[-] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 3 points 11 hours ago

And you're entitled to your opinion. I don't need to present my credentials in terms of fulfilling my own sexual fantasies, nor do you need to believe that I had to create a group on FetLife so that the porn I made with my ex actually had a home.

It's generally not a great idea to tell an editor that he needs to learn how to consult dictionaries, and I hope you don't extend such pleasantries to other members of the Beehaw community.

Context is king. We're talking about literary genres, and you want to talk sex. I fully approve! This said, get off your high horse. You knew damn well the context and decided to inject irrelevant data to ... I don't know ... "win?"

We're not here to argue. If that's your goal, Beehaw is not the correct instance for you.

[-] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 4 points 12 hours ago

I ended up in middle school with my head in the lap (get your mind out of the gutter; I was facing up) of a very butch classmate after P.E. She was clearly able to break any guy in two and was, so far as any of us knew, cishet. I've not followed her progress since the '80s, but it occurs that some women are built a bit more sturdy, and that's the real issue here.

God forbid the far right learns about Scottish chicks. Actually, they should, just so their heads can explode.

[-] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 4 points 12 hours ago

Just to be clear, you won't read things like T.H. White's The Once and Future King?

I get the hate for Rowling, and I'm old enough that I grew up on Narnia instead. I never read Rowling's books, given that I was an adult, but I lived with a woman a decade younger for a time, and she was all about Harry Potter, so I slogged through all of the movies. Great acting, good production values, but I had a hard time figuring out why to care.

Worth noting, though, is that as a kid, I had no idea when the first two books were read to me in bed that C.S. Lewis was a Christian apologist. I started reading from there. I'll frankly take someone who seems to have espoused the actual teachings of Jesus over a TERF any day.

I will say that Lewis helped get me through a rough patch via Mere Christianity as an adult suffering my first marriage falling apart ... while I remain an atheist, he made compelling arguments. Rowling really has nothing of substance to say through her works.

[-] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 2 points 12 hours ago

While I appreciate the self-reflection, fantasy literally means shit that can't possibly happen in real life. If it could, well ... it wouldn't be fantasy, now would it?

Once one veers into the realistic, it's one of a number of genres, wherein "fantasy" is not considered.

[-] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 1 points 12 hours ago

Fuck. You win the internet today. 🥇

[-] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 4 points 20 hours ago

I saw this pop up in the YouTube post-play grid a couple of days ago and didn't bother clicking, because so often after watching a climate-impact video, it'll suggest eight-year-old videos in said grid.

After living off of solar for a year and a half, the idea of going back to paying an absurd amount monthly is unpalatable. Even two years ago, when I bought my panels, each 100W panel cost less than the base fees before usage over two months. With 1200W installed, that's some 20 months to break even, and fees and rates have now gone up five times since I went off grid, meaning I'm in the black by now.

But seriously: Five rate increases in less than two years? This from a city-owned utility that generates and purchases fossil-fuel electricity.

Now, solar alone only does so much if one cares to do anything at night, and 600Ah of LFP cost twice what the panels did, and once I got the rest of the pieces together, I was at about $4,000. But that amount of battery allows me to deal with three days of clouds and rain, and I specced the solar to be able to completely charge my battery in a single sunny day.

I think the main problem is inertia. I was paying usually $60 per month for 20kWh. That's three fucking dollars per kWh. When people post on r/Austin about electric rate hikes and I point out the usury, I get brigaded by people saying it's somehow disingenuous to look at the whole bill and instead can only count power and distribution.

Which is fine, but I couldn't just pay the $15 in usage and keep getting service. So people bend themselves into pretzels to defend absurd pricing structures (there's of course a fair amount of "stop being poor, and things look reasonable ... bootstraps!")

Of course, going off-grid introduces new concerns. I have to lug my two batteries to a friend's place twice a year to keep them in balance by individually charging from mains (this is not an issue with a single battery, but 300Ah is about as much as I can lug). It's a bitch to disconnect them from the full system, and of course there are breakers and switches that need to be thrown such that I don't return to a charred shell of a van.

But I always chuckle when I see people talking on Reddit about power or internet being out. The tipping point for me to want to get off grid was what we lovingly call 2021's Snowmaggedon, that time where everyone not on a critical circuit was down for days instead of the advertised "rolling blackouts" -- and by days, for some it was nine; I was at the top of the bell curve with six.

And meanwhile, the empty skyscrapers downtown stayed on like a beacon in the night.

Not only is the grid expensive, not only is it polluting ... it's also really fucking expensive for what it is. Oh, and unreliable. Just what I'm looking for when highs don't break 20F and I'm boiling snow on my gas stove (I taught a neighbour how to light her stove manually; she'd never considered it) just to stay alive by bundling up.

People being unwilling to consider alternatives and look at ROI timelines because "that's work" just confuses me. I was paying $75 per month just to have access to electric and natural gas, and again, there have been several increases since. Granted, I do use diesel for heat (the heater uses about a cup an hour) as needed, because I'm input bound -- 1200W of solar that will never perform to top spec so produces about 6kWh per day doesn't solve that a space heater will burn through that in four hours.

We don't expect anyone laying cables for phone service anymore, and I'm of the same mindset for power at this point. Sure, building your own microgrid is a large upfront cost, but a lot of places (at least two years ago) were offering 0% financing for six months to a year, so "upfront" is squishy.

We put up with the state of the power industry and grid because we've been conditioned to believe there are no alternatives. And even five years ago, that was true -- rolling your own was prohibitively expensive for most. But you don't buy a house expecting a return in three months, so why does it persist that burning dinosaurs should only be compared on that timeframe?

5

The new US political party that Elon Musk has boasted about bankrolling could initially focus on a handful of attainable House and Senate seats while striving to be the decisive vote on major issues amid the thin margins in Congress.

Tesla and SpaceX’s multibillionaire CEO mused about that approach on Friday in a post on X, the social media platform he owns, as he continued feuding with Donald Trump over the spending bill that the president has signed into law. On Saturday, without immediately elaborating, the former Trump adviser announced on X that he had created the so-called America party.

“One way to execute on this would be to laser-focus on just 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8 to 10 House districts,” wrote Musk, who is the world’s richest person and oversaw brutal cuts to the federal government after Trump’s second presidency began in January. “Given the razor-thin legislative margins, that would be enough to serve as the deciding vote on contentious laws, ensuring they serve the true will of the people.”

Ross Perot already tried this gambit. Billions of dollars can't buy a political party starting from scratch. Musk has always been more successful as an investor who turns around and claims to be the founder.

Not to mention, Fox News will no doubt find any snippet they can to tear him down after being the golden boy for a while.

I point this out because I think he can only pull from non-MAGA conservatives, and I've no idea what his approval rating is amongst them. The rest of us know he's a drug-addled Nazi.

A phased start makes logical sense instead of trying to build out a 50-state network Day 1. But I see no way to critical mass, even at the congressional district level, for a win as opposed to being a spoiler.

6

Do people from different cultures and environments see the world differently? Two recent studies have different takes on this decades-long controversy. The answer might be more complicated, and more interesting, than either study suggests.

One study, led by Ivan Kroupin at the London School of Economics, asked how people from different cultures perceived a visual illusion known as the Coffer illusion. They discovered that people in the UK and US saw it mainly in one way, as comprising rectangles – while people from rural communities in Namibia typically saw it another way: as containing circles.

To explain these differences, Kroupin and colleagues appeal to a hypothesis raised more than 60 years ago and argued about ever since. The idea is that people in western industrialised countries (these days known by the acronym “weird” – for western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic – a summary that is increasingly questionable) see things in a specific way because they are generally exposed to highly “carpentered” environments, with lots of straight lines, right angles – visual features common in western architecture. By contrast, people from non-“weird” societies – like those in rural Namibia – inhabit environments with fewer sharp lines and angular geometric forms, so their visual abilities will be tuned differently.

[-] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 2 points 1 day ago

I'm not sure this is generative rather than really shitty Photoshopping (no reason it can't be both). That it's a square makes the former a distinct possibility, but the level of sharpening in the condiment cup tops alongside the blurry fries where the effect spills over to the cup bases is jarring.

For the dogs themselves, that looks like standard food staging for a shoot. If this is generated, the model certainly was trained on using Elmer's glue with food dye for mustard. It's absurd that we've hit the point of needing art with every story, but at least this isn't a filer of crime scene tape in front of police cars with the lights going.

[-] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 6 points 1 day ago

Great. So subsisting off nothing but bologna sandwiches isn't the best of ideas. But at $1.50 per pound, it's protein yielding eight two-slice meals.

[-] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 5 points 1 day ago

The Wire (I think it's the final season) does the best job of accurately showing a newsroom in the era it was created of any show I've seen.

[-] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 2 points 1 day ago

I was actually finishing bingeing Hornblower as you were posting. I just did a full writeup over on Entertainment after concluding the series.

[-] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 1 points 1 day ago

Not the ruling itself, but corporations file all sorts of motions before and during the initial trial specifically so that if a motion is denied, voila! Now the jury verdict and compensation decision isn't what they're challenging, but rather technical aspects from rulings by the judge overseeing the trial court ... admission or inadmission of evidence is always a popular one.

To suggest that anyone else has the sort of law firms on retainer to play this game all the way to the top is folly. It's just another way in which the system is rigged.

[-] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 2 points 1 day ago

Not at all ... it's just that corporations, unwilling to take no for an answer, have functionally unlimited funds to throw toward several rounds of escalating court cases while defendants ... don't. It creates an inherently lopsided situation the legal system wasn't explicitly designed for, but now this is just standard.

Companies walk into these trials essentially seeing the first round as a rehearsal.

54

In a memo to employees earlier this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared a vision for a near-future in which "personal [AI] superintelligence for everyone" forms "the beginning of a new era for humanity." The newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs—freshly staffed with multiple high-level acquisitions from OpenAI and other AI companies—will spearhead the development of "our next generation of models to get to the frontier in the next year or so," Zuckerberg wrote.

Reading that memo, I couldn't help but think of another "vision for the future" Zuckerberg shared not that long ago. At his 2021 Facebook Connect keynote, Zuckerberg laid out his plan for the metaverse, a virtual place where “you're gonna be able to do almost anything you can imagine" and which would form the basis of "the next version of the Internet."

Zuckerberg believed in that vision so much at the time that he abandoned the well-known Facebook corporate brand in favor of the new name "Meta." "I'm going to keep pushing and giving everything I've got to make this happen now," Zuckerberg said at the time. Less than four years later, Zuckerberg seems to now be “giving everything [he's] got" for a vision of AI “superintelligence," reportedly offering pay packages of up to $300 million over four years to attract top talent from other AI companies (Meta has since denied those reports, saying, “The size and structure of these compensation packages have been misrepresented all over the place").

Once again, Zuckerberg is promising that this new technology will revolutionize our lives and replace the ways we currently socialize and work on the Internet. But the utter failure (so far) of those over-the-top promises for the metaverse has us more than a little skeptical of how impactful Zuckerberg’s vision of “personal superintelligence for everyone" will truly be.

Looks like Zuck is angling for the golden shoehorn award (a real thing at one of the papers I worked for). It would be nice if all these failures actually put a dent in Meta's income, but who's really going to notice tens of billions being lost when you essentially own a money-printing scheme?

52

The traffic receded as Chicago withdrew into the distance behind me on Interstate 90. Barns and trees dotted the horizon. The speakers in my rental car, playing Spotify from my smartphone, put out the opening riff of a laid-back psychedelic-rock song. When the lyrics came, delivered in a folksy vibrato, they matched my mood: “Smoke in the sky / No peace found,” the band’s vocalist sang.

Except perhaps he didn’t really sing, because he doesn’t exist. By all appearances, neither does the band, called the Velvet Sundown. Its music, lyrics, and album art may be AI inventions. Same goes for the photos of the band. Social-media accounts associated with the band have been coy on the subject: “They said we’re not real. Maybe you aren’t either,” one Velvet Sundown post declares. (That account did not respond to a request for comment via direct message.) Whatever its provenance, the Velvet Sundown seems to be successful: It released two albums last month alone, with a third on its way. And with more than 850,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, its reach exceeds that of the late-’80s MTV staple Martika or the hard-bop jazz saxophonist Cannonball Adderley. As for the music: You know, it’s not bad.

It’s not good either. It’s more like nothing—not good or bad, aesthetically or morally. Having listened to both of the Velvet Sundown’s albums as I drove from Chicago to Madison, Wisconsin, earlier this week, I discovered that what may now be the most successful AI group on Spotify is merely, profoundly, and disturbingly innocuous. In that sense, it signifies the fate of music that is streamed online and then imbibed while one drives, cooks, cleans, works, exercises, or does any other prosaic act. Long before generative AI began its takeover of the internet, streaming music had turned anodyne—a vehicle for vibes, not for active listening. A single road trip with the Velvet Sundown was enough to prove this point: A major subset of the music that we listen to today might as well have been made by a machine.

I don't understand streaming music as a concept. My collection of individual tracks stands at about 1,700 (clocking in at 190 hours -- that is 22 hours more than a week), and there are several full albums atop that.

In my 40s, new music discovery has been a low priority, but if I'm really in the mood, I'll find a weekly radio mix from known quality DJs and hop over to Beatport if something moves me.

The use case for streaming is ... you don't want to choose what you listen to, pay monthly for stuff you'll never own and pay for a higher data plan? That sounds like radio with really expensive extra steps (I ceased listening to the radio after being thrust into the rave scene in the late '90s, and through interactions with others came to the conclusion that I was missing out on nothing.).

I'm sure "AI" can produce perfectly milquetoast music, but are you ever going to want to listen again? I have tracks I've listened to hundreds of times because they mean something to me emotionally (and often have a temporal element wherein I remember where I was living and what I was doing the first time I heard it) -- and most of my tracks do not have lyrics.

Layering nonsensical lyrics atop forgettable melodies sounds more like torture than a service providing any value.

6

Barack Obama, the former US president, sounded the alarm about Joe Biden’s ailing re-election bid almost a year before polling day, warning his former vice-president’s staff “your campaign is a mess”, a new book reveals.

The intervention came amid tensions between the Obama and Biden camps as they braced for a tough fight against Donald Trump. In the end, the ageing Biden withdrew from the race in favor of his vice-president, Kamala Harris, who was defeated by Trump.

Obama’s prescient anxiety is captured in the upcoming book 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America by journalists Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf, a copy of which was obtained by the Guardian.

The authors describe how Biden, trailing in opinion polls, kept hearing complaints from congressional Democrats that his campaign lacked a presence in their district. His staff in Wilmington, Delaware, were “despondent” and the president confided in one aide: “I have a leadership problem on the campaign.”

15

Reporting Highlights

Winning Record: In the Texas Capitol, where the vast majority of bills fail to pass, all but three of Elon Musk’s public priorities became law this legislative session.

Company Gains: Musk’s wins include laws that will benefit companies like SpaceX and Tesla.

Playing the Long Game: Musk has steadily invested his personal and professional capital in Texas over more than a decade. Most of his businesses are now headquartered here.

14

In an era when a cold beer and a hot dog define the quintessential baseball experience, it’s hard to imagine a time when the former could cause an all-out riot. But the annals of baseball history are not only filled with double plays and home runs; they also record moments when the game spiraled out of control. One such incident, the infamous “Ten Cent Beer Night,” is a tale of caution recounted with both horror and fascination by the channel Weird History, and detailed by Grace Johnson and Samuel Trunley in an article for the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.

The promotion by the Cleveland Indians (now Guardians) was deceptively simple: entice fans to a baseball game by offering Stroh’s beer cans for just 10 cents, significantly below the standard price of 65 cents. On June 4, 1974, this ploy worked a little too well. The Indians were in a slump, and a Tuesday night game would usually draw a crowd of 12,000 to 13,000 fans. That night, the lure of cheap beer attracted over 25,000 spectators, who consumed an estimated 60,000 cups of beer.

The stage was set for chaos even before the first pitch. Earlier that season, the Indians and the Texas Rangers had been involved in a heated brawl, leaving tensions high. Add to that the social conditions in Cleveland—economic downturn, factory closures, environmental crises—and you had the perfect storm for trouble.

UW college roommate just sent this my way after we were talking about nickel beer night a mile or two from the ASU campus.

35

I'd not yet seen Mamdani in a sit-down interview. He gives off strong Obama vibes.

48

Because if there's one person I want to start a third party, it's Elon Musk.

Elon Musk has vowed to unseat lawmakers who support Donald Trump’s sweeping budget bill, which he has criticized because it would increase the country’s deficit by $3.3tn.

“Every member of Congress who campaigned on reducing government spending and then immediately voted for the biggest debt increase in history should hang their head in shame! And they will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this Earth,” he wrote on his social media platform, X.

A few hours later he added that if “insane spending bill passes, the America Party will be formed the next day”.

With these threats, lobbed at lawmakers over social media, the tech billionaire has launched himself back into a rift with the US president he helped prop up. Since taking leave from his so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, Musk has sharply criticized Trump’s budget bill, which he has said will undermine his work at Doge by increasing spending.

43

Can't we just ship Cruz off to Cancun permanently at this point?

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has a plan for spectrum auctions that could take frequencies away from Wi-Fi and reallocate them for the exclusive use of wireless carriers. The plan would benefit AT&T, which is based in Cruz's home state, along with Verizon and T-Mobile.

Cruz's proposal revives a years-old controversy over whether the entire 6 GHz band should be devoted to Wi-Fi, which can use the large spectrum band for faster speeds than networks that rely solely on the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. Congress is on the verge of passing legislation that would require spectrum to be auctioned off for full-power, commercially licensed use, and the question is where that spectrum will come from.

When the House of Representatives passed its so-called "One Big Beautiful Bill," it excluded all of the frequencies between 5.925 and 7.125 gigahertz from the planned spectrum auctions. But Cruz's version of the budget reconciliation bill, which is moving quickly toward a final vote, removed the 6 GHz band's protection from spectrum auctions. The Cruz bill is also controversial because it would penalize states that regulate artificial intelligence.

Instead of excluding the 6 GHz band from auctions, Cruz's bill would instead exclude the 7.4–8.4 GHz band used by the military. Under conditions set by the bill, it could be hard for the Commerce Department and Federal Communications Commission to fulfill the Congressional mandate without taking some spectrum away from Wi-Fi.

31

A leading UN expert is calling for criminal penalties against those peddling disinformation about the climate crisis and a total ban on fossil fuel industry lobbying and advertising, as part of a radical shake-up to safeguard human rights and curtail planetary catastrophe.

Elisa Morgera, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and climate change who presents her damning new report to the general assembly in Geneva on Monday, argues that the US, UK, Canada, Australia and other wealthy fossil fuel nations are legally obliged under international law to fully phase out oil, gas and coal by 2030 – and compensate communities for harms caused.

Fracking, oil sands and gas flaring should be banned, as should fossil fuel exploration, subsidies, investments and false tech solutions that will lock in future generations to polluting and increasingly costly oil, gas and coal.

“Despite overwhelming evidence of the interlinked, intergenerational, severe and widespread human rights impacts of the fossil fuel life cycle … these countries have and are still accruing enormous profits from fossil fuels, and are still not taking decisive action,” said Morgera, professor of global environmental law at the University of Strathclyde.

Yes, it's a pipe dream to expect any of this, let alone all of it, but allowing corporations an exclusive microphone moves the needle in the wrong direction.

8

I consider no activity more luxurious than posting up at a bar solo with a good book. The creasing of a paperback in one hand, the weight of a wine glass in the other, the feeling of being alone in a crowd of people all make for a lovely evening. Or at least, I thought so, until recently, when two twentysomethings approached me during this ritual. “Are you reading alone?” one asked. “I could neverrrr,” the other said, and then uttered the universal mean girl slight: “I wish I had your confidence.”

Reading in public – not cool. Or at least “performative reading”, as it’s been dubbed on social media, is worthy of ridicule.

Not long ago, during the peak years of corny millennial humor, we celebrated @HotDudesReading, an Instagram account-turned-book that showed attractive men toting books on trains and park benches. Now, god forbid anyone (hot dudes included) enjoy a moment of escapism during the capitalist grind, or else they might end up in someone’s mocking post. To quote the caption of one popular meme depicting an anonymous train passenger reading a Brit lit classic: “Poser art himbo on the subway barely 10 pages into his performative copy of Frankenstein.”

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Powderhorn

joined 2 years ago