Powderhorn

https://beehaw.org/u/Powderhorn

Freelance journalist and dirty hippie burner.

I read news so you don’t have to (but you still should).

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Last Notes

2026-08-27 17:29:13 GMT

> If you’re so tired of expensive housing prices in your major city, then why don’t you stop complaining and move to this random town I found with some cheap houses for sale and exactly zero other amenities?
>
> No place is perfect. Sure, this city is in the middle of nowhere, isn’t near major job markets, and doesn’t have maintained roads, well-funded schools, or functioning emergency services, but it does have a series of dilapidated ranch houses located between a data center and a second data center that is currently on fire.
>
> You can’t complain about the price of housing if you refuse to move hundreds of miles away to a city I just learned about for the purposes of this bad-faith argument.
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> For the same amount as a down payment in New York City, you could buy an entire house in this town in upstate wherever or whatever it’s called. You could also buy absolutely nothing else in the town because any industry was decimated in a post-industrial economic order that bled regional metros dry for the benefit of a handful of global conglomerates.

2026-08-03 17:29:47 GMT

> With no background in coding, Faith Maeba, a psychology major, was reluctant when her mother first suggested she enroll in classes on artificial intelligence.
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> But the senior at Virginia Commonwealth University began to see it differently as she looked into graduate psychology programs that explore human behavior in the workplace, which is quickly being upended by machine learning. Maeba, 21, is now pursuing a minor in AI.
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> “It’s giving me an edge and standing out,” she said.
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> Hiring has cooled for entry-level software developers — work increasingly done by AI agents — and college enrollment in computer and information science programs has been declining. Yet at campuses across the country, many professors are finding themselves busier than ever teaching students from a range of majors about artificial intelligence.
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> Colleges are responding to changes in student demand, but they also recognize that new graduates — regardless of their field — are facing questions about their AI skills from potential employers.
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> “We have to democratize it,” said Peter Stone, the chair of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, who recently developed an introductory course on AI essentials for noncomputer science majors.
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> “In the same way that everybody needs some degree of math, reading and writing, I think everybody needs a degree of AI literacy,” he said.

2026-05-15 21:21:32 GMT

My ex has a new kitten. She's very cute and, at five weeks, as the kids like to say, "smol." I'm not certain at what point "small" became too difficult to type, but as an editor ...
At any rate, the cat is not the point. Rather, she invited me up, this time insisting I pay for the Lyft in *both* directions, which is not how we've done this before. I can swing $70, but $140 is too much. (She told me to call my mom and ask for more money, which is A) not how this works; and B) really fucking insulting when she used to berate me for having my parents willing to help out in a pinch but happily enjoyed the results.)
In addition to wanting me to cover all costs, she made it clear that she doesn't want to act like a couple if I visit (actually not plausible; that's how we've interacted each time I've visited since December) ... *but* ... she has expressly forbid sex and wants to get really drunk and stoned, at which point she may be more amenable.
The relevant consent conversation happened, with her being the one saying, "Look, if I want it at the time, that's consent." Except it isn't, by a fair country mile.
She was asking for it ... did you see what she was drinking?
Thankfully, the logistics worked in my favour. I've got a guy coming by in the next hour to pick up my broken fridge in the hopes of being able to repair it. He thinks he knows the right control board, but it'll take three weeks to source, so I'm just getting a new fridge.
How Amazon can take fully a week to ship something is beyond me, but here we are.
He'd been angling for this evening, which will happen, but also left the rest of the weekend open. I mean, he's getting a free fridge that partially works but drains battery like nobody's business.
The only way to make this a plausible idea was being able to Lyft to Temple from Killeen (relatively cheap at $20) to stay with another burner friend until she had to hoof it back to Austin, and at this point, she has so much shit going on that it was a nonstarter.
For context, this is the woman who picked up a few bags of trash Monday, then sent me pics and info about a piece of land they're considering for the commune they intend to start up (I'll be on growing food and solar). So it's not like she just knee-jerk said no, more "now is not a good time."
I got back to my ex, let her know it wasn't feasible, and she hung up on me. Her son is going to be on ESPN tonight, and she wanted someone to watch with her. I could not care less about cross-country, and watching it on TV sounds like hell.
I'm glad her kid is excelling nationally, but still, it's people running on a screen.
It means giving up a chance to do laundry, but it just didn't feel right, which I've not gotten from her since we reconnected intensely. Why invite me and then say you don't really want me there, you just don't want to be alone?
That's your fucking problem, not mine, and I'm sure as fuck not going to feel like I need to spend my limited resources on an aloof partner who doesn't want to act like we know each other too well to make it a platonic visit. That flew the day we met in 2009, but only for about 12 hours.
I guess I should be grateful that we got to see each other a few times over the past few months. I can feel my heart rate decreasing as I walk through the door and put things in the fridge. Within minutes, it's like we never got divorced.
That was nice ... this is unpleasant sounding.

2026-05-14 14:32:34 GMT

> A solar-powered drone has been lost at sea after a record-breaking flight lasting eight days between late April and early May. The crash also marks the untimely demise of the pioneering aircraft Solar Impulse 2, which previously performed the world’s first solar-powered crossings of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans before becoming an uncrewed test platform for US military missions.
>
> The carbon-fiber aircraft could perform such feats of aeronautical endurance while running solely on renewable energy and batteries because of a 236-foot (72-meter) wingspan—comparable to a Boeing 747 jumbo jet’s wings—covered with more than 17,000 solar cells. The company Skydweller Aero purchased and modified the original Solar Impulse 2 aircraft to become a test platform for “perpetual uncrewed flight” with the capability of carrying up to 800 pounds (363 kilograms) of payload.
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> Skydweller Aero was conducting test flights for maritime patrol mission scenarios with the US military, and the company also holds contracts with the Navy and Air Force. So the Skydweller drone was operating in that capacity when it took off on its final flight in the early morning hours of April 26.

2026-05-06 17:10:53 GMT

> California recently passed a law that will, in practice, cause AI chatbots to respond to any hint of emotional distress by spamming users with 988 crisis line numbers, or by cutting off the conversation entirely. The law requires chatbot providers to implement “a protocol for preventing the production of suicidal ideation” if they’re going to engage in mental health conversations at all, with liability waiting for any provider whose conversation is later linked to harm. New York is considering going further, with a bill that would simply ban chatbots from engaging in discussions “suited for licensed professionals.” Similar proposals are moving in other states.
>
> If you’ve been reading Techdirt for any length of time, you know exactly what’s happening here. It’s the same moral panic playbook we’ve seen deployed against cyberbullying, then against social media, and now against generative AI. Something terrible happens. A handful of tragic stories emerge. Lawmakers, desperate to show they’re doing something, reach for the most visible technology in the room and start passing laws designed to stop it from doing whatever it was supposedly doing. The possibility that the technology might actually be helping more people than it’s hurting, or that the proposed fix might make things worse, rarely enters the conversation.
>
> Professor Jess Miers and her student Ray Yeh had a terrific piece at Transformer last month that actually engages with the data and the incentive structures here, and their central argument may seem counterintuitive to many: the way to make AI chatbots safer for people in mental health distress might be to reduce liability for providers. For many people, I’m sure, that will sound backwards. That is, until you actually think through how the current liability regime shapes behavior — as well as reflect on what we know about Section 230’s liability regime in a different context.

2026-04-23 19:36:10 GMT

> Palantir has won a $300 million contract from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to support the National Farm Security Action Plan (NFSAP) and modernize how USDA delivers services to America's farmers.
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> The agreement aims to boost farm security and support USDA’s Farm Production and Conservation (FPAC), which facilitates crop insurance, conservation programs, farm safety net programs, lending, and disaster programs.
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> Palantir has pledged to provide operational software to enable the USDA to boost supply chain resilience and protect programs from fraud, abuse, and "foreign adversary influence." The government department is to gain critical visibility into risks that can affect America’s agricultural production and food supply, the US spy-tech company said in a statement.
"Palantir has pledged" is a scary phrase.

2026-04-09 17:53:14 GMT

> OpenAI has put on hold plans for a landmark project to strengthen the UK’s AI capabilities, citing high energy costs and regulation.
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> Stargate UK was a part of the landmark UK-US AI deal announced last September, in which US companies appeared to commit £31bn to the UK’s tech sector, part of a larger series of investments intended to “mainline AI” into the British economy.
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> A Guardian investigation last month revealed many of these were “phantom investments” and a supercomputer scheduled to go live in 2026 was this March still a scaffolding yard in Essex. That supercomputer was to be built by Nscale, a UK firm that had never built a datacentre before but said it was aiming to deliver the project in 2027. Nscale was also to build key datacentres for Stargate UK.
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> The Stargate project was to support Britain in building out “sovereign compute” – infrastructure that would allow the government and other UK institutions to run AI models on datacentres in the country. This is in theory important to the security of British data, for institutions and individuals.
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> An OpenAI spokesperson said: “We see huge potential for the UK’s AI future. We continue to explore Stargate UK and will move forward when the right conditions such as regulation and the cost of energy enable long-term infrastructure investment.”
Or maybe it's as simple as "shit, we actually don't make any money, and people have caught onto the grift."

2026-03-21 17:51:56 GMT

This is admittedly somewhat redundant to the earlier post about the taskbar, but there's enough additional information that I find it worth posting.
> If you were eating in a restaurant and the head chef came out from the back multiple times to loudly proclaim that the kitchen was deeply committed to the quality of the food, would you find that reassuring? Or would you start wondering why the chef felt the need to keep saying it?
>
> That’s the conundrum facing the Windows team at Microsoft right now. Windows VP Pavan Davuluri has gone on the record several times since the start of the year to insist that Microsoft is committed to Windows 11’s quality, most recently in a post today titled “our commitment to Windows quality.” Windows 11 is an operating system that many people use but that few enthusiasts seem to love, either because of recent high-profile bugs or the steadily increasing flow of annoying add-ons, notifications, “helpful” “reminders,” and ads for other Microsoft products and services that coat most of the operating system’s virtual surfaces.
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> “Every day, we hear from the community about how you experience Windows,” Davuluri wrote. “And over the past several months, the team and I have spent a great deal of time analyzing your feedback. What came through was the voice of people who care deeply about Windows and want it to be better.”
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> Today’s post at least shows Microsoft attempting to put its money where its mouth is, as it included a short list of specific changes the company will begin rolling out to Windows Insider Program testers between now and the end of April.

2026-03-10 18:42:34 GMT

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When I was a student in Germany, I lived in a Dorf of some 700 people, 10km from the school in the "big" city -- Hameln. If the weather was good, I'd bike to school through wheat fields. If it was bad, the Stadtkreis (regional government, but not state level; roughly akin to a county) had regular bus service to get into town.
Once in Hameln, wheels were rare. All of downtown was a pedestrian zone, and where that ended was about a five-minute walk from the train station. At which point I could take a regional train to Hannover, and from there, an ICE (not the bad one, the Intercity Express) that could get me to France or Switzerland in only a few hours, without any customs or airport bullshit. And the trains were, of course, all electric, and ran on time (leave it to the Germans!).
This was 30 years ago, and we're still trying to figure out basic transport here that has been in use for decades.

2026-03-10 17:27:28 GMT

Autonomous vehicles are already doing so well with two dimensions, why not add a z-axis?
> The skies over parts of the US could soon get busier, as the Federal Aviation Administration launches pilot projects spanning 26 states to test electric air taxis and other next-gen aircraft, with operations expected to begin by summer 2026.
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> Selections for the electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) Integration Pilot Program (eIPP) were announced by the FAA on Monday, with eight projects chosen to participate in the initiative. The program will run for three years after the first project begins operations, and the selected efforts span 26 states.
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> According to the FAA, the projects will explore operational concepts including urban air taxi services, regional passenger transportation, cargo and logistics networks, emergency medical response operations, autonomous flight technologies, and offshore or energy-sector transportation.
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> "These partnerships will help us better understand how to safely and efficiently integrate these aircraft into the National Airspace System," said FAA Deputy Administrator Chris Rocheleau. "The program will provide valuable operational experience that will inform the standards needed to enable safe Advanced Air Mobility operations."

2026-03-04 20:48:16 GMT

> IT consultant and services provider Accenture has agreed to buy Speedtest and Downdetector owner Ookla from Ziff Davis for $1.2 billion in cash.
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> Accenture plans to integrate Ookla’s data products into its own offerings that are targeted at helping communications service providers, hyperscalers, government entities, and other types of customers “optimize … mission-critical Wi-Fi and 5G networks,” Accenture’s announcement today said.
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> Ookla’s platform also includes Ekahau, which offers tools for troubleshooting and designing wireless networks, and RootMetrics, which monitors mobile network performance.
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> Accenture plans to use data gathered from Ookla’s services for applications such as helping hyperscalers and cloud providers “ensure the resilience of AI infrastructure and edge datacenters, which deliver most of the inference workload,” improving fraud prevention in banks, conducting smart home analytics in utilities, and retail traffic optimization.

2026-03-03 17:16:30 GMT

> Burner accounts on social media sites can increasingly be analyzed to identify the pseudonymous users who post to them using AI in research that has far-reaching consequences for privacy on the Internet, researchers said.
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> The finding, from a recently published research paper, is based on results of experiments correlating specific individuals with accounts or posts across more than one social media platform. The success rate was far greater than existing classical deanonymization work that relied on humans assembling structured data sets suitable for algorithmic matching or manual work by skilled investigators. Recall—that is, how many users were successfully deanonymized—was as high as 68 percent. Precision—meaning the rate of guesses that correctly identify the user—was up to 90 percent.
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> The findings have the potential to upend pseudonymity, an imperfect but often sufficient privacy measure used by many people to post queries and participate in sometimes sensitive public discussions while making it hard for others to positively identify the speakers. The ability to cheaply and quickly identify the people behind such obscured accounts opens them up to doxxing, stalking, and the assembly of detailed marketing profiles that track where speakers live, what they do for a living, and other personal information. This pseudonymity measure no longer holds.

2026-02-27 17:53:56 GMT

> Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s financial services company Block has announced it will fire 40 percent of staff – around 4,000 people – because new "intelligence tools" the company is implementing “can do more and do it better.”
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> The company announced the sackings in the shareholder letter [PDF] accompanying its Q4 earnings announcement on Thursday. The payments and crypto company reported quarterly revenue of about $6.25 billion – up 3.6 percent year-over-year – and gross profit of around $2.9 billion. The company made $1 billion of gross profit in December 2025 alone. Full-year revenue came in at about $24.2 billion, and gross profit was around $10.36 billion.
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> “2025 was a strong year for us,” Dorsey wrote in the shareholder letter, before posing the question, “Why are we changing how we operate going forward?”
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> His answer, spread across the letter and a Xeet, is that AI has already changed the way Block works, so it needs to change its structure.
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> “We're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly,” he wrote on X.

2026-02-09 20:30:52 GMT

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I don't use Discord for adult content, so it sounds like I won't really be affected. But they're sure as hell not getting my face or ID.

2026-02-07 21:40:45 GMT

Because nothing says "fun" quite like having to restore a RAID that just saw 140TB fail.
> Western Digital this week outlined its near-term and mid-term plans to increase hard drive capacities to around 60TB and beyond with optimizations that significantly increase HDD performance for the AI and cloud era. In addition, the company outlined its longer-term vision for hard disk drives' evolution that includes a new laser technology for heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), new platters with higher areal density, and HDD assemblies with up to 14 platters. As a result, WD will be able to offer drives beyond 140 TB in the 2030s.
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> Western Digital plans to volume produce its inaugural commercial hard drives featuring HAMR technology next year, with capacities rising from 40TB (CMR) or 44TB (SMR) in late 2026, with production ramping in 2027. These drives will use the company's proven 11-platter platform with high-density media as well as HAMR heads with edge-emitting lasers that heat iron-platinum alloy (FePt) on top of platters to its Curie temperature — the point at which its magnetic properties change — and reducing its magnetic coercivity before writing data.

2026-01-19 21:24:08 GMT

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What sort of load do you have? Like, kWh/month?

2026-01-19 20:13:30 GMT

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Heh ... I just finished reading this story from another source.
I've been offgrid on solar for over two years at this point. The future is here, it's just not going to be evenly distributed.
And, hey, if you feel like you need to provide corporate welfare to utilities that are endlessly raising rates, that's certainly your right. But it's very nice to have neither a monthly power nor natural gas bill.
Is it perfect? No. Sometimes I have to plug in to rebalance the batteries, and when things get truly frigid, I have to flee to shelter. Still, a few days in a motel a couple times a year is *far* cheaper than paying for power each month.

2025-11-22 15:15:09 GMT

Yeah, that'll happen.
> While AI bubble talk fills the air these days, with fears of overinvestment that could pop at any time, something of a contradiction is brewing on the ground: Companies like Google and OpenAI can barely build infrastructure fast enough to fill their AI needs.
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> During an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Google’s AI infrastructure head Amin Vahdat told employees that the company must double its serving capacity every six months to meet demand for artificial intelligence services, reports CNBC. The comments show a rare look at what Google executives are telling its own employees internally. Vahdat, a vice president at Google Cloud, presented slides to its employees showing the company needs to scale “the next 1000x in 4-5 years.”
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> While a thousandfold increase in compute capacity sounds ambitious by itself, Vahdat noted some key constraints: Google needs to be able to deliver this increase in capability, compute, and storage networking “for essentially the same cost and increasingly, the same power, the same energy level,” he told employees during the meeting. “It won’t be easy but through collaboration and co-design, we’re going to get there.”

2025-11-08 17:27:31 GMT

> VPN company CyberGhost just sent Cloudflare a bogus DMCA takedown demand, claiming that our article about their last bogus copyright takedown demand, somehow violates their copyright.
>
> I’m not sure I’d trust a VPN company that fucks up this badly.
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> There are a lot of sketchy VPN companies out there, and it’s sometimes tricky to tell which ones are legit, and which ones to be wary of. I would suggest that if your VPN company is running around sending totally bogus DMCA notices that’s a bad sign. But if your VPN company is sending bogus DMCA notices to take down stories about its bogus DMCA stories, well, then you really have found the worst of the worst.
>
> Enter CyberGhost.
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> Almost exactly a year ago, we wrote about a bizarre copyright takedown involving CyberGhost. In that case, it had sent the takedown to Facebook because we had reposted the Daily Deal we had offered in 2016 for a CyberGhost subscription. As with all Techdirt posts, it had automatically reposted to our Facebook account.
>
> For no clear reason, CyberGhost falsely claimed that Facebook post (but not our original post) violated its copyright (it does not). So yeah, this seemed like CyberGhost sending a copyright takedown of us running a promotion for their VPN from eight years earlier. How bizarre.
At the risk of sounding like a shill, Mullvad is the answer.

2025-10-27 19:36:00 GMT

> Mike Brock’s piece on Sequoia Capital last week laid out a pretty damning case study: a well-respected COO complains about a partner’s Islamophobic posts, senior leadership invokes “institutional neutrality” and declines to act, she resigns, he stays because he made them billions on SpaceX. Brock correctly calls this out as a choice, not neutrality—a calculation about whose value to the firm matters more.
>
> The thing that struck me about Brock’s piece is that it highlights how there’s a broader pattern here: institutional cowardice from organizations that spout high-minded ideals as a shield to explain their refusal to make a clear decision, while ignoring that doing so is a very real choice with very real consequences.
>
> That’s worth highlighting, because we keep seeing it play out in nearly identical ways. Whether it’s a venture capital firm or a social media platform, the playbook is the same: invoke “neutrality” or “free speech” as a shield, refuse to take a clear stance on bigoted behavior, and then act shocked when the people being targeted decide they don’t want to stick around.
>
> This is the Nazi bar problem, and it keeps happening because people in positions of power either don’t understand it or don’t want to.
We head off into an excursion about paid blogging platforms ...
> Sequoia took the cowardly way out. It made a choice, but it wouldn’t own it, just like Substack refuses to own its pro-Nazi position. It pretends it doesn’t by saying “we’re staying neutral.” But their version of “staying neutral” and “supporting free speech” is really “bigotry and hatred are welcome” and then, what follows naturally is “the targets of bigotry and hatred must leave.”
>
> And it’s the exact same choice Substack made. When [CEO Chris] Best refused to answer Nilay’s questions, he was saying: we value the revenue from writers who publish bigoted content more than we value the writers and readers who don’t want to be associated with that content.
>
> Just as Balbale felt the need to leave Sequoia, a ton of Substack’s top writers left that platform. Joe Posnanski, Casey Newton, Marisa Kabas, Ryan Broderick, Molly White, Ken White, Audrey Watters, Mark DeLong, and many others have left Substack, with many of them pointing out that Substack’s stance on Nazis makes them feel unwelcome (for what it’s worth, many are also noting they make more money on other platforms).
Hmm. More money, fewer Nazis seems a decent tradeoff.

2025-10-25 01:10:02 GMT

My god, this is just hilarious. Remember, kids: If a piece of furniture that has been basically agreed upon for thousands of years (with some changes) needs a cloud connection:
* You're paying too much.
* You'll continue paying too much.
* You might wake up sweating in an uncomfortable position.
> This week’s Amazon Web Services outage had some people waking up on the wrong side of the bed.
>
> A Domain Name System (DNS) resolution problem affected AWS cloud hosting, resulting in an outage that impacted more than 1,000 web-based products and services and millions of people.
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> Perhaps one of the most avoidable breakdowns came via people’s beds. The reliance on the Internet for smart bed products from Eight Sleep resulted in people being awoken by beds locked into inclined positions and sweltering temperatures.
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> As spotted by Dexerto, the AWS outage caused smart mattress covers from Eight Sleep to malfunction. These “Pod” mattress covers connect to a physical hub, and users can set the covers to temperatures between 55° and 110° Fahrenheit via a companion app. Eight Sleep also sells smart mattress bases that let people control their bed’s elevation with the app. As of this writing, the Pods’ MSRPs range from $2,449 to $3,249, and the base has a $1,950 MSRP. Eight Sleep also sells its Autopilot feature through an annual subscription that starts at $199. Autopilot is supposed to help automatically set Eight Sleep devices to users’ optimal sleeping conditions. Pod purchases require a one-year subscription to Autopilot.
There's admittedly a bit of Schadenfreude here. You seriously subscribed to a fucking *bed*?

2025-10-23 17:05:50 GMT

> While most video screens such as those on our phones, TVs, and stadium jumbotrons seem to improve in resolution on a monthly basis, there has been an issue in improving the resolution of the tiny screens required in virtual reality apps. The problem is that as the screen moves closer to the human eye, the pixels that comprise it need to get smaller and smaller. Yet, if pixels get too small, their function starts to degrade and the image suffers. On a micro-LED screen, for example, pixels can't get much smaller than one micrometer wide before losing their ability to render a clear, crisp image.
>
> So instead of relying on pixels, researchers from Chalmers University of Technology, the University of Gothenburg and Uppsala University in Sweden turned to a different technique. They created what they've termed "metapixels" out of tungsten oxide, a material that can switch from being an insulator to a metal based on its electrical state. The metapixels reflect light differently based on their size and how they're arranged, and can be manipulated by an electrical current. In a way, they function much like the pigments in bird's feathers, which can take on different colors based on how the light is hitting them.
>
> The fact that metapixels don't need a light source eliminates the problems that video pixels take on when they get too small such as color bleeding and issues with uniformity.
!remindme 30 years
It's cool tech, but if it could actually replace displays, get ready for the patents to be bought up and buried so we can keep selling glowing rectangles with tons of e-waste, as god intended.

2025-10-22 18:49:10 GMT

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Both things can be true. Given that the author drives a Tesla, though, that's the lens through which he's writing from a longitudinal timeline.

2025-10-22 12:53:35 GMT

Sounds like hell on wheels is going to become common.
> For most of its short life, my Tesla Model 3 has aged beautifully. Since I bought the car, in 2019, it has received a number of new features simply by updating its software. My navigation system no longer just directs me to EV chargers along my route—it also shows me, in real time, how many plugs are free. With the push of a button, I can activate “Car Wash Mode,” and the Tesla will put itself in neutral and disable the windshield wipers. Some updates are more helpful than others: Thanks to Elon Musk and his middle-school humor, I can now play an updated array of fart sounds when an unsuspecting passenger sits down.
>
> But Musk is already starting to leave my car behind. In July, Tesla rolled out a version of Musk’s AI assistant, Grok, to its vehicles. Even as a chatbot skeptic, I could see the usefulness of asking my car for information without having to fumble with my phone. Alas, at present Grok runs only on Teslas made in the past few years, which have a more advanced processor to power their infotainment system. My sedan is simply too old.
>
> Cars used to be entirely mechanical objects. With hard work and expertise, basically any old vehicle could be restored and operated: On YouTube, you can watch a man drive a 1931 Alvis to McDonald’s. But the car itself was stuck in time. If the automaker added a feature to the following year’s model, you just didn’t get it. Things have changed. My Model 3 has few dials or buttons; nearly every feature is routed through the giant central touch screen. It’s not just Tesla: Many new cars—and especially electric cars—are now stuffed with software, receiving over-the-air updates to fix bugs, tweak performance, or add new functionality.

2025-10-18 19:45:03 GMT

> New documents and court records obtained by EFF show that Texas deputies queried Flock Safety's surveillance data in an abortion investigation, contradicting the narrative promoted by the company and the Johnson County Sheriff that she was “being searched for as a missing person,” and that “it was about her safety.”
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> The new information shows that deputies had initiated a "death investigation" of a "non-viable fetus," logged evidence of a woman’s self-managed abortion, and consulted prosecutors about possibly charging her.
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> Johnson County Sheriff Adam King repeatedly denied the automated license plate reader (ALPR) search was related to enforcing Texas's abortion ban, and Flock Safety called media accounts "false," "misleading" and "clickbait." However, according to a sworn affidavit by the lead detective, the case was in fact a death investigation in response to a report of an abortion, and deputies collected documentation of the abortion from the "reporting person," her alleged romantic partner. The death investigation remained open for weeks, with detectives interviewing the woman and reviewing her text messages about the abortion.
>
> The documents show that the Johnson County District Attorney's Office informed deputies that "the State could not statutorily charge [her] for taking the pill to cause the abortion or miscarriage of the non-viable fetus."
You tax dollars at work. Let's spend a month investigating something the DA immediately shuts down.
But, hey: Good on the DA.

2025-10-16 17:43:54 GMT

> Bad news, baby. The New Yorker reports the rapid advance of AI in the workplace will create a “permanent underclass” of everyone not already hitched to the AI train.
>
> The prediction comes from OpenAI employee Leopold Aschenbrenner, who claims AI will “reach or exceed human capacity” by 2027. Once it develops capacity to innovate, AI superintelligence will supersede even a need for its own programmers … and then wipe out the jobs done by everyone else.
>
> Nate Soares, winner of “most sunshine in book title” and co-author of AI critique If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies suggests “people should not be banking on work in the long term”. Math tutors, cinematographers, brand strategists and journalists are quoted by the New Yorker, freaking out.
>
> The consolation here is that if you are among those panicking about being forced into the permanent underclass, you are already in it. Inherited wealth makes more billionaires than entrepreneurship, the opportunity gap is growing; if your family don’t have the readies to fund your tech startup, media empire or eventual presidential ambitions, it’s probably because they were in a tech-displaced underclass, too.

2025-09-04 00:49:51 GMT

I find Patrick Boyle to be a consistently interesting voice for current events. Here, the conversation centers on journalism.

2025-07-26 02:57:39 GMT

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Company That Cannot Describe How It Will Ever Make Money Seeks Money

2025-07-17 17:02:01 GMT

> For the first time ever, Linux has clawed its way past the five per cent desktop market share barrier in the United States so maybe 2025 is finally the much predicted year of Linux on the desktop.
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> StatCounter’s latest figures for June 2025 show Linux holding 5.03 per cent of the US desktop market. That might sound modest, but it is a massive milestone for the open-source faithful who have been banging on for decades that Linux would one day break through. Even more satisfying, Linux has now overtaken the “Unknown” category in the stats, a small but symbolic victory that shows the growth is no longer being ignored or misattributed.
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> It took a grinding eight years for Linux to crawl from one to two per cent by April 2021. Another 2.2 years were needed to hit three per cent in June 2023. From there it snowballed, taking only 0.7 years to cross four per cent in February 2024 and just four months later Linux is through five per cent.
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> Analysts say AI workloads, the backlash against surveillance-heavy proprietary platforms, and the never-ending trainwrecks of Apple have made Linux a more attractive option for ordinary users. Microsoft’s increasingly locked-down Windows 11, with its forced online accounts and hardware restrictions, has not helped either.
I guess Apple and MS are finally finding out.

2025-06-28 13:19:13 GMT

This would be a lot more tinfoilesque were a court case on the matter not already underway in New York.
> The missing votes uncovered in Smart Elections’ legal case in Rockland County, New York, are just the tip of the iceberg—an iceberg that extends across the swing states and into Texas.
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> On Monday, an [investigator’s story](https://dissentinbloom.substack.com/p/the-machines-were-changed-before) finally hit the news cycle: Pro V&V, one of only two federally accredited testing labs, approved sweeping last-minute updates to ES&S voting machines in the months leading up to the 2024 election—without independent testing, public disclosure, or full certification review.
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> These changes were labeled “de minimis”—a term meant for trivial tweaks. But they touched ballot scanners, altered reporting software, and modified audit files—yet were all rubber-stamped with no oversight.
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> That revelation is a shock to the public.
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> But for those who’ve been digging into the bizarre election data since November, this isn’t the headline—it’s the final piece to the puzzle. While Pro V&V was quietly updating equipment in plain sight, a parallel operation was unfolding behind the curtain—between tech giants and Donald Trump.

2025-06-25 05:50:08 GMT

> Murkowski is seemingly keeping a door open to potentially caucusing with Democrats moving forward, or at the very least in a more independent mode to avoid the current hardened partisan divide, according to an interview being released in full on Tuesday.
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> Galen Druke, host of the GD Politics podcast, asked a hypothetical question about Murkowski being open to caucusing outside of the GOP if Democrats were to pick up three Senate seats in next year's elections, and if she had more opportunities to help her Alaskan constituents.
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> "There may be a possibility," Murkowski said, later adding, "There is some openness to exploring something different than the status quo."
It's an open question whether this being couched as a hypothetical allowed that response. It seems plausible that this is a gambit for other reasons.

2025-06-12 22:46:30 GMT

*Spaceballs II: The Quest for More Money* is finally being made!

2025-02-09 21:18:00 GMT

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What makes you think they're springing for name-brand glue?

2025-02-09 19:30:47 GMT

Spend a few grand on a once-in-a-lifetime concert vacation, get accused of being a bot months later.

2024-08-28 05:35:11 GMT

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.