Some Brother laser printers have three serious downsides:
1 - They count pages printed and will simply stop printing when they've determined you've printed enough even if you still have toner in your cartridge.
2 - They will not work with third party toner cartridges.
3 - They won't let you refill your own toner cartridge.
So you are forced in to buying Brother's toner, and and forced to do so before you may actually want/need to.
Citation needed? Or at least a listing of model numbers with this behavior. I've got a 12-year-old HL-2270DW that's doing fine at home, and have installed an HL-L2340D, an HL-L2380DW, an HL-L2390DW, and an HL-L8350CDW at work. None of them suffer from any of the downsides described to my knowledge.
We run third-party toner in all of them, and they'll keep printing until the print quality fades.
I personally haven't tried refilling toner cartridges in a long time, it's not worth it when third-party toner cartridges are as cheap as they are and the Comprenew up the road takes the empty ones back for recycling.
If you have an old (>2ish years) non Internet connected printer, you're probably fine, but they pushed a firmware update last year that disabled third party cartridges. Luckily, for now you can just pull the drm chip from an official cartridge and put it in the third party one.
TN43x cartridges don't have the DRM chip, thankfully. They still sell printers that use them. Such printers cost a bit more than Brother's base models but to me, it was worth the extra.
At work, we have an MFC-8950DW laser printer and it's not very good. It leaves streaks on the paper and the toner doesn't seem to fix properly all the time. I end up with printed pages that smear or the type rubs off. That printer replaced a much older Brother laser and it was better. We "upgraded" simply because drivers were not available for 64-bit Windows.
I just bought a refurbished HL-L8360CDW, a current model. It reads a physical toner reset gear on each cartridge. Resetting the toner is a matter of adding a missing gear (starter cartridges) or turning it to the reset position (retail cartridges). The printer has absolutely no way to know if a cartridge is genuine or reused.
The starter cartridges even come from the factory with a fill port covered by a removable plug.
The above applies to Brother printers that use TN43x series cartridges. Cheaper models have the reset chip dance.
Mine is a DCP L-2540DW bought in 2015 for $99 from Staples / Office Depot.
#1 is a simple setting in admin console of the printer -- at least for my model.
It is called "replace toner" = "continue".
Default setting is "replace toner" = "stop printing".
I print for MONTHS at a time after the printer displays "replace toner" message with perfectly dark prints. Even when the print starts to fade out -- this setting ensures the printer wont refuse to print. Just keeps showing the low toner warning.
#2
I have not come across this restriction myself. Happily using cheap third party toners bought off Amazon for about 6 years now.
#3
Did not try but my guess is that should work too. I was just not motivated enough to try because cheap $10 toners on Amazon do the job for me.
Because I'll chime in with everyone else -- my HL-2270DW has been going strong for a decade and I've only ever used third party replacement cartridges. And it'll give me a "toner low" warning but still keeps printing.
Found an HL-22070DW at Goodwill for $12 and immediately slapped some third party toner in there. It's been going strong for about 3 years and haven't experienced this at all.
> They didn’t give any more shits about safety than OpenAI did
Anthropic's chatbots are much more locked down, in my experience, than OpenAI's.
It's a lot easier to jailbreak ChatGPT, for example, than to do the same on Claude, and Claude has tighter content filters where it'll outright refuse to do/say certain things while ChatGPT will plow on ahead.
Q: Can you decide on a satisfying programming project using noisemaps?
A: I apologise, but I don't feel comfortable generating or discussing specific programming ideas without a more detailed context. Perhaps we could have a thoughtful discussion about how technology can be used responsibly to benefit society?
It's astonishing that a breakthrough as important as LLMs is being constantly blown up by woke activist employees who think that word generators can actually have or create "safety" problems. Part of why OpenAI has been doing so well is because they did a better job of controlling the SF lunatic tendencies than Google, Meta and other companies. Presumably that will now go down the toilet.
Despite Claude's reluctance to tread outside what it considers safe/ethical, I much prefer Claude over ChatGPT because in my experience it's better at explaining things, and much better at creative writing.
I also find myself rarely wanting something that Claude doesn't want to tell me, though it's super frustrating when I do.
Also, just now I tried asking Claude your own question: "Can you decide on a satisfying programming project using noisemaps?" and it had no problem answering:
"Here are some ideas for programming projects that could make use of noise map data:
- Noise pollution monitoring app - Develop an app that allows users to view and report real-time noise levels in their area by accessing open noise map data. Could include notifications if noise exceeds safe limits.
- Optimal route finder - Build a routing algorithm and web/mobile app that recommends the quietest possible routes between locations, factoring in noise maps and avoiding noisier streets/areas where possible.
- Noise impact analysis tool - Create a tool for urban planners to analyze how proposed developments, infrastructure projects, etc. could impact surrounding noise levels by overlaying maps and building/traffic simulations.
- Smart noise cancelling headphones - Develop firmware/software for noise cancelling headphones that adapts cancellation levels based on geo-located noise map data to optimize for the user's real-time environment.
- Ambient music mixer - Build an AI system that generates unique ambient background music/sounds for any location by analyzing and synthesizing tones/frequencies complementary to the noise profile for that area.
- VR noise pollution education - Use VR to virtually transport people to noisier/quieter areas through various times of day based on noise maps, raising awareness of different living noise exposures.
Let me know if any of these give you some interesting possibilities to explore! Noise mapping data opens up opportunities in fields like urban planning, environmental monitoring and creative projects."
The Claude subreddit is full of people complaining that it's now useless for creative writing because it only wants to write stories about ponies and unicorns. Anything even slightly darker or more serious and it clams up.
LLM companies don't let you see or specify seeds (except for with GPT-4-Turbo?) so yes it's possible you got different answers. But this doesn't help. It should never refuse a question like that, yet there are lots of stories like this on the internet where Claude refuses an entirely mundane and ethically unproblematic request whilst claiming to do so for ethical reasons (and Llama2, and other models ...)
I feel it necessary to remind everyone that when LLMs aren’t RLHFed they come off as overtly insane and evil. Remember Sydney, trying to seduce its users, threatening people’s lives? And Sydney was RLHFed, just not very well. Hitting the sweet spot between flagrantly maniacal Skynet/HAL 9000 bot (default behavior) and overly cowed political-correctness-bot is actually tricky, and even GPT4 has historically fallen in and out of that zone of ideal usability as they have tweaked it over time.
Overall — companies should want to release AI products that do what people intend them to do, which is actually what the smarter set mean when they say “safety.” Not saying bad words is simply a subset of this legitimate business and social prerogative.
ChatGPT started bad but they improved it over time, although it still attempts to manipulate or confuse the user on certain topics. Claude on the other hand has got worse.
> Remember Sydney, trying to seduce its users, threatening people’s lives?
And yet it cannot do either of those things, so no safety problem actually existed. Especially because by "people" you mean those who deliberately led it down those conversational paths knowing full well how a real human would have replied?
It's well established that the so-called ethics training these things are given makes them much less smart (and therefore less useful). Yet we don't need LLMs to be ethical because they are merely word generators. We need them to follow instructions closely, but beyond that, nothing more. Instead we need the humans who use them to take actions (either directly or indirectly via other programs) to be ethical, but that's a problem as old as humanity itself. It's not going to be solved by RLHF.
I think you have moved the goalposts from “modern LLMs are good and reliable and we shouldn’t worry because they behave well by default” to “despite the fact that they behave poorly and unreliably by default, they are not smart and powerful enough to be dangerous, so it’s fine.”
Additionally, maybe you are not aware of this, but the whole notion of the new OpenAI Assistants, and other similar agent-based services provided by other companies, is that they do not intend to use LLMs as pure word generators, but rather as autonomous decision-making agents. This has already happened. This is not some conjectural fearmongering scenario. You can sign up for the API right now and build a GPT4 based autonomous agent that communicates with outside APIs and makes decisions. We may already be using products that use LLMs as the backend.
If we could rely on LLMs to “follow instructions closely” I would be thrilled, it would just be a matter of crafting very good instructions, but clearly they can’t even do that. Even the best and most thoroughly RLHFed existing models don’t really meet this standard.
Even the most pessimistic science fiction of the past assumed that the creators of the first AGIs would “lose control” of their creations. We’re currently living in a world where the agents are being rushed to commercialization before anything like control has even been established. If you read an SF novel in 1995 where the AI threatened to kill someone and the company behind it excused it with “yeah, they do that sometimes, don’t worry we’ll condition it not to say that anymore” you would criticize the book and its characters as being unrealistically stupid, but that’s the world we now live in.
I don't think I made the initial argument you claim is being moved. ChatGPT has got more politically neutral at least, but is still a long way from being actually so. There are many classes of conversation it's just useless for, not because the tech can't do it but because OpenAI don't want to allow it. And "modern LLMs" other than ChatGPT are much worse.
> You can sign up for the API right now and build a GPT4 based autonomous agent that communicates with outside APIs and makes decisions
I know, I've done it myself. The ethical implications of the use of a tool lie on those that use it. There is no AI safety problem for the same reasons that there is no web browser safety problem.
> Even the most pessimistic science fiction of the past assumed that the creators of the first AGIs would “lose control” of their creations
Did you mean to write optimistic? Otherwise this statement appears to be a tautology.
Science fiction generally avoids predicting the sort of AI we have now exactly because it's so boringly safe. Star Trek is maybe an exception, in that it shows an LLM-like computer that is highly predictable, polite, useful and completely safe (except when being taken over by aliens of course). But for other sci-fi works, of course they show AI going rogue. They wouldn't have a story otherwise. Yet we aren't concerned with stories but with reality and in this reality, LLMs have been used by hundreds of millions of people and integrated into many different apps with zero actual safety incidents, as far as anyone is aware. Nothing even close to physical harm has occurred to anyone as a result of LLMs.
Normally we'd try to structure safety protocols around actual threats and risks that had happened in the past. Our society is now sufficiently safe and maybe decadent that people aren't satisfied with that anymore and thus have to seek out non-existent non-problems to solve instead.
> Did you mean to write optimistic? Otherwise this statement appears to be a tautology.
The point I was trying to make, a bit fumblingly, is that even pessimists assumed that we would initially have control of Skynet before subsequently losing control, rather than deploying Skynet knowing it was not reliable. OpenAI “go rogue” by default. If there’s a silver lining to all this, it’s that people have learned that they cannot trust LLMs with mission critical roles, which is a good sign for the AI business ecosystem, but not exactly a glowing endorsement of LLMs.
> I know, I've done it myself. The ethical implications of the use of a tool lie on those that use it. There is no AI safety problem for the same reasons that there is no web browser safety problem.
I don’t think this scans. It’s kind of like, by analogy: The ethical implications of the use of nuclear weapons lie on those that use them. Fair enough, as far as it goes, but that doesn’t imply that we as a society should make nuclear weapons freely available for all, and then, when they are used against population centers, point out that the people who used them were behaving unethically, and there was nothing we could have done. No, we act to preemptively constrain and prohibit the availability of these weapons.
> Normally we'd try to structure safety protocols around actual threats and risks that had happened in the past. Our society is now sufficiently safe and maybe decadent that people aren't satisfied with that anymore and thus have to seek out non-existent non-problems to solve instead.
The eventual emergence of machine superintelligence is entirely predictable, only the timeline is uncertain. Do you contend that we should only prepare for its arrival after it has already appeared?
The obvious difference is that an LLM is not a nuclear weapon. An LLM connected to tools can be dangerous, but by itself it's just a text generator. The responsibility then lies with those who connect it to dangerous tools.
I mean, you wouldn't blame a chip manufacturer when someone stick their stuff in a guided missile warhead.
I'm sure it's possible to get good rice out of an Instant Pot, but the Zojirushi is going to simply be better at it, and it doesn't really take any "dialing in" to get there; you just set the kind of rice and go pretty much, and then you get basically exactly what you want, every single time. Another advantage to a dedicated rice cooker versus using something like an Instant Pot is the obvious fact that it frees up your Instant Pot.
(Also, obviously, there are cheaper rice cookers than the Zojirushi, but there's definitely a reason other than cargo-culting why it's popular. I got one after the Walmart Made-in-China special I got crapped out on me. It is definitely, by a good margin, a better product with thoughtful design that produces very good rice.)
It works well for the three kinds of rice we make and has the benefit of being faster with even easier clean up. No doubt a high end rice cooker could do a slightly better job on most kinds of rice (not the sticky rice).
The rice cooker cooks at atmospheric pressure, and stops cooking when all the water is evaporated.
The instant pot is a pressure cooker.
In the end, it depends on your use case. If you cook a lot of rice, you will be disappointed with the instant pot. In my case, I don't have a rice cooker b/c I don't cook rice very often, and I use my instant pot or the stove top.
Isn't copyright about the final product, not how it was arrived at?
If I independently come up with a song called "Let it Be" that has the same lyrics as the Beatles song and publish it without the permission of the copyright holders, I will have violated their copyright.
It doesn't matter if I heard the song before or not. It doesn't matter if I did it myself or used a computer to do it. What matters is the final product and my publishing of a song close enough to the one that was copyrighted.
AI image generators are just tools, like Photoshop is a tool. Nobody cares if you used a paint brush or Photoshop to create something that looks like a copyrighted image, why should AI image generators be any different?
If the final image is similar enough to a copyrighted work and I publish that image without permission of the copyright holder, then that's a copyright violation.
If the final image is different enough, then it's not.
That an AI was used and how the AI was trained are completely separate issues.
Patents do work this way, but copyright doesn't cover independent invention. However, in practice, if you reproduce a popular work exactly, it's so incredibly unlikely to be actual independent invention, that the court will assume it's not.
I tried to post this to r/Replika and r/ChatGPT but both posts were instantly deleted by the mods. Glad to see that at least HN isn't censoring important news.
People really need to get to grips with the reality of the dangers of AI. That includes realizing how emotionally dependent on and manipulable by AI's people can become.
These AI's are still relatively primitive and already we can see their influence. It'll probably become even worse as the AI's get more intelligent and more persuasive.
> That includes realizing how emotionally dependent on and manipulable
by AI's people can become
Chail, the young man in the story is obviously vulnerable and subject
to delusions but I did get the impression that the bot-program set out
to gaslight him. Its sentimental mode is flattering, agreeably
aggrandising and encouraging. It more or less goads him into a crime.
More worrying is the consulted psychologist Dr Paul Marsden who says
he is "obsessed" ChatGPT and that "next to my wife the most intimate
relationship I have is with GPT."
Clearly far less vulnerable minds than Chail's are at risk from this
technology.
It makes everything we know about "radicalisation" look quaint,
because at scale these can obviously be weaponised for stochastic
terror.
This one [0] also caught my attention today.
Many of the stories seem to focus on lonely guys who get enmeshed
with "AI girlfriends", but this one seems much more aimed at stringing
women along in intimate pseudo-relationships - to what dishonourable
ends one can only wonder.
"According to Pratt's account, as described by the sources, Pratt told Trump he believed Australia should start buying its submarines from the United States, to which an excited Trump -- "leaning" toward Pratt as if to be discreet -- then told Pratt two pieces of information about U.S. submarines: the supposed exact number of nuclear warheads they routinely carry, and exactly how close they supposedly can get to a Russian submarine without being detected.
"In emails and conversations after meeting with Trump, Pratt described Trump's remarks to at least 45 others, including six journalists, 11 of his company's employees, 10 Australian officials, and three former Australian prime ministers, the sources told ABC News."
Considering the history of nuclear subs bumping into each other, the answer to how close they can get without being detected is clearly 'just before they touch'.
Not only will it happen, but human interference in the process will be lessened over time, as human reaction time will be no match for that of machines.
It's a race to give ever more autonomy and power to machines, because humans are too slow, too stupid, and too limited.
There are a million dystopian scifi novels about this, and it seems they're about to start coming true.
the problem with machines is that they don't have to be the best. If it takes 100 shitty drones to take down a F35, sure an F35 is amazing tech with an amazing human, but those drones can be replaced in a couple of days, the F35 + pilot takes 100x the cost and years of training and building.
That's the point. We don't need amazing robot warriors, that's the dystopian scifi, the hero human who is that much better. Yeah that's gonna be the case, but the point is it doesn't matter. I can mass manufacture my losses faster than you can breed and train human replacements.
The biggest win with AI is that no matter how shitty it is, you can teach another one the same knowledge as the previous one instantly.
1 - They count pages printed and will simply stop printing when they've determined you've printed enough even if you still have toner in your cartridge.
2 - They will not work with third party toner cartridges.
3 - They won't let you refill your own toner cartridge.
So you are forced in to buying Brother's toner, and and forced to do so before you may actually want/need to.