Powderhorn

Powderhorn , 1 day ago

Poorly thought-out Facebook posts are forever; coverage of city council malfeasance from two years ago, not so much.

Powderhorn OP , 5 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?"

Powderhorn OP , 6 days 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.

Powderhorn , 6 days ago

If you know, you know.

Powderhorn , 5 days ago

I'm not really aware of anyone still shooting porn after 15 years outside of HKJ, and if I'm being honest, I'm not entirely sure she was active yet ... it was a different time.

It was also damn near impossible to monetize back then (self-host, find payment processor overseas that took 30% minimum, self-advertise), especially anything outside of male-centric boring shit you've seen a thousand times, which led to more of a discovery process and a tighter-knit community for those shooting or appearing in kink.

I'm glad she's doing OK after just an event, but I never found myself wondering why she didn't post anymore.

Powderhorn , 12 days ago

Darmok and Jalad ...

Powderhorn , 18 days 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 ...

Powderhorn , 18 days ago

It's also then just one step removed from refusing to accept any friends or romantic partners who don't do exactly what you want at all times because life is supposed to be tailored to you.

Powderhorn OP , 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.

Powderhorn , 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.

Powderhorn , 2 months ago

This interview brings up a number of points about the gulf between how a newsroom works and how bean-counters would like a newsroom to work. Unfortunately, it also shows that the latter has been working well enough for 17 months to keep getting the paper out.

I don't envy younger journalists for whom this is the introduction to the industry, but the time to get out of corporate journalism is now. Yes, it's a career that is an identity, and it's fucking crushing to have it in the rear view, but today's job market favours those just out of college across industries, so clinging on without adequate pay only makes getting out of the field worse when you've crossed the Rubicon and have extensive experience doing things no other industry wants.

Obviously, this is ultimately a story about the lack of labour protections from the government. Crucially, though, individual strikes are not moving the needle on that front. Some publishers have negotiated new contracts, but the ones that haven't -- and this is an excellent example -- are not going to change what they're doing: delay after delay until someone tells them they can't.

That day coming is an "if," not a "when."

Most journalists want to do the right thing and see the work as crucial to societal function. However, losing years that one can never get back, either from an income standpoint or just health and energy is the wrong call.

Powderhorn OP , 2 months ago

That's a very fair point. Much as I'd like to think I haven't aged in the past 20 years (when we were covering him as one of our senators), I've made the same error in assessing his age.

Powderhorn OP , 2 months ago

It's difficult to innovate when most (or all) of what used to go to R&D is instead given to shareholders.

Powderhorn OP , 2 months ago

Feels like everything's written in that self-congratulatory treacly voice these days. Most products are the equivalent of the little McDonald's hamburger with reconstituted onions and two anemic pickle slices but sold as though they have Michelin stars.

Powderhorn OP , 2 months ago

Yep, make it 10x salary, they can pay everyone in the company half as much, and the C-suite gets the difference in options or straight-out vesting.

Powderhorn OP , 2 months ago

Using 40 years as the yardstick, we're pretty much at the logical end of Reagan's policies of union-busting, deregulation and upward redistribution of wealth through "tax cuts for the middle class." Main difference is people now view an 8% mortgage as usury.

Powderhorn , 2 months ago

Quelle surprise.

Powderhorn , 2 months ago

One of my biggest regrets is actively choosing not to help organize the hub at Gannett. I was one rung below director and didn't want to sabotage what I still felt might work out well for me. But I was also supporting a family, which changes the calculus and is, indeed, exactly where they want you.

Powderhorn , 2 months ago

hustles to find pearls to clutch

Powderhorn , 2 months ago

I also go to great lengths to say LLMs vs. AI.

But, I also spent most of my career in the "mainstream press," and reporters can be surprisingly blasé about what technology means if that isn't their beat. I've had to spike a story or two about new police tech that includes zero quotes from anyone outside the PD and their vendor. I've held an order of magnitude more so they could be fixed ahead of publication.

And this was 15-20 years ago, when newsrooms employed people with more than three years of experience. I heavily curate my news diet on an ongoing basis, as outlets can go down the shitter in a matter of weeks with buyouts.

What we get today from many supposedly reliable outlets is not helpful to society.

Powderhorn , 2 months ago

Lying on an S-1 isn't an FTC problem; it's an SEC one.

Powderhorn , 2 months ago

Pretty much why people stay in abusive relationships.

Powderhorn , 2 months ago

I'm facing this as well across the board, not just where a CS degree is expected. I started off in CS, then a year in discovered I liked working at my school paper enough to drop out after hitting managing ed and having no one left to learn from because the J-school had been gutted in the '80s ... in 2000.

So, no degree. Which now means no job. Not even interviews. I never had any pure development titles that AI would pick up on, so the coding I've done also doesn't count. Your basic bottom-of-the-barrel "and then we were able to lay off half the team" automation that then got me pushed out for providing a useful but unrequested solution that made me a threat.

I determine my needs and then choose my tools, so sure, I'll get back up to speed in Python for a visualization project, but I'm not going to spend a couple of weeks trying to retain things with zero goal.

Powderhorn , 3 months ago

I'm on T-Mobile via an MVNO for $204/year all-in (Mint, 5GB/month) and have 5G Business Internet through them for the flat $50. Combine that with being exclusively on solar power, and it's cute to hear when the local utilities go down.

Is it as fast as fixed internet? No. Is that relevant 95% of the time? Also no.

Powderhorn , 3 months ago

I rarely break 1GB/month given how often I'm on WiFi, and I don't stream anything on my phone (purchased music collection works just fine). I get that's not how we're encouraged to use phones, but it suits my needs.

Powderhorn , 3 months ago

I didn't have a choice when I started looking into 5G as primary internet ... home was not available at my address but business was for whatever reason. "Very Good" signal tends to get me about 200Mbps, with "Excellent" hitting 400Mbps peaks.

Powderhorn , 3 months ago

I don't get podcasts. Like, I've tried, several times over the years, but I'd really rather read something in five minutes than hear it dragged out for an hour.

So "where" I get my podcasts is already question-begging. I was pointed to one last week where the intro was all about things "everyone" experiences ... getting the kids to school, what fast-food place to go to, arguing with the spouse about decor, usw. None of these applies to me, so I saw no reason to listen to the meat of the thing.

Don't assume your audience is like you. Sure, some people may get warm fuzzies that others have experienced the hell of deciding to pop out a kid, but distilling the human experience to having kids and all that comes with that is going to turn off a lot of people. We know it's hell. That's why some of us noped the fuck out.

Powderhorn , 3 months ago

It's about time! BIOS-based ChatGPT looks so outdated.

Powderhorn , 3 months ago

It’s always good to keep one’s shill detector up on Ars vis-a-vis Reddit given the ownership situation. I’ve so far not seen anything that rises to that level, including here, because of the audience. If you’re on Ars and don’t know what Reddit is, this story isn’t going to be of interest and thus is not going to push you to try using Reddit.

That said, this story only seems relevant to the minuscule-if-at-all-extant sliver of Ars readers who know what Reddit is and haven’t been using it only because they’ve been waiting to hear what paid apps look like eight months after the whole fiasco started. That’s not a demographic I’ve ever seen represented in the comments.

Powderhorn , 3 months ago

When 23andme was first announced, all I read was Startup Offers Access to Inevitable Security Breach Involving DNA.

Powderhorn , 3 months ago

It's almost like fair wages are totally affordable, and institutions just don't want to be fucked to pay them.

Powderhorn , 3 months ago

All this will do is push standard users into more expensive machines. Which, well, yeah, that's the point.

I mean, 16GB? Is anyone who's aware of RAM needs on a workstation accepting that in the first place? I'd love to run a poll and see who's running less than 32. 16 was luxurious 15 years ago.

Powderhorn , 4 months ago

I expected a longer beard.

Powderhorn , 4 months ago

I had no idea the entirety of Max Headroom was available to stream off the Internet Archive! Oddly enough, searching on there for "max headroom" doesn't return any results, so I'd never have stumbled across it by looking.

Powderhorn , 4 months ago

$5/300 is just under 1.67 cents per search.