Powderhorn
Freelance journalist and dirty hippie burner.
I read news so you don’t have to (but you still should).
- 73 Posts
- 63 Comments
Powderhorn@beehaw.orgOPto
Technology@beehaw.org•Mint Mobile is running a deal currently on a 50GB mobile/1TB gateway phone and internet plan: $45/month for 12 months ($540 upfront)English
31·4 days agoSome people are pretty much always on Wi-Fi and never stream anything on a phone. I struggle to use 500MB/month of cellular data, so the $15/month plan is overkill by far.
I’m not “obsessed” with Mint; it’s just been reliable service for a decade for the same price (data went from 2GB to 6GB in that time). The cheapest broadband around here is $100/month, so this would be less than half the price and includes phone service. With inflation being how it is, I figured I’d point out something that could save people money.
Powderhorn@beehaw.orgOPto
Technology@beehaw.org•Mint Mobile is running a deal currently on a 50GB mobile/1TB gateway phone and internet plan: $45/month for 12 months ($540 upfront)English
1·4 days agoIt’s a really long con, then.
Powderhorn@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•Outrage after Meta suspends No Kings Instagram account during protestsEnglish
6·7 days agoNo Kings is also on Bluesky, though they have fewer than 500 followers, somehow.
Powderhorn@beehaw.orgOPto
Technology@beehaw.org•Meta may use sweeping new commercial TOS to avoid millions in AI licensing feesEnglish
3·10 days agoMeta and Google seem totally fine with other people creating things while they get all the profit. “Reach” means very little sans traffic.
Powderhorn@beehaw.orgOPto
Technology@beehaw.org•Cyberattack destroys food at hundreds of French grocery storesEnglish
3·14 days agoFixed. The UPI story is better anyway.
Powderhorn@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•Six Flags has installed one of the largest solar carports in the US - 12.37-megawatt - the annual power use of both the amusement park and neighboring Hurricane Harbor Los AngelesEnglish
4·15 days agoOne of them died from the brain injury, so it counts.
Powderhorn@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•Six Flags has installed one of the largest solar carports in the US - 12.37-megawatt - the annual power use of both the amusement park and neighboring Hurricane Harbor Los AngelesEnglish
6·15 days agoAs of today, “the one that kills people” can soberly be rejoined with “which one?”
Powderhorn@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•Six Flags has installed one of the largest solar carports in the US - 12.37-megawatt - the annual power use of both the amusement park and neighboring Hurricane Harbor Los AngelesEnglish
14·15 days agoOn a cloud-free day with ideal sun angles, that’s a theoretical max of 60MWh/day. Just to be conservative, let’s go with half that on average over the year. That’s ~11TWh/year. Yeah, that should handle a couple of large amusement parks.
Powderhorn@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all — targets 100% parity in one month despite piracy claims and safety warningsEnglish
1·15 days agoAll the files I deal with are CS6 files. Can’t speak to CC compatibility, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they made intentional breaking changes to file formats. This is Adobe we’re talking about, after all. Any inconvenience they can profit from will be seized.
Powderhorn@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all — targets 100% parity in one month despite piracy claims and safety warningsEnglish
3·15 days agoI do so little image manipulation these days that it’s sort of a nonissue. I tried the GIMP years ago, and the interface was too much to bother trying to learn. PS works fine for my extant files.
Powderhorn@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all — targets 100% parity in one month despite piracy claims and safety warningsEnglish
7·15 days agoIf on Windows, add these two lines to the hosts file (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc):
127.0.0.1 practivate.adobe.com
127.0.0.1 activate.adobe.com
Powderhorn@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all — targets 100% parity in one month despite piracy claims and safety warningsEnglish
8·15 days agoI still have CS6 for those rare occasions that I need to open an InDesign file or a PSD. I was not going to get on board with a subscription, and CS6 still works fine.
Powderhorn@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•The death of web development educationEnglish
10·16 days agoA lot of excellent points here. Sadly, it all sounds a bit too familiar, especially:
I don’t enjoy my field any more because the field is gone. Assuming that there’s still something there is a mistake. That feeling you have isn’t a frustration with changes to your chosen field. It’s nostalgia for a field that disappeared overnight.
Powderhorn@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•Where are typefaces being designed?English
3·17 days agoInteresting data. I’m about 20 years removed from running in foundry circles (loosely … a few would show up to SND conferences; they were fun to talk with), and oddly, The Hague being a hotbed of typography training is news to me.
Powderhorn@beehaw.orgOPto
Technology@beehaw.org•People are asking ChatGPT to help them decide how to vote in the midtermsEnglish
4·21 days agoJust to have a bit of fun, I sent that link to ChatGPT to see what their take would be. After the requisite throat-clearing absolving itself while agreeing it’s an inappropriate use case, I got down to brass tacks:
Following election news is admittedly a pain in the ass, especially in an environment where empirical facts now often take a back seat to the letter after a candidate’s name, and shouting nonsense is often the core of a campaign. Take the Texas Senate race as an example: If you only watch Fox News, James Talarico is a radical godless communist whose main goal is to turn all kids trans before they even make it to high school, and the campaign ads in between will confirm the narrative, when the reality is Talarico is a Presbyterian seminary student who may know a bit more about Christianity than most voters who claim to be staunch Christians. Evangelicals hate when you point out the basis of the faith is loving each other.
And this, I shit you not, was the beginning of the response:
Following an election properly is a research problem with a continuously changing corpus. You have to keep updating the set of facts you’re working from, distinguish primary evidence from somebody’s characterization of it, and notice when something that seemed peripheral becomes important.
And the Talarico example is almost comically good for demonstrating why “relevance” isn’t a neutral filtering operation.
There is a real, documented religious story here. Talarico attends Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary and is training to become a Presbyterian minister; the Texas Tribune has reported extensively on how his theology informs his politics. His central theological argument really does involve the Christian obligation to love one’s neighbour and the idea that political action is, in part, about how we treat other people.
At the same time, he has said things such as “God is nonbinary” in a legislative speech, and Republican opponents have seized on that as evidence of his supposedly radical theology. The underlying statement exists; what it means theologically is a separate question.
Well, that’s an unexpected response, not least of which because I’ve been following the race pretty closely, and I’ve not seen this quote before, which I point out.
Talarico is a Presbyterian seminarian who has explicitly made Christianity central to his political identity; he completed a master’s degree in theological studies and has described his politics through Jesus’ commandments to love God and one’s neighbor.
And “God is nonbinary” is absolutely a real Talarico quotation. But it came from a 2021 Texas House speech about a bill concerning transgender athletes, where he was making a theological argument about biblical descriptions of God. He has subsequently explained that he was deliberately being provocative and meant that God cannot be confined to human categories.
So, I ask why the hell a quote from an unrelated situation from five years ago would come in response to a question about a candidate in 2026, and it admits there’s a fair amount of sources in current conservative circles presenting it as both current and relevant, so that’s what it went with.
Great when you already know enough to question; propaganda otherwise.
Powderhorn@beehaw.orgOPto
Technology@beehaw.org•World’s first enhanced geothermal power plant completed in just 23 monthsEnglish
13·23 days agoEGS is essentially using fracking techniques to make deep, hot rock more porous to turn water into steam more efficiently. In this case, they likely have former O&G people on staff for whom waiting 23 months from first drill to production is actually glacial.
Powderhorn@beehaw.orgOPto
Technology@beehaw.org•Reddit is putting more limits on Old.Reddit.comEnglish
9·26 days agoI mean, that jackass move is how I found Beehaw! But the reality is, many old. users didn’t use apps in the first place. So while that was a clusterfuck, it wasn’t surgically targeted at the very people who produce the content that makes Reddit valuable. Cutting off access to old. will be the final straw for me, and I’m going to guess I’m not alone. I don’t want some cartoonish, ad-laden approximation of Reddit.
Powderhorn@beehaw.orgto
Technology@beehaw.org•Trump Sparks Suspicious Gold Rush For .SI DomainsEnglish
3·27 days agoOnly a rube actually pays for pianos. Not paying is called being smart.
Powderhorn@beehaw.orgOPto
Technology@beehaw.org•Discord gives more advertisers more tools to target its usersEnglish
5·27 days agoWow. Pay to get more ads. That’s certainly a take. I guess people really like their stickers?
















My music collection is on my phone. If I’m not on Wi-Fi, I’m generally listening to music, so no data needed. Basically, it’s just notifications while I’m out and about. I certainly don’t care to watch videos on my phone! I can send that tab to my computer and watch when I get home.