Powderhorn

joined 1 year ago
MODERATOR OF
 

I was assuming this was a retirement announcement from the editor.

Sadly, not the case. The site has ceased publication as of this story, though content and the forum will remain up for an indeterminate amount of time.

It launched in 1997, the same year I wrote my first HTML, having started college and suddenly having access to hosting.

It sucks to see a pub that has adhered to its goals for the most part (we all make mistakes) for 27 years get shut down by a corporate owner.

 

I wasn't expecting anything Earth-shattering coming out of this given that everyone at Fox News was salivating for fresh meat. Problem is, not having a straight answer for anything now becomes the narrative.

This was not a great look for either of them (as little time as Walz got).

If you haven't seen it, links below:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

 

Here's a great example of dystopian tech being rolled out without guardrails. Brought to you by Axos, which you may know as the company that rebranded after Taser became a liability as a name.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

So long as one gets off the couch! 🤣

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

 

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 at least fact checking vendor collateral before it goes live.

 

This was a surprising area to see novel approaches being tried, though it doesn't seem to remotely solve the problems around cocoa beans.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago

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.

 

This is a surprisingly interesting thinkpiece for its length that ultimately arrives at no conclusion, but it's an important discussion to be having while we still can.

 

I canceled Amazon Prime last month given that I've lost all trust in getting a functioning version of whatever I've ordered. This is some next-level shit.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

Jelly doughnuts?

 

I'm comparatively old. I was raised in a household that viewed news as the highest calling.

Net result is I watched, at 5, Geraldine Ferraro's speech at the 1984 DNC. She had far more energy than Mondale, and my takeaway was if I could vote, it would be for her. I told my parents as much, and we had a fucking picture of Thatcher in the office.

That was my dad's call, as somehow a believer in Reagan. Mom told me we weren't ready yet, but I would see a woman elected president in my lifetime.

That was 40 years ago. Hillary couldn't get there, but with so much baggage that you want a private jet, scarcely surprising.

What I see today is not that. I didn't really expect this to be "biracial woman of colour," but we are finally exhausted of Trump's artless self-dealing, and we have zero interest in playing that movie again.

I've previously expressed not being thrilled with Harris, but she's grown on me.

This is where we finally get out of the dark ages and recognise that a woman can run the goddamn country. This is different. It's rather crazy to me that no one in my lifetime has run on joy. We keep plumbing the depths of society and wonder how we don't move forward.

No politician has ever been perfect. I'd argue Biden gets close for seeing the writing on the wall and accepting he can't win again. Giving us this.

Harris is also not perfect, but she is right for the era.

I watched her acceptance speech and felt 5 again. With hope for the future.

What happens past Nov. 5 is going to be interesting, but I think the felon will lose and fight it tooth and nail. He's literally running again to avoid prison. That's not who we are. We cannot reward this.

There was a post on the local subreddit that Texas is now in play. Holy shit, do you have to fuck up royally to have that be a thing. Florida is in play. North Carolina is in play. Forget all the swing states, we have an election on our hands.

There's plenty of time before then, and, as someone who ran a newsroom for the first time in 2000, that's worrisome. But if we can finally break out of this pattern, I welcome it.

We are about to see the U.S. cast off the chains and see the GOP for the cult of personality it is. They have no policy we want. I won't go much past that, as it's clear they're unaware of what "soul searching" looks like.

But I have hope for the first time since 2008. I hope it's not misplaced.

 

This is a battery manufacturer with shoddy QC and that overstates Amp-hour ratings.

As someone who relies on batteries to survive, this is personally offensive. My entire solar setup is largely thanks to Will Prowse, so when he says to avoid something, I tend to listen. Thankfully, I already have 600Ah of battery that appears to be functioning within normal parameters.

I'm glad to see Rossmann calling this bullshit out.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

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

view more: next ›