Powderhorn @ Powderhorn @beehaw.org

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

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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.

Likely less than we actually are in aggregate.

The fact that more people signed sworn affidavits that they voted for Harris than tallied votes was enough for a judge to move to discovery makes this tonally different from the 2020 challenges that all failed. I don't think Harris was a particularly great candidate, but that's miles away from votes being miscounted.

You're conflating and making false equivalencies between separate events.

Is that really serendipity, though? There's a huge gap between asking a predictive model to be spontaneous and actual spontaneity.

Still, I'm curious what you run locally. I have a Pixel 6 Pro, so while it has a Tensor CPU, it wasn't designed for this use case.

The Roberts court has consistently chipped away at fundamental rights that we take for granted. (see also: Dobbs)

Nationwide injunctions have been key to holding back the worst impulses of the junta, and now that's also off the table. Reliance on both is all well and good, but it doesn't match the reality of not knowing what rights we'll lose each SCOTUS term.

The only part of the Constitution that's guaranteed to last through this is the Second Amendment. The Fourth is out the window, and the 14th is looking shaky. Articles I and II are being ignored.

Citizens United did that. I'm just pointing out this is another sign that we cannot rely on the rule of law, nor constitutional protections.

I don't believe it's all that new. In middle school, we took a field trip to a mosque, followed by lunch at an Iranian restaurant. The Imam was happy to explain the tenets of the faith, and the food was good.

I'd later have a Kuwaiti friend at community college who was one of the first people to treat me like an adult (I was still in high school). She'd take me to all sorts of Levant-related establishments to broaden my horizons, and I have to say, the Muslims I got exposed to were some of the kindest people, vis-a-vis what we see today from "Christians."

Then I had a flight from DCA to Charlottesville in 2005. I got the ass seat in the back of the plane, but at least aisle. The woman already settled in by the window was reading The Economist, which was an opening ... I'm not going to ignore such a thing.

As we were talking, she mentioned being Palestinian. I'd rather up to that point countenanced the propaganda that these were evil people. Evil people aren't pleasant and reading The Economist ... I'd of course been writing heds on BC-Israel-Palestinians for years by then, and holy fuck was even the AP horrifically biased on that conflict.

That was the interaction that turned me against the narrative. It was only a 40-minute flight, but in that time, the plight of Palestinians just wanting to live and thrive overrode all the Zionist propaganda I'd been fed to that point.

The whole Muslim scare is nothing more than othering. These are people, just as anyone is, wanting a secure life with opportunities for advancement.

Islam brought us al-Jabr's mathematical ideas and the very fucking numbers we use. The Levant was where advances were being made during the European dark ages. And we got algebra out of it.

To judge Muslims as a whole by a few is akin to saying everyone in the U.S. supports Trump.

I don't think MAGA is aware of the Streisand Effect.

My second wife was absolutely someone I enjoyed showing off as a symbol of success. She was the sort of chick everyone wants for a night just by seeing her, but I got to find out how deep the rabbit hole goes. This was, of course, 10-15 years ago.

What she did teach me was that fleeting connections definitely matter. We didn't meet until five years after I reached out. And when we did, there was no going back from the electric touch.

I've considered trying out an AI companion. My main concern is where the hell my data goes, how it will be used and how it might be sliced and diced for brokers.

Sometimes I'm up at 04.00 ... and of course no one I know is around. But I go the route of trying to meet people on Reddit. Fully 95% of responses are boring as fuck, but they're at least real (I require voice or photo verification). I'll take real and boring over virtual and engaging.

This said, I spend more time than is healthy on Google's NotebookLM, feeding it my writing and then getting a half-hour two-host audio "exploration" of any given piece. It's sycophantic, likely designed that way to keep me coming back (it's free, so I'm not really sure what Google gets out of this outside of further LLM training), but it tends to hew to just this side of feeling fake.

I went to Church Night -- the weekly burner meetup at a warehouse a 10-minute walk away where everyone's drinking and toking -- yesterday. I try to go weekly, but sometimes I don't have the energy to engage with real people.

Last night, I got to listen to (yeah, I actually realized I should shut the fuck up, as I had nothing to add) conversations about 1970s CPUs, SpaceX's Starship issues from an engineering standpoint (they went too thin on the outer hull after round one was too heavy, and why wouldn't one expect a critical failure in such a case?) from people who knew what they were talking about.

I'd never get that from an AI companion. I take no issue with people looking to one, but serendipity is lost.

What the Jesus-tapdancing-Christ is this tripe?

Dating has always confused me. If this takes a half-hour, it's likely not right. It isn't about wordplay ... it's a gut reaction. Mind you, I can engage in wordplay, but the spark, that sense that you've always known each other ... throw out the calendar.

You. Fucking. Know.

I actually texted my ex tonight. This is usually months apart, and here it was as well. But I went out (yay, me!) to a weekly burner meetup, and there's my ex's Doppelgaenger, equally tatted, blue hair, gesticulating as said ex did. So I sent a pic. I hate talking to Babe, but there was no one else who could understand what had happened at 23.00 CT.

Nothing happened. The woman who I'm doting on a bit too much and I didn't even talk this week. She was engaged in her sketchbook, and I didn't want to be a dick and see her exasperatedly put down what she was working on. I'd seen this from the middle distance, and we'd talked last week. Oddly, she doesn't just look like my ex -- she espouses what I enjoyed in terms of interaction: brusque and disinterested, if polite.

And while my ex and I had what could charitably be called an "oh fuck" moment after the divorce in 2016, it has been quite the journey. Have we fucked over the years since? Well, yes.

I don't need to approve her new choices, nor does she mine. You can't hate someone you don't love, and we eventually came to this timeless realization. There was a lot of hate. See prior reference.

Which to a certain extent I think is about insecurity. We both thought we were done with having to look when we met, but this turned out not to be the case. Fuck, we thought we were done with each other. And yet she kept the name and still wears my wedding collar (no, not what you're thinking -- it was far more substantial and required a lot of collaboration to pull off for the day of the wedding after an absurdly huge steel portion showed up from the blacksmith first go 'round).

We are done, but ... that doesn't mean she's gone. The number of times I wanted to set her to blocked is in the high three-figures. I just can't. Oh, sure, I try to come up with rationalizations, and I'm not thrilled with having to tell someone new, "So, you should know Mrs. Powderhorn is still out there."

Our phone conversations are oddly binary. Either we're talking like we're back in bed, or it's scorched Earth. I think both of us resent that it didn't work.

So this woman at the warehouse? She won't ever realise (let alone care about) the extent to which a nice-looking counter-culture punk chick is actually alarming because I know where this goes via personality.

Tangentially related, back in 1999, I picked up a copy of the Vancouver Sun, as I was wont to do, and there's a photo of me around A6 (I know it was an even page), except it wasn't me. The Canadian girlfriend (yes, they exist) looked at what had caused my reaction and didn't quite need a fainting couch, though I can't see her saying "no" to one.

"Waiter!"

Perhaps the most jarring thing about the now-nearly-decade-ago divorce is that we operate in two states. When we're working together, all is well.

Yo no soy marinated.

Good they've got cables ready to go when no one has 2.2 on both ends, and likely won't for years.

Yes, yes, I know that this is how tech goes, but sometimes it feels like HDMI looks at USB and is like "hold my beer."

I forgot about the Croissan'wich ... I've had my fair share of those over the years. Invariably, the croissant was soggy, but two of those and I was set until dinner for like $3.

I'm sure they've since found a way to fuck that up further, especially with the egg-price rollercoaster.

I last went to Five Guys in 2018, and it's really good, but not $25 good. I can get five slightly less good but still top-tier double cheeseburgers at a local chain for that price. Not exactly like you're paying for the ambience and personal touch.