Powderhorn

To say Billie Jean Sweeney's had a storied career in journalism would be an understatement. Over more than two decades of experience in the field the longtime journalist, editor and press freedom advocate has worked at the Hartford Courant, the Associated Press, the Committee to Protect Journalists and, most recently, as a volunteer editor at Assigned Media.

She also worked at The New York Times for over a decade, [ed. note: I love that they decide to say "oh, yes, and also the NYT"] until her retirement in mid-2024, eventually becoming the day assignment editor at the international desk. There, as one of the Times’ few trans staffers, she witnessed the highest echelons of the paper's management increasingly push anti-trans bigotry and disinformation.

Trans communities have known, and sounded the alarm, about the NYT’s increasingly anti-trans stance for years. Sadly, too many cis people have ignored these warnings, especially as many of the details have often remained obscured behind the paper's extensive corporate hierarchy and established reputation.

I am currently going through a maelstrom. My ex is a viable option, as learned in mid-December. Not totally viable, but holy shit, are we still on the same page.

If only she didn't have kids ...

It's fucking hell to be next to the love of your life for two nights and have to leave. She told me she actually couldn't relax with me there, as she expected something to go wrong.

Which is not an expectation one holds when inviting a former partner to your apartment. She knew better.

I'm not going to once again revisit how things went, but they went well.

The problem is now disentanglement. Though I'm not sure I want to. She's absolutely terrible for me, but I can't see being happier with anyone else. Maybe that's bias, but ... she's exactly my brand of crazy while we're not trying to destroy each other.

I did not say this was a healthy relationship. It is not.

This said, I think there's a weird dichotomy in the world of relationships. Sure, something where you're just working together without issue sounds appealing.

But for some people, the fight is the point. And if you're mismatched on this front, problems will ensue.

She told me on the night we met that she'd most likely get bored of me within a week, as she needs a certain level of challenge.

That was 16 years ago.

I also don't care for a compliant bitch, as that's usually my role, so things moved along.

I just don't know what to make of it currently. We met up, we obviously still connect, and yet ... we can't make it work.

Yeah, we don't think much of those couple of floors in an office building.

Before she was hired by right wing billionaire Larry Ellison to turn CBS into a right wing propaganda and safe space, Bari Weiss tried her best to create a fake propaganda-fueled college in Austin.

If you recall, Weiss (alongside Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale) helped create the University of Austin in 2021 under the pretense they were creating an “anti-woke” (read: right wing) corrective to “campus leftism running amok” (read: a handful of young people annoyed by systemic racism, broad U.S. corruption, or Benjamin Netanyahu’s industrialized mass murder of toddlers).

The “university” pretended to champion free speech and the truth, but, much like the “renovation” of CBS, the pseudo-university is really part of a larger right wing initiative to reshape journalism and education in order to coddle right wing ideology, eradicate uncomfortable truths right wingers don’t like, and distort reality into a strange, delusional safe space (the exact thing the experiment professes to be combating).

This seemed a bit too quirky to bother posting, but there's an absolutely amazing reduction of what Wendy's does, and I had to share it.

Wendy's is a fast-food chain, predominantly found in the US, with a few scattered locations elsewhere around the world. It is notable for serving square hamburger patties in round buns, and a few examples of the company's goods can be glimpsed in the menu – the "Baconator" sounds particularly alluring.

And the Baconator is alluring ... at 2018 pricing.

And this is why, if you're going skiing in Switzerland, you stick to the German-speaking parts (or Romansch, but that's not really a well-known language).

It's a live blog, so excerpts would not be useful.

Computerworld columnist Steven Vaughan-Nichols is warning that foreign tech workers are avoiding attending US events and are not interested in jobs in the Land of the Fee.

Vaughan-Nichols said that after President Donald Trump returned to office in January, European conference attendees told him they would not take jobs or attend conferences in the United States.

The mood is not exactly mysterious when the US feels like it has “Keep Out!” and “No Trespassing!” signs nailed to the arrivals hall with bizarre rules about handing over all your data to check you have not made a social media post taking the Michael out of Trump.

He said that even top tech people who flew in with proper visas and paperwork were getting turned away at the border.

Trade show organisers are seeing the same pattern, and they are not pretending it is a blip. Getting speakers and attendees from outside the States to commit to US events is getting harder, and plenty refuse to try.

Quelle surprise.

Following two years of immense hype in 2023 and 2024, this year felt more like a settling-in period for the LLM-based token prediction industry. After more than two years of public fretting over AI models as future threats to human civilization or the seedlings of future gods, it’s starting to look like hype is giving way to pragmatism: Today’s AI can be very useful, but it’s also clearly imperfect and prone to mistakes.

That view isn’t universal, of course. There’s a lot of money (and rhetoric) betting on a stratospheric, world-rocking trajectory for AI. But the “when” keeps getting pushed back, and that’s because nearly everyone agrees that more significant technical breakthroughs are required. The original, lofty claims that we’re on the verge of artificial general intelligence (AGI) or superintelligence (ASI) have not disappeared. Still, there’s a growing awareness that such proclaimations are perhaps best viewed as venture capital marketing. And every commercial foundational model builder out there has to grapple with the reality that, if they’re going to make money now, they have to sell practical AI-powered solutions that perform as reliable tools.

This has made 2025 a year of wild juxtapositions. For example, in January, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, claimed that the company knew how to build AGI, but by November, he was publicly celebrating that GPT-5.1 finally learned to use em dashes correctly when instructed (but not always). Nvidia soared past a $5 trillion valuation, with Wall Street still projecting high price targets for that company’s stock while some banks warned of the potential for an AI bubble that might rival the 2000s dotcom crash.

Life has been, in my experience, a bunch of waiting followed by an explosion of things just short of what I can't handle.

For reasons that escape me, I'm listening to music again tonight.

Bringing me back to trance, which is pretty much notorious for going absolutely nowhere for four to five minutes before finally losing the plot for several bars ahead of getting to the point.

Look: I love the genre, but you really have to be invested to put up with it, as I've learned from friends. They want tracks done by the time the foreplay is just beginning; I'm rarely interested in something that doesn't run at least eight minutes.

But, you see, here is the parallel to my life, and why I think trance attached itself like a fungus: devoid of direction, followed by complete collapse before triumphantly being assertive in major (usually ... some trance is in minor past the breakdown, and that's certainly for a certain mood).

It's always wait, wait, wait, oh fuck, shit went off the rails, and oh, look, here's a solution. I don't know a better way to describe trance.

Maybe that's why it speaks to me so deeply. I don't need lyrics -- make me feel.

This is long, even for Ed. But you have to admire the legwork.

One time, a good friend of mine told me that the more I learned about finance, the more pissed off I’d get.

He was right.

There is an echoing melancholy to this era, as we watch the end of Silicon Valley’s hypergrowth era, the horrifying result of 15+ years of steering the tech industry away from solving actual problems in pursuit of eternal growth. Everything is more expensive, and every tech product has gotten worse, all so that every company can “do AI,” whatever the fuck that means.

We are watching one of the greatest wastes of money in history, all as people are told that there “just isn’t the money” to build things like housing, or provide Americans with universal healthcare, or better schools, or create the means for the average person to accumulate wealth. The money does exist, it just exists for those who want to gamble — private equity firms, “business development companies” that exist to give money to other companies, venture capitalists, and banks that are getting desperate and need an overnight shot of capital from the Federal Reserve’s Overnight Repurchase Facility or Discount Window, two worrying indicators of bank stress I’ll get into later.

When Toronto’s streetcars hit a rare open stretch of road, the metallic grind gives way to an airy electric hum, and for a fleeting moment, there is a feeling that one is hurtling along the knife’s edge of the future.

Seconds later, the illusion shatters: the car grinds to a halt, at a stop – or more often, in traffic. As the city slips past the stalled riders, some notice a runner zipping by.

Mac Bauer is fast, but the city’s trams, weighing more than 100,000lbs and travelling at a maximum speed of nearly 45mph, should be far faster than him.

And yet as of late December, in head-to-head races against streetcars, the 32-year-old remains undefeated in his quest to highlight how sluggish the trams, used by 230,000 people daily, truly are.

This was the year when public broadcasting was gutted and hyper-partisans prospered, when the First Amendment was exhaustively praised and opportunistically abandoned. It was the year when media capture came to America.

Before 2025, “media capture” was a term used exclusively overseas, describing the compromise of a free press to curry favor with the regime in power. Sometimes this happened through threats and intimidation, greased by partisan group think. Other times, the cudgel was money: wealthy administration allies would buy independent news organizations and neuter them to fall in line with the state-backed version of facts.

Hungary is often cited as a prime example of media capture — and so it seemed notable that Hungary’s elected autocrat Viktor Orban was repeatedly praised by Donald Trump and Republicans during the 2024 election. It was a clear sign of intent.

One year later, we’ve gotten used to Baghdad Bob-like lies from Trump administration flacks and absurd sycophancy from Cabinet secretaries. We expected spinelessness from the vast majority of congressional Republicans. But the lack of leadership inside news media when faced with an explicitly hostile executive branch has been surprising, largely driven by corporate owners who hid behind a fig leaf of “fiduciary responsibility” to shareholders and genuflected when threatened. They shoveled out millions to Trump for perceived slights (and there is always a perceived slight) that never would have held up in court.

I never knew what I was going to write from one week to the next. Once I was managing editor, I was like "fuck, fuck, fuck, I have to write a column" while herding cats.

You run a college newsroom sometime and tell me how it goes.

But back to the topic at hand, I had a very simple process that lasted my whole career. That title? It's why I'm writing right now.

So as not to bury the lede, the formula is this:

• Have a headline.
• Have a thesis.
• Know where the fuck I'm going.

I'm only posting this because I know where I'm going.

Being a columnist is one of the easiest jobs in the world. Even with a few interviews here and there, you get to spout off about current events. One of the nice things about student journalism is no one has already worked in, say, the White House press office.

So we just wing it. Not the East Wing at this point, I'd imagine.

There were several Tuesday evenings where I was concerned I'd not fill the left of A4. On Tuesday nights, as such, I became far more interested in what reporters were working on.

Here's the bar: "Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me!"

And then, usually about 25 minutes later, my column was headed to the copy desk, after which the edited copy was discarded, and I ran the original, because, oh, yes, I was also the designer.

Look ... I'm a copyeditor by trade over the decades, but in college, the desk may as well have been the error-introduction desk. The chiefs were all solid, but under them? Yeah, I'll keep my original copy, let you play editor and then run what I wrote. (This is, incidentally, a very bad idea, as everyone needs an editor.)

It has been the same every time since I settled into column writing in the late '90s: Once I have a hed, the whole thing flows out so fast I'm not even thinking about it. Maybe that's an odd writing process, but until I've seen the whole thing writ large, I can't even start. Once I know, then it's a simple matter of getting from Point A to Point B.

Unlike the rest of my life.