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

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Joined 1Y ago
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Cake day: Jun 06, 2023

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Only a true visionary could have foreseen YouTube in 1982!



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.
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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.
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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.



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.
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Second round of Trump-themed NFT trading cards released: Analysis
I've never actually seen one of Trump's sales ads. I'm speechless for a number of reasons. How big is that dude's jacket? Somehow, the second one is even worse. Clips of the first NFT "issuance" made it to late night, but this is some next-level cult shit. Unless I'm misunderstanding, $7,500 gets you invited to no-expenses-paid visit to Mar-A-Lago, where I'm sure you'll be expected to pay for dinner, for the chance to shake his hand and be scammed yet again? Is this what's being sold? I share this because it's rather eye-opening what he thinks enough people will fall for to be worth it for a handsome profit. There's not much need to watch the analysis after the second ad, but if, like, me you are too stunned to form your own coherent thoughts, it helps on the come down back to reality.
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Oh, the irony that enshittification has led to not trusting online tech firms to sell tech items online.


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.


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.


Amazon Sells Fake, Dead Toshiba Hard Drives as New: Detailed Inspection & Proof of Their Scam
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.
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Is there a particular reason that an 18650 or 21700 would suit your use case less?



DCS Uses False Privacy Claim to Silence Another Reviewer: ‪@WillProwse‬
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.
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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.


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.


AI Cheating Is Getting Worse
[Archive link](https://web.archive.org/web/20240819154004/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/08/another-year-ai-college-cheating/679502/)
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I’m (unfortunately for reasons) running Win11 on a Surface Pro 7 with keyboard, and pinch/pull to zoom works fine in Firefox and Vivaldi, which are the only apps I use the feature on. It produces funky behavior in Explorer and usually does nothing elsewhere.

Is it universally functional in Windows? No. Is it implemented at the OS level? Absolutely.


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.




I'm leaving the hed as-is per protocol, but the larger story here seems to be we've already hit the point where LLMs produce better prompts for other LLMs than human prompt engineers do. This is not in my wheelhouse but feels like something of a marker being laid down far sooner than anyone was publicly expressing. The fact itself isn't all that surprising since we don't think in weights, and this is so far domain specific, but people were unironically talking about prompt engineering being a field with a promising future *well into this year*. I use ChatGPT daily for work. Much of what I do is rewriting government press releases for a trade publication, so I'll often have ChatGPT paraphrase (literally `paraphrase: `) paragraphs which I'll then paste into my working document after comparing to the original and making sure something festive didn't show up in translation. Sometimes, I have to say "this was a terrible result with almost no deviation from the original and try again," at which point I get the result I'm looking for. As plagiarism goes, no one's going to rake you over the coals for a press release, written to be run verbatim. And within *that* subset, government releases are literally public domain. Still, I've got these fucking *journalism* ethics. So, I've got my starting text (I've not tried doing a full story in 4o yet) from which I'll write my version knowing that if I do end up changing "enhanced" to "improved" where the latter is the original in the release, I'm agreeing with an editorial decision, not plagiarizing. For what I do, it's a godsend. For now. But because I can define the steps and reasoning, an LLM can as well, and I see no reason the linked article is wrong in assuming that version would be better than what I do. From there, I add quotes, usually about where they were in the release but stripped of self-congratulatory bullshit (`remove all references in quotes to figures not quoted themselves in the story and recast with unquoted intro to match the verb form used in the predicate, where the quote picks up` would, frankly, get you 90% of the way there) and compile links (`For all proper nouns encountered, search the Web to find the most recent result from the body issuing the release; if none found, look on other '.gov' sites; if none found, look for '.org' links; if none, stop attempting to link and move on to next proper noun`). It sounds like all this (and more!) could be done by LLM's today, relegating me to the role of copyeditor (not the briar patch!). Cool. No one's reading my stories about HVDC transmission lines for my dry wit, so with a proper line of editing, the copy would be just as readable, and I'd have more time to fact-check things or find a deeper resource to add context. But then how much more quickly do we get to a third layer of machine instructions that takes over everything that can be turned into an algorithm in my new role? At a certain point, all I have to offer that seems unattainable for LLMs (due to different heuristics and garbage training data) even in the medium term is news judgment, which isn't exactly a high-demand skill. This development worries me far more than anything I've read about LLM advancements in quite some time.
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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.


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.


Elon Musk moves X out of San Francisco. City leaders shrug.
Hed o' the day so far ... [Archive link](https://ghostarchive.org/archive/Pa8IF)
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Harris officially secures Democratic nomination for president
[Archive link](https://ghostarchive.org/archive/vcCfg)
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The big takeaway from this is that Depeche Mode is still touring.


In 51 weeks, the decreasing usefulness of that search drops to zero. This is not about now; it’s about the future.


I’m not a huge fan of Harris, either, but I’ll sure vote for her instead of the Fourth Reich.

I’d say media coverage of her has been so abysmal that no one knows what she’s even done as VP, but in trying to think of a veep who did get more coverage, I’m drawing a blank.

All I can think of is the Weekend Update that included Kevin Nealon for no reason showing a picture of Spiro Agnew and saying, “Former vice president Spiro Agnew,” pausing a beat and then moving along. I was too young to know the name, so it felt incredibly random.


This summarily erases two of Trump’s ongoing arguments: age and his whole “Biden crime family” schtick. Dems need to go much younger here to present a stark contrast and finally have someone not old enough to be a great-grandparent to Gen Z.


I’m of that particular age where my memories start just after AT&T was broken up into Baby Bells (to the extent that I thought “Ma Bell” was a weird shortening of Mountain Bell). So I know we’ve been here before.

Tesla’s not a great example, given that their connector is now a standard. Yes, it’ll take year for other charging networks to get built out, but that’s a temporary situation that’s a tech question. Cell service is not.


Nobody would put up with buying a car that only runs off gas from ExxonMobil, even with a discount. Nobody would buy a laptop that can only get an internet connection through Comcast. That so many people put up with locked phones are OK with this practice shows a lack of comparative analysis.


5GB/month Mint Mobile plan. Eight years in, and it started as 2GB. I buy my music, so I don’t stream. Most data use is background stuff with apps.


Here’s an idea: How about zero days?

I admittedly don’t get how this is even a thing, having bought unlocked phones for prepaid service going on 14 years now. Wait for a sale on a phone, get a high-end device for like $800 (financing always available), and pay $200 once a year for service.

It’s appalling to me that people think more than $17/month for cell service is reasonable.


I’m good with a Warren/Harris ticket. In this environment, I do not see female and not white gaining traction if Biden does decide to step aside. I want policy, not platitudes. And the GOP is geared up to explain to their brainwashed masses how bad a minority woman would screw them over. I’d give a lot for the timeline where the recount happened instead of Bush v. Gore.



Great. So now we have to hear from this asshole daily in addition to Trump’s meandering authoritarian christofascist rants.



I don’t see Biden stepping aside. This is somewhat of a milquetoast piece that ignores the absurd amount of legwork that would need to be done. It’s not just a vote at the DNC; it’s turning a battleship around in terms of communications against a guy who would paint it in a particularly vile way as weakness. Which is to say, fucked either way.

The only way this conceivably happens is Biden dies before the election, which I’m sure there are contingency plans for, but that is the ultimate in-case-of-emergency-break-glass situation.

These thinkpieces about how Biden turned in a poor showing (he did) that also ignore that Trump was abysmal … I don’t know what to make of that. Biden was low energy and a bit rambly, but he at least allowed the truth to come out of his mouth once. That should not be the bar, but with the candidates we have, it has to be.

I cannot understand how anyone watches Trump and thinks “this guy gets me.” He’s not the second coming of Christ, he’s the second coming of P.T. Barnum.


This is not a case of great editing … solid reporting, good numbers, takes a turn in the last graf and then summarily falls off a cliff. You can’t claim a trend, show one data point and then run the tagline.


There’s a certain level of amusement in trying to picture what those college end-of-party conversations that turn into breakfast at Denny’s look like for conservatives. I enjoy a good, heated argument, but you don’t bond over those except under very specific circumstances one doesn’t run into at that time.


I could swear Google wasn’t broadly a thing yet. The startup I worked at in 1999 had an elevator pitch for how we “could be the next Yahoo.” Not a great thing to aspire to in retrospect, but Google wasn’t on our radar.


I left Facebook in 2014, having had to rejoin because in that era, you had to have an account to get a job. Which is another topic but worth keeping in mind.

If I don’t know why I’m somewhere, I leave. Rave, website, bar … these are all the same questions, just with less external pressure because you aren’t the product in the other two situations.


Remember what that landscape looked like. The only major players we know today that existed then are Microsoft and Apple, and Apple had just been bailed out by MS to get in front of antitrust issues. Amazon existed as a bookstore, Google was not around yet, Facebook would still be several years out … MySpace wasn’t yet around. AOL was still a behemoth. Adobe sold perpetual licenses.

This is a far more recent development.


There’s always the option to store things locally. You want to get fancy, you can set up a NAS for remote access.

Saying “isn’t X also doing Y” implies the behaviour itself isn’t the problem, when it is. Doesn’t matter who’s using dark patterns for rent-seeking; it matters that we’ve normalized it.



This is an underrepresented viewpoint. We are at the point of “find out,” which so many tech companies thought they could stay just to the other side of the line on. Thing is, you can only move the goalposts so often before they’re in someone’s yard, and they didn’t sign up for this shit.

It was OneDrive upgrade nagging that made me switch to Linux. Microsoft could have, you know, not done that and kept a user. They also could have not gone regressive with how the taskbar functions. Or any number of other things that were dismissive of users.

At a certain point, you’re sitting in ever warmer water in the pot, and it occurs that maybe you’re being turned into food. That’s when the Linux pots start looking appealing. This was a completely avoidable problem brought to you by greed.

Greed! Because we don’t think making a good product is what capitalism is about.


That is a uniquely awesome hed. And only strengthens my belief that 404 Media is going to make corporate journalism wish that they’d not shit the bed to the extent that viable alternative options sprang up.



Quick reminder that you are on Beehaw. There’s only one rule here, and this sort of dismissive take does not adhere to it. Please find something substantive to dismiss.




Even though there are already a couple of other threads about this Schweinerei, there wasn't a good place to insert this into the discussion, and for those unfamiliar, this video's a good starting point.
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I hate to go as cliche as "surprising absolutely no one," but really, this is not a surprise.
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[Archive link](https://ghostarchive.org/archive/8frlF)
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Surely the clearest path to retaining only the best.
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The truly shocking thing to me is that any voters believe the ISP's arguments and are ... I guess *fine* with a portion of their monthly bills being earmarked for litigation to make their consumer experience ever worse. Anyone who thinks internet regulation is a net negative hasn't tried looking for a job in the past 15 years. Guaranteed full-speed access to job boards is essential in a way that classifieds never managed to achieve.
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>“While no one predicted this specific outcome, we shouldn’t be surprised,” added the investor Benaich. “If antitrust regulators make [mergers and acquisitions] prohibitively difficult, we should expect these bizarre semi-exits to become more common.”
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Ars provides this asterisk: >Even though the spreadsheet contains a complete AI language model, you can't chat with it like ChatGPT. Instead, users input words in other cells and see the predictive results displayed in different cells almost instantly. ... [L]anguage models like GPT-2 were designed to do next-token prediction, which means they try to complete an input (called a prompt, which is encoded into chunks called tokens) with the most likely text. The prediction could be the continuation of a sentence or any other text-based task, such as software code. Different sheets in Anand's Excel file allow users to get a sense of what is going on under the hood while these predictions are taking place. Direct github link [here](https://github.com/ianand/spreadsheets-are-all-you-need/releases/tag/v0.5.0); YouTube intro from the creator [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjD2n_e9E3w).
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Wyden has been spectacular on actually understanding tech issues for a very long time at this point. The gerontocracy needs to stop acting like they have any clue how the internet works. It's not a dump truck; it's a series of tubes.
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As a general rule, when trillion-dollar companies don't like regulation, it simply means they're admitting the rules are good for their customers.
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Not much to add here, given the opening dependent clause.
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From the "no matter how bad you think it is, it's worse" department.
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This is one of the more scathing pieces to come out on Ars about Reddit. As the site did not respond to inquiries, all that was available to report on was profoundly negative statements that Advance is unlikely to enjoy seeing.
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The Cult of AI: How one writer’s trip to an annual tech conference left him with a sinking feeling about the future
From the (middle of the) story: *The reason CES was so packed with random “AI”-branded products was that sticking those two letters to a new company is seen as something of a talisman, a ritual to bring back the (VC) rainy season.*
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With a fair amount of system integration (no wake word available) missing, of course. Which rather sounds like a feature.
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Grab your favourite beverage; this is a long piece, but it provides a fair amount of insight on the pre-Thanksgiving imbroglio.
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YouTube once again ahead of uBO on Firefox; fiddling with the extension settings not working this time and DDG search is useless … anyone got ideas?
Pretty much the subject line. uBO has successfully blocked the nag screen enough times that I can't play anything at this point. No preview loads, and the play button serves no function. I'd really prefer not to have to find content on YT, copy the URL and use Piped/Invidious, but this ongoing escalation is steeling my resolve to screw Google.
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Sharing here because of the post from 14 hours ago. In my case, I thought I could survive a few weeks on a Surface with a fresh Windows install because I'd been planning to sell it. Now that it's turning into my daily driver with no real end in sight (and with all my thumb drives packed away), I have Yet Another Flash Drive™ arriving this evening so I can go back to KDE precisely because of this sort of bullshit.
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Not quite there yet ... from left on surface, 5G internet, WireGuard router, pihole on a Zero W and 4x4 N95 HTPC, plus 1080p projector. When a computer that size (actually smaller, since I don't need a SATA bay) can outperform my tower, though ... [This photo](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/CvcqX85m7TkTkbAbZGrsth.png) of Meteor Lake shows 16GB of LPDDR5X on the package. AMD's looking to kill the low-midrange GPU in the next couple of generations of APUs, with Intel attempting to reach parity. And all of this in a fraction of the power envelope of a midrange gaming rig. Maybe it's next-quarter-itis dominating the tech press, but these developments feel like they deserve a bit more attention given that all signs point to gaming 4x4 PCs with a wall wart in the next two years. This actually makes Intel's exit from the NUC space somewhat surprising, but they've been shedding products pretty consistently and this may just be a part of that. I'm in the situation of having a 5-year-old gaming rig that's still going strong (caveat: I'm a factory/city-builder gamer so an RX 6600 works fine for me at 4K60), and moving into a stepvan in the next couple of weeks and therefore suddenly very aware of power draw, so all of this may be more exciting to me than the average bear, as I could see finally upgrading on account of a dead component in the next couple of years. Yet there's still that part of me from college that wants to keep abreast of the latest developments, and as I've watched now six desktop Intel generations hit benchmarks since I was the lucky winner of an 8086K, there's been nothing that really draws a line in the sand and says "this will be the clear new minimum target." Intel starting over at 1st gen for Meteor Lake shows they see this finally changing. It honestly could have happened anywhere from introduction of E-cores to the seeming destination of Rentable Units, which have finally popped up outside of MLID. I've seen nothing about what AMD's disaggregated endpoint looks like, even though I'm definitely looking to Strix Halo as where I may be able to ditch the ITX sandwich tower completely. Couple this with swapping out my TV for a native 1080p mini projector (a "maybe" suggestion that turned into having to try one at $40, and wow!), and I could be gaming in a van in fucking style with essentially zero dedicated hardware space in just a couple years! Anyway, in situations like this, I've found that I may have inadequate sources, so I thought I'd see if anyone had suggestions.
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[Archive link](https://ghostarchive.org/archive/ANfAz)
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