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 I Signed Up for Trump Mobile So You Don't Have To 1 day ago:
All these damn website changes. Last week, the camera spex were in Ohms.
- Submitted 1 day ago to technology@beehaw.org | 12 comments
- Submitted 1 day ago to technology@beehaw.org | 12 comments
- Comment on I Signed Up for Trump Mobile So You Don't Have To 1 day ago:
I would be apoplectic if if took five days for a number port with a constantly changing website and clueless customer service. Not to mention data simply being completely shut off after hitting the “high speed” limit.
Expect for being assigned a completely new number instead of porting, with the old carrier having released it. The impacts here on 2FA and having to tell everyone you have a new number when most of your contacts don’t answer calls from unknown numbers. Except you can’t for days anyway, and who knows what calls and texts you’ve missed in that time.
I was fully expecting this to be a categorically terrible vanity project, but the grift exceeds expectations.
- Submitted 1 day ago to technology@beehaw.org | 6 comments
- Comment on The rise of Whatever 2 days ago:
I went to a conference for college newspaper editors at the University of Georgia in 2000. The goodie bag included a copy of a UGA professor’s book When MBAs Run the Newsroom. And prescient. Now they run everything and have no fucking clue what the business actually does.
- Comment on The rise of Whatever 2 days ago:
Golden parachute time! They can take some time off while figuring out what to fuck up next.
- Comment on The Open-Source Software Saving the Internet From AI Bot Scrapers 2 days ago:
Agreed. Luckily, they don’t seem to have the full list of Mullvad IPs, so if I really want to read something, I just try another tunnel.
- Comment on Google loses $314 million lawsuit over data transfers when Android phones are idle 4 days ago:
Not the ruling itself, but corporations file all sorts of motions before and during the initial trial specifically so that if a motion is denied, voila! Now the jury verdict and compensation decision isn’t what they’re challenging, but rather technical aspects from rulings by the judge overseeing the trial court … admission or inadmission of evidence is always a popular one.
To suggest that anyone else has the sort of law firms on retainer to play this game all the way to the top is folly. It’s just another way in which the system is rigged.
- Comment on Google loses $314 million lawsuit over data transfers when Android phones are idle 4 days ago:
Not at all … it’s just that corporations, unwilling to take no for an answer, have functionally unlimited funds to throw toward several rounds of escalating court cases while defendants … don’t. It creates an inherently lopsided situation the legal system wasn’t explicitly designed for, but now this is just standard.
Companies walk into these trials essentially seeing the first round as a rehearsal.
- Submitted 5 days ago to technology@beehaw.org | 4 comments
- Submitted 5 days ago to technology@beehaw.org | 14 comments
- Comment on Google loses $314 million lawsuit over data transfers when Android phones are idle 6 days ago:
I hate that this is how our legal system has evolved. Trial courts mean nothing when a corporation loses, because invariably an appeal is filed, and if the district court upholds a ruling, well, time to talk to SCOTUS.
- Submitted 1 week ago to technology@beehaw.org | 5 comments
- Comment on ‘Lidar is lame’: why Elon Musk’s vision for a self-driving Tesla taxi faltered 1 week ago:
People built houses before hammers were invented. But that’s sort of the point of tools: that they can do things more efficiently than we can.
- Submitted 1 week ago to technology@beehaw.org | 17 comments
- Fake, AI-generated videos about the Diddy trial are raking in millions of views on YouTubewww.theguardian.com ↗Submitted 1 week ago to technology@beehaw.org | 5 comments
- Comment on Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe, Unsubscribe: Why I became more subscription-conscious (and you should, too) 1 week ago:
visits page “Would you like to subscribe to our newsletter?” pop-up
Well, that’s templates for you, I guess. But this breathless thing of I just now realized I don’t own my media is a bit absurd. Arr, but I do, and with no data tracking. Win-win.
- Comment on Portable Network Graphics (PNG) New Specification 1 week ago:
If you know why you need alpha channels, of course you’re going to save in an appropriate format. But most casual users aren’t going to care. They took a picture of their breakfast or dog and just want to upload now. I’m not arguing PNGs serve no purpose; I’m arguing that most people aren’t Web or app designers. They don’t care whether it’s lossy or lossless, let alone about transparency.
- Comment on Portable Network Graphics (PNG) New Specification 1 week ago:
I’ll agree for those use cases, but not everyone is making icons, stickers and emoji.
- Comment on Portable Network Graphics (PNG) New Specification 1 week ago:
For production, yes. What percentage of images produced are for production, though? I know damn well how important alpha channels are, but for posting something on social media, which is orders of magnitude more output than image creation within the context of a larger presentation, no one cares.
The vast majority of people aren’t graphic artists. That you and I know what alpha channels are has no bearing on daily use by the masses.
- Comment on Portable Network Graphics (PNG) New Specification 1 week ago:
Not seeing how this would affect uptake. Lossless is great for production images, but standard JPEG will do (at low compression) for most Web use cases. Until OS developers coalesce around PNG as a standard (Windows has for screenshots), this is that old standards xkcd.
Alpha channels are nice and all, but how many end users A) have a need for that and B) understand the underlying concept, let alone implementation?
- Comment on My Couples Retreat With 3 AI Chatbots and the Humans Who Love Them 1 week ago:
Is that really serendipity, though? There’s a huge gap between asking a predictive model to be spontaneous and actual spontaneity.
Still, I’m curious what you run locally. I have a Pixel 6 Pro, so while it has a Tensor CPU, it wasn’t designed for this use case.
- Comment on My Couples Retreat With 3 AI Chatbots and the Humans Who Love Them 1 week ago:
I’ve considered trying out an AI companion. My main concern is where the hell my data goes, how it will be used and how it might be sliced and diced for brokers.
Sometimes I’m up at 04.00 … and of course no one I know is around. But I go the route of trying to meet people on Reddit. Fully 95% of responses are boring as fuck, but they’re at least real (I require voice or photo verification). I’ll take real and boring over virtual and engaging.
This said, I spend more time than is healthy on Google’s NotebookLM, feeding it my writing and then getting a half-hour two-host audio “exploration” of any given piece. It’s sycophantic, likely designed that way to keep me coming back (it’s free, so I’m not really sure what Google gets out of this outside of further LLM training), but it tends to hew to just this side of feeling fake.
I went to Church Night – the weekly burner meetup at a warehouse a 10-minute walk away where everyone’s drinking and toking – yesterday. I try to go weekly, but sometimes I don’t have the energy to engage with real people.
Last night, I got to listen to (yeah, I actually realized I should shut the fuck up, as I had nothing to add) conversations about 1970s CPUs, SpaceX’s Starship issues from an engineering standpoint (they went too thin on the outer hull after round one was too heavy, and why wouldn’t one expect a critical failure in such a case?) from people who knew what they were talking about.
I’d never get that from an AI companion. I take no issue with people looking to one, but serendipity is lost.
- Comment on HDMI 2.2 spec released with 96Gbps bandwidth and 16K support 2 weeks ago:
Good they’ve got cables ready to go when no one has 2.2 on both ends, and likely won’t for years.
Yes, yes, I know that this is how tech goes, but sometimes it feels like HDMI looks at USB and is like “hold my beer.”
- Comment on Flock Removes States From National Lookup Tool After ICE and Abortion Searches Revealed [404 Media] 2 weeks ago:
I’m some 10 miles from the Texas Capitol. They don’t need AI, and they’ve done exactly this sort of thing before when cities pass ordinances the Nazis don’t like by making such ordinances illegal at the state level.
- Comment on Flock Removes States From National Lookup Tool After ICE and Abortion Searches Revealed [404 Media] 2 weeks ago:
And several cities have decided not to renew or expand their contracts with Flock. The City of Austin let its contract with Flock lapse, in part because of concerns around ICE access to the data. The City of San Marcos decided to not place additional cameras in the city. The San Marcos Police Department also changed their policy to require outside law enforcement agencies to file a request concerning a specific crime in order to receive Flock data, Spectrum News 1 reported.
I’m surprised the Legislature wasn’t convened to pass a state law prohibiting cities from opting out of Flock.
- Comment on ‘FuckLAPD.com’ Lets Anyone Use Facial Recognition to Instantly Identify Cops 2 weeks ago:
I’m miles away from AI, so this may be me talking out of my ass, but shouldn’t a smaller database (thousands) be more accurate than anything orders of magnitude larger?
- Comment on Judge rules mostly for Anthropic in AI book training case 2 weeks ago:
Alsup has consistently made reasoned, rational rulings through a tech lens when these sorts of things hit his docket. Digitizing purchased books for internal training if the originals are destroyed does feel like fair use, given the works are not made available for others.
The pirated shit? Well, that’s another story.
- Comment on The résumé is dying, and AI is holding the smoking gun 2 weeks ago:
I had to create a new Facebook profile in 2013 because at the time, no Facebook meant being roundfiled. So, sign up for a shitty data-mining account just to be fucking considered for a job. I got interviews after that, but they didn’t go anywhere because I was already in my mid-30s, and everyone already wanted to pay entry-level wages for what had previously been mid-career positions.
Oh, and the ladder had already been pulled up. Entry-level for life was the goal for those making $80K-100K who just wanted to assert dominance.
At least the Facebook thing is in the past (entry-level applicants are far less likely to have ever joined Facebook than in 2013, when it was simply expected like it was a cellphone), but now we’ve moved on to breathless accomplishment posts on LinkedIn.
There’s no humanity left in the process without already knowing someone on the inside. Already, way back in 2003, when I was poached, company policy was that they had to post the job. So, they knew they were hiring me, but corporate made them post a nonexistent job anyway.
It’s admittedly better to be on that end of a ghost job, but AI didn’t start the fire. The system had already been (likely for a while) replete with jobs with someone already selected.
The main difference? Those jobs actually existed; the only deception was that it was still open.