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 How One Company Secretly Poisoned The Planet 8 hours ago:
My first year at the college paper, we had the photo credit in the cutline box in the library filled in as Tungsten J. Smith. The “J” stood for statinum, as in, right the fuck now, playing off tungsten being W on the periodic table. One of the other designers was into chemistry.
- Comment on How One Company Secretly Poisoned The Planet 10 hours ago:
There is an element of truth.
- Comment on 10 to 100 Times Faster than a Starlink Antenna, and Cheaper Than Fiber: Taara Unveils a Laser Internet That Could Shatter the Status Quo 1 day ago:
claimed metric kilometers
As opposed to imperial, customary or nautical kilometres?
- Submitted 1 day ago to technology@beehaw.org | 0 comments
- Comment on In 3.5 years, Notepad.exe has gone from “barely maintained” to “it writes for you” 1 day ago:
That’s the one! Awesome! Thanks for the link.
- Comment on In 3.5 years, Notepad.exe has gone from “barely maintained” to “it writes for you” 2 days ago:
I got the most badass mousepad I’ve ever seen in Germany. It was a cartoon of someone trying to sell an abacus to the king with a mouse (an actual one) with its tail nailed to it, and his advisor suggesting he wait, as in (some number of months – I got it in 1995, so details are a bit hazy) it will cost half the price.
I only remember some of this verbatim, but it was absolute gold because of double meanings.
Ihr solltet noch warten … inclusive Maus … auf Festplatte
The mouse is easy enough to jump language comprehension (though “inclusive” is pronounced differently), but Festplatte means both a wooden board, as the base of the abacus was, and hard drive.
- Comment on In 3.5 years, Notepad.exe has gone from “barely maintained” to “it writes for you” 2 days ago:
Problem: Not enough AI training data. Solution: Start scraping everything people type in Notepad, errors and all.
- Comment on What Are People Still Doing on X? 3 days ago:
I have all Meta domains (that I’m aware of) blocked at the router level. When Facebook went from MySpace 2.0 to a feed that deprioritized posts from friends and acquaintances, I was done. And I’m too old to have ever had interest in Instagram, Twitter has always been a shitshow to my mind. That Facebook and Twitter also played major roles in killing the production of local news did not improve my opinion of either. I was on a group chat with overseas family members on WhatsApp but deleted that as soon as the acquisition was announced.
- Comment on In 3.5 years, Notepad.exe has gone from “barely maintained” to “it writes for you” 3 days ago:
I cycled through a number of distros a few years back on my mini HTPC before finally settling on KDE Neon. The amount of customization with panels and such is insane. I started by trying to recreate the Windows experience (which is dead simple) but soon branched out to having multiple panels, which can be autohidden individually. Settings on the left side of the screen, power options on the right (both set to hide), system tray up top, and the task manager at the bottom.
- Comment on In 3.5 years, Notepad.exe has gone from “barely maintained” to “it writes for you” 3 days ago:
I tried vi in college and still haven’t been able to exit. (exaggeration, of course, but dear god, that made Notepad seem user friendly) When in Linux, I tend to use Kate and nano.
- Comment on What Are People Still Doing on X? 3 days ago:
I still have my Reddit account(s) for niche areas as well as local news, but I’m an old fart and don’t much care for spending time exploring Lemmy to curate a larger feed after running into frustration on that front after the API imbroglio that led me here. If I want a firehose, Reddit does that just fine (for now). I come to Beehaw to read curated news and relax.
It’s certainly an advantage of the Fediverse that I can use it the way I like, as can you. There’s no “right” way to experience federation.
- Comment on What Are People Still Doing on X? 3 days ago:
I prefer unreasonably dank memes.
- Comment on What Are People Still Doing on X? 3 days ago:
That’s true of anything posted to the Web, though.
- Submitted 3 days ago to technology@beehaw.org | 9 comments
- Comment on What Are People Still Doing on X? 3 days ago:
To be honest, I just stick with Beehaw. I have a .world account (that I’ve not opened in months), but I really don’t make use of federation. I like that this feels more like an old-school site where you recognize most names and reference past interactions. Tech’s fetish for scale inherently means enshittification, whereas a small instance feels like a community.
- Submitted 3 days ago to technology@beehaw.org | 45 comments
- Comment on Brian Eno, creator of the Windows 95 startup sound, calls on Microsoft to sever ties with Israel 3 days ago:
This seems a pretty straightforward regex blunder. “Palestin” with a wild card would have done the trick.
- Comment on Brian Eno, creator of the Windows 95 startup sound, calls on Microsoft to sever ties with Israel 3 days ago:
One doesn’t really “invent” sounds so much as compose them. Inventing would be more like creating the theremin.
As to the iconic Law & Order sound, damn, that’s a pretty sweet gig. Do something once and ride it for decades.
- Submitted 3 days ago to technology@beehaw.org | 33 comments
- Comment on Adobe to automatically move subscribers to pricier, AI-focused tier in June 4 days ago:
Bee Nice.
- Comment on Meta hypes AI friends as social media’s future, but users want real connections 4 days ago:
Using Facebook to connect with family and friends is a valid idea … during the Obama administration.
- Comment on Brian Eno, creator of the Windows 95 startup sound, calls on Microsoft to sever ties with Israel 4 days ago:
He was that one guy who made that one track, right?
(I’m 45 and know damn well who he is.)
- Comment on Meta hypes AI friends as social media’s future, but users want real connections 5 days ago:
There’s also this link in the comments. Basically, Black Mirroresque satire.
- Comment on Meta hypes AI friends as social media’s future, but users want real connections 5 days ago:
JFC, this comment:
Gives me PTSD from my 2014 job search. I’d already left Facebook for the first time and wasn’t getting any responses to applications. After sleuthing around online, I learned this was now an HR thing where if they couldn’t find your full personal history on social media, immediate round file.
Gritting my teeth, I created a new account but did nothing with it. Still didn’t move the needle. I ended up having to take the pay cut to move to Texas, as being a known quantity with GateHouse got my foot in the door.
Neither I nor my then-wife wanted to leave Oregon for … Texas. But Facebook’s dominance forced it. In an alternate reality, I’d still be housed and in a place I actually like, possibly with my marriage not falling apart.
Fuck Facebook.
- Comment on The Era Of The Business Idiot 5 days ago:
I’d not say this is a story about Microsoft. Far more time is spent on journalism than MS.
To start, Zitron is simply better at this sort of analysis than I am. Which isn’t something I like to admit (I want to be the best at everything!), but he has more dots to connect than I do. He basically stitches together about six columns and blog posts I’ve written over the years and effectively synthesizes them into one coherent narrative.
Management has become completely unhinged from production, unaware of what the fuck we actually do and uninterested in wasting time improving anything other than their own image. Fuck the product, I got mine.
In a way, it’s oddly … soothing? Like, I’m not crazy but perhaps a bit too aware of where late-stage capitalism was going a bit earlier than most. Such awareness doesn’t exactly buy beer.
- Comment on Adobe to automatically move subscribers to pricier, AI-focused tier in June 1 week ago:
Adobe’s '90s pricing made the definition of “usury” insufficient. Things did not improve.
I still run CS6. I’ve little reason to use it these days, but I don’t have to pay monthly to open an old file. What they did by switching to a subscription model in my case was lose a customer for life.
With all the ATS bullshit, I ended up having to go back to Word because neither LinkedIn nor Indeed could parse my InDesign resume. Both would tie incorrect roles with dates and job descriptions because “PDFs are hard” essentially.
- Comment on My AI therapist got me through dark times 1 week ago:
A few thoughts here as someone with multiple suicide attempts under his belt:
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I’d never use an “AI therapist” not running locally. Crisis is not the time to start uploading your most personal thoughts to an unknown server with possible indefinite retention.
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When ideation hits, we’re not of sound enough mind to consider that, so it is, in effect, taking advantage of people in a dark place for data gathering.
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Having seen the gamut of mental-health services from what’s available to the indigent to what the rich have access to (my dad was the director of a private mental hospital), it’s pretty much all shit. This is a U.S. perspective, but I find it hard to believe we’re unique.
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As such, there may be room for “AI” to provide similar outcomes to crisis lines, telehealth or in-person therapy. But again, this would need to be local and likely isn’t ready for primetime, as I can really only see this becoming more helpful once it can take over more of an agent role where it has context for what you’re going through.
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- Comment on China begins assembling its supercomputer in space 1 week ago:
In this economy, they’re only hiring junior Heat Transfers.
- Submitted 1 week ago to technology@beehaw.org | 13 comments
- Comment on Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet 1 week ago:
All the lefties fled to Bluesky following Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. But CEO Jay Graber says the app is for everyone—and could revolutionize how people communicate online.
… but probably not.
