Powderhorn

Powderhorn , 4 days ago

Only a true visionary could have foreseen YouTube in 1982!

Powderhorn , 28 days ago

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 , 30 days 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.

Powderhorn OP , 30 days ago

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

Powderhorn , 1 month ago

Jelly doughnuts?

Powderhorn , 1 month ago

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

Powderhorn OP , 1 month ago

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 , 1 month 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.

Powderhorn , 1 month ago

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

Powderhorn OP , 1 month ago

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 , 1 month ago

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.

Powderhorn , 1 month ago

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

And yet …

Powderhorn , 1 month ago

The big takeaway from this is that Depeche Mode is still touring.

Powderhorn , 2 months ago

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

Powderhorn , 2 months ago

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.

Powderhorn , 2 months ago

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.

Powderhorn , 2 months ago

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.

Powderhorn , 2 months ago

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.

Powderhorn , 2 months ago

Niche Product Fails to Exit Niche

Powderhorn , 3 months ago

… they said Archly.

Powderhorn , 3 months ago

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.

Powderhorn , 3 months ago

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.

Powderhorn , 2 months ago

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.

Powderhorn , 3 months ago

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.

Powderhorn , 3 months ago

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.

Powderhorn OP , 3 months ago

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.

Powderhorn OP , 3 months ago

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.

Powderhorn , 3 months ago

Has there ever been a left-wing austerity programme? This is anti-labour bullshit every fucking time.

Powderhorn , 3 months ago

Which is particularly acute in the case of Argentina.

Powderhorn , 3 months ago

It’s an investment problem. No one is doing scalable wave power because the money is in offshore wind.

Powderhorn , 3 months ago

There’s no need of “slam” – or “eye,” “mull,” “Solons,” usw – in an era where you’re not writing a 1-42-4.

(1 column, 42pt, four lines)

Powderhorn , 3 months ago

I bet it isn’t!

Powderhorn OP , 3 months ago

If you start from the assumption you’re using Quark 3.3, it’s not bad,

Powderhorn OP , 3 months ago

It’s not a word I often trot out; usually, “clusterfuck” suffices. The level of malice here instead of incompetence is enough to make Hanlon grow a beard, so here we have 'ne echte Schweinerei.

Powderhorn , 3 months ago

This was very much me, and for a rather stupid reason: My resume was in InDesign.

It would have served me well to realize InDesign resumes are a bad idea to get past ATS years ago, but I eventually came around.

I can still fire up CS6 in a VM; for my needs, CC never made sense. Like, seriously, for ID, layers and transparency and trapping and anything else I might need for offset or digital is taken care of. Illustrator has a competent Live Trace feature. Photoshop has the magnetic lasso, which is about as advanced as I need to get past cropping and toning. Audition lets me make really bad mashups.

The only subscription I have that is not a utility or insurance is Mullvad. I don’t want to rent anything on my computer, thank you very much. Yarr!

Powderhorn , 3 months ago

use unsuitable software for years in the hopes that volunteer devs will eventually add the features they need.

There’s an opportunity here to unbundle Photoshop from itself.

Since my background is print, I can say for at least a few more weeks, there’s an audience interested in reading RAW, cropping, toning for both CMYK and RGB, scratch removal on negatives and cutouts. And literally nothing else.

And so now imagine anyone else. They don’t need CMYK. What the fuck is that, anyway?

That Photoshop has gained bloat is not something to emulate. FOSS shouldn’t try to replicate it so long as there’s a universal file format one can jump between apps to manipulate.