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

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

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • I personally reduced trade-show receiving times by 75% per item by designing a Microsoft Form for warehouse employees to upload photos of shipping labels, where 10 lines of JS pulled all the relevant info from the sheet being populated by the form. This replaced hand-writing complex triplicate forms, allowed us to send reports before close of business, and the client was thrilled.

    My boss absolutely hated the new workflow, as she couldn’t read code and therefore didn’t trust that my system worked, all client satisfaction to the contrary. Absolutely absurd.

    And this before LLMs were a thing. “AI” is not doing significant automation that hasn’t already been being done for decades.























  • I mean, most services have decided to price themselves out of the business. A great example is fast food. I remember the 99-cent Whopper and $1 McDoubles. At that price, it was acceptable food. It got the job done.

    That any chain claims to still have a “value menu” befuddles me. And don’t get me started on $3.79 fountain drinks.

    The problem isn’t RTO, it’s that there’s simply no value anymore. Time was, grabbing a burger on the way home was cheaper than making dinner. Those times have passed, and if you have to drive for an hour, why pay $7 for something you can make at home for $2?






  • I first ran into this story on /r/energy (yeah, I cheated on Beehaw because I had to see what was going on in /r/journalism with the Post news), and while most comments were useful, there was also a tinge of “but it’s China, so that’s bad.”

    Well, we were on our way to building up production and infrastructure here in the U.S., which I know because I fucking covered federal grants for green-energy projects and battery production until being laid off Jan. 20, 2025.

    I mean, this is like complaining that another kid has a chocolate bar on the playground and you don’t. China invests for the long term. The U.S. needs quarterly returns. We did a lot better at advancing the state of the art in everything when we had robust corporate R&D departments than we do going with share buybacks.

    We have lost our edge. Period, graf.