Who the fuck is Alice? (if you do not get this reference, Gompie is what you’re looking for.)

That’s all well and good, but it comes at the expense of the user experience.

The implication that rewriting GPT output makes one a professional writer … not sure we’re on the same page there. If you know how to use it for those results, great!

That’s because of bots like you. (I kid to make a point.)

This cannot be taught. I really wish it could, don’t get me wrong, but it just can’t.

We would not be here if this were possible. Something about rhyming, but I’m sorry, when Hitler is what you’re quoting, this becomes a different conversation.

I have read Mein Kampf. I’ve never read anything so poorly written, and I’ve dealt with a lot of junior reporters. Hitler should have stuck to speeches.

The problem here is we’re talking about Hitler. You generally don’t want to go there.

“But my phone said it would be OK” is a lousy epitaph!

This is the correct take. Hence my worry.

We got used to foreign call centers. They’re not incompetent, but the wording is always off, and I say this as someone whose English usage is not exclusively American. Took me weeks to drop the Aussie accent.

GIMP suffers the same problem. If you’re used to CS, anything else is going to be a horrific experience.

I’ve not tried Inkscape. Is it a bit more friendly?

As you’re dealing with digital print output, Scribus may be a good option. That’s layout (something of a mix of Illustrator and InDesign), not image editing, but cropping photos is easily done in a variety of FOSS without having to be subjected to the learning curve of GIMP (so long as your RIP can translate RGB into CMYK, which was a solved problem in the aughts). I’ve admittedly only played around with Scribus a bit, but from what I can tell from your use cases, you’re not looking for the bells and whistles like trapping one needs for offset.

1:42 into this, and “above the fold” – while defined correctly within the scope of newspaper layout – somehow ignores the ear ads that have been showing up for decades. Hell, I was involved in redesigns where the big question was “OK, but how do we fit more ads in there?”

This is in fact how one gets from a good design decision to offending readers with an unfulfilled promise, and this ain’t coding.

In the early aughts, there was a fad for taking up newshole just inside the paper to … tell readers what was in the paper. No one is buying something off the rack to open it to A2 to figure out what the refers are, but some metros were doing it, and midsize dailies tended to be lemmings 20 years ago.

I went several rounds with editors, folks from advertising and even higher-ups at The Washington Post (for unusual reasons) crafting what Page 2 would consist of. Upper half of the page was pretty much set in stone, with 4-col art that somehow needed to be demoted to A2 because we rarely went bigger than 3 cols out front (you try fitting nine stories plus at least three pieces of art, refers, index, blacklines [obit names], weather and anything else out front on a 44" web down from full broadsheet).

The bottom half was another story. Early on, it was decided that we’d have most of the bottom half of the page be a story we called (I shit you not) “A Closer Look” (I did it first, Seth). The idea was we had about 30" to play with and could run a wire story that was interesting but not A1 worthy … not exactly a feature, just news that wasn’t paper-of-record news. This concept would reappear out front downpage at a later paper, where it was called “Editor’s Choice.”

Once ads was done with that voodoo they do so well in terms of selling positions, we had on a good day 10" for A Closer Look, leading to it being internally referred to as A Cursory Glance. To the point that within two weeks, even the managing ed would ask in the budget meeting what we had for A Cursory Glance that evening as the guy who insisted on keeping the overline as “A Closer Look,” as that’s what he sold the publisher on.

I’m morbidly curious to continue watching and will from here, but Google didn’t invent shitty ad placement that insulted their audience anymoreso than Apple invented flat, rounded rectangles; print was there around 9/11 (and before, if one considers the precursor to “native advertising,” “sponsored content” – that editorial-looking stuff in the wrong typeface saying that, for example, you could only buy these exclusive silver coins during a half-hour window based on ZIP Code).

This is the logical continuation of unregulated late-stage capitalism. Pretending it’s about tech is certainly a framing choice, but it isn’t the right one.

Are those small oranges currently in season?

I don’t know that it’s influential so much as formulaic. It’s been working for them for decades. And without it, we’d never have gotten Schweddy Balls, and that’s a worse timeline.

For real fun, submit your resume (that shit’s already all over online; Google can have it) and listen to NPR hosts take 7 minutes to describe your career arc.

Only a true visionary could have foreseen YouTube in 1982!

Oh, the irony that enshittification has led to not trusting online tech firms to sell tech items online.

This. It’s not well-advertised in KDE – I accidentally discovered it through a key combo – but it was good enough (i.e., Win 11-level) in KDE 5 to make the switch painless on desktop. Where both have issues is apps insisting there are arbitrary dimensional minimums for functionality and refusing to adhere to positioning. This is most egregious in messaging programs.

Is there a particular reason that an 18650 or 21700 would suit your use case less?

Jelly doughnuts?

I had to find my own way. That’s of value.

If you had a supportive set of teachers, telling you that you can do anything, where’s the challenge? I went back to my high school and dutifully waited for the department chair with a rehearsed, belittling speech. When Columbia says you’re the best editorial writer in the country at the college level from literally the first one I wrote, teachers tend to not only back the fuck off but also to do this weird thing where they revise history and talk about the promise they saw in me.

I succeeded despite what I was told. It’s possible that I was more inclined to fucking do it right. When I was doing the Aaron Sorkin thing and moving through the newsroom and telling my reporters that their girlfriends are irrelevant on election night, and indeed told one to get the fuck out, I saw the power of my role. This was 24 years ago, and we didn’t have the phones we have today.

There are a lot of people who care deeply about others. Many of us go into journalism. We don’t want anyone else to go through what we have. It’s difficult, but one win is all one needs to feel like maybe we saved the next generation.

First off, 10 is an integer square root. Of 100.

I get where you’re coming from on most points and agree overall. However, you’re not taking into consideration what secondary schooling looks like before students arrive.

I was told by multiple English teachers (including the head of the department) that I was a math student and should never attempt to write because I saw through the regurgitation assignments, didn’t agree with teacher assessments of what Dickens “was trying to do” and had zero interest in confirming their biases.

I also didn’t pursue page design and getting onto my high school paper because the only F I got there was from the advisor who was exceptionally clear that I was not welcome to attempt committing journalism after mocking up yearbook pages and being very unhappy with the results in Aldus PageMaker; there was no support system in place. (Also, our yearbook was shit on every level.)

That said, I can still write a ternary line of code where it makes sense sted an if-else block.

College coursework on the whole is a waste of time reinventing wheels. I don’t need to spend a couple of weeks working up to “Hello, world!” in C and as such left CS as a major my first quarter at uni.

For the most part, I’ve been very lucky with teachers and professors. When I started taking college classes in high school and escaped the absurdity of recitation being “thinking for myself,” I learned to love writing because my prof, a Catholic deacon, wanted thesis defense, not what he’d said in lecture. If I was 180 off of his viewpoint but could cite sources, that was an A.

But teachers do this shit every day, year after year, and we blindly say they’re doing important work even as they discourage people from finding their path and voice, because god forbid a 16-year-old challenges someone in their 50s.