The Verge published this spam article about the “best printers of 2024” to demonstrate how terrible Google’s search results are. It now appears as the top non-sponsored post if you search “best printer” on Google.

I love a good, informative troll.

  • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    From the article…

    Don’t feel compelled to do it; my only ask is that you make this article go viral by sharing it in faux-outrage that the EIC of The Verge has published an article partially generated by AI, because after the buttons I am going to include a bunch of AI-generated copy from Google’s Gemini in order to pad this thing out.

    I have to admit, it was an interesting read, not quite like anything I’ve ever read before, for a review.

    I honestly can’t tell if this is just some genius way of sliding in some AI generated content into a review and getting it to pass our review, or just an editor-in-chief really frustrated with Google’s search algorithm paying attention to manipulation by others, so trying to really get their stuff out there for us to see.

    Either way, it’s definitely worth the read.

    As far as Brother printers go, I own an all-in-one laser that’s over a decade old, and it’s still going strong. And it actually works with Linux to boot. I do hate though that they do some squirrely stuff to try to get you to buy a new toner cartridge early, but if you mask sensors and such, then an existing toner will work forever.

    Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

    • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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      2 years ago

      One of my housemates has a brother printer and I was testing some stuff out on LMDE and noticed it was available to print to. No searching for it or driver to be installed or anything. I don’t actually need to print but that’s pretty cool.

      • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        One of my housemates has a brother printer and I was testing some stuff out on LMDE and noticed it was available to print to. No searching for it or driver to be installed or anything. I don’t actually need to print but that’s pretty cool.

        People keep missing that I’m talking about a all-in-one, and not just a simple printer-only.

        I never had a problem with the printing part of the all-in-one printer, but the scanning and faxing stuff required the Brother driver support, and that wad not natively supported, or were supposed to be supported but it didn’t work well, or at all. There were issues with 32-bit versus 62-bit libraries, etc.

        Took years to get to a point where the brother drivers would just install and everything would work right. And not everything ever worked right from native Linux.

        Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)