I had to share another installment. Installment 1 here. Installment 2 here.

At this point, since the names of all involved are now a matter of very public record, I'll stop trying not to dox the parties in question.

Really all the information that's fit to update you all with is in an article in a paper local to where I live. The article is here (archive link to get around pay wall). And the text of the article is pasted below:

Pokin Around: A Springfield dentist blamed his office manager for forcing him to close. She says there’s much more to the story.

Peggy Myers didn’t quit over more money, she says. She didn’t quit over wanting to take days off. She didn’t quit because of outside work needs. She made it explicitly clear to Dentist Brian Hoffman, she says, that the problem was the way he treated her and other female employees

On Oct. 1, Peggy Myers had just started a vacation with her family and friends when her social media accounts blew up.

Her former boss, Springfield dentist Brian Hoffman, had just sent out a letter to about 1,000 patients (according to Myers) informing them he had just closed his practice and that Myers was to blame.

Hoffman wrote: “Our Office Manager, Peggy Myers, walked-out and gave no notice. With that one decision, came a host of issues.”

Hoffman’s letter ended up being posted on Springfield Reddit. In total, there have been over 1,100 comments on the post.

I contacted Myers because — as the saying goes — there are two sides to every story.

Myers tells me she and her family were pulling into Barry’s Seafood Buffet, in Mississippi, hours from the Gulf Coast, when she read the letter, which she received because she not only was an employee but also a patient.

“I couldn’t even eat because I was so stressed out,” she tells me. “I spent the entire time outside, away from my family and my friends and my children. I was trying to figure out what was going on. … I was so stressed out that I couldn’t focus on spending time with my family. I couldn’t focus on spending time with anybody.

“Honestly, it ruined my whole vacation.

“He’s a very vindictive person,” Myers says. “I think he just used me as a scapegoat for a business that he ran into the ground very abruptly.”

She says she started in January and soon was the longest-tenured employee

Myers, 33, had started work in January at Hoffman Stone Advanced General & Implant Dentistry, 3331 E. Montclair St., Suite G. She was promoted to office manager in March.

Thomas Stone had run the practice for decades but retired and sold it to Hoffman in 2025. Stone was not working there when Myers was hired.

Hoffman wrote in his Oct. 1 letter to his former dental patients: “Our confirmation system is automatic and the only person who had the ability to operate it was Peggy. So, I personally apologize to any of you who came to the office and found it closed, after receiving a confirmation message of any type. Peggy alerted no one to her departure.

“It seems it has become fairly common practice for employees to ‘just leave’ a job, whenever they feel like it. This is not a good demonstration of basic humanity or basic accountability,” Hoffman wrote.

“You may want more money, you may want to take days off, you may have outside work needs … all of which are understandable, but are part of the business relationship.

“It’s the killing of the Golden Goose if you try to make employment all about you, when it’s not — it’s a team. When employees make everything about themselves individually, this is the result.”

She made it clear what the problem was: he treated employees, especially women, horribly

Myers didn’t quit over more money, she says. She didn’t quit over wanting to take days off. She didn’t quit because of outside work needs.

She made it explicitly clear to Hoffman, she says, what the problem was: It was the horrible way he treated her and other female employees.

Myers tells me that while she worked at the dental office, Hoffman treated two male employees differently. He treated them with more respect, she says.

“He didn’t cuss them out,” she says. “He didn’t do any of that.”

Myers shared with me an email she sent to Hoffman on Sunday, Sept. 13 — a day before two new employees were to start at the dental practice, which had seen a pronounced turnover in staff.

“Tomorrow needs to represent a genuine fresh start. We cannot continue bringing new employees into the same unhealthy environment and expect a different outcome. We have already lost a tremendous number of employees, and we have also lost patients. At some point, that pattern must be acknowledged for what it is.

“It cannot continually be blamed on employees being too sensitive, unwilling to work, incapable of meeting expectations, or simply not being the right fit. When the same problems continue happening with different people, leadership has an obligation to examine the common factor and accept responsibility for its role in those outcomes.

“The way you speak to people, the way frustrations are handled, the inconsistency of expectations, and the lack of accountability have created an environment in which employees often feel disrespected, anxious, unappreciated, and afraid of making a mistake. People should not come to work wondering what version of their employer they are going to encounter that day.

“I am exhausted from repeatedly being placed in the position of trying to repair the damage after an employee or patient has been spoken to poorly. I am tired of having to calm people down, explain behavior I cannot justify, rebuild morale, prevent resignations, respond to complaints, and attempt to hold the practice together while simultaneously being blamed when something goes wrong. I cannot continue to be your scapegoat.

“The new employees starting tomorrow deserve the opportunity to enter a workplace where they are welcomed, trained, respected, and given clear expectations. They deserve the chance to learn without being humiliated, spoken down to, or made to feel incompetent for asking questions. They should be allowed to make reasonable mistakes as they learn the practice.

“They need consistency, patience, and constructive feedback. Correcting someone should be done privately and professionally—not through anger, embarrassment, sarcasm, intimidation, or public criticism.”

After long email, she says meeting did not go well

Hoffman took off work Monday, Sept. 14; he told Myers he wanted to reflect on her email. They met the next day — Tuesday, Sept. 15.

It did not go well, she says. Hoffman, once again, talked about how he had bought a bad dental practice.

“We’ve heard it multiple times because it’s always his excuse that he had bought a bad practice,” she says. “… It wasn’t a good practice from the beginning.

“So then he says … people don’t want to work; people have oversold themselves; people are lazy. And I was like, okay. I was like, I get what you’re saying. I said, ‘but that’s your personal problem.’ I said we need to figure out what we’re going to do for employee retention and patient retention. So what is your plan?

“And he goes, ‘Are you not listening to me? I’m telling you exactly why this is happening.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I’m hearing you, but you’re not coming up with a solution. You’re telling me everything and every excuse that I don’t want to hear. I just want to know what we’re going to do better. And he looks me straight in the face, and he says, ‘If you’re looking for me to tell you I’m going to treat anybody any different than I am, you can keep looking.’

“He was going in circles. Like he kept going back to all the excuses as to why he’s awful to his employees and patients. And anytime I would try to say something he would do this thing to me, and he did it during the meeting. He would put his finger up, like he was asking me a question, and I’d go to answer, and he’d go, ‘Why are you talking? You don’t speak when I’m speaking.'”

At the end of the work day, she says, she did not tell him she was quitting. She left him a resignation letter stating that he was the problem. She has not been back since.

“I’m just done,” she says.

Troopers detail prior road rage incident

I reached out to Hoffman for comment. I specifically told him I wanted to know why he sent the letter, blaming Myers by name, to some 1,000 people.

He responded via email that his patients had been transferred to another dentist office and the closure had been done in accordance with Missouri Dental Board protocol.

A few years ago, Hoffman, now 53, was charged in connection with a road rage incident that occurred on Oct. 3, 2023, on Interstate 44 in Greene County. He was ticketed by a Missouri State Highway Patrol trooper.

The probable cause statement says that “the investigation of the crash revealed Hoffman and Victim 1 were actively involved in a road rage incident, and had been for several miles. The crash occurred as Victim 1 would not initially allow Hoffman to change from the left lane to the right lane as Hoffman’s Infiniti was beside Victim 1’s Ford.

“Eventually, Hoffman was able to overtake Victim 1 and moved from the left lane to the right lane, directly in front of Victim 1. After changing lanes, Hoffman applied his brakes causing the front of Victim 1’s Ford to strike the rear of Hoffman’s Infiniti.

“After the initial impact, Hoffman’s Infiniti began skidding/sliding, and struck Victim 2’s vehicle in the left lane. The Infiniti continued off the roadway and struck the median cable.”

Hoffman pleaded guilty in March 2025 to a Class C misdemeanor and paid a $500 fine and was placed on six months of unsupervised probation.

She’s working as a temp; helping family business; and has enrolled at Ozarks Tech

Myers is married with two children. She and her husband own a collision repair shop in Camdenton. Since she quit, she has worked in dental offices through a temp agency and has helped her husband with business records at the family business.

She also has enrolled at Ozarks Technical Community College and is pursuing an associate degree in business.

They live between Lebanon and Camdenton. She drove over an hour each way to work when employed at Hoffman’s Springfield dental practice.

Myers says Hoffman slandered her. I asked if she is going to sue him.

“It is definitely under consideration. I have spoken with several attorneys,” she says. “Random strangers have reached out to me, referring attorneys.”

Does Hoffman need to do something to make things right to keep you from filing suit?

No, she says. “He’s already done enough.”

Ho. Lee. Chit.

Aside from that, there's another article from not terribly long ago that has a tiny bit more information.

Also, Reddit thread 1, Reddit thread 2.

For my part, I went to another dentist and got my crown finished. Hoffman still has over $1,000 that he charged me for services he clearly isn't going to be rendering. I've found there's a Missouri agency I can submit a claim to about that. I could also take him to small claims court. Haven't decided whether to go to that much trouble yet.

Whatever the case, this is starting to sound like Purr Cat Cafe (there's a privacy-friendly-frontend alternate link to the Purr Cat Cafe video here).

Feel free to be loose with your definitions. "Not usually considered a drug" is fine to qualify as "non-drug", for instance. I'm not really thinking so much of "foods", though, but maybe "food ingredients" and substances found in food ingredients are fine, especially if they're quasi-drug-like or if you'd get a lot of the same benefits/enjoyment from it consuming it straight rather than in food.

Also ITT, tell other users why their substances actually are drugs actually.

Mine:

• Chamomile - good for my mood and gives me vivid dreams.
• Capsaicin - I and Wilbur Scoville are well acquainted.
• Cacao - I don't really do cacao any more because I've quit caffeine, but I include it here because I still miss sucking on unsweetend baker's chocolate daily.

As the title indicates, this is something of a followup to a previous post. An update to the story started in this thread. So if you want to be caught up, that's the place to start.

Well.

Since that post, I still haven't been able to contact the dental office. Today I received an email from them. The text follows, but with names changed to avoid any appearance of "doxing". (But it's likely that searching some of the text will get you the full, uncensored version with names).

Names:

• <Dr. Bastard McMotherfucker> - a placeholder for my dentist's name.
• - a placeholder for the name of the dental practice.
• - a placeholder for the name of the office manager (who was having to double as a dental technician, by the way). Everywhere I substituted with this, the real, personal name (like, the one on their driver's license) was used in the original. Though in some places where I've replaced it, only the first name was used in the original.

Email Body:

Dear Patients,

Our office has encountered some unexpected and abrupt issues that will not allow us to operate into the future. We know this is unwelcome news to you, as it is to us.

Our Office Manager, , walked-out and gave no notice. With that one decision, came a host of issues I needed to immediately resolve, but it quickly became understood that fixing these issues was not possible.

If you have received an email, text message or other electronic communication ‘confirming’ any future appointment, please disregard that message. Our confirmation system is automatic and the only person who had the ability to operate it was . So, I personally apologize to any of you who came to the office and found it closed, after receiving a confirmation message of any type. alerted no one to departure.

Due to the fact this situation affects all of us in a negative way, I would like to take a moment and comment on proper employee etiquette. It seems it has become fairly common practice for employees to ‘just leave’ a job, whenever they feel like it. This is not a good demonstration of basic humanity or basic accountability. Businesses need employees, ideally long-term employees, one’s who will do the work they promised they would do when they were hired and negotiated a salary. There has been a standard 2-week notice in place for businesses across America since I can remember and there’s a reason for that accountability. If a business is not afforded an opportunity to hire and train a replacement, that business may not survive; especially a small business like a dental practice.

I would like to appeal to all employees of small businesses to understand how incredibly important you are to our businesses! You may get upset about something, you may want more money, you may want to take days off, you may have outside work needs…all of which are understandable, but are part of the business relationship. All employees have these same issues, and as a business owner it is up to us to try to address them all, many times simultaneously. At the end of the day, the business must be able to survive. So, if you and your coworkers are all wanting more than your fair share, sometimes the answer to your requests has to be ‘No’. It’s not because we are ‘mean’ or ‘rude’ or ‘uncaring’, it’s that the business must operate. The business must support the rest of the employees and the entire patient population, properly. It’s the killing of the Golden Goose if you try to make employment all about you, when it’s not - it’s a team. When employees make everything about themselves individually, this is the result. Again, I apologize to all of you for allowing things to get this far and not being able to correct things before they came to this conclusion.

Apologetically,

<Dr. Bastard McMotherfucker>

First off, there's no fucking way Dr. Bastard McMotherfucker is representing any of what actually went down accurately. But throwing your employee by name under the bus for the failure of your company and then preaching about all employees these days not being loyal enough or whatever is extremely unprofessional behavior on its own. And dripping with "no one wants to work any more" energy.

From publicly available court documents I've learned that Dr. McMotherfucker is in the middle of a contentious divorce and custody dispute. And from reports from former employees of McMotherfucker Dental, not getting paid was very much becoming the norm there.

There is a review of McMotherfucker Dental on a prominent business review site right now that says "Justice for Office McManager". This whole thing has also reached local news sources and blown up on several Reddits (including pretty popular ones that aren't local).

Oh, and after researching, it seems Dr. McMotherfucker has done this multiple times. Started (or as in the latest case, acquired) a dental business and ran it into the ground within two years.

And in retrospect, there have definitely been a lot of indications that Dr. McMotherfucker is extremely narcissistic.

And I've paid Dr. McMotherfucker over $1,000 for services they haven't rendered and clearly never will. It seems like the way contesting charges works in my case, I had about 60 days to contest charges, but I was charged back in April, so I'm fucked unless I want to try to take Dr. McMotherfucker to small claims court or some shit. :\ At least I'm not super hurting for the money or anything. I do have to find another dentist to finish the work Dr. McMotherfucker left half-finished, though.

I only started seeing Dr. McMotherfucker because my previous dentist sold their practice to Dr. McMotherfucker and then pointedly endorsed Dr. McMotherfucker directly to me. I stayed with the practice because the practice had never done me wrong previously.

Update: Another, later installment in the same story here.

Invidious link

And more importantly, what's an "unreasonable" length of time to have to wait and/or jump from dentist chair to dentist chair?

I had a tooth suddenly get painful in March. Went to my new dentist. (My old dentist retired recently.) The tooth is all decayed (the reason it suddenly started hurting was because it had broken) and needs a root canal, so I get the referral to the endodontist and get the root canal. When that heals, I go back to the regular dentist and he says that the root canal had to take more of the tooth than he expected, so now I need a distal wedge procedure. One periodontal procedure and 5 more weeks of healing later, I made the appointment with my regular dentist to get the crown. That appointment was scheduled for today, but yesterday I got a call from the dentist at 8:45am (I wasn't awake yet, so they left a message) saying they had an emergency and would have to reschedule. I've called them 9 times between yesterday and today to try to reschedule and can't get a hold of them. So...

Anyway, it's been 6 months and my tooth is still half-done. No crown. He "built it up" to make it ready for a crown, I guess. And I've gotten the distal wedge done. So it should be all ready. But does all the waiting and logistics and stuff really take 6 over months to get a crown sometimes?

And, of course, I don't even have a temporary crown yet, so I expect it to take significantly longer than it already has.

Now, the rest of this is a tangent, but I kindof suspect this wasn't a cavity like he said, but rather a resorption. Aside from this, I haven't had a cavity in 20 years. But I just had a resorption about 2.5 years ago. In the corresponding tooth symmetrically across from this one that's getting the crown. Also, my regular dentist's dental hygenist and both the endodontist and periodontist remarked that they've never seen a cavity on the back of the back-most top tooth like this one before. (Tooth number 2 if you're keeping track. I had my wisdom teeth out like 20 years ago-ish.) And guess where the resorption was 2.5 years ago? (I mean, it was a resorption, so it started inside the tooth, but when it finally got to the outside surface...) it was on the back of my backmost top tooth.

Anyway, that part's just a rant, but yeah. Am I wrong to be pissed at being strung along this long?

Update: Still haven't heard back from them. Called more times. I finally went there in person to see if I could get a human and there were a bunch of "sorry we missed you" notes from UPS/FedEx. Like, they weren't at the office to receive packages. So... :\

Update: This update deserved a whole post.

Update: And another post.

I'm writing a bot. I just created a Backrooms community (![email protected]) and I want a bot to post links (as the user @[email protected]) to Backrooms-related content from the Backrooms wikis on a regular basis. (My current thought is daily, but I could be persuaded otherwise.) I might also add other features in the future like checking Kane Pixels' YouTube channel and automatically posting links to his new videos, but that's probably a later (if ever) kind of feature. I don't have any specific plans to add any kind of automod or mod tools capabilities at this point. (In fact, I don't have plans to make the bot account a mod in the community.) But I guess there might be a future when that happens.

I've read the Bot Usage and Guidelines section of the TOS and I've read this thread. It's all straightforward and I'm following all the rules and guidelines. My plan is not to put it on a cron for a while. I'll just run it manually every day for a while (until it proves itself) so that I can inspect what it does and if it misbehaves (not that I expect it to, but out of an abundance of caution) fix issues quickly to not impact users on Lemmy. I have also tested it on a locally-running Lemmy instance to ferret out any bugs or bad behaviors. It doesn't accept any commands from other users (well, except command-line arguments from me when I run it on my computer from a Bash prompt, but it doesn't take any actions in response to being @'d or DMed or anything). It DMs my user account when it encounters an error. I've been a professional software engineer for decades, so I like to think I know a little bit about what I'm doing. (Not that that means I'm incapable of producing bugs, but yeah.) And I cannot express in strong enough terms how cold and dead I will be in the ground before I put even a single solitary god-damned line of GenAI-generated code in any coding project I write. This is not some vibe-coded monstrosity. I wrought every single line using my brain, Go documentation, and Vim as God intended.

Oh, and I'll publish my bot's code on Codeberg or something under AGPL one of these days once it has demonstrated real-world success at doing what it does for a while.

All that to justify my use of "friendly" in the title of this post. Heh.

Anyway! To my question. My bot is being blocked by Cloudflare's CAPTCHA verification. You know, the thing specifically intended to repel bot traffic. Bots do seem to be explicitly allowed by .world's rules, so long as they follow all the rules. And I've definitely seen other bot accounts successfully posting. So my guess is that there's some good way to get my bot posting properly without being intercepted by Cloudflare. All that said, my searching hasn't revealed anything specific about how exactly that could be made to work. I'm hoping someone here can give me a lead or two, or just tell me why I'm wrong-headed about some basic assumption I'm making.

Thanks in advance!

Update: I got it working! Mostly the problem was that I wasn't caching my JWT token. Thanks again to MrKaplan.

I find myself in need of a new job in software engineering. I'm lucky not to have been pushed to use LLMs or anything in any tangible way so far and I'd like to keep it that way.

I personally am interested in companies in tech (not that there are many companies not in tech these days), but I figure it makes sense to make this thread generally about employers in any field who... even if they're not anti-GenAI at least aren't likely to make their employees' paychecks contingent on GenAI use any time soon.

(I'd give information about the company I'm currently working for, but I don't think GenAI use will be optional there for much longer. That's not what I'm leaving over specifically, but yeah.)

So, what companies haven't succumbed quite as much to the GenAI psychosis? (Or for that matter, did succumb and then learned from their mistakes.) And of course, bonus points if they actively hate GenAI or have taken public stands against GenAI like, say, Dove and Cadbury (who I only found out about by searching on DuckDuckGo).

But also, if you suggest a company where officially everyone is supposed to use GenAI but they don't enforce it and the workers can ignore the rules, I'd be thrilled to hear about an option like that as well.

And while we're at it, feel free to steer folks away from companies you know to have drunk the Kool-Aid. Particularly if it's not obvious from outside the company that they're GenAI-brained.

Hopefully this thread can be a good resource for others who hate GenAI and need a job.

Sorry for the compound-sentence question.

The first part is in reference to this story which I've seen in a few different publications now.

Today, I happened to look up the price of Bitcoin (because it was relevant to a conversation I was having) and found it had shot up recently and was now at about $77,400 (up from the $63,000 when I last checked). Doing a little bit of searching, it seemed like the reason was the bond buyback.

(Sorry also for the sensationalistic hype article. I'm about as critical of blockchain snake oil as anyone can be. But I didn't find a better article about why it affected the price of Bitcoin.)

My questions are, in simple terms:

• Is it roughly correct that buying a U.S. Treasury bond is loaning the U.S. money?
• And that this story about bonds is basically saying that the U.S. government is "working on paying off its debts" (to bond holders)?
• How is the interest rate on bonds decided?
• What are bond "yields" exactly? (Is that just the same as the interest rate on bonds?)
• Why are yields skyrocketing?
• What reason does the treasury secretary give for buying back bonds?
• Are there probable hidden ulterior motives for doing so? If so, what are they?
• It seems like the idea to buy back bonds came from the White House, so this is probably a MAGA thing, yes? (Or is it more bipartisan than that?)
• Who (if anyone) thinks the buyback is a bad idea and why?
• Why are the blockchain bros so excited? What do they think this has to do with cryptocurrencies?

Thank you in advance, people! I like to think I know a fair amount about a fair amount, but finance (let alone fake blockchain Libertarian fairy tail finance) definitely isn't my strong suit, and I'm curious to know more about the dynamics at play here and where they're likely to lead.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/1301386

Comments

The question is basically the title.

It's very hit-and-miss. But mostly miss. That picture of a cat hiding under wrapping paper taunts me.

It doesn't seem to be related to what instance the content is on. But I haven't been able to find any pattern.

Is there an alternative (for non-instance-admins) that works more reliably?

I don't do a lot of travel between cities, so mostly the driving routes I take are pretty close to home.

I have a couple of appointments over the next week and have prepared by planning my driving routes to avoid Flock cameras in my area entirely.

Of course deflocked.org may not be perfectly up-to-date, so it might have some false negatives, but at least I'll be doing my best.

It's my intention moving forward to simply never drive(/do the worm/parachute/unicycle/etc) anywhere a Flock camera can see me moving forward. We'll see how long that remains feasible as my city, I expect, keeps installing more cameras.

For anyone else also doing this, how far out of your way are you having to go? For me, it's not terrible, but I don't know necessarily what the density of Flock cameras is like in other cities.

(I'm in the U.S. midwest if that helps.)

I ran across this video the other day that I thought did a great job of summing up all the reasons why I intend never to touch GenAI bullshit.

And it's from a former "vibe coder". I'll definitely be keeping this in my back pocket to share with people who ask me why I eschew GenAI.

I know that "past the best-by date" doesn't necessarily mean "unsafe" or illegal to sell. And to be fair, most of what I'm talking about is canned/jarred sort of stuff that probably is pretty decent for a good amount of time after the best-by date.

But...

I used to do my regular shopping at the place within walking distance of my house, but they had kindof a scandal and were terribly mismanaged and just within the last few years, it became clear it was no longer safe to eat food from there. (Not just "past its best-by date", though that definitely started happening. "Fresh" produce isn't fresh and smells terrible already on the shelf, cheese is moldy on the shelf even when it isn't past its date, etc.) They're still open (they do have the advantage of being the closest grocery store to a big highway for folks driving through/near my town not familiar enough with my town to know better) but it's very clear that their customer base has shrunk drastically and it wouldn't surprise me at all if the whole chain closed or sold or some such in the near-ish future. Before they went down hill, I don't think I'd ever really seen anything on the shelf that was past the best-by date at that store or any other. Maybe extremely infrequently at most, and it was usually because something was obviously "lost" somehow. Kicked under a display case or way in the back of the shelf in the wrong section of the store behind stuff that stays stocked up or some such.

So I switched my regular shopping routine to the fancy new grocery store a little bit further away. (This location was built within the last 5 years and I started shopping there pretty exclusively about 2 or 3 years ago.) It's fairly ritzy. (There was a time when I would have called the other store "ritzy" as well.) But tons of stuff is past its best-by date on the shelves. Dry/powdered spices, condiments (hot sauces in particular), jarred pickled stuff, etc. All months or sometimes years past their best-by dates. But even the things that aren't already past their best-by dates are hard to get with a decent best-by or expiration date. Milk in particular is often hard to find with an expiration date more than a week out (and usually milk does start to taste off like a day or two after that expiration date at most), so I tend to buy it in quarts.

(I also know there are stores dedicated to dumping substandard/old food on poorer communities for a lower price. But I really don't think that's a factor here.)

I dunno. Just seems weird compared to my previous experience to see things on the store shelves already past their best-by date. Do you folks avoid buying things from the grocery store that are past their best-by dates?

I'm in the U.S. midwest if that makes a difference. And I wonder if the fucking tariffs might be a big factor in that. Maybe keeping things on the shelf past their best-by dates is a way to reduce the costs for the store while they're having to pay a lot more for goods, allowing them to pass the cost on to consumers partially in the form of lower-quality, less fresh food so they can reduce how much of the cost they pass on to customers in the form of prices going up.

Or maybe this has always been more common than I realized and I've just gotten more observant more recently. 🤷

Edit: Ok, I'll name and shame. I guess I only avoided doing so to avoid doxing myself, but yeah. The first store I mentioned that is just terrible is a Price Cutter location. The second store is a HyVee.

Hopefully this is a good place to ask this question.

I think of myself as "generally tech-savvy", at least in some ways. But my expertise is way more STEM-y and less related to any artistic pursuits than maybe this calls for, so this particular problem is well outside my area of expertise and I haven't been able to solve it satisfactorally.

My mother has been warring with the problem of colors not being the same between her monitor and her printer for a very long time. She doesn't do photography per se (but I figured probably if any community would have expertise that could help, it'd probably be this one), but she does a lot of crafts that involve printing stuff. Right now, the main craft she's into in that area is that she's decorating a dollhouse and wants to print wallpaper to affix to the walls. It's all mid-century modern and she's pretty picky about the color scheme.

Her concern is that when she makes or finds an image that looks good on her computer and prints it, the result from the printer looks "pink-tinted" relative to what's on the screen. The hue is off.

I've done a good amount of research on the subject and advised her on how to try to resolve the issue. First she got a SpyderExpress Colorimeter to calibrate her monitor. That one doesn't support calibrating the printer, but it was (relatively) cheap and I thought maybe it would be good enough. The profile I got from that definitely changed the colors on the screen, but the result wasn't really any closer to what was on the printed page. So she got a Calibrite ColorChecker Stuido which does support calibrating both monitor and printer. (Even projectors, which is cool, but irrelevant to my question.) Using both the monitor profile and the printer profile produced by the Calibrite device and software still didn't give great results.

Side note: she's on a Windows 11 laptop, and of course built-in laptop screens don't typically support things like color adjustment or anything. So I lent her an external monitor for these experiments. It's a cheap, fairly old ViewSonic LCD monitor (a VS15451 if that helps any). Not to use forever, but at least to validate whether an external monitor with more controls than the built-in laptop monitor would be likely to have some success. This monitor does support things like tweaking the individual R, G, and B channels of the output. I spent a good deal of time tweaking everything to be exactly as the Calibrite software asked and all. But didn't get result that matched well between the monitor and printed page.

Another side note: She doesn't have Photoshop and doesn't really want to invest in Photoshop. She's using Paint.net primarily. And mostly the experiments we've done used a Brother color laser printer on regular typing paper. (She wants to use the laser printer in partiulcar because the pigments won't run/bleed if you use glue on it.)

My mother's pretty frustrated with all of this and she can't imagine that, say, professional photographers could possibly have to tweak colors and "guess" what the image will look like when it comes out the printer, so she thinks surely there must be some solution.

Mind you, I understand that there are colors that monitors can't produce and colors that printers can't produce, and which ones can't be produced may not line up. (Plus the monitor is backlit and paper isn't and that of course will affect what colors each medium can produce. Also, the lighting in the room can make a difference as far as color perception is concerned.) She doesn't really understand that. (Like, it kindof doesn't compute to her that a hex code isn't some universal, objective standard of color.) But still, I'd think she should be able to get better results than she's getting.

Also, I guess I'll mention that she does have cateracts and good reasons why she can't have them treated at this particular time. But her perception of the difference in color between what comes out of the printer and what appears on screen (whether with or without applying the Calibrite-produced color profiles) seems greater than mine. But... is it unreasonable to think that isn't "the whole issue" because catacts should be expected to reduce the perceived difference btween colors rather than increase it? (I hope the admission that she has cataracts won't make everybody throw up their hands and withold any other helpful advise. I don't have cataracts and again, I feel like probably we should be able to get better results than we're getting.)

I'll mention that the other thing she doesn't really "get" is that changing how the monitor displays colors (by applying a color profile, say) won't change what comes out of the printer when you print. She's asked me several times after recalibrating a monitor "ok, now print it out again and let's see how it looks". I have to remind her that if I print it out again using the same printer profile, it'll produce the exact same image in exactly the same colors. Also, I've had to explain to her that after applying a monitor color profile, the image won't look like it does now, and even if you did have color parity between monitor and printer, you'd have to edit the colors on the image after applying the monitor profile to look "how you want".

I also tried taking a photo of a printed page next to the monitor to show the color disparity here, but the difference in color on the photo is basically imperceptable (but in person it's not).

I guess my question at this point is: is there any hope of getting better color parity than what I've tried has produced, and if so, what would be my best direction to go?

I guess the approaches I have in mind off the top of my head are:

• Better/different monitor.
• Better/different printer. (Maybe inkjet is better for color? I dunno.)
• Better/different paper.
• Better/different colorimeter?
• Better/different computer? (I mean, Macs have a reputation for being good for this kind of thing, but I can't imagine that getting better color parity on a Windows machine would be a complete no-go.)
• Maybe I'm missing something super basic and I just need a little more knowledge.
• Maybe we're just being unrealisticly picky about color parity?
• Maybe nothing can be done without cataract surgery?

She's asked that I pick out a new monitor that may fix the issue, but we've sunk a fair amount of money into things we thought should help and at this point I'm not terribly confident that just throwing more money at the problem without getting better information from someone with expertise in the area will help.

If you do end up recommending that we purchase a product, I'd appreciate specific model recommendtations. (Like, if we should get another colorimeter, which specific one? Or if we need a better monitor, which one would you recommend?)

Definitely if there's more info I can provide, please ask! And thanks in advance for any advice you can provide!

My mother's birthday is coming up, and she loves jewelry and likes QVC's stock. So I went to qvc.com and navigated to one of the categories. In response, I got the following:

Not sure why I go the error message, but it's funny that the response code is 418.

(Also, I don't get that error if I use Chromium.)

I posted about this once before, but...

The long and short is:

• Vizio put a bunch of GPL'd software on their TVs in compiled/binary form only in violation of the terms of the GPL.
• the Software Freedom Conservancy is suing Vizio to force them to follow the terms of the GPL and release the source code of said GPL'd software.
• The courts seem quite sympathetic to the SFC's arguments.
• And if the SFC wins, we can expect 1) a FOSS Linux distribution for smart TV's (think OpenWRT but for smart TVs) and 2) moving forward, demands for GPL compliance to consumer electronics manufacturers from regular folks like you and me will have more "teeth" than they did previously, potentially resulting in a proliferation of new FOSS distributions for various consumer electronic devices.

I really think this is something to get excited about, and I can't wait to follow along as more news comes out about the proceedings.

Full disclosure, the trial has been delayed at the last minute more than once already, so I suppose there's a possibility it won't start tomorrow, but I think this is more "last minute" than any of the last delays have been. So I'm crossing my fingers extra hard.

Edit: Damn! Looks like it got delayed again. Now the trial date is listed as "late 2026". :(

For the last few hours, I've been defending something I made from encroachment by another artist. I figure my (much) earlier claim to the space justifies me holding the line. Whatever the case, it's annoying!

Update: Looks like they've given up at least for the moment, so I'm systematically "bending" their work just a little further away from mine in a way that makes it still look pretty good/natural. Hopefully they'll consider that a good enough compromise for them.

Update 2: The "encroacher" made a "rat" who overlapped with my contribution, but later someone came along and removed the rat's head.

Update 3: Looks like maybe whoever removed the rat's head half-heartedly started putting the rat's head even further from what I did, but hasn't really followed through.

As I write this, I'm eating, for breakfast, a parfait made with (among other things) close to a tablespoon of cayenne pepper and 11 hearty shakes of 650,000 Scoville unit jolokia pepper hot sauce. (The cayenne pepper hits quick. As soon as it hits the tongue. The jolokia peppers take a bit before the heat starts. So, I like to balance the two.)

Last night I made a 7-layer bean dip also with cayenne and the same hot sauce. The day before that, egg salad with... you guessed it: cayenne and jolokia hot sauce. Most of what I eat, I add really spicy stuff to it.

AMA!

So, I was recently banned from a community for being a "serial downvoter". If the votes I've cast there were only downvotes, that surprises me, but I'm looking to gather more information about how, historically, I've voted in that community before I seek an appeal with the mods.

Being banned from that community, I can't see my my votes in that community just by sorting by "new" and scrolling through all posts in the community looking for blue (upvotes) here and orange (downvotes) there to get a rough idea of how much I've upvoted and how much I've downvoted specifically in that community. (And even that sounds like a pain.)

I tried lemvotes.org. It will give me every post and comment I've ever upvoted or downvoted, which is great, I guess, but it's not really easy to see which votes were for what communities. In fact, it's not really easy to see what votes are for what instances. Each vote has an associated link on lemvotes.org to the post (or comment) I voted on, but domain name of the link doesn't necessarily go to the instance that hosts the post. As in (for instance) a post I downvoted that shows up on lemvotes.org with a link to a piefed.zip may take me to a post that was originally posted to a programming.dev-instance community. So the domain of the link doesn't narrow it down any. As far as I can tell, the only option lemvotes.org affords me is to look exhaustively at all of my votes, click the link for each of them, take note of what instance/community the vote was cast on, and keep a tally of upvotes/downvotes only for the community I'm particularly concerned with, which would be super time consuming. And I haven't found any better options.

But I haven't really found any better options, and I'm hoping you folks might have an idea or two. I guess worst case, I can DM the mod without getting this information, but I'd really rather go into that conversation a little more informed. (And, I suppose, if I find out that the only votes I've cast in that community are downvotes, I might decide not to even pursue an unban. But I'll see what I can find out, at least.)