The Cult of Pythagoras would like to have a word with you.

That doesn’t stop them from being obsolete, it just means that people who have the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality can get fucked.

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See, I agree with everything up to the end. There you are getting into the philosophy of cognition. How do humans answer a question? I would argue, for many, the answer for most topics would be "I am repeating what I was taught/learned/read. An argument could be made that your description of responding with “What would a realistic answer to this question look like?” is fundamentally symmetric with “This is what I was taught.” Both are regurgitating information fed to them by someone who presumably (hopefully) actually had a firm understanding of the material themselves. As an example: we are all taught that 2+2=4, but most people are not taught WHY 2+2=4. Even fewer are taught that 2+2=11 in base 3 or how to convert bases at all. So do people “know” that 2+2=4 or are they just repeating the answer that they were told was correct?

I am not saying that LLMs understand or know anything, I am saying that most humans don’t either for most topics.

Just letting you know that you are definitely suffering a Dunning Kruger moment. I have had to study how printers work all the way down to the electrochemical level and no paper printer is simple to make aside from a dot matrix printer. In my educated opinion I will say that you are borderline correct that a laser printer might be more feasible from a materials standpoint, neither are feasible in general for a home lab, let alone a guy at his kitchen table assembling a kit.

Laser printers and ink jet printers involve extremely complex electrochemical and physical processes to function that a home lab is going to struggle to replicate. The optics for laser printers have to be assembled in a clean room because even a single stray particle of dust will destroy the print quality for a large section of the page. Ink jet printers use tiny heaters to vaporize the ink and electric fields to propel it through a nozzle to the page. These jets are created using multilayer acid etched circuitboards that are precicely tuned for the specific inks and substrates that are used.

These are just examples of challenges to overcome, and are by no means exhaustive.

I hate the printer companies probably more than anyone here, so do not think I am a shill for them. I am articulating why what you are saying is impractical and unreasonable. Laser printers are probably easier to source most of the mechanical parts, but assembly is obscenely delicate and prohibitive. Ink jet printers are simpler to recreate and assemble, but the miniaturization required makes it impossible to do at home.

You are missing a vital part of how a laser printer works. The toner is dusted onto a drum that has a static charge. That charge is manipulated by the laser, which means that there is a very specific frequency that the laser has to utilize and it has to be keyed to the material used for the drum. I would have to dig more into the specific interaction, but I am pretty sure that off the rack lasers and drums are not going to be functional, both in wattage and frequency.

So the laser printer process is: a laser traces the negative space on a drum with a static charge to discharge those spots, next a pigment substrate is dusted onto the drum, being held by the static where the positive space is going to be. Following that, a heater heats the substrate to permanently affix it to the page.

I have never used an AI to code and don’t care about being able to do it to the point that I have disabled the buttons that Microsoft crammed into VS Code.

That said, I do think a better use of AI might be to prepare PRs in logical and reasonable sizes for submission that have coherent contextualization and scope. That way when some dingbat vibe codes their way into a circle jerk that simultaneously crashes from dual memory access and doxxes the entire user base, finding issues is easier to spread out and easier to educate them on why vibe coding is boneheaded.

I developed for the VFX industry and I see the whole vibe coding thing as akin to storyboards or previs. Those are fast and (often) sloppy representations of the final production which can be used to quickly communicate a concept without massive investment. I see the similarities in this, a vibe code job is sloppy, sometimes incomprehensible, but the finished product could give someone who knew what the fuck they are doing a springboard to write it correctly. So do what the film industry does: keep your previs guys in the basement, feed them occasionally, and tell them to go home when the real work starts. (No shade to previs/SB artists, it is a real craft and vital for the film industry as a whole. I am being flippant about you for commedic effect. Love you guys.)

I prefer the didgeridoo.

How about Dolph Lundgren. The Russian boxer from Rocky 2 has a MS in Chemical Engineering and Fulbright scholarship from MIT.

Danica McKellar (Winnie Cooper from the Wonder Years) has a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Chicago and had graduated summa cum laude from UCLA for her BS.

Those are my favorites.