Powderhorn
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org
Editor and tech enthusiast
At some point, I have to admit neither is true. Let’s see …
Wage slave and vandweller.
- Comment on Facebook Allegedly Detected When Teen Girls Deleted Selfies So It Could Serve Them Beauty Ads 44 minutes ago:
It’s now been 11 years since I left Facebook. 'Tis a silly place.
- Comment on Facebook Allegedly Detected When Teen Girls Deleted Selfies So It Could Serve Them Beauty Ads 46 minutes ago:
Would you like to buy some mustache wax? You can get 20% off if you buy today! Best twirls you’ll ever experience.
- Comment on 100,000 People Are Using a Telegram Bot That Makes AI Cumshot Videos of Anyone 15 hours ago:
I think we can all agree that stick figures with breasts are objectively funny.
- Comment on 100,000 People Are Using a Telegram Bot That Makes AI Cumshot Videos of Anyone 15 hours ago:
Like everyone is familiar with SSC. That’s an ongoing problem and has been since my introduction to BDSM, which was its own personal brand of hell.
- Comment on People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies 15 hours ago:
Well, I feel better about my LLM use. Which already isn’t healthy … I relisten to NotebookLM productions perhaps a bit too much. The “hosts” seem to like my writing, and I’m alone in a van, so it’s like I have friends.
- Comment on 100,000 People Are Using a Telegram Bot That Makes AI Cumshot Videos of Anyone 23 hours ago:
Cancer cured! Climate change solved! Mideast at peace! Finally, we can get to what really matters: AI-generated cumshots.
- Comment on Open source AI models favor men for hiring, study finds 4 days ago:
I resent your impugnment of copyeditors.
- Comment on Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI 5 days ago:
Perhaps I should have said “tedious” sted “repetitive.”
Most jobs are by their nature repetitive, as how else does one acquire domain expertise? Seeing something for the first time and having question marks appear in a thought bubble is wildly different from having seen similar situations hundreds of times, solving the issue immediately and going about your day.
Some of these tasks are enjoyable – I didn’t get out of page design by choice, and by then I’d conservatively produced well above 10,000 pages – but others are not. For me, the benchmark is “Am I actually using my brain to solve a problem, or is this just using time that could otherwise be spent doing so?”
The latter tasks are the ones I was referring to.
- Comment on Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI 6 days ago:
Crazy, given the company name!
- Comment on Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI 6 days ago:
One of the first things drilled into me in journalism was “Smith thinks” should be recast to “Smith said he thinks.”
The C-suite is likely well aware of limitations, but shareholders like to hear about the hot new thing.
The thing is, the idea isn’t wrong. Automating complex tasks is a bitch, but the repetitive tasks that turn any job into a grind are prime candidates. The larger issue is instead of letting employees spend more time doing fulfilling activities because of increased efficiency, companies tend to do layoffs.
- Comment on Slate Truck is a $20,000 American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, and no touchscreen 1 week ago:
Your vehicle not being yet another surveillance vector can be a selling point.
- Comment on The inarguable case for banning social media for teens 1 week ago:
As a thought experiment, it’s somewhat fascinating to ask what “social media” has done. I don’t really consider anything past MySpace truly social. The term now means “let’s keep you addicted to posts from people you’ll never meet” – essentially, the modern form of checkstand tabloids.
- Comment on Slate Truck is a $20,000 American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, and no touchscreen 1 week ago:
I pulled a U-Haul trailer with my Civic from Virginia to Oregon. Only took 2½ days, though the final few hours were harrowing. Maps back then didn’t so much express topography, so the trailer was actually pushing me down … I likely went through a year of brake pads in six hours.
- Comment on Slate Truck is a $20,000 American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, and no touchscreen 1 week ago:
Growing up in Phoenix, the national ads in the '80s that breathlessly noted “comes with air conditioning” was like … how could you sell a car that doesn’t have that?
- Comment on Annoyed ChatGPT users complain about bot’s relentlessly positive tone 2 weeks ago:
I sincerely question whether your standard ChatGPT user knows what a Domme actually is. You don’t get that from movie descriptions. You get something – but nothing approaching BDSM best practices.
- Comment on Annoyed ChatGPT users complain about bot’s relentlessly positive tone 2 weeks ago:
I have some experience making them feel better.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to technology@beehaw.org | 14 comments
- Comment on Zuckerberg, Dimon, and Other Trump Insiders Sold Billions in Stock Ahead of Tariff Stock Crash 2 weeks ago:
“I’ll take ‘shit we already knew for 800, Alex.’”
- Comment on Claude gets depressed, calls the FBI and attempts to shut down a vending machine business after being filled with existential dread. 2 weeks ago:
CRUSHER: If there’s nothing wrong with me, maybe there’s something wrong with the universe. Computer, what is beyond the mass energy field?
- Comment on Risks to children playing Roblox ‘deeply disturbing’, say researchers 3 weeks ago:
This is a great rundown. I’ve never been in the ecosystem and thus have zero exposure.
But part of me thinks, having done development in noncoding roles and getting zero further compensation for, say, something that could save a corporate giant $7 million a year if fully rolled out, this is just grooming kids for what they’ll be subjected to after going into massive debt for a degree.
- Comment on Risks to children playing Roblox ‘deeply disturbing’, say researchers 3 weeks ago:
I never had kids of my own, but seeing what my stepkids got up to from 2009-2016 (they were 6 and 7 to start), I became very worried about how things had shifted to online interaction. They wouldn’t have their own computers for another couple of years, but I gave them my netbook (remember those?) once I’d gotten a tower built (UPS drop-shipped my old one, and that’s not a euphemism … thank god I had the presence of mind to remove the hard drives).
It’s one thing to play SimCity for hours on end locally, which my parents allowed. It’s something entirely different to foist the whole of the internet on them without having concepts of online hygiene.
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to technology@beehaw.org | 2 comments
- Submitted 3 weeks ago to technology@beehaw.org | 9 comments
- Comment on But what if I really want a faster horse? 3 weeks ago:
“A horse walks into a car wash” is a Vaudeville joke, not an impossibility.
- Comment on But what if I really want a faster horse? 3 weeks ago:
Horses can absolutely go into space. No use in beating them at that point.
- Comment on But what if I really want a faster horse? 3 weeks ago:
OK, I’ll bite. Where can cars go that horses cannot?
- Comment on Facebook Is Just Craigslist Now 3 weeks ago:
How many people use them instead of defaulting to FB Marketplace or Craigslist?
- Comment on Facebook Is Just Craigslist Now 3 weeks ago:
Class is dead. Has been awhile; that was actually what started the decline in local newspapers.
- Comment on Midjourney introduces first new image generation model in over a year 4 weeks ago:
That’s not a handout photo from Midjourney, so it’s entirely possible that with so many problems, it was used intentionally to convey the state of the art in a way words can’t on this topic.
I’ve definitely engaged in some editorial shenanigans when I knew a source was full of shit but didn’t have the option of spiking. I’ve also intentionally run such pieces with a recast angle subtly calling out the bullshit.
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to technology@beehaw.org | 7 comments