Powderhorn @ Powderhorn @beehaw.org

Unemployed journalist, burner, raver, graphic artist and vandweller.

---

Read more

Posts

705

Comments

1,932

Joined

2 yr. ago

Moderating

---

In Trumpian Washington, swamp drains you.

OK, so. A majority of Americans did not do so. Grossly simplified, one-third did, one-third didn't, and one-third stayed home. If you're being fed the line that a majority of voters wanted Trump, it simply isn't true. Millions stayed on the sidelines because of Gaza and feeling like there was no point (which, in many states, there isn't; there are like seven where your vote matters).

You don't have to be nice to her. But how often have you seen "bitch" used as a pure pejorative on Beehaw? Consider your audience.

Tone it down a bit. Most of us didn't vote for him, if only because a significant chunk simply didn't vote.

But "bitch" is a bit beyond the pale for Beehaw. That's objectively not Beeing Nice.

That the establishment is flailing tells you this is a movement with legs. I don't think they can shut it down like 2016 Bernie, so ... it'll be interesting to see what comes next.

Gut feeling, I agree. That said, I've heard from friends (let's hear it for hearsay!) that their friends and relatives seem to be going away from their core beliefs and instead believing everything endlessly spat at them by a glowing rectangle.

I have to think there's an Ouroboros aspect to all of this. Regardless of Musk's upbringing, he did bring electric vehicles front and center and oversaw the creation of reusable rockets. These are not small things. Many would be content with that, but then he went megalomaniac ... MOAR ... MOAR, and now we're seeing declining sales at Tesla; Xitter is, well, whatever it is; and SpaceX hasn't been doing great of late.

I'm reminded of Tom from MySpace. Got a few million on the way out, and he's under the radar, presumably enjoying cocktails with umbrellas in them. Like, if you're set for life, maybe don't try again.

People built houses before hammers were invented. But that's sort of the point of tools: that they can do things more efficiently than we can.

This really rises to the level of an interrobang?

First off, the "BBC paywall thread" didn't occur on Beehaw, so you're just confusing users here.

Al-Jazeera has a consistent history of objective journalism that covers topics Western sources don't -- or from an angle they're unwilling to explore. That's it. No conspiracy, no mystery. Objective news is objective news, regardless of whether you happen to like the name or the framing they start from.

Millions of people consider Fox News "journalism" when it simply isn't. Al-Jazeera is. So, to answer the title question: because it is. Whether you like that or disagree because it's a little too Muslim for you changes nothing about the empirical evidence of their coverage.

“The turnout model targeted key districts and constituencies and the campaign met those turnout goals — and got more votes than Eric Adams did four years ago,” she said. “However, Mamdani ran a campaign that managed to expand the electorate in such a way that no turnout model or poll was able to capture, while the rest of the field collapsed.”

Can we please, please stop with this asinine "I got more votes than the guy in the last election" bullshit? It's irrelevant and Trumpy as fuck. The electorate is still growing in the U.S., so of course you can get more votes and still lose, as there are simply more voters.

Raw numbers mean nothing in an election. Percentages do.

It's entirely possible he was responsible for some of PayPal, but since, his MO has been, as you said, buying up promising companies. And there's nothing wrong with that. The problem comes when he rewrites history to be the founder instead of simply an investor in these firms and claims credit for shit he simply didn't do.

I fell for it myself for a while. Early days of Tesla, early days of SpaceX ... dude knows how to sell and arguably accelerated BEVs, but it appears he doesn't know how to actually carve tunnels or rewrite mass transit with functionally unlimited money. Not to mention, Starship is having a really bad time these days, which stands in stark contrast to how banal Falcon launches have become.

Calling Musk an engineer is like saying the same about Steve Jobs. Both are(/were) salesmen happy to claim credit for every success while delegating blame for problems.

Not that this is unique to the pair in the current climate of people believing in messianic oligarchs, but I'm not really aware of any boots-on-the-ground innovation that sprang forth from Musk's mind. The Cybertruck is a fucking joke, and that seems to be the thing at Tesla he was most involved in of late, then broke the windows during a demo.

Leave breaking Windows at a keynote to Steve Ballmer.

OK, and the kernel is written in C and assembly. Should they know both of those as well?

visits page "Would you like to subscribe to our newsletter?" pop-up

Well, that's templates for you, I guess. But this breathless thing of I just now realized I don't own my media is a bit absurd. Arr, but I do, and with no data tracking. Win-win.

I think it's just mind-fuckery with some fun for the IDF.

If you know why you need alpha channels, of course you're going to save in an appropriate format. But most casual users aren't going to care. They took a picture of their breakfast or dog and just want to upload now. I'm not arguing PNGs serve no purpose; I'm arguing that most people aren't Web or app designers. They don't care whether it's lossy or lossless, let alone about transparency.

I'll agree for those use cases, but not everyone is making icons, stickers and emoji.

For production, yes. What percentage of images produced are for production, though? I know damn well how important alpha channels are, but for posting something on social media, which is orders of magnitude more output than image creation within the context of a larger presentation, no one cares.

The vast majority of people aren't graphic artists. That you and I know what alpha channels are has no bearing on daily use by the masses.

Candidate quality and tally manipulation are separate issues. There's enough here for a judge to move forward, so "but Biden" is a red herring. Lindell couldn't produce a shred of evidence, and Giuliani et al. got laughed out court every time -- more than 60 times.

Here we have a first challenge on 2024 where there's this crazy thing called "evidence." Is this a nationwide thing? I have no idea. But why would you flip the results in a rural New York county via software and leave it at that? That screams waste of coding resources.

I have never seen one speak in the media.

We're in agreement here, but it's important to bear in mind that corporate media has already bent the knee. Being subjected to one of Trump's tirades (and lawsuits) for reporting discrepancies isn't good for shareholders, which is their audience -- not readers, listeners or viewers ... fuck, not even the ever-dwindling number of advertisers at this point.

Plus, I don't think Mike Reed wants to be hauled before Congress to defend freedom of the press. He doesn't believe in it in the first place.

Not seeing how this would affect uptake. Lossless is great for production images, but standard JPEG will do (at low compression) for most Web use cases. Until OS developers coalesce around PNG as a standard (Windows has for screenshots), this is that old standards xkcd.

Alpha channels are nice and all, but how many end users A) have a need for that and B) understand the underlying concept, let alone implementation?

First-mover advantage has historically led to complacency. Sure, Tesla was first to scale in the U.S., but then Musk started focusing on the Quixotic quest toward self-driving -- which should show up just before fusion power -- and forgot the expectation car buyers have of annual incremental updates, with a general overhaul every five years. Honda isn't selling the same Civic as a decade ago.

IBM fell into this trap with PCs ahead of the clone wars. Intel is now finding out, having learned nothing from AMD's resurgence that forced it to start competing and the rise of ARM. Tesla feels rudderless, and Musk going batshit as the public face of the company isn't helping. Better to keep his shares and step down so competent leadership can be brought in.

Plenty more rockets he can be blowing up instead of myopically focusing on shit like the Cybertruck while running a far-right circlejerk.