You should consider talking to a therapist about why you don’t consider non-romantic relationships to be valuable, because your take is not only not universal, but also indicative that you have some shit you need to work through.

When I started playing the game, one of the rules was that if someone else announced they’d lost the game, I didn’t lose. It was only if I thought about it when someone hadn’t lost (within the past 20 minutes) that I would lose. And since you have to announce you’ve lost when you think about it, just whispering “the game” or something similar, when your intent is clearly to get someone to lose the game, is also functionally an announcement of your loss.

You might say that I’m not playing right, but I’d argue that my version of the game is more mature and functions like a pink elephant challenge (“Don’t think about pink elephants. What are you thinking about?”), giving the game more nuance and depth. Not much, but still. And besides, I’d say that your version of the game is supposed to have that rule, too, and whoever told you about it just forgot to mention it. Maybe because they want you to lose more frequently. Maybe they just didn’t know.

You’re welcome to play my version of the game.

Sorry for your loss, but I haven’t lost the game for years.

Only if you have a sign posted, reading “All ye who enter here forfeit thine selves – body, mind, spirit, and soul – to the owner of these lands, until such time as ye leave or are slain,” with the sign carved from stone by hand, with a willowbark dagger, blessed under the light of a blood moon, approximately eight feet tall, flanked by two shrubberies – that look nice and are not too expensive – and visible to all who enter, lit eternal by the captured light of the new moon.

Please, enlighten me - how do you propose we use the term “AI” in a way that’s more useful than a definition that includes machine learning, large language models, and computer vision?

I doubt I’ll agree with your definition, but I’m curious to see how you would exclude machine learning, computer vision, LLMs, etc., from your definition. My assumption is that your definition is going to be either a derivative of “AI is anything computers can’t do yet” or based on pop culture / sci fi, but maybe you’ll surprise me.

To be clear, I’m a software engineer; I’m not speaking in sales speak. I’ve derived my understanding of the term from a combination of its historical context and how it’s used in both professional and academic contexts, not from marketing propaganda or from sci fi and pop culture. I’m certainly aware of the hype machine that’s ongoing, but there are also tons of fascinating advancements happening on a regular basis, and the term “AI” is at minimum a useful term to refer to technologies that leverage similar techniques.

it’s not ‘ai’, it’s just a poorly trained voice recognition system that’s trying to decipher any random person’s voice.

I’m baffled that you can say “It’s not ‘AI,’ it’s a machine learning powered speech to text system” with a straight face.

Even if we were to agree that ML-powered speech to text isn’t AI (and I don’t agree to that premise, for the record), there’s still the matter of processing the transcription to transform it into something that can be understood by the point of sale system - aka natural language processing. And while that NLP could be implemented without use of an LLM, given LLM’s current level of hype and the ease with which they can be shoved into any given product, I wouldn’t bet on Taco Bell execs approving such an approach, much less asking for it.

I could’ve sworn I’d used Foobar2000 on Linux years ago and now I feel like I’m experiencing a mini Mandela effect

Fascinating, thanks for sharing. I didn’t check for every one of those but surprisingly the ones I did check, VLC doesn’t support.

Apparently I should have asked if you’d tried foobar2000, because it has support for all of those, or Audio Overload, which has support for many of them.

PSF

Interesting, it appears Winamp supported PSF via a plugin that basically handled hardware emulation. I found a still open ticket from 2015 for adding support to VLC, though.

According to https://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=PSF, foobar2000, which has a Linux client, has support. I’ve used foobar2000 before and it’s decent.

Audio Overload is also listed, with a parenthetical - though it’s possible that support has improved since the article was last updated (in 2019). I’ve never used it myself, though.

NSF

Per https://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=NSF the same players are available, this time without a warning on Audio Overload (notably this article is from 2022). Nosefart is also listed as supporting it and having Linux support.

2SF

https://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=2SF only lists foobar2000 and Winamp

Various PCM Streams

That’s a lot - and I suspect some of those are supported by VLC based off the codecs listed - but according to https://github.com/vgmstream/vgmstream, foobar2000 has a plugin for vgmstream.

VGM

https://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=VGM lists foobar2000 and Audio Overload, as well as VGMPlay, which I’ve never heard of before.

GBS

https://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=GBS again lists foobar2000 and Audio Overload

SPC

https://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=SPC - same deal.

What kinds of formats does Winamp support that VLC doesn’t support?

Case in point, I have no clue what you wrote, but the intent is clear:

What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo.

Not sure why you’ve gotten downvoted for that, as it’s part of the referenced rule and also true. Unless you’re someone who sees a word in a foreign language and has their brain turn off in response, this should be intelligible to someone who understands English and who doesn’t understand Spanish.

It helps that more than half the words are in English / are used by English speakers: Steam, Proton, Grand Theft Auto 5, Gabe Newell, Linux Mint, Microsoft, Windows, RAM, 100 FPS, 75 FPS

And the important Spanish words are easy to understand:

“Gracias” is pretty commonly understood even by bon-Spanish speakers.

“Uso Software Libre” is pretty obvious, since Libre is a term used in FOSS communities. “Uso” is the most complicated part and I suspect if I didn’t know Spanish I’d just think it meant “Use,” and “Use Libre Software!” is close enough to the intended meaning

Unless Telemetria doesn’t mean Telemetry, it’s pretty obvious.

If I blanked out all the other Spanish words I think the effect would be pretty much the same.

I’m a millennial and I did it more than once on hardware older than I was, but because I wanted to, not because there were no other options.

Thank you! That gives me a starting point that should be easy to look up!

Why is 255 off limits? What is 127.0.0.0 used for?

To clarify, I meant that specific address - if the range starts at 127.0.0.1 for local, then surely 127.0.0.0 does something (or is reserved to sometimes do something, even if it never actually does in practice), too.

Advanced setup would include a reverse proxy to forward the requests from the applications port to the internet

I use Traefik as my reverse proxy, but I have everything on subdomains for simplicity’s sake (no path mapping except when necessary, which it generally isn’t). I know 127.0.0.53 has special meaning when it comes to how the machine directs particular requests, but I never thought to look into whether Traefik or any other reverse proxy supported routing rules based on the IP address. But unless there’s some way to specify that IP and the IP of the machine, it would be limited to same device communications. Makes me wonder if that’s used for any container system (vs the use of the 10, 172.16-31, and 192.168 blocks that I’ve seen used by Docker).

Well this is another advanced setup but if you wanted to segregate two application on different subnets you can. I’m not sure if there is a security benefit by adding the extra hop

Is there an extra hop when you’re still on the same machine? Like an extra resolution step?

I still don’t understand why .255 specifically is prohibited. 8 bits can go up to 255, so it seems weird to prohibit one specific value. I’ve seen router subnet configurations that explicitly cap the top of the range at .254, though - I feel like I’ve also seen some that capped at .255 but I don’t have that hardware available to check. So my assumption is that it’s implementation specific, but I can’t think of an implementation that would need to reserve all the .255 values. If it was just the last one, that would make sense - e.g., as a convention for where the DHCP server lives on each network.

Why is 255 off limits? What is 127.0.0.0 used for?

The American Dream is capitalist propaganda, not anticapitalist.

We’re in c/showerthoughts. “What if my grandma was a bike?” would fit right in

It was already known before the whistleblower that:

1. Siri inputs (all STT at that time, really) were processed off device
2. Siri had false activations

The “sinister” thing that we learned was that Apple was reviewing those activations to see if they were false, with the stated intent (as confirmed by the whistleblower) of using them to reduce false activations.

There are also black box methods to verify that data isn’t being sent and that particular hardware (like the microphone) isn’t being used, and there are people who look for vulnerabilities as a hobby. If the microphones on the most/second most popular phone brand (iPhone, Samsung) were secretly recording all the time, evidence of that would be easy to find and would be a huge scoop - why haven’t we heard about it yet?

Snowden and Wikileaks dumped a huge amount of info about governments spying, but nothing in there involved always on microphones in our cell phones.

To be fair, an individual phone is a single compromise away from actually listening to you, so it still makes sense to avoid having sensitive conversations within earshot of a wirelessly connected microphone. But generally that’s not the concern most people should have.

Advertising tracking is much more sinister and complicated and harder to wrap your head around than “my phone is listening to me” and as a result makes for a much less glamorous story, but there are dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of stories out there about how invasive advertising companies’ methods are, about how they know too much, etc… Think about what LLMs do with text. The level of prediction that they can do. That’s what ML algorithms can do with your behavior.

If you’re misattributing what advertisers know about you to the phone listening and reporting back, then you’re not paying attention to what they’re actually doing.

So yes - be vigilant. Just be vigilant about the right thing.

proven by a whistleblower from apple

Assuming you have an iPhone. And even then, the whistleblower you’re referencing was part of a team who reviewed utterances by users with the “Hey Siri” wake word feature enabled. If you had Siri disabled entirely or had the wake word feature disabled, you weren’t impacted at all.

This may have been limited to impacting only users who also had some option like “Improve Siri and Dictation” enabled, but it’s not clear. Today, the Privacy Policy explicitly says that Apple can have employees review your interactions with Siri and Dictation (my understanding is the reason for the settlement is that they were not explicit that human review was occurring). I strongly recommend disabling that setting, particularly if you have a wake word enabled.

If you have wake words enabled on your phone or device, your phone has to listen to be able to react to them. At that point, of course the phone is listening. Whether it’s sending the info back somewhere is a different story, and there isn’t any evidence that I’m aware of that any major phone company does this.

Sure - Wikipedia says it better than I could hope to:

As English-linguist Larry Andrews describes it, descriptive grammar is the linguistic approach which studies what a language is like, as opposed to prescriptive, which declares what a language should be like.[11]: 25  In other words, descriptive grammarians focus analysis on how all kinds of people in all sorts of environments, usually in more casual, everyday settings, communicate, whereas prescriptive grammarians focus on the grammatical rules and structures predetermined by linguistic registers and figures of power. An example that Andrews uses in his book is fewer than vs less than.[11]: 26  A descriptive grammarian would state that both statements are equally valid, as long as the meaning behind the statement can be understood. A prescriptive grammarian would analyze the rules and conventions behind both statements to determine which statement is correct or otherwise preferable. Andrews also believes that, although most linguists would be descriptive grammarians, most public school teachers tend to be prescriptive.[11]: 26

You might be interested in reading up on the debate of “Prescriptive vs Descriptive” approaches in a linguistics context.