Powderhorn

Freelance journalist, burner, raver and vandweller.

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

Public Key

npub1whgaz8s5g7s476mfe63nrzv8qn94jlq802nnyvryp235tdcklx5qg3n0v6

NIP-05 Address

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs8t5w3rc2y0g2ldd5uage33xrsfj6e0srh4fejxpjq4g69kut0n2qprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntqyf8wumn8ghj7umpd36xjantvyhx7un8jlgftc

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

saltivka.org

nostr-pub.wellorder.net

Author Public Key

npub1whgaz8s5g7s476mfe63nrzv8qn94jlq802nnyvryp235tdcklx5qg3n0v6

Show more details

Last Notes

2026-03-21 17:51:56 UTC

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.
>
> “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.”
>
> 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 UTC

- reply

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 UTC

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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> "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 UTC

> IT consultant and services provider Accenture has agreed to buy Speedtest and Downdetector owner Ookla from Ziff Davis for $1.2 billion in cash.
>
> 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.
>
> Ookla’s platform also includes Ekahau, which offers tools for troubleshooting and designing wireless networks, and RootMetrics, which monitors mobile network performance.
>
> 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 UTC

> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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 UTC

> 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.”
>
> 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.
>
> “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?”
>
> 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.
>
> “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 UTC

- reply

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 UTC

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.
>
> 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 UTC

- reply

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

2026-01-19 20:13:30 UTC

- reply

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 UTC

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.
>
> 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.”
>
> 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 UTC

> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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 UTC

> 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 UTC

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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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 UTC

> 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 UTC

- reply

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 UTC

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 UTC

> 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.”
>
> 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.
>
> 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 UTC

> 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 UTC

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 UTC

- reply

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

2025-07-17 17:02:01 UTC

> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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 UTC

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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> That revelation is a shock to the public.
>
> 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 UTC

> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> "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 UTC

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

2025-02-09 21:18:00 UTC

- reply

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

2025-02-09 19:30:47 UTC

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 UTC

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.