@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

Powderhorn

@Powderhorn@beehaw.org

Green energy/tech reporter, burner, raver, graphic artist and vandweller.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

We can now watch Grace Hopper’s famed 1982 lecture on YouTube ( arstechnica.com )

Hopper's famous 1982 lecture on "Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People," has long been publicly unavailable because of the obsolete media on which it was recorded. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) finally managed to retrieve the footage for the National Security Agency (NSA), which...

Powderhorn ,
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

Only a true visionary could have foreseen YouTube in 1982!

Powderhorn OP ,
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

And that's as clear as she got the whole time. As least she was answering the question asked in that case.

(As to single-issue Gaza voters, I get it in the "had a close friend who was Palestinian in my 20s" sense, but Trump doesn't give a shit about the Palestinians. Somehow suggesting she's the worse choice in this race on that issue alone isn't even true, regardless of the larger picture. That's not politics or conjecture.)

Powderhorn OP ,
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

If you don't care about any dead child above 17,000, you've made a fine argument. But now you're saying more deaths is fine (and better than current policy) because you've reached some tipping point where more suffering and death is actually preferable to ... what? A Democrat in the White House? Your logic doesn't work within your own argument.

This is very common among single-issue voters. As another example: abortion. Plenty of people who think Trump is heinous vote for him based on that issue alone (something the GOP has been using to great effect for the past 30 years), and accept whatever else his cronies get him to enact because they perceive him as "wanting to get rid of abortion."

If your think the suffering of Palestinians is the greatest domestic issue facing the U.S., dwarfing all others combined, by all means let it guide your choice. But don't complain about the internment camps that start getting built if Trump wins when you found everything else in this election irrelevant.

Six hundred Nader votes in Florida going to Gore instead 24 years ago would have put this country on a very different trajectory, so it is not hyperbole that staying home or voting for the other guy can result in an even worse outcome.

Powderhorn OP ,
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

To your last point, you're dead wrong. I'm not whipped into anything, but thanks for the personal attack (not just on me, but on the gestures broadly "y'all") with zero basis. That's not Beehaw etiquette.

I'm far to the left of the current U.S. Overton window, so being cast as aligned with neoliberalism is laughable. As far as I can tell, your argument is that everyone for whom Gaza isn't their only deciding factor in a U.S. election supports genocide. That's certainly an opinion.

Powderhorn OP ,
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

Thanks for the explanation and apology. No harm done ... using the second person when talking about contentious issues can be pretty fraught, so I just wanted to let you know how I received it.

Powderhorn ,
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

I'm sorry, but this whole "it's unfair to deny kids the use of personal technology in class" is darkly hilarious to me. I did, in fact, try coding on my TI-85 in English class because I was bored, and it was immediately taken. Why is a phone more acceptable?

It wouldn't have been taken if left in my backpack, so any "well, what about an emergency?" arguments are disingenuous. Put your phone on silent; refrain from using it. This is not phone time. In an emergency, parents calling the school was effective with primitive '90s technology. Surely, they can still do that now.

Excuse me; I need to go yell at a cloud.

Powderhorn OP ,
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

It's an apples-to-oranges comparison. The idea here is replacing solar usage with kinetic energy in certain applications so fewer devices need an external power source and therefore wiring. It would also reduce grid use (by a minuscule amount), but I'm assuming the solar comparison is solely because both produce a DC current.

Powderhorn OP ,
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

So long as one gets off the couch! 🤣

Powderhorn OP ,
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

You have to admit, making them self-replicating would be pretty cool ... for a time.

Lionsgate Marketing Consultant Built Movie Trailer Filled With AI Generated Fake Movie Reviews Of Old Films ( www.techdirt.com )

I did see this trailer or at least part of it somehow and thought they were joke quotes. The ChatGPT connection isn't really the issue here, it's fucking lorem ipsum in production (that's why it's used; this is what inevitably happens otherwise). They don't have an AI problem; they have a process problem if there's no editing or...

Powderhorn ,
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

The only surprising data point I'm seeing is that 55% of self-described Trump supporters agree that "[r]eligion should be kept separate from government policies" -- and yet the GOP is running on a platform of establishing a nondemocratic theocracy.

Powderhorn ,
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

This. It's not well-advertised in KDE -- I accidentally discovered it through a key combo -- but it was good enough (i.e., Win 11-level) in KDE 5 to make the switch painless on desktop. Where both have issues is apps insisting there are arbitrary dimensional minimums for functionality and refusing to adhere to positioning. This is most egregious in messaging programs.

Nearly half of Venezuelans are considering leaving the country in the coming months, poll says ( theworld.org )

“There’s always fewer people who leave than those who say they plan to,” he said. “A quarter of the population of Venezuela has left already, so it’s unlikely we’re going to see a massive flow overnight of people fleeing. It could be a continuous trickle over the next few years, not the massive outflow we once...

Powderhorn ,
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

Thanks for quoting the elephant in the room. We've seen these sorts of polls stateside in 2016, one of which suggested 28% of U.S. residents were considering moving to Canada in the event of a Trump win.

That happened, but the exodus did not.

Powderhorn OP ,
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

Oh, the irony that enshittification has led to not trusting online tech firms to sell tech items online.

Powderhorn ,
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

Jelly doughnuts?

Powderhorn ,
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

Is there a particular reason that an 18650 or 21700 would suit your use case less?

Powderhorn OP ,
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

First off, 10 is an integer square root. Of 100.

I get where you're coming from on most points and agree overall. However, you're not taking into consideration what secondary schooling looks like before students arrive.

I was told by multiple English teachers (including the head of the department) that I was a math student and should never attempt to write because I saw through the regurgitation assignments, didn't agree with teacher assessments of what Dickens "was trying to do" and had zero interest in confirming their biases.

I also didn't pursue page design and getting onto my high school paper because the only F I got there was from the advisor who was exceptionally clear that I was not welcome to attempt committing journalism after mocking up yearbook pages and being very unhappy with the results in Aldus PageMaker; there was no support system in place. (Also, our yearbook was shit on every level.)

That said, I can still write a ternary line of code where it makes sense sted an if-else block.

College coursework on the whole is a waste of time reinventing wheels. I don't need to spend a couple of weeks working up to "Hello, world!" in C and as such left CS as a major my first quarter at uni.

For the most part, I've been very lucky with teachers and professors. When I started taking college classes in high school and escaped the absurdity of recitation being "thinking for myself," I learned to love writing because my prof, a Catholic deacon, wanted thesis defense, not what he'd said in lecture. If I was 180 off of his viewpoint but could cite sources, that was an A.

But teachers do this shit every day, year after year, and we blindly say they're doing important work even as they discourage people from finding their path and voice, because god forbid a 16-year-old challenges someone in their 50s.

Powderhorn OP ,
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

I had to find my own way. That's of value.

If you had a supportive set of teachers, telling you that you can do anything, where's the challenge? I went back to my high school and dutifully waited for the department chair with a rehearsed, belittling speech. When Columbia says you're the best editorial writer in the country at the college level from literally the first one I wrote, teachers tend to not only back the fuck off but also to do this weird thing where they revise history and talk about the promise they saw in me.

I succeeded despite what I was told. It's possible that I was more inclined to fucking do it right. When I was doing the Aaron Sorkin thing and moving through the newsroom and telling my reporters that their girlfriends are irrelevant on election night, and indeed told one to get the fuck out, I saw the power of my role. This was 24 years ago, and we didn't have the phones we have today.

There are a lot of people who care deeply about others. Many of us go into journalism. We don't want anyone else to go through what we have. It's difficult, but one win is all one needs to feel like maybe we saved the next generation.

MDMA for PTSD: Three studies retracted on heels of FDA rejection ( arstechnica.com )

I understand the purpose of appeals and that we rarely hear about things that are not appealed. But I don't think either the FDA or court system are functioning when people and companies go in front of a decision-making body knowing they're going to lose and viewing the ruling as the real starting gun.

Powderhorn OP ,
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

I'm baffled. At no point did I say the denial was the wrong decision. The best MAPS can do here is start over again at Phase III but this time figure out solutions to the fatal flaws that sank the application -- and maybe not let anyone get sexually assaulted in the process.

The biggest hurdle I see is blinding. There's simply no way to know you're not rolling, whether you've done MDMA in the past or not, so placebo is pointless.

Powderhorn OP ,
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

I recall seeing that the therapeutic dose was pretty close to if not the same as recreational, which would be 100 mg.

Powderhorn ,
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

With corrections by John Cleese.

Powderhorn ,
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

This feels rather out of context. At the national level, the memes get attention, and while that's of some utility, the ground game is still where the most reliable bloc of voters -- seniors -- pay attention.

Harris and Walz wisely did their whirlwind tour of key states to work this aspect at the same time as memeing it up. Sure, NYT and WaPo were all over it, but it was also on A1 the next morning for both people who still subscribe to their metro print newspaper. And local TV news covered it. That gets older people talking, and Silver isn't exactly new to this concept.

This is a classic false dichotomy. The options aren't "memes or" -- the one being employed, "memes and," is simply ignored here.

Some subreddits could be paywalled, hints Reddit CEO - 9to5Mac ( 9to5mac.com )

“I think the existing, altruistic, free version of Reddit will continue to exist and grow and thrive just the way it has,” Huffman said. “But now we will unlock the door for new use cases, new types of subreddits that can be built that may have exclusive content or private areas, things of that nature.”

Powderhorn ,
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

There's already r/OnlyVans, but it's not very high volume.

Powderhorn OP ,
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

Also, the easiest way -- by far -- to get a job in Austin is to not already be in Austin. God help you once you're already here and get laid off.

Powderhorn ,
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

Pretty sure I just read the mashup of

Court Tosses Facially Absurd Case
and
Baliey Kicks Off Gubernatorial Campaign

and can file it in the portion of my memory reserved for things done solely for optics, which tends to get emptied every night.

US Email Providers - Other then Google, MS, Apple, ...

I need to change ISPs and need to find a new email provider. This time I want to move to my own domain which I purchased through Namecheap and I do not want to use another ISP's email system nor do I want to use Google, or Microsoft since I am Linux (and Android too) based. I would like this to be US based or at least have a...

Powderhorn ,
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

The US is not suppose to spy on US citizens in the US

And yet ...

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • random
  • test
  • worldmews
  • mews
  • All magazines