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 Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI 5 hours ago:
I’ve used ChatGPT for work, just asking it to paraphrase original sources so I’m blinded from the original wording ahead of doing my rewrite. One paragraph at a time, it works great (I check against the source); feed it a full story at once, and holy shit, do you not have anything reliable. At that point, you’re spending more time checking and verifying than you saved by using it in the first place.
- Comment on Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI 6 hours ago:
But I’ve never seen it generate so much as half a page before it writes something that requires editing.
Most human writers require editing well before five column inches. Not trying to give a pass to LLMs, but humans don’t produce perfect output, either.
And there’s an old saw: “Everyone needs an editor … especially editors.” That’s why creative work is collaborative.
- Comment on Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI 6 hours ago:
Not to be flippant, but as a copy editor and page designer for most of my career, we already went through this a decade ago without AI because we were deemed “doesn’t generate content.”
And frankly, I hate the term “content.” We were committing journalism, not posting to OnlyFans (at least, none of the people I worked with).
But my point is, I got all the “it can’t be that bad” and “bootstraps” bullshit that now other creatives are getting hit with. Accuracy was deemed too expensive more than 10 years ago. And trust me, editing is an art. You won’t get the same final copy and heds and layouts from two different copyeds at the same pub. It’s as much intuition as knowing the rules.
We were mocked (not necessarily by those finding themselves in the crosshairs now, but there’s a Venn diagram there that isn’t separate circles) for thinking we brought value to the table alongside the institutional gravitas.
Well, let’s see how trust in the media has gone over the past decade. Look, I’m not saying the desk disappearing is the sole cause of declining trust, as that would be absurd, but it sure as fuck didn’t help.
So, welcome to the club of “why pay you if we don’t have to?” It’s a fun ride. I was a graphic artist before things completely fell apart in print journalism and we became rectangle wranglers, a pair of hands implementing someone else’s decisions.
Y’all got an extra decade, having seen the decimation of print design and were like, “Well, that won’t happen to me.” And here we are, shocked Pikachu face and all.
First they came for …
- Comment on YouTube Live adding joint horizontal/vertical streams, side-by-side ads 16 hours ago:
Great. Here’s something no one asked for, presented as a breathless positive.
“I wish my video experience included concurrent ads right next to it.” – No One Ever
- Comment on I Was Scammed Out of $130,000 — And Google Helped It Happen 17 hours ago:
I fell for an email scam about 15 years ago. I was job searching and got a message about a contract editing position looking for a native English speaker, which, given that I had my resume up for just such a role, didn’t make me bat an eye. So I responded expressing interest. Long story short, it was one of those “we FedEx you excessive checks and then you keep your portion and Western Union the rest to this other person” affairs.
Of course the first check bounced, my bank account was flagged for fraud, with a balance of -$999,999, and it took weeks to be made whole (thankfully I was) while I navigated the byzantine process of “look, I got fucked; it’s as simple as that.”
It took going through that experience to be able to look for clear tells (important, as once you’ve fallen for one scam, you’re flagged as an easy mark, so more come down the pike), and I agree that most people shouldn’t be expected to be able to spot that unless they’ve gone through it.
My point is, if you actively work in security, the bar is far higher. This writer basically gave someone his PIN because his phone didn’t provide full headers, and instead of verifying on desktop, just assumed it was legit, which is an amateur-level error for an authentication professional.
- Comment on I Was Scammed Out of $130,000 — And Google Helped It Happen 19 hours ago:
Honestly, the email record eventually shared screams scam. It’s not quite fluent English, has urgency and requests the information not be shared with anyone else. That’s a pretty damning trifecta and should have been a red flag for someone who literally works in an authentication role.
- Submitted 1 day ago to technology@beehaw.org | 7 comments
- Comment on Ethical alternatives to Spotify 1 day ago:
Not sure why the jump to piracy here, but it’s consistent with your thoughts on the rest of the thread. “Won’t somebody think about the music labels that screw artists? It’s piracy ruining everything!”
- Comment on Ethical alternatives to Spotify 1 day ago:
Tell me you don’t know how Qbittorrent works without doing so. It’s not a streaming service. If you’re redownloading on BT each time you want to listen, my god, are you wasting disk space.
- Comment on Ethical alternatives to Spotify 2 days ago:
“If you don’t pay for it then you are pirating” is not a discussion, it’s an erroneous blanket statement.
- Comment on Ethical alternatives to Spotify 2 days ago:
My 1,700 tracks, most at 320kpbs, take up 20GB. Albums add another 4GB. My four-year-old phone has 256GB of storage. I’m not sure where this “fortune” comes from. Especially when you’re paying extra for data monthly just to stream. You’re still spending the money, just pretending it’s unrelated to music.
- Comment on Ethical alternatives to Spotify 2 days ago:
Being subscribed is not the same as listening. In fact, I use a Firefox add-on to specifically exclude what I’ve categorized as music. It is vanishingly rare that I turn that setting off.
I strongly associate any given track with the mood I was in when I first heard it, and I’ve not been in anywhere near a good mood since the election, so listening to new stuff at this point would give it negative connotations that would forever follow that track around in my mind.
So I stick with “college road trip” or “I just met my (ex-)wife” sorts of stuff. I don’t exercise or anything, and my earbuds are lost somewhere in my van. I rarely listen to music, period, because it reminds me of not being homeless.
- Comment on Ethical alternatives to Spotify 2 days ago:
Wait … people still listen to the radio?
“Here’s a shitload of ads and someone in Cincinnati choosing what hundreds of stations play.”
- Comment on Ethical alternatives to Spotify 2 days ago:
Almost all of my collection was pirated in college (it didn’t help that someone stole my 96 CD binder from my car). Once I was making OK money and paid downloads became a thing, I slowly rectified that. It was hard to find electronic music any other way in the '90s.
- Comment on Ethical alternatives to Spotify 2 days ago:
Are most artists still aligned with labels these days? I was under the impression that there’s been a massive shift to going independent.
- Comment on Ethical alternatives to Spotify 2 days ago:
LOL. “I’ve been considering CDs” is not something I’ve heard since the '80s. And you don’t really need specialized hardware to rip tracks to digital. Literally any optical drive can do that.
- Comment on Ethical alternatives to Spotify 2 days ago:
Generic and shitty is the most common form of electronica.
Source: was raver in the '90s.
- Comment on Ethical alternatives to Spotify 2 days ago:
I hope you enjoyed feeling like you had a “gotcha” moment. When on my computer, yeah, I watch some YouTube, but mostly news and late-night monologues. I sure at shit don’t pay for it.
- Comment on Ethical alternatives to Spotify 2 days ago:
OK, so fix the tax code to the extent that corporations are actually the main funder of the government (since they’re the only constituents with any power) and pay me a living wage, and I’ll … oh, no, wait. The vast majority of my purchase doesn’t go to the artist?
“Rights” are for the rich.
- Comment on Ethical alternatives to Spotify 2 days ago:
I highly doubt any artist would genuinely care if someone pirated their music
That’s literally what happened with Napster. Metallica were rather pissed, and Napster shut down, leading the the fun P2P days of Whac-a-Mole.
- Comment on Ethical alternatives to Spotify 2 days ago:
OK. Lots of assumptions here. I haven’t listened to the radio since the '90s, and I’ve never paid for cable.
My preferred genres are progressive house and trance, and I got into the rave scene about the time I stopped listening to the radio. I started my collection via fservs on IRC, ratio FTP sites and then Napster and P2P, totally obviating the record labels. I’m subscribed to various music producers on YouTube for when I’m thinking I want something new, and if it makes me cry, off to Beatport I go.
So, like, not to be rude, but you got every assumption wrong.
- Comment on Ethical alternatives to Spotify 2 days ago:
I’m in the phase of my life where if I encounter a new track I like in the wild, I’ll buy it. But I’m not seeking out new stuff because (cracks open a PBR and grows a goatee) everything feels homogenized today.
Perhaps it’s just different use cases. Still, you’re dependent on a company to be able to continue listening to the music you like. That’s worrisome. If a company took away the collection I’ve been building since the '80s, livid wouldn’t begin to explain my reaction.
- Comment on Ethical alternatives to Spotify 2 days ago:
My music collection spans some 1,700 tracks and several full albums. It’s not difficult to create local playlists, I don’t pay monthly, and I don’t have an excessive data plan because I need streaming. Look at the knock-on costs. It’s not $12/month.
- Comment on Ethical alternatives to Spotify 3 days ago:
I prefer buying individual tracks to the Tower Records model of $20 before you know if that one song you’re getting it for is the only good one on the album.
- Comment on Ethical alternatives to Spotify 3 days ago:
Old fart checking in … why not just buy the tracks instead of paying for monthly access that screws artists? I mean, each song is unlikely to be more than $1.49, and then you own it. I don’t have a streaming music account and never will because the idea of paying repeatedly for the same thing – with the option of it being pulled at any time – is nauseating.
- Comment on Anonymity is dead and we’re all content now 4 days ago:
I was seriously tying my brain in knots trying to figure out which syllable got the stress and therefore whether it was a verb or a noun.
Clever, yes, but not a great hed as clarity goes.
- Comment on Anonymity is dead and we’re all content now 4 days ago:
Oh, for Fawkes’ sake.
- Comment on The iPhone 17 square selfie camera is a bigger deal than you think 4 days ago:
It’s definitely a bigger deal than I think. Given that the baseline of selfie camera expectations is “nothing.” So any utility would count.
- Comment on Proton Mail Suspended Journalist Accounts at Request of Cybersecurity Agency 4 days ago:
Even if you pay, you’re still the product. Newspapers made their money off ads, not circulation. Cable made money off ads, not outrageous fees. Proton is just enshittifying.
- Comment on Comcast Executives Warn Workers To Not Say The Wrong Thing About Charlie Kirk | 404 Media 4 days ago:
It’s a fair sight more complicated than that. Twitter was a terrible development for journalism, but laying off or buying out anyone experienced is far more the root cause, in addition to corporate control tightening.