoughts?
I'd love to be able to see/know what I have at home while I'm shopping.
But yeah, it's a minor convenience
Our fridge is most of the time fairly full so I have a hard time imagining where would I put a camera to get a good overview of its contents. It seems that the best place is about half a meter outside. Even a fisheye would not be able to cover both door and the rest of it.
Our fridge is often 75-95% full, and things I can picture this maybe being useful for - sour cream, pickles, condiments - are often pushed to the back or on the door. I have a hard time imagining anything besides mostly "oh look, the milk jug/large bowl of last night's leftovers is blocking the camera's view of this entire shelf".
It also doesn't solve the "is that sour cream at least 1/3 full?" or equally important "is it expired?" problem, which is almost worse, because seeing the sour cream container leads to a false positive, which means I don't buy more despite needing it.
This is me too (or more realistically, my fridge is 95-105% full) but there's definitely people out there whose fridges are usually mostly empty and a camera could reasonably capture everything in it.
The thing is that turn on remotely is useless, it requires that you've added soap, closed the dishwasher and that it's turned on. At that point you might as well just set a timer.
There are two features I could see being useful: Auto-start during the night, when the electricity cost is lowest and a detailed error report, like heating element is 100% function, or water is leaking. None of those features will ever be available, because that's not why they are adding "smart" features.
Then after a few weeks the company decided they had to change their authentication scheme to something really complex and I couldn't be bothered - deleted the app and don't really miss it.
They typically have a very powerful 2.5 kilowatt heater they run in bursts - for like 5 mins when prewashing, for like 10 mins when starting the main wash, and like 10 mins again when drying.
In between those times, the machine uses only ~60 watts for pumps.
I have often pondered what a world of machines designed to meet solar output looked like - and for a dishwasher it would involve the heater being modulated to match the solar output (and knowing that sometimes the wash cycle would take longer if a cloud was overhead so heating was delayed by a half hour).
Concrete costs far fewer $$$'s than batteries do, per kwh of heat stored, it also doesn't require inverters, balancing or safety systems, ad lasts millions of cycles rather than thousands.
You can still slowly heat it up to 70 or 80°C and just add some extra heat on use, but that will still leave a lot of immediate power to deal with.
However, since my array is currently 4.4kw at 3 in the afternoon, a 2.5kw burst isn't a problem.
Once you've started an appliance on a cycle it's going to keep running, even if the sun goes behind a cloud. So you don't need to start it when the instantaneous solar power is at its highest, you need to start it when the predicted next two hours of solar power are at their highest.
And it turns out you don't need complex monitoring to figure that out.
I will absolutely never enable it.
"Less to go wrong" is my mantra for appliances. I want to switch them on and forget about them.
Your dishwasher might not implement it, but the existence of wifi-connected start function probably means that home assistant could enable this.
There's no money to save on spot price optimization there.
I have yet to see a single non-bullshit feature from any "smart" appliance, honestly.
It turns out it was a very simple Wifi ESP8622 project to wire up a reed switch + a magnetic door sensor to add such an alarm to Home Assistant.
Same - although I have experienced an interesting extension of this: HomePods now have alarm detection (the intention being to detect a smoke/burglar alarm). It is also triggered when the fridge is left open, leading to everybody in the household getting a critical alert (which ignores silent mode).
I would like a smart fridge that lets me know what is inside - so I know if I should get milk or a salad on my way home. So far nobody makes that.
I'm sure this is practically not a real issue, but my OCD paranoia cannot fathom the idea of my oven being on while I'm not at home due to safety / fire concerns.
I feel this is a terrible trade-off: a minor convenience, in exchange for a huge attack surface that could allow someone to burn your house down remotely. The folks who build IoT systems have neither the skill nor the economic incentive to keep these things secure for the 15+ year lifespan of a durable good like a cooking range.
Would be fun though, appliances can just have a "make me smart socket" with direct connection to hardware. Then it's the smart plug that needs kept updated, but more sustainable since it's used for many products. And if your manufacturer for it dies, can just replace with any other one since they'd be held to a standard.
Aren't RFID tags on all groceries a viable solution to make product info available to a fridge?
If you get a notification at work that your fridge door is left open, it would stay open until someone gets home and manually closes it.
I am quite annoyed after "breaking" two Inkjet printers in 5-6 years and want to buy a laser one this time, but am not sure how is the cartridge issue different between laser and inkjet. Do laser cartridges last longer? Is it less problematic to use non-original cartridges?
How well non-original cartridges work is highly dependent on the printer model. Some have more complex authentication of the cartridges and others it’s a simple page counter.
The main downside is color is a significant increase in cost of the printer as fairly expensive pieces need to be duplicated for each color.
Laser cartridges are just boxes of fine black dust. You can buy a matching box of fine black dust from somebody else, or refill your (empty) box with a different version of fine black dust, this won't matter much at all.
Having said that, I use a Brother b/w laser for 10+ years, and — with original toner being sold on Amazon at $40 and delivered for free to my door — have never bothered with neither refilling nor using "aftermarket" toner.
Its PDF parser doesn't seem to support all PDFs, and for some PDFs it will PRINT, on paper, an error message from the PDF parser.
So not only did it not print a perfectly valid PDF, it also wasted paper and ink for it.
You can't know beforehand which PDFs it'll support or not from looking at them, any computer / phone PDF viewer supports those. It could be as simple as a PDF sent by an airline.
They should:
1) use a proper PDF library, not some half baked one
2) if something is wrong with the PDF, show the error on screen, not waste paper for it
My Brother and Epson have both have trouble with printing old out-of-print machine manuals that used ancient PDF versions. They'd happily accept the job, and then proceed to crash the print spooler and more-or-less break explorer on more than one machine with the same set of drivers.
The problem would go away if I converted the pdf to a newer version or into an entirely different format.
Contrast to 10-15 years ago, feels like I would've been needing a printer on a weekly basis, at least.
Would be much cheaper and more inclusive to ask for a small fee and print it on professional devices centrally organized by the school.
Well - now the free market has figured it out! There's a private company who will buy everything for you on the list and deliver it to your classroom.
Welcome to America.
Yes. COVID saw some of this move to Microsoft Teams at our district, but some teachers are definitely holdouts. Some teachers want essays handed in on paper for marking up, as well.
:)
Brother Compact Monochrome Laser Printer, HLL2390DW, Flatbed Copy & Scan, Wireless Printing, Duplex Two-Sided Printing, https://a.co/d/8vMWJCK
If you want one that additionally has PCL 6 support for universal compatibility, get the slightly more expensive HL-L2375DW.
I have both, no regrets.
For a long time Monoprice sold very good Brother compatible toner for reasonable prices. Sadly, that time has long passed. Brother 1st party toner is not as cheap as I'd like but it's still decently affordable compared to other major brand 1st party toner. I've had horrible luck with non-Monoprice 3rd party Brother toner.
Brother HL-3140CW. Color laser printer. If you'd have told me it'd still be working ten years later, I wouldn't have believed you. I print so sporadically, but when I do, it just works. Does AirPrint from smartphones, etc.
My only complaint with this model is that it actually has no Ethernet port, so it connects only via WiFi. Seems like a strange trade-off for something like a printer.
Printers were a product category that were expensive for what they offered and were always kind of finicky. I can still remember never knowing if my printer was going to work when I needed it to or not.
Since I purchased a Brother printer all of those concerns went away. It works well, requires minimal set up, is reliable, and represents great value for money over a period of years.
I'm on my second printer from them in the last 10 years and wouldn't even consider a competitor unless there's a serious decline in their quality.
Edit:
Since I saw someone ask below my model is MFC-9340CDW
I wasn't implying that you can't complain about it!
Couldn’t be happier with it
It's universally coupled with a lot discussion about how much of a scam inkjet printers are from any company.
> I don't print often, but when I do I want color so a BW laserjet isn't a good fit.
.....then....buy....a Brother COLOR laser?
The levels of arrogance in "well I can just throw out more than half the advice" is breathtaking...
...and then you have the nerve to blame the community?
1) Buy a cheap inkjet printer
2) Discover it runs out of quick within ~50-100 pages
3) Learn about the distinction between laser and inkjet printing
4) Buy only Brother laser printers for the rest of your life
It's a rite of passage at this point.
Inkjet is also typically more viable for non-commercial borderless and supertabloid printing, like large prints and posters.
Think about that before you email anything you want to keep private.
I dont see any way to register the sender's expected email on the printer. Back to fax spamming...?
https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-...
"And here’s 275 words about printers I asked ChatGPT to write so this post ranks in search because Google thinks you have to pad out articles in order to demonstrate “authority,” but I am telling you to just buy whatever Brother laser printer is on sale and never think about printers again."
(followed by chatgpt output)
It never gets in my way, always works when I need it, is happy about the default drivers and costs me around 20€ in ink every two to 3 years.
It makes me happy to hear it once a week when it cleans itself.
If anyone knows how to fix this please let me know, I want to love my printer as well.
I print once a never, so the only answer I remember is to power cycle the little bastard.
And then I have to reboot my pc so windows 10 will find it.
There's probably a couple services I could restart instead, but reboot is fast enough I don't care.
Observation: disconnecting the printer from the network avoided the un-wake-able "deep sleep" state. Re-connecting the network made it susceptible again. I suspect it's particular network traffic that causes the printer to wedge into a sleep it cannot leave; possibly a Debian box that I've since de-commissioned. The problem no longer occurs despite having the same firmware as before and being connected to the network.
If anything its connectivity works too well: I first connected it via USB, installed the Brother drivers (i386 only, but whatever, I don't need a 64-bit printer driver really!), and CUPS shared it over the network to all my computers. Then I added an Ethernet connection and it shared itself over the network. So now there are multiple ways to reach it.
Apparently this can be fixed be reflashing its firmware but from what I can gather this requires some obscure utility that’s not generally available.
Also look at the delicious Windows 2000 style settings interface:
https://i.imgur.com/YtnfaAN.jpg
All the cloud nonsense is there to enrich the manufacturers, it doesn't actually make these products better. KISS!
Further, I got mine as a refurb since I wanted it in the throes of the pandemic so I wasn't going to spend big bucks on a printer and needed something for the amazon returns labels primarily...
The HP laser that was replaced was finicky at the best of times.
Wifi is the only "innovation" that I cared about when buying a new printer. My old Brother just had USB, which was fine for 12 years. But my newer (10 years old) Brother has wifi and printing from the couch is great!
They've made the best scanner by refusing to innovate in that area as well.
In the end it somewhat boils down to pure greed. Instead of stabilizing production costs and/or reusing generic components to ease up manufacturing and repair - HP, Epson, Canon, Dell, Samsung, Kyocera and others try to hype their products with whatever tech stack is currently in trend. "growth hacking" is literally their job description.
There eventually will be a ChatGPT printer on the market. It's inevitable due to what kind of people manage a printer business: It's not the type of people that know how to build printers anymore.
..."
My own methods would also have easily produced this kind of error if you set the threshold for what to consider identical when clustering high enough. But for OCR the risk is somewhat mitigated by people not trusting it to be error-free, and so it can be an acceptable tradeoff if it reduces the overall error rate, but if you're outputting the raw pixel data and let people think it's an unmanipulated image you're begging for trouble.
I unfortunately discovered that my brand new Brother printer can only communicate over 2.4 GHz wifi, which conflicts with the 5 GHz my phone requires (my router can only do one at a time, and there's no way I'm switching as needed). So USB it is.
It's one of their cheapest inkjets (MFC-1010DW), but I selected it for features more than price. Wish I had read the documentation. I would have purchased the next model up.
Nicely compact compared to the ~10 year old Canon that died recently.
That's abysmal! Every 5GHz Wifi AP I've ever come across lets you run both PHYs at the same time.
Please, on my behalf, sternly talk down to your router.
Even ignoring the massive issue of device compatibility: 5GHz and its protocols do not have anywhere the range and penetrating power of 2.4GHz. When I walk outside my house I can keep watching videos, but my laptop does this by transitioning to the 2GHz radio link modes.
Whenever you replace it, get a separate AP and modem.
Also, DOCSIS 3.1 modems come with queue management. You may benefit significantly from an upgrade even if nothing else changes.
> only 5ghz is performant
Most of these barely need any bandwidth. A printer is possibly on the higher end of bandwidth, but I think the number of printers that support 5GHZ is possibly still single digits.
And/or documented microcontrollers that are purchasable in the states?
Won't 2.4GHz have better range anyway over 5GHZ?
I think that 2.4GHz having longer range is a myth. When I worked on WiFi for Google Fiber we tested it pretty extensively and didn't see any common building materials that attenuated 2.4GHz more than 5GHz. Historically, the problem was that routers often selected low-power channels for 5GHz. If you use a channel where the maximum power is permitted, 5GHz is just as good.
The 5GHz band plan is kind of complicated. You will want to ensure that you get a 160MHz channel. How you accomplish that varies by region, unfortunately.
Oddly the C6 was announced before the C5 I think is only now making it's way onto devkits.
> When I worked on WiFi for Google Fiber we tested it pretty extensively and didn't see any common building materials that attenuated 2.4GHz more than 5GHz.
Huh interesting, I might have to play with that at some point (I'm hoping either ubiquiti or openwrt will let me do that).
There’s some standalone dual-band access points on sale this weekend for <$40 right now which would solve your problem.
Don't be. A comprehensive list of our WiFi-capable devices are two smartphone models, the printer, and two laptops that are plugged in to wired connections.
Edit: Forgot about the two wireless work laptops.
For our purposes the 10 foot USB cable solves the problem fine.
Since Wifi on the printer was not in use at this point, it was then possible to simultaneously connect an additional wireless PC when needed, directly to the printer using the printer's Wifi-Direct alternative.
Interestingly, the printer was connected to the USB socket of a Windows XP client, but I had also ended up adding some Windows 8, 10, & 11 PC's to the network through time.
IT was not optimistic since the new printers have no drivers for Windows XP, plus this was a discontinued model havng no drivers newer than Windows 8 either.
Windows 7 drivers worked fine for XP, Windows 8 drivers worked for Windows 10, so everything was good.
When Windows 11 came out, there was a notice on the Brother website advising that you would need to wait over 30 days before they would be posting compatible drivers.
When they did post the W11 drivers, they were the exact same files that had already been released for W10 years earlier. Apparently the factory only needed to confirm there were no show-stoppers when installed in W11, with no modification of the drivers needed.
> https://www.honeywell.com/us/en/press/2020/08/honeywell-depl...
All these companies still have their original core competency: Canon still makes optics, Brother still makes home equipment like sewing machines, and Nintendo to this day has not discontinued their playing card products.
Yes, you can buy Nintendo playing cards. I have several sets both modern and older and they’re very good.
These companies think in terms of decades and half-centuries. They may fall trap to occasional trends, but they’re not the ones who rush into a market to innovate; Canon started making a clone of a Leica camera and happened into doing the first indirect X-ray system in Japan, as a single example.
Lego's original core competency was toys, but not plastic ones. The original Lego toys were nearly all wooden, but they gained success with the plastic bricks.
It's unfortunate how many spinoffs they've had that failed.
[1] https://business.time.com/2012/07/23/innovation-almost-bankr...
[2]https://www.bbc.com/news/business-43298897
I got years of use out of a second-hand Brother 2350 printer and then eventually some of the electronics failed. I needed a new printer and I still owned a couple unused Brother toner cartridges. Imagine my joy when I discovered that Brother would sell me a new model that still used the same toner system.
Sticking with the same spartan feature set was fine by me. It's all I need. I didn't even bother looking at the other makers' low-end offerings. Brother's approach of treating printing as a solved problem (Build once; sell often) is so much simpler and more cost-efficient than the super-frisky alternative (Build many times; sell once)
But all that stuff doesn't get in the way of the core feature, network laser printing.
One of the best bits was the no nonsense Windows drivers and easy Linux Postscript compatibility that just worked out of the box.
I was willing to forgive a whole lot of flaws due to it's low price, but it turned out have very few.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
It seems like something that the EU could make itself useful with, for instance.
It would force companies that make printers to be honest, as otherwise we'd just get the open hardware one that doesn't force bullshit upon us.
/s
Always works with no fancy drivers and aftermarket toner is cheap.
Part of the reason though is selection bias. I prefer the simplicity of a B&W laser printer and don't mind the "lo-fi" aesthetic.
It’s like $50 now and the toner lasts for soooo many pages it’s basically free. In other words, for the price of an inkjet cartridge that lasts maybe a year, this thing lasts forever.
Cartridges last for thousand of pages; no strange cloud requirements; the FritzBox registers the printer immediately and all devices in the local net can print.
Non of this was the case for my previous HP or Epson printers…
Additional software is needed for photo prints (color management and stuff like that) and (maybe?) scanning. I didn't try scanning without additional software, as I installed it with the photo print software. And since that software inly works under Windows anyway, I never bothered with scanning under Linux.
Printing works just fine so.
(Seriously, GNOME, whether to scan one side or two sides is actually important and the desired mode changes all the time. Would it kill you to dedicate some screen real estate to it, instead of filling everything with empty post-modern white space?)
Well it doesn’t work! Ink needs to be flushed to keep the lines clear. Inkjet printers need to print regularly for optimal performance and low waste. If you need a printer to sit on the shelf for 4 months between print jobs, laser is the only game in town. Toner is a solid powder and it lasts forever without issues. No clogging, no mess.
You still have the problem at the print head, though.
People were buying second-hand 1995-era Laserjets in 2010 because they were simply better than anything you could buy new. They... Just Worked.
That's not completely true.
Those printers sucked so much power you could brown out your local substation.
And the amount of ozone they kicked off could be smelled in a cube farm--I don't want to think what they would do to you in a home office.
So now I bought a color laser instead, and I couldn’t be happier.
Had an HP color inkjet before that. With that I felt like I did not have a printer.
Consumer garbage printers are consumer garbage printers.
What happens instead is companies keep rewarding executives by increases in revenue, they keep rewarding product managers similarly, and product managers selectively choose metrics that optimize immediate revenue, at the expense of brand loyalty. This is happening to almost every tech company, and the exceptions are rare gems.
In android, if I click on a link in facebook messenger that takes me to facebook, the back button takes me "back" to facebook's home screen instead of to the messenger app. Tapping back button again does nothing. I have to switch back to messenger manually. That's 5-6 taps/swipes instead of 1, because a product manager's bonus in FB depends on how well they beg for more engagement. As a result, I rarely use any of these products. I used to spend some time in Instagram/FB. I close LinkedIn immediately after an important interaction for similar reasons.
I made a mistake of buying another Samsung product after years. Never again. I made a mistake of buying another HP product, never again. I might still consider Dell only because of how well they supported me with their monitor flicker.
None of these products have a defect that's caused by poor design, programming, or manufacturing. They all suffer from growth-obsessed mindset.
Brother is what it is, not because of lack of innovation, but because of deliberate evasion of short-sighted greed.
The shareholders can then invest into new companies and startups.
This is much better for the economy AND for the shareholders
The alternative to stock buybacks is that the corporation make stupid acquisitions and try to integrate them into their processes, thereby killing them.
In fact every society which tried to take all of their money away and eliminate them as a class (more or less violently) has failed economically. Turns out when it works properly free market competition is strongest force for economic and technological progress that has ever existed.
Stock buybacks only benefit shareholders and companies, not the economie. Trickle down and all that doesn't work, stock buybacks reduce a companies tax burden, especially when leveraged which they often are, do not lead to more investment. And they make the rich even richer.
See, for example, here:
https://hbr.org/2020/01/why-stock-buybacks-are-dangerous-for...
And salaries rise, primarily, through labour organization and collective bargaining.
I believe the parent commenter's point was exactly this. Giving money to the investor class and expecting it to benefit everyone is the definition of trickle-down economics.
> And salaries rise, primarily, through labour organization and collective bargaining.
No. Supply and demand is and pretty much always was a much stronger force.
I'm all for it as a employee AND a shareholder.
But besides that, is there anything that makes buybacks worse than dividends?
Dividends are cleaner and affect the price in well understood ways: you set a date for the elegibility, and if you bought before that you get the dividend, if you buy after you don't.
Stock buybacks are less transparent (you don't buy them all at once).
Dividends also give money to people who have shares.
There is not difference beteeen these two mechanisms in who gets the money.
Like I said, it's the tax treatment that basically stopped growth companies giving dividends. I think that we should change said tax treatment and also make buybacks illegal but that's a bit more controversial.
In any case, for both G and FB, they'd need to do buybacks anyway because of their employee share programs.
Given a certain amount of money, spending it on stock buybacks vs spending it on dividends returns the same amount of money to each HOLDING shareholder.
In one case, they receive a small sum. In the other case, the value of their stock goes up.
Which is to say, very little overhead
That’s what happens when the oil companies do buybacks instead of investing the money
This way at least the money stay in country, instead of sending overseas checks.
Stock buybacks have destroyed companies like GE and Boeing.
This is very well covered in the book about Boeing - Flying Blind. A bunch of Jack Welch mentees did the same trick, selling the company for parts and buying back the stock - until there was nothing left to sell. It was very "profitable" for a while, though!
It's not a tool for company growth - it's an accounting trick to make the wealthy ultra-wealthy.
There is a reason why buybacks at these levels were illegal (or at least very hard) until the early 80s, but there were multiple pro-big-business "reforms" that took root under Reagan which are now wrecking sensible Capitalism.
Ooh nice, TIL and thanks! I really liked "Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric" about the failure of GE and was looking for something similar.
On the topic of buybacks and dividends, it's part of the short term quarter-oriented thinking. Spinning off subdivisions and doing stock buybacks and dividends are very popular and look good on the balance sheet in the short term... but if you think about a quarter or two ahead, it's crippling. But it doesn't matter, stock go up, bonus go up, everyone happy for now, kicking the can down the road until it's someone else's problem.
That companies should always operate as worker cooperatives and never return money to shareholders?
Because stock buybacks are just another type of dividends.
Workers are the shareholders in worker cooperatives.
>You don't like fruits!?
The money in the pockets of shareholders is more effective at finding good investment opportunities than the innovation department of big ol’ corporate.
But yes, there is an argument to be made, that acquiring small companies can be a valid strategy for big companies. Overall, I think this is bad for the economy though, therefore I am glad that antitrust is pushing back on this.
My mental model is that money in the pocket of companies is "low entropy money" and money returned to shareholders is "high entropy money".
It's the same amount, but much less effective.
To be clear, I think that we need to address both of these issues: general wealth distribution and lack of affordable housing.
Most of the money returned to shareholders isn't going to be pumped back into the economy as money spent on goods and services. It just goes into the casino we call stock and bond markets where it provides some liquidity for some investment into companies, but most of it is just spinning around creating no value.
It matters whether people’s work is effective or not, because it it’s ineffective, you have fewer goods and services that can be consumed.
The factor that connects work to output is called productivity.
It matters how the goods get distributed, yes. But as communism has shown, it also matters a whole lot how many goods and services are being produced.
All the time, that's what dividends are. Not something that happens much in growth tech stocks but real common in the rest of the economy.
Imagine a human being with a growth mindset. He optimises his bodyfat to the point of anorexia. He optimises conversations by extracting knowledge then moving on. His diet is pure protein shakes and broccoli. Every morning he does six Leetcode Hards. If you met him you'd think he was deranged.
This growth ideology means every company we interact with behaves like Bob. Soon enough this Bobism filters into people through the labour market and professional values. (Like the Leetcoders). It's alienating and the only purpose it serves is an investment based economy with unclear benefits to society at large
It creates a very strange world where we have computers acting like people and people acting like machines
[0] https://youtu.be/_o7qjN3KF8U?si=OyKs8ULYBNLOmmcI
More to the point, if you think about it the biggest follower of the growth mindset is cancer.
And turns out that’s not just of
> unclear benefits to society at large
But actively detrimental to it, and ultimately, with a handful of exceptions, to the cancer itself.
https://jacquesmattheij.com/if-growth-was-good-then-getting-...
This obsession with growth is so utterly self-centered. I still have those chairs, by the way.
However starting 200-300 years ago the industrial revolution and various innovations have made other growth possible. Today war destroys far more than it gains you need a large industrial base to build a lot of equipment that you destroy (bombs are not cheap), plus all the equipment the enemy destroys. If you don't go to war you can instead use your industry to build more luxury goods (vacations are a valid luxury good for this discussion though we don't normally think of them that way!)
Note, war above is entirely from the attackers point of view, and it is - as attackers are - optimistic about the chances of winning a war. The defender has other considerations.
This was my life 2-3 years ago! Almost exactly. Definitely was deranged, no argument there. But I got in shape for the first time in my life (-90lbs), found a romantic partner, and got a ridiculously well paying job, all within a year. So, yeah, definitely worth it!
At some point, obsessive focus on growth has to lead way to something more sustainable.
This is not to say low-creative types make a better company. I've worked with completely different sets and it makes for polar opposites. What I find interesting is that companies/groups tend to cluster leaning towards ones which push for innovation or either shun it, again determined by their core member personality makeup. I wish there was some more tendancy for them to balance out somewhat, but it is definatey a phenomenon.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proving_too_much
The three month stock market cycle coupled with capitalism and advertising are at the root of a ton of societal problems that we are incapable of solving within that framework. Between those three we are all just lemons to be squeezed.
As long as they aren’t acting in a way that excessively blocks/restricts competition, I don’t really see a problem with this. Old companies get boring, and eventually if they get too boring they get disrupted … maybe disrupted to death.
Growth for growth's sake is simply wrong. It is always growth at the expense of something larger.
I would expect a growth mindset as applied to health and fitness would recognise short term versus long term benefits. Maintaining a healthy bodyweight decreases the risk of all cause mortality. Losing weight to the point of anorexia would cause numerous potential problems, and quickly be recognised as not ideal and a different approach applied.
Optimising conversations only for maximum knowledge extraction is not a valid approach within the broader goal of optimising social interactions to maintain a healthy group of friends and family who you enjoy spending time with and can depend upon for years to come.
A diet of pure protein shakes and broccoli is clearly not in line with any reasonable approach to a healthy diet which instead should aim to have a broad a varied source of nutrients, again with the goal of maintaining long term health and supporting whatever sports/training/activities the person takes part in.
A programmer/software engineer who is serious about improving their craft would be much better served by taking a holistic view of their role and expanding their knowledge and expertise to a much broader set of skills than just algorithms and data structures.
Your hypothetical deranged person I would argue is operating under the exact opposite of a growth mindset.
I'm lambasting the "growth strategy" that leads companies to release worse products via over-optimisation. I am pointing out how this sort of 'growth strategy' would lead to absurd behaviours if a human applied the same logic.
I think it would be reasonable to class his mode of being as that of individual growth mindset.
Analogy is a literary device for conveying an idea. You obviously understood the idea being conveyed, thus, the analogy did exactly what it was meant to do.
The point isn't that the particular strategy for health and fitness is right or wrong, it's that the growth mindset causes the person (Bob?) to over-focus on that aspect of their life to the detriment of more important but less obvious ones, like personal relationships, being kind to others, or enjoying fallen leaves in autumn.
Bob spends his 20s trying to improve his bodyfat percentage, max his bench, get a Porsche, and build his 401k.
He misses out on his niece's early childhood, loses his highschool friendships, and breaks up with his girlfriend for a job opportunity in a different city.
This is like the printer company focusing on revenue instead of brand loyalty or its reputation.
But there seems to exist another phenomenon that is described in the book The Mindset, where the term originates, which is quite different.
Let's take some examples from partner dancing which I am very familiar with.
In some dance cultures, it is customary for the leader to try to maximize the area on the dance floor that is occupied (or "owned") by the couple. This is done, so you can dance more freely, do whatever you please. Such leaders may use many methods, such as intimidation and even physical force to push "weaker" leaders away from the area they consider their own.
There are other dance cultures, where the leaders try to co-operate. For them, the area on the dance floor is shared. I feel where the other leaders are going, in a way I dance with the other leaders as well. We will try to harmonize our movements so that we can all share the area. The leaders who are able to effectively use the space are highly valued in such cultures. Beginners are given a little bit more slack, of course, but at the same time, non-cooperating leaders may be pushed out by the co-operating leaders.
I once participated in an Argentine tango dance event (called a milonga) in Buenos Aires, which was for locals only. Many milongas are filled with tourists, so the locals try to keep the tourists out from certain events they consider their own.
I was invited to the event by a friend, a follower, who knows many locals and so is accepted member of that event. But even knowing my friend did not give me any slack, but my co-operation was put into a rough test from the beginning.
Many leaders intentionally surrounded me on the dance floor, and pressured me from all sides. As I am quite experienced in dancing in small spaces, I did not hesitate and was able to continue my dancing and keep co-operating with the other leaders although they were putting me into this test. After I had passed this test, I was accepted, and the testing stopped.
I have also been invited into events where one key requirement to even get allowed to apply is that the organisers know your dancing, and they especially need to know that you will co-operate. These are lovely events, because the level of co-operation is very high.
I think one key part of the real growth mindset is co-operation. You give up on fighting for some resource (in this case, the area you occupy on the dance floor), and you will gain something more valuable -- co-operation with the peers -- and through this co-operation you will have enough of the resource you need -- in this case you will always have enough space for your dancing.
Another part of the real growth mindset appears to be the attitude of anti-fragility. If I accept the challenge of trying to learn to dance without aggressively trying to occupy space -- even though I would be skilled enough to do it -- that pressure will eventually teach me to become an even better dancer. It is not easy, however, it may take years of persistent effort to overcome this hurdle. But without this pressure I would have never learned.
It already has: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius
And I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of glad the healthcare industry has a growth mindset that “what we have is good enough”.
It’s how humans advance. If cavemen thought “well this is good enough” well, we’d still be living in caves.
Where did I say that?
> And I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of glad the healthcare industry has a growth mindset that “what we have is good enough”.
No, you really don't know about me. But there is plenty of innovation in healthcare, and not all of it is super costly (though some of it is). Like every other industry it is a confusing mixture of regulatory capture, people that really care, people that only care about their income stream or bottom line and people that wished they could do even better. The difference between say 'big pharma' and your average nurse of doctor is massive and to lump them all into one giant heap is not very productive.
> It’s how humans advance. If cavemen thought “well this is good enough” well, we’d still be living in caves.
The 'this is good enough' is a strawman. There are plenty of things that really are good enough, and which have turned into pathways that are borderline extortionist.
And there is plenty of innovation that is not cancerous.
But do deny the reality that short term stock market driven goals of eternal growth are incompatible with a sustainable and healthy society is a non-starter for me, it is so incredibly clear that to ignore it is almost wilful at this stage. "After me, the deluge".
Yet here we are - with the most prosperous and healthy nations all based on a model around, what you call, “short-term stock market driven goals”.
May you have give an example? Because I look around and don’t see what you see.
The problem with reality is it is not clean or simple. For example having chlorinated water keeps you from getting any number of terrible diseases when you get a drink. At the same time it's a deadly chemical that takes huge amounts of industrial processing to make, and if not treated right is a source of pollution.
Not any different then the 'forever chemicals' we've made. They were highly stable and did their jobs well. They also are terrible cancer causing bioaccumulators that have caused tons of misery.
Open ended problems do not have simple solutions. They have trade offs. It's a good idea to fully understand the trades you're making.
> investment based economy with unclear benefits to society at large
"unclear benefits"? Unlimited growth is causing the environmental collapse.
Growth mindset is the _personal_ belief that _your own_ abilities are not fixed and can grow. It provides psychological benefit when faced with difficult problems and improves grit. It is not the classic HN over-optimized self. It says nothing about _requiring_ growth.
But for this conversation, the point is made well enough, I just hoped we could avoid a viral pushback against a perfectly reasonable thing.
I like how you phrased that as the positive result of a (personal) growth mindset. For non-native English speakers, the word "grit" might be interesting to learn about. Aside from the other common meaning of "coarse grains as of sand or stone"..
> In psychology, grit is a positive, non-cognitive trait based on a person's perseverance of effort combined with their passion for a particular long-term goal or end state (a powerful motivation to achieve an objective).
> This perseverance of effort helps people overcome obstacles or challenges to accomplishment and drives people to achieve.
> Distinct but commonly associated concepts within the field of psychology include "perseverance", "hardiness", "resilience", "ambition", "need for achievement", and "conscientiousness".
It reminds me of a similar term, "gumption".
> gumption - Boldness of enterprise; initiative or aggressiveness.
You can have ordinary well functioning products that just do their one thing and do them well, and thus grow market share.
There is nothing about 'growth' that says your product must add and add features until it is un-usable, which it seems like people are saying is 'growth' as in 'personal growth'.
Just build good products and 'grow' market share.
Printers have failed this by making their products bad by growing features, and thus Brother is winning because it can simply print. A printer that can just print, and not wash your car.
https://youtu.be/C7FG6-KmMPg?si=ivTxNNdR6Ha4vOQK
But it's absolutely crucial to VC funded businesses. Current VC groupthink isn't "how can we create businesses that deliver value", it's "how can we create businesses that we can convince other investors to see as valuable before we cash out and move on?"
That's why we have things like "increasing headcount" as a goal, because increasing the number of people a business employs increases its perceived value. It doesn't matter if it destroys team dynamics, increases the burn rate, etc. It's a tool used to make a company seem more valuable before the VCs exit.
"How can we steal a man's shirt while convincing him he only lost it[1] instead?"
If there's only so many shirts to go around, and they have to come from someone else, maybe we just load a bag full of rocks, lie and tell people it's full of their laundry, and then leave the laundromat before they notice. When they do notice, they will blame themselves. "Why oh why," they lament, "did I not immediately recognize it was a bag of rocks all along!"
1. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/losingyourshirt.asp
That sounds more like a sustained model with unhealthy targets.
I'd think a growth model would be more like uncontrolled addiction, where the goal dosage continually increases and stays out of reach.
Growth is good, but it will eventually cap out. It's what people do when that happens that really matters.
>You've mastered the highest paying technology, you've moved to the highest paying location, etc.
If you've studied artificial life and see societies as mechanisms for executing the genetic algorithm, you see the faults with the growth ideology you've criticized. It's a plateau-making machine: it will tend to reward what's working right now, and starve out the genetic pool of anything else, leaving the resultant society unable to adapt.
Computers acting like people and people acting like machines is a bad trade-off. It's not at all focussing on the strengths of each. There's a reason societies (such as big cities) that seemingly focus over-much on caring for useless and suboptimal people (compared to the darwinism of the wild frontier), end up burgeoning and becoming hotbeds of accomplishment. If you treat people not as machines, but as the genes of the genetic algorithm, it suddenly makes a lot more sense to be humanist: you'll get unexpected wins out of unexpected traits being cultivated until they can be useful in their own right.
indeed there's a notion of quality in innovation and development, and also market rhythm fit..
as a kid, waiting 3-5 years to see the next version of photoshop or office was long but good, when the web came, you could get a near direct line with the devs.. instant download, constant updates.. and it quickly felt like a disease, this growth is just instability under disguise
Of course people here are getting hung up on your analogy. It's no surprise. But what you've written here is a very real consequence of our growth economy because humans are merely inputs into hoarding monetary capital. All other capital, including people, with the exclusion pf land and some selective niceties are expendable towards that end.
Once you hit that ceiling, the only reasonable thing is to focus on churn, not growth (as it will have the most impact). But that is like explaining that a "circular line on a map is actually a straight line" they say they get it, but they still see a circular line.
How would these "consumer groups" even work? Would they be democratically elected? Appointed by governments? How would they be insulated from pressure from companies trying to suppress competition? It would inevitably lead to a thoroughly inefficient and corrupt system...
This! Each and every time I see an Instagram link I avoid clicking on it for the same click/login capture nonsense. If they opened it up for views only with out logging in, I'd probably actually end up using the service. Short-term protectionist strategies like these will be etched into the gravestone of Meta/Facebook.
At our company we're trying to do the same thing now, supporting logged out users is just too expensive and not worth it.
Logged in users receive more errors.
Thanks, caching, for allowing me to continue procrastinating.
Ultimately we prioritize our logged-in customers.
Any app that does something other than that is wrong and should not have been approved.
Kent Beck calls this the Explore and Extract phases (with the middle phase being Expand). I'm not sure if you had this talk in mind as you were writing your comment, but if not I think it'll resonate with you.
[1]: https://youtu.be/YGhS8VQpS6s
The worst part is that when companies MUST switch must switch to "sustain" because they can't squeeze out any more growth or their efforts to squeeze out more growth become counter productive, they instead switch to enshitification and drain their user base, and the company, of all the value they can, essentially running into the ground for a few more quarters of profit and bonuses.
As an aside, I'm sad that "growth mindset" has been hijacked to mean "grow at all costs" when it originally meant "the belief that a person's capacities and talents can be improved over time". It was originally a term of nurturing, not of exploitation and infinite capitalism.
But if this strategy underperforms as badly as we as customers feel it does, it will eventually drive its perpetrators from the market. If they think that their positions are unassailable, let them remember how the unassailable GMC and Ford felt in 2000s.
Google kind of did this for a time with Inbox and similar products. Apple had multiple phone lines (less like this, but a tad). Facebook has multiple social media platforms. Block has square and cash app (among other things).
The American growth at all costs mindset (particularly quarterly) is excellent during the technology exploration phase. It spurs radical innovation, but as a technology matures it becomes impossible to meet growth expectations. In response to this the spiral of Enshittification kicks off and eventually the company and it's products fade into irrelevance. Stability in such an environment is impossible (the gain knob is cranked to the max).
The German Mittelstand are different, typically they are much slower to innovate during the technology exploration phase (I think mostly due to the German economy not really rewarding early stage innovation). However as a technology matures the Mittelstand's strength in stable, gradual evolution and refinement really shines. They focus on being the best in their niche and grow by expanding to new markets, opening adjacent product lines etc. Enshittification is the last thing on their minds (the system is critically/over damped).
What you are referring to is simply Capitalism.
Capitalism is where 'capital', aka money, ultimately, owns the 'means of production'. And it also innovates, and creates the means of production, by deploying money to uncertain ventures; building a new factory or whatever.
The problem is that deployed capital needs to earn a return, else why bother. In other words, everything needs to grow. The system just doesn't work without growth.
'Growth' can be, people doing more things, or, more people doing things, or, making more money from the things people do (though I'm not sure that's actual growth). We've come a long way in the last century with the first two, and now the focus seems to be on that third option.
IMHO the current system is past, or at least fast approaching, it's expiry date, and we really should have researched, and have at least a vague idea of a plausible future replacement, by now, otherwise we might be doomed to recycle the 20th C.
While I'm not advocating for the growth mindset, you seem to be neglecting why, exactly, most executive incentive packages so frequently include stock options. They are directly intended to defer the rewards over a defined vestment period to align their incentives for the long term success of the company.
I've worked in several support organization that sincerely prioritized providing good support to customers. They paid good tech's good salaries, hired good managers, and we provided great support. Sales team members would come to me and say they were selling support contracts with ease because of the support provided, "easiest money I ever made" was a common refrain.
But eventually at every company customer / tech support eventually is viewed as a cost, an annoyance. After all when customers complain what do they complain about? Even the best customer's can't praise support enough for companies to avoid eventually seeing it as an annoyance and eventually cost that is easily cut. Good managers see it coming and jump ship, support for support teams starts to erode and the culture changes.
I worked one company where the engineering team would secretly invite some of the support staff over to their building when they had a team lunch ... because they liked us and knew that our team lunches (low cost pizza) had been cancelled.
It happens time and again ... :(
Eventually I moved on and learned to code. Maintenance is hard and not valued.
This is OK if management is paid and get bonuses by the money they make by selling products. If they make money and get bonuses by selling their shares or increasing their value, they cross the line between industry and finance. Finance doesn't give a f** about industry. They'll eat one after another like we eat cherries. Unsustainable growth and enshittyfication are two tools to squeeze the most money from a company and if it dies in the process they move to the next one.
Somewhat pedantic comment: the phrase "growth mindset" is also psychology jargon that refers to the fact that many skills are more learnable than most people realize. It contrasts with a "fixed mindset" where people assume you have to work with what you've got.
Just wanted to point that out so people don't get confused between the healthy idea of being able to grow and the idea you're addressing, which is more like a compulsion for businesses to grow economically.
The one overwhelmingly large difference is that the professionals that deal with it on the context of people are well trained and know not to push it over the point it becomes harmful. But that detracts nothing from the point.
However, investors aren’t interest in buying stock in a company with poor returns. They have other options with better returns. It comes with accessing capital in the public markets.
The other issue is that a sustainable business quickly becomes a dying business when competitors innovate and you don’t.
I honestly can’t think of any business that just prints cash without a daily struggle to keep the company growing.
Exactly. We have two new Brother multifunction printers at work and they're pretty great. They're exactly like printers, you tell your computer to print a document, that's where it comes out. No hassle.
All this other BS that HP, Epson etc. are pulling isn't innovation, it's extortion. "Just be a printer that isn't shit" is innovation in this environment.
This topic reminds me a lot of the recent thread on Signal being so comparatively small but being scaled so big (and shaming big tech companies for being so big). https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/signal-meta-google-too-b... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38382811
Yes! What I see instead is a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot mindset. Its everywhere I see. I wish there was a way to see and fix this before its too late.
The right way to treat your loyal customers is also micro-intangible, hard to show clear numbers and so does not bear any rewards for a manager taking this approach. Instead, the opposite of screwing loyal customers for new ones is rampant, easy to cook up numbers and so amply rewarded not just limited to tech companies.
Unless the same management chain is responsible for new customers and leaving ones, this is an internal conflict of interest and its effects only show at the macro level.
I've seen many once-popular restaurants go this route, losing long time repeat customers who prefer well priced, familiar drinks and dishes over hit or miss exotic overpriced ones. They don't complain, they just stop coming back.
Car manufacturers, Appliance manufacturers, Food chains, Internet Service Providers, Telcos, tech startups are all guilty of this. Factions at MS, Goog, AAPL too are guilty.
Exceptions here are really really rare. I've never bought a brother printer, but it will be my next.
Honest question: what's wrong with Samsung? I'm pretty happy with their phones and SSDs but haven't had any experience with their appliances.
Only after I set it up with the TCP/IP protocol, it works fine and is available every time.
It did take Time to stabilize the design, anything before the ql700 is clunky. But the ones I tried after have been Great
I ended up buying a thin client and installing full windows 10 as a print server.
I'm betting lots of people haven't experienced this, because their old printers are still working great.
I have a basic Canon which, to be fair, has worked well for ten years or more but I want to be ready for when it eventually stops working.
I'm only using the Brother Windows app for scanning purposes, as the OCR works well for my needs.
It's been 2.5 years, no issues whatsoever, just needed one toner change after a while.
There is a reason laser printers usually have their own room or remote corner in offices, they aren't really great for air quality.
As for price, a hl-2140 is $50 and will last you for 10k pages if not more. I don’t think inkjet pricing economics ever win here even with the pay per use the latest “pricing innovation” the inkjet companies have invented. I love that my laser printer has 0 maintenance aside from filling the paper tray and I never have to think about it. It ran out toner after like 7 years of very occasional printing and there was lots of advance warning. The printer itself just works with no issues.
Seems like the subscription might be a decent deal if you actually print quite a lot, though.
I was just on Brother’s website thinking I would get a printer and 20 minutes later I’ve given up. Their website is really bad. In my first five minutes I think I closed the pop up advertising their Refresh ink program five times.
They have a soooo many models but thankfully there’s a help-me-choose button. I went through that and at the end it recommended something that had everything I need. But there’s no buy button at the end. The more information button says I need to contact a dealer for pricing.
I think checking duplex-copying pushed me into their business line (even though I chose home at the start). So I started over and skipped that option and at the end I got a different recommendation but again, no buy button and the only listed retailer was Walmart. I searched for it on Google and I think it might be a discontinued model.
Their help—me-choose function didn’t help much because my number one feature is that it not have DRM’d cartridges (ie accepts third party cartridges) and that’s not something you can filter by.