Powderhorn

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[–] [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.

 

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.

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

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.

 

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

With corrections by John Cleese.

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

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

 

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 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.

 

Hed o' the day so far ...

Archive link

 

It's almost like endless mergers lead to homogeneity.

 

I'm OK with Harris. Not thrilled, but OK.

It would have been nice to get Warren. Sanders has the same age issue (though is still mentally there in interviews) as Biden, and that window has closed. So many people at the federal level have clung to their positions for so long, it feels like as a country, we wouldn't be familiar with people in the primes of their life actually running the show.

At 45, I shouldn't still be waiting for my generation to have any level of power. AARP is coming for me in 10 years.

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