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 U.S. FTC Surveillance Pricing Study Indicates Wide Range of Personal Data Used to Set Individualized Consumer Prices 2 days ago:
We’ll see how long it takes for the government to put a stop to US companies actively data-mining, profiling, and discriminating against our citizenry.
Narrator: It never happened.
- Comment on The Slop Society 3 days ago:
Dude is just consistently good. Hands down the best blog suggested to me in 2024.
- Comment on Hollywood stars and geeks unite to billionaire-proof social media 1 week ago:
The rest of the Fediverse runs off ActivityPub.
- Comment on America’s Right-Wing Propaganda Problem Might Be Terminal -- [Opinion] 2 weeks ago:
You have got to be fucking kidding me. Some 54% of U.S. adults read at a sixth-grade level or less? We all saw this coming from the '80s on, but I forgot that it’s been 40 years, and education has been properly gutted.
- Comment on Luigi Mangione Content Is a Challenge for Social Media Moderators - B… 2 weeks ago:
Sadly, “you’ll never work in this city again” has been true for my entire career. What are you going to do? Walk across Main Street to the other paper?
But it has never been an editor’s job to “push back on the folks who write articles,” which I thought would be the worst part of that sentence; literally, rewriting is what editors do. We don’t push back on staff, we push back on copy. A minor omission here, a glaring hole there, and – as a last resort – spiking a story until questions are answered.
No one has felt any job security in this industry for at least 15 years. “You can’t say that” probably cuts both ways at this point.
- Comment on Discussion: Cybertruck involved in attempted bombing in Las Vegas auto-locked after explosion 2 weeks ago:
2025 didn’t exactly open as the most vehicle-friendly year.
- Comment on Tech worker movements grow as threats of RTO, AI loom 3 weeks ago:
The same thing happened in journalism starting in the early aughts, and I don’t see anyone saying the field is better for it 20 years on. When your entire stable is people less than three years out of college, you’re going to get what you pay for.
- Comment on Honda teases reveal of two new Honda Zero EV prototypes 4 weeks ago:
“Teases, reveal and prototypes” is a lot of hedging.
- Comment on Google Contract Staff Reach Union Deal Banning Keystroke Monitoring 4 weeks ago:
As with so many things, that this was legal in the first place is the problem.
- Comment on Never Forgive Them 5 weeks ago:
This year has, on some level, radicalized me …
It’s unusual to run into a story with a line I’d just been thinking about.
- Comment on Amazon starts selling Hyundai cars, more brands next year 5 weeks ago:
The list of cities where this is available simply reaffirms the AP’s take on dateline cities. It’s a useful list for geography buffs but incompetent at suggesting the scale of operations for anyone else.
- Comment on Authorities urge U.S. citizens to use encrypted messaging apps to combat Chinese telco hackers 1 month ago:
Right. China is the problem. “Look over there!”
- Comment on Brits are scrolling away from X and aren't interested in AI • The Register 1 month ago:
Eh?
- Submitted 2 months ago to technology@beehaw.org | 4 comments
- Comment on ‘It gets more and more confused’: can AI replace translators? 2 months ago:
If these are technical manuals, I see no issue.
But fucking fiction?
- Comment on Striking New York Times tech workers ask people not to play Wordle or other NYT games 2 months ago:
Do you want to know more?
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
This feels like a “may be able to” situation. Once they’ve completed a flight from New York to London, I can get on board with the notion of them being able to fly from New York to London.
- Comment on Reddit is profitable for the first time ever, with nearly 100 million daily users 2 months ago:
Who the fuck is Alice? (if you do not get this reference, Gompie is what you’re looking for.)
- Comment on Reddit is profitable for the first time ever, with nearly 100 million daily users 2 months ago:
That’s all well and good, but it comes at the expense of the user experience.
- Comment on AI Slop Is Flooding Medium 2 months ago:
The implication that rewriting GPT output makes one a professional writer … not sure we’re on the same page there. If you know how to use it for those results, great!
- Comment on AI Slop Is Flooding Medium 2 months ago:
That’s because of bots like you. (I kid to make a point.)
- Comment on Media Literacy Can't Save Us 2 months ago:
This cannot be taught. I really wish it could, don’t get me wrong, but it just can’t.
We would not be here if this were possible. Something about rhyming, but I’m sorry, when Hitler is what you’re quoting, this becomes a different conversation.
I have read Mein Kampf. I’ve never read anything so poorly written, and I’ve dealt with a lot of junior reporters. Hitler should have stuck to speeches.
The problem here is we’re talking about Hitler. You generally don’t want to go there.
- Comment on Humane slashes the price of its AI Pin after weak sales 2 months ago:
“But my phone said it would be OK” is a lousy epitaph!
- Submitted 2 months ago to technology@beehaw.org | 6 comments
- Comment on Microsoft launches autonomous AI agents in November 2 months ago:
This is the correct take. Hence my worry.
- Comment on Microsoft launches autonomous AI agents in November 2 months ago:
We got used to foreign call centers. They’re not incompetent, but the wording is always off, and I say this as someone whose English usage is not exclusively American. Took me weeks to drop the Aussie accent.
- Submitted 2 months ago to technology@beehaw.org | 9 comments
- Comment on YouTube: Why Google Search is Falling Apart. [Mrwhosetheboss] 3 months ago:
1:42 into this, and “above the fold” – while defined correctly within the scope of newspaper layout – somehow ignores the ear ads that have been showing up for decades. Hell, I was involved in redesigns where the big question was “OK, but how do we fit more ads in there?”
This is in fact how one gets from a good design decision to offending readers with an unfulfilled promise, and this ain’t coding.
In the early aughts, there was a fad for taking up newshole just inside the paper to … tell readers what was in the paper. No one is buying something off the rack to open it to A2 to figure out what the refers are, but some metros were doing it, and midsize dailies tended to be lemmings 20 years ago.
I went several rounds with editors, folks from advertising and even higher-ups at The Washington Post (for unusual reasons) crafting what Page 2 would consist of. Upper half of the page was pretty much set in stone, with 4-col art that somehow needed to be demoted to A2 because we rarely went bigger than 3 cols out front (you try fitting nine stories plus at least three pieces of art, refers, index, blacklines [obit names], weather and anything else out front on a 44" web down from full broadsheet).
The bottom half was another story. Early on, it was decided that we’d have most of the bottom half of the page be a story we called (I shit you not) “A Closer Look” (I did it first, Seth). The idea was we had about 30" to play with and could run a wire story that was interesting but not A1 worthy … not exactly a feature, just news that wasn’t paper-of-record news. This concept would reappear out front downpage at a later paper, where it was called “Editor’s Choice.”
Once ads was done with that voodoo they do so well in terms of selling positions, we had on a good day 10" for A Closer Look, leading to it being internally referred to as A Cursory Glance. To the point that within two weeks, even the managing ed would ask in the budget meeting what we had for A Cursory Glance that evening as the guy who insisted on keeping the overline as “A Closer Look,” as that’s what he sold the publisher on.
I’m morbidly curious to continue watching and will from here, but Google didn’t invent shitty ad placement that insulted their audience anymoreso than Apple invented flat, rounded rectangles; print was there around 9/11 (and before, if one considers the precursor to “native advertising,” “sponsored content” – that editorial-looking stuff in the wrong typeface saying that, for example, you could only buy these exclusive silver coins during a half-hour window based on ZIP Code).
This is the logical continuation of unregulated late-stage capitalism. Pretending it’s about tech is certainly a framing choice, but it isn’t the right one.
- Comment on Column | No time to read? Google’s new AI will turn anything into a podcast 3 months ago:
I don’t know that it’s influential so much as formulaic. It’s been working for them for decades. And without it, we’d never have gotten Schweddy Balls, and that’s a worse timeline.
For real fun, submit your resume (that shit’s already all over online; Google can have it) and listen to NPR hosts take 7 minutes to describe your career arc.
- Submitted 3 months ago to technology@beehaw.org | 18 comments