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 New Windows AI feature records everything you’ve done on your PC 2 hours ago:
That closing quote is ominous:
“Recall is currently in preview status,” Microsoft says on its website. “During this phase, we will collect customer feedback, develop more controls for enterprise customers to manage and govern Recall data, and improve the overall experience for users.”
I read “so, yeah, we built in all the telemetry connections we swear we’ll never use … just for testing, ya know?”
- Comment on New Windows AI feature records everything you’ve done on your PC 3 hours ago:
I have to believe at this point that a serious generation gap exists if there is an audience for this sort of constant monitoring. Because that’s what it is.
Where it goes and whether Microsoft can be trusted are of course very valid concerns, but Jesus tap-dancing Christ, this is surveillance before the data go anywhere. Add that to your AI assistant that works best with the camera on, et voila!
No doubt Google is going to say “hold my beer,” and there’s no pure Linux offramp on the overwhelming majority of Android hardware, so even if you’ve told Microsoft to fuck off …
- Comment on Online Content Is Disappearing 2 days ago:
Poorly thought-out Facebook posts are forever; coverage of city council malfeasance from two years ago, not so much.
- Comment on Apple, SpaceX, Microsoft return-to-office mandates drove senior talent away 6 days ago:
Sure as fuck happened to journalism. Except they had the balls to offer buyouts instead of just saying “your service counts for nothing unless I see the back of your head every time I meander around with a coffee mug.”
The truly absurd bit of it to me is absent Covid, already working remote for years would not have been a problem. I went remote in 2016, and there’s no fucking way I’d be like “oh, the recent grads you hire to chew and spit out are an issue for remote? Sure, why don’t I restart the pointless thing of driving for an hour and a half a day with concomitant fuel costs, having to choose my food for the entire day at 7 a.m. or paying four times as much, and generally being more surly in my personal life so that you, dear boss, can prove you have something to do?”
- Submitted 6 days ago to technology@beehaw.org | 20 comments
- Comment on Major ChatGPT-4o update allows audio-video talks with an “emotional” AI chatbot 1 week ago:
How impressive this is will hinge on whether there were any shenanigans behind the demos. I find it difficult to take breathless announcements at face value given recent issues.
- Submitted 1 week ago to technology@beehaw.org | 11 comments
- Submitted 1 week ago to technology@beehaw.org | 17 comments
- Submitted 1 week ago to technology@beehaw.org | 42 comments
- Comment on I used an original iPod in 2024, and it was pretty fun 1 week ago:
Darmok and Jalad …
- Comment on Microsoft’s VASA-1 can deepfake a person with one photo and one audio track 2 weeks ago:
It’s also then just one step removed from accepting a romantic partner who doesn’t do exactly what you want at all times because life is supposed to be tailored to you.
- Comment on Microsoft’s VASA-1 can deepfake a person with one photo and one audio track 2 weeks ago:
This is an education problem as much as – if not moreso than – a tech problem. Before the GOP gutted critical thinking wherever they held a majority and two generations were able to grow up under those circumstances, a video of any current president rounding up Christians would have been roundly rejected as either satirical or disinformation by the vast majority of the population, owing to the absurdity of the idea.
Once we got to the point of a not-insignificant minority of the population believing that the true power in the United States lies in the basement of a pizza shop with no basement …
- Comment on Cable lobby vows “years of litigation” to avoid bans on blocking and throttling 1 month ago:
Apologies! That was not my intended takeaway, rather that old ways of finding work no longer, well … work. So being able to throttle such traffic is akin to having a power bill that only guarantees lighting.
- Submitted 1 month ago to technology@beehaw.org | 13 comments
- Comment on Mozilla just ditched its privacy partner because its CEO is tied to data brokers 1 month ago:
What happened to due diligence? This is the right move given the situation, but the situation shouldn’t have had the opportunity to come up.
- AI unicorn Inflection abandons its ChatGPT challenger as CEO Mustafa Suleyman joins Microsoftwww.forbes.com.au ↗Submitted 1 month ago to technology@beehaw.org | 4 comments
- Submitted 2 months ago to technology@beehaw.org | 1 comment
- Comment on New solid state battery charges in minutes, lasts for thousands of cycles 4 months ago:
Seems other battery research is trying to reduce lithium use, whereas this solution requires more by replacing rather ubiquitous graphite…
- Comment on Why Linux is Best for Most People 4 months ago:
Yep, you can remote in from Chrome on any other machine. Just get on the phone so they can provide the connection code, and you’re good to go. Unfortunately, this does not cover “I forgot my login password” …
- Submitted 4 months ago to technology@beehaw.org | 33 comments
- Comment on OpenAI says it’s “impossible” to create useful AI models without copyrighted material 4 months ago:
A comedian walks on stage and says, “Why is there a mic here?”
- Comment on Why Linux is Best for Most People 4 months ago:
My situation was my dad’s existing Windows laptop was borked, and on a visit for his birthday with other family, I was tasked with fixing the situation. I’d never considered a Chromebook, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense, given that he’s past doing anything beyond Web browsing and writing emails. Local storage was irrelevant, and in 2021, any CPU was sufficient.
We splurged and got him a $300 model with a nice, big 1080p screen that I still had to scale to 150%, and he was very happy not to have all these things on his desktop and just a few big buttons that did what he wanted.
It’s not a solution for repurposing an existing machine, unfortunately. But the savings in time and agony (I had to unsnarl a few things with his accounts on all sites after local “help” did about what you’d expect from someone taking advantage of a guy in assisted living) since have more than made up for the initial expense.
- Comment on OpenAI says it’s “impossible” to create useful AI models without copyrighted material 4 months ago:
Any reasonable person can reach the conclusion that something is wrong here.
What I’m not seeing a lot of acknowledgement of is who really gets hurt by copyright infringement under the current U.S. scheme. (The quote is obviously directed toward the UK, but I’m reasonably certain a similar situation exists there.)
Hint: It’s rarely the creators, who usually get paid once while their work continues to make money for others.
Let’s say the New York Times wins its lawsuit. Do you really think the reporters who wrote the infringed-upon material will be getting royalty checks to be made whole?
This is not OpenAI vs creatives. OK, on a basic level it is, but expecting no one to scrape blogs and forum posts rather goes against the idea of the open internet in the first place. We’ve all learned by now that what goes on the internet stays there, with attribution totally optional unless you have a legal department. What’s novel here is the scale of scraping, but I see some merit to the “transformational” fair-use defense given that the ingested content is not being reposted verbatim.
This is corporations vs corporations. Framing it as millions of people missing out on what they’d have otherwise rightfully gotten is disingenuous.
- Comment on Why Linux is Best for Most People 4 months ago:
You can pry KDE from my cold, dead hands. But there’s no way I’d put it on my dad’s laptop and then fly back out of state.
Linux for the elderly is called ChromeOS. Links to individual sites on the launcher with their web icons. Email, Amazon, banking, Google. Settings can’t be accidentally changed.
So yes, it’s widely available, but it’s not a distro.
- Comment on Duolingo Fires Translators in Favor of AI 4 months ago:
My career was as a copyeditor, so we were the canaries in the coal mine when it came to learning about “good enough.” First came the buyouts of anyone with any longevity, then the annual layoffs started (and continued for nearly 10 years) until editing was completely excised from the role and anyone remaining was just a pair of hands moving rectangles for several papers on any given night. Cancellations were less than we’d cost.
Thing is, there was a fairly long exit ramp for those of us smart enough to see the endgame (I was not among them, believing there’d always be sufficient demand for rigorously vetted and edited news to keep papers afloat).
This time around, we’re not even 14 months out from the public release of ChatGPT, and having used just the free model, its abilities do raise the question “why do we have someone doing this?” for a number of fields I’ve worked in. Layoffs are happening without warning caused by something not even on most people’s radars mid-2022, and there’s no way it slows down from here.
- Comment on Duolingo Fires Translators in Favor of AI 4 months ago:
This is going to be a wild year for the white-collar bubble. Always remember the corporate wants “good enough for cheap” not “best in class.”
- Comment on Discontinued and unreleased Microsoft peripherals revived by licensing deal 4 months ago:
its so weird how willing Microsoft is to cook up full products and axe official support seemingly randomly.
They’re learning from Google.
- Comment on This app lets restaurants and coffee shops charge to use the bathroom 4 months ago:
Coffee shops would do well to charge less than the cheapest item on the menu.
And building new entrances exclusively for washrooms? Now you have fresh capex.
All apps like this point to is the lack of public infrastructure, which always has the excuse of “people will fuck it up.” Wonder if that’s a structural societal problem instead of individuals. (/s)
- Submitted 4 months ago to technology@beehaw.org | 19 comments
- Submitted 4 months ago to technology@beehaw.org | 15 comments