Current Events > I hate how everything requires internet to work.

(+) Yeah! (+)

I'm trying to use the scanning feature on my printer, but it won't work because it's having issues connecting to the internet. I restarted it and the computer and still nothing.

What's the fucking point of having a scanner in my printer if it's perfectly functional but refuses to be used just because it doesn't have an internet connection!? Fuck this.

Is it connected to your computer?

How else will they know that your subscription is current and your credit card is still valid?

I spent two weeks in my new apartment without internet. The first night, nothing that uses Bluetooth wanted to connect, but once that worked I just used 5g on my phone for internet stuff. Some of the last days I had internet, I made sure to load my computer down with everything.

One of the best comedy bits from one of my favorite comedians is the special Glorious by Eddie Izzard whose final encore bit is his extreme frustration with a printer. Its pretty funny.

Tom_Joad posted...

Is it connected to your computer?

Yeah

Payzmaykr posted...

I spent two weeks in my new apartment without internet. The first night, nothing that uses Bluetooth wanted to connect, but once that worked I just used 5g on my phone for internet stuff. Some of the last days I had internet, I made sure to load my computer down with everything.

Every time I have moved Ive been without the internet for at least two days. Its a bit like camping.

BakonBitz posted...

Yeah

A physical cable?

If so, go into your computer's and see if it's showing up as your multifunction device.

If so, it's connected.

Then go into your printer's settings (on the little printer window) and turn off it's wifi.

It should work then.

You might need to turn off your printer and then shut down your computer. Then turn the printer back on and then your computer, though.

The digital "future"

Tom_Joad posted...

A physical cable?

If so, go into your computer's and see if it's showing up as your multifunction device.

If so, it's connected.

Then go into your printer's settings (on the little printer window) and turn off it's wifi.

It should work then.

You might need to turn off your printer and then shut down your computer. Then turn the printer back on and then your computer, though.

I was going to say this.

It thinks its online because of the wifi even if it isnt.

Been complaining about this and adjacent things for a while now, and the lukewarm enthusiasm for these issues has been more than a little annoying.

The first time I bought a physical game to find out it requires steam to install, I was pissed.

The internet was out a while back and I tried to do PCVR via Quest Link, but the PC software, for no good reason at all, requires an internet connection to open.

BakonBitz posted...

What's the fucking point of having a scanner in my printer if it's perfectly functional but refuses to be used just because it doesn't have an internet connection!? Fuck this.

So the FBI knows what you are scanning and it is not copyrighted Disney book.

I'm of the mind that we reached "peak tech" maybe 10-15 years ago and we couldn't think of anywhere to go but down, so that's where we went.

Think about it - what piece of tech or even tech function has come out in the last decade that you've been legitimately excited for?

In the 70s, all phones were landlines, a 24 inch tube TV was good, you typically got a few channels via rabbit ears, music was on vinyl (or 8-tracks if you were fancy), home video only just started becoming a thing at the end of the decade, and video game consoles were both laughably primitive and prohibitively expensive.

In the 80s, you started seeing cell phones (which, originally, were larger than bricks), that 24-30 inch TV was still the norm, cable TV expanded your view options to a few dozen channels (only a handful of which were any good), cassette players became standard (and the Walk-Man was the hip new accessory), VHS players became more widespread, home computers started becoming a thing (for those with money and extensive tech know-how) and video game consoles were 8-bit.

In the 90s and early 2000s, cell-phones got a lot smaller and, with the advent of the flip-phone, a lot more usable (with functions like texting and a camera), 36-48" TVs started becoming commonplace, cable improved and satellite TV came down in price, we got CDs and the disc-man, DVDs were better VHS tapes, the internet rose to prominence, and video game systems went through their 16-, 32-, and 64-bit eras.

In the mid-2000s through to the middle of last decade, we had the birth and meteoric rise of the smart phone; flat screen, high-def TVs made the old tube behemoths of yesteryear obsolete; streaming became the new, affordable way to listen to any song or watch any show or movie you could dream of on your own schedule, with no commercials; the internet allowed you to order any good or service from the comfort of your own home; video games got massively popular and hugely ambitious, while the rise of the indie developer caused end-user prices to plunge, meaning it's never been cheaper to be a gamer.

But... what have we really done since then?

Phones? Cost more now, despite functionally doing pretty much the same thing they were doing 10 years ago. TVs? We had 3D TVs and those sucked; now the industry is trying to sell people on motion-blur, despite it being near-universally despised. Streaming? Way more expensive and fragmented now, with people needing to subscribe to half-a-dozen services if they want to watch all the hot new shows (which was supposed to be the thing that streaming got rid of). The internet? AI has made things measurably worse for everything from search engines to customer service - speaking of, trying to get in contact with an actual human - even with a digital form or e-mail - is virtually impossible at a lot of big companies these days. And, as you observed, if you ever lose your internet connection for any reason, half the shit in your house stops working because we stopped designing stuff to be enhanced by an internet connection and started designing it to require an internet connection (mostly for petty financial reasons). Video games? Now riddled with microtransactions, gacha-mechanics, loot boxes, season passes, and other transparent money-grabs trying to wring every last penny out of you they possibly can (and, again, video games today really don't functionally play different than they did 10 years ago; in some cases - Minecraft, Fortnight, GTA5 - we're literally playing the same game a decade later).

Seriously, what tech came out in the last decade that you can say, without any qualifications, measurably improved life for the general public?

darkknight109 posted...

I'm of the mind that we reached "peak tech" maybe 10-15 years ago and we couldn't think of anywhere to go but down, so that's where we went.

actually there was a period of stalling where they couldn't put more transistors on a chip without using prohibitively expensive materials like diamonds

they did find a way around this how which is why all your cpu are dual core, quad core etc, but for awhile it was big talk in the computer industry

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qlv5pB6u534

https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/11x37u9/revisiting_moores_law_was_supposed_to_be_dead_in/?rdt=54708

Yes, absolutely. Certainly the number of transistors in an iso-cost piece of silicon (or even a package) is no longer doubling every 18 months, which is the original definition.
Progress hasn't stalled out entirely - MCM lets you use two smaller pieces of silicon and overcome yield problems somewhat, but, the overall problem is that this is still just "letting you use more wafer per product" and the wafer costs are continuing to scale such that this isn't meeting moore's law. It's 2x the transistors, but also 2x the cost, so cost-per-transistor is flatlining. And this comes at a power cost (higher data movement) and many devices have not figured out workable patterns for deploying MCM effectively.
At this point it's not only dead in the sense of cost improvements not meeting the law's predictions, but cost improvements have at a minimum flatlined - costs are now growing basically as fast as the density is. We are debatably starting to see it reverse and costs actually grow faster than density - but this depends on the specifics and who you ask. But at minimum the expected cost improvements have completely stopped, the best-case argument from people like u/dylan522p is flatline cost-per-transistor, basically cost growing at the same rate as density. Still not great - this basically means "you can make bigger products but they're also equally more expensive". 2x faster GPU? That needs at least 2x the transistors so it'll basically be 2x as much. Or you can make a more efficient GPU with the same number of transistors, and hold costs flat, but, you don't get much performance scaling in that case. Sound like any major GPU releases lately?
This is the reason GPU progress is so mediocre nowadays, specifically. Nobody has figured out how to split a GPU die into MCM, at best AMD has pulled out the memory controllers and it still kinda has some unfortunate design consequences seemingly. GPUs are the absolute poster child for "they'll grow as big as science lets them grow", but that also means they are completely dependent on node improvement for continued scaling. If you don't get big shrinks that let you use more transistors, it's just hard to keep improving performance-per-transistor every year. Raster has already pretty much tapped out and to keep that asymptotic perf/transistor increasing, the shift has been towards things like upscaling/DLSS and variable rate shading with hardware adapted towards handling that (eg tensor cores). And unfortunately, the high-bandwidth nature of GPUs makes it very difficult for them to be coherent when processing a single task in the same way as multiple cores inside a CPU - there's just too much data flowing.
But yeah moore's law (or the death thereof) is literally the reason people are livid about the GPU market recently, whether they know it or not. It's absolutely being felt in the consumer market and design trends are adapting to compete and people are complaining about that too ("why are you spending 7% of the die on this DLSS thing? just make the GPU 3% faster in everything instead!!!"). It's been a big thing over the last 5 years - Turing was a huge shift in design approach.

however today the innovations are more software approaches

a.i. breakthrough having LLMs actually start really producing stuff that wows people

cloud computing

shading to make graphics really pop

It should actually be illegal to do this for things that don't actually require internet.

Scanning a paper does not inherently need it. Scanning is the core purpose of a scanner and locking it behind a sub needs to be illegal.

I wish eternal hellfire upon these fucking snakes.

BakonBitz posted...

I'm trying to use the scanning feature on my printer, but it won't work because it's having issues connecting to the internet. I restarted it and the computer and still nothing.

If there is a way to disable OCR (sometimes called "searchable PDFs") and maybe other fancy clean-ups, you can see if disabling those features helps. I have a scanner that used its manufacturer's servers/cloud for OCR, and when the company went bankrupt, it wouldn't work because those servers no longer existed. Once I disabled OCR, it scanned just fine (except for OCR).

Is this an HP printer? I've heard they are getting really bad about requiring a subscription just to print and do stuff.

Jupiter posted...

Is this an HP printer? I've heard they are getting really bad about requiring a subscription just to print and do stuff.

Yeah.

Btw I dunno if turning off Wifi will help since it's not connected physically to the computer. It'll print things out just fine but god forbid I want to scan something, lol.

Verify that you don't have it set to scan to Google/One Drive, scan to email, etc. If you are using a special HP scanning app, switch to the built-in Windows scan app.

BakonBitz posted...

Yeah.

Btw I dunno if turning off Wifi will help since it's not connected physically to the computer. It'll print things out just fine but god forbid I want to scan something, lol.

If you don't have your printer directly connected to your computer via a cable, then it's not directly connected to your computer.

Because, you know, that requires a direct connection... which is a cable.

This is how corporate futures work. Make a paid service necessary in society whether you like it or not.

Tom_Joad posted...

If you don't have your printer directly connected to your computer via a cable, then it's not directly connected to your computer.

Because, you know, that requires a direct connection... which is a cable.

Yeah, I didn't catch that you meant physical connection.

WingsOfGood posted...

actually there was a period of stalling where they couldn't put more transistors on a chip without using prohibitively expensive materials like diamonds

That justifies things staying the same, not actively getting worse.

Yeah it's gonna be pretty bad if wars happen.

kind9 posted...

The first time I bought a physical game to find out it requires steam to install, I was pissed.

I remember when i bought Xcom Enemy Unknown.
I hadn't made the switch to digital yet, so i got a physical copy.
The disc installed like 30%, then it insisted on getting the rest from Steam

WingsOfGood posted...

they couldn't put more transistors on a chip without using prohibitively expensive materials like diamonds

how is that even a thing considering that lab-made diamond exists, and it's quite cheap to make