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 Opinion: China’s ‘Engineer Dividend’ Is Paying Off Big Time 1 day ago:
Putin is far from the only one. But again, as a journalist, I prefer not to speculate. This is very much “I know it when I see it” … it’s just unclear what “it” is.
- Comment on Opinion: China’s ‘Engineer Dividend’ Is Paying Off Big Time 2 days ago:
What Trump is achieving is making China great again. It’s certainly a leap forward. This is all so idiotic … we’re actively ceding leadership in industry to other countries, discouraging the best and brightest from coming here to study in the first place – and don’t even get me started on Intel.
We’re seeing an engineered collapse. To what end is unclear.
And don’t come at me with “christofascist”; that’s a problem, but tanking the economy and our standing as the premier country to study and do advanced R&D isn’t that. I don’t know what it is and have a few thoughts, but I’m unqualified to try to untangle why Trump’s handlers are doing this, and I generally don’t like to spout off without evidence.
- Submitted 3 days ago to technology@beehaw.org | 0 comments
- Comment on Cloudflare turns AI against itself with endless maze of irrelevant facts 3 days ago:
We don’t disagree here. I’m just viewing it through the lens of climate and regime change, wherein it appears we’re going to move away from renewables.
Do it off geothermal all day, so far as I’m concerned. Once you’re burning hydrocarbons, the benefits become far less clear.
- Comment on Cloudflare turns AI against itself with endless maze of irrelevant facts 3 days ago:
The thing is the sheer scale of Cloudflare. This is going to be widespread and, as such, way more energy intensive than even, say, AWS trying the same thing (not that I expect they would).
- Comment on Cloudflare turns AI against itself with endless maze of irrelevant facts 3 days ago:
I disagree with your conclusion. The solution the the societal issues we face is not more personal animosity.
Do we need to fuck up corporations? Well, that’s already happening via widespread boycotts. But there’s no path from there to “people are being too nice.”
- Comment on Cloudflare turns AI against itself with endless maze of irrelevant facts 3 days ago:
Interesting approach. But of course it’s another black box, because otherwise it wouldn’t be effective. So now we’re going to be wasting even more electricity on processes we don’t understand.
As a writer, I dislike that much of my professional corpus has been ingested into LLMs. So there’s stuff to like here for things going forward. The question remains: At what cost?
- Comment on A Win for Encryption: France Rejects Backdoor Mandate 4 days ago:
Sometimes, you don’t realize the other read. My favourite example of this was when I was at my first paper, proofing, and hit upon “Man who killed for beer money wins case.” Needless to say, it didn’t end up running.
- ‘We need to set the terms or we’re all screwed’: how newsrooms are tackling AI’s uncertainties and opportunitieswww.theguardian.com ↗Submitted 4 days ago to technology@beehaw.org | 0 comments
- Comment on Discord heightens ad focus by introducing video ads to mobile apps in June - Ars Technica 5 days ago:
A BMW 3-series will get to to 100km/h way faster than a Honda Civic, but way slower than a Swasticar. Context is important. I had three Civics and no issue making it from Point A to Point B, enjoying blowing past 911 Porsches back when Montana didn’t have a speed limit. Holy shit, is gas mileage terrible at 198km/h (can be done in a stick while also going downhill).
Thing is, for pure voice communication, 96kbps suffices. We’re talking like somehow bumping it to 128 makes a noticeable difference when it doesn’t.
- Comment on Perplexity proposes to buy TikTok, says it wants to open source the algorithm and that it is “singularly positioned to rebuild” it “without creating a monopoly”. 5 days ago:
This is propaganda pushed by Perplexity. It was crafted for investors, not the general public. If you cannot see where the problem with the source is, I question your news diet.
- Comment on Perplexity proposes to buy TikTok, says it wants to open source the algorithm and that it is “singularly positioned to rebuild” it “without creating a monopoly”. 5 days ago:
What the fuck is this? It certainly isn’t news. Don’t post PR to Beehaw.
- Comment on Has VC killed more value than it’s created? 5 days ago:
Yes.
This is why question heds are a terrible idea.
- Comment on Discord heightens ad focus by introducing video ads to mobile apps in June - Ars Technica 5 days ago:
I remember when standard mp3 quality – these are pre-Napster days – was 112kbps. Honestly, 96 is sufficient for a voice call, especially for those of us who remember landline quality.
- Comment on Discord heightens ad focus by introducing video ads to mobile apps in June - Ars Technica 5 days ago:
International calls are what Signal is for!
- Comment on Discord heightens ad focus by introducing video ads to mobile apps in June - Ars Technica 5 days ago:
Maybe I’m just too old (or not enough of a gamer), but I’ve never used Discord for screen sharing or voice chat. It’s basically my current ICQ.
- Comment on Discord heightens ad focus by introducing video ads to mobile apps in June - Ars Technica 5 days ago:
Discord’s mobile app will have video ads starting in June, the company announced today. The initial pilot for the video ads, which Discord calls Video Quests on Mobile, will offer advertisers the ability to “showcase trailers, make impactful announcements, and highlight premium content” to users, Discord said.
“Impactful.” A word that no human outside of marketing uses.
- Comment on Porn on Spotify Is Infiltrating the Platform’s Top Podcast Charts 5 days ago:
That’s fair. Posting the original source and letting the rest of us figure out how to get to the story with our own methods is perfectly fine.
- Comment on Nearly All Cybertrucks Have Been Recalled Because Tesla Used the Wrong Glue 5 days ago:
Stimmt!
- Comment on Nearly All Cybertrucks Have Been Recalled Because Tesla Used the Wrong Glue 5 days ago:
Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines.
- Comment on Mom horrified by Character.AI chatbots posing as son who died by suicide - Ars Technica 5 days ago:
Ars is actually my only paid subscription. Didn’t need to, but wanted to support their journalism.
- Comment on Mom horrified by Character.AI chatbots posing as son who died by suicide - Ars Technica 5 days ago:
Thank you.
- Comment on Mom horrified by Character.AI chatbots posing as son who died by suicide - Ars Technica 5 days ago:
I generally don’t go about doing research for free.
- Comment on Mom horrified by Character.AI chatbots posing as son who died by suicide - Ars Technica 6 days ago:
I don’t much like that take. Ars commits excellent journalism.
From the story:
About 3 percent of students in the study had positive mental health outcomes, reporting that talking to the chatbot “halted their suicidal ideation.” But researchers also found “there are some cases where their use is either negligible or might actually contribute to suicidal ideation.”
- Comment on Nearly All Cybertrucks Have Been Recalled Because Tesla Used the Wrong Glue 6 days ago:
Valid point. Whether they have sufficient hydrocarbons the start their own industrial revolution is of course another question.
- Comment on Nearly All Cybertrucks Have Been Recalled Because Tesla Used the Wrong Glue 6 days ago:
We call them flight attendants these days, but if this is an Airplane reference, I endorse it.
- Comment on Porn on Spotify Is Infiltrating the Platform’s Top Podcast Charts 6 days ago:
Archive.ph suffers from the same problem.
- Comment on Mom horrified by Character.AI chatbots posing as son who died by suicide - Ars Technica 6 days ago:
I’ve given up on crisis lines. Their whole premise seems to be “get back to being comfortable with the oppressive system, you little bitch.”
- Comment on Mom horrified by Character.AI chatbots posing as son who died by suicide - Ars Technica 6 days ago:
I actually used Pi as my intro to generative LLMs. It was … I guess not encouraging self harm, but so fucking irritating that it led me to want to. Always with the irrelevant supportive words that I guess work if you’re a teen?
- Comment on Nearly All Cybertrucks Have Been Recalled Because Tesla Used the Wrong Glue 6 days ago:
For god’s sake, don’t expose it to water, though. I mean, what sort of steel is this? Steel for Rust programmers?