You’re not supposed to like Carol Sturka, so great - the writing worked.

I consider Pluribus to be one the really great shows in the last decade, and I also do not like Carol. Often, I’m annoyed by her actions, and once or twice I was really pissed at how she interacted with the Others, because IMHO, there was just so much unnecessary hostility, or she was just being a dense cunt.

Why would a movie, a TV show or a play require the audience to like the protagonist? Outside of these fictional depictions, I’d probably not be acquainted with someone like Carol - but here, I want to watch her. I want to see how she deals with the overall situation, how choices made by someone who is fundamentally different from me play out, how she grows as a character, how she overcomes her flaws, of which there are many, or how she might completely fail. There even is the option I eventually grow to like her. Wouldn’t that be great, an actual character arc?

Carol is an alcoholic who doubts her self-worth and has just lost her love, a death which she directly blames on what she considers to be the alien invaders she now has to interact with on a daily basis. She was also recently promoted to one of the greatest mass murderers in history and the isolation she suffered as consequence of her actions made her realize she really can’t exist in complete solitude, leading to a complex relationship with an entity she wants to hate. I think she deserves some jagged edges.

I really don’t think Pluribus is a comedy show.

Naturally, given its setting, it will be absurd at times, and how people deal with situations will be equally absurd - there can be comedy in those moments, but that’s about it.

It can’t be enabled by Microsoft since the tile is only a link opening the Copilot website using the TV’s browser - it’s a URL shorcut.

The stylophone is probably not a very good choice if you actually want to make a musical track, it’s quite a bit limited.

Also, please don’t assume that hardware is simpler than plugins. A lot of hardware has plenty of menu diving or arcane shortcuts due to the limited hardware controls, tiny (or absent) screens etc. You should be looking at “one knob per function” devices.

If you just want to explore a bit and make tracks, get a groovebox l. If you are looking to dive into synthesis and a bit of sound design, look at the Arturia Microfreak.

I agree, but I’d also like to mention that it’s absolutely possible to get great mileage out of a “toy” synth, provided you already know what you’re doing.

​‌‌‍​‍‌​‍​‌‌‍​‌‌‍​‍‌​‍‌​‌‌‍​‍

Nothing wrong with prostitutes. Often, plenty of stuff is wrong with prostitution, but let’s leave the prostitutes out of it.

There are people out there who have mastered the Theremin and can absolutely play on point.

Also, not everything even needs to be perfect. Unpredictability, glitchiness, noise and not being pitch-perfect can be an aesthetic goal in itself.

I’m currently compiling a list of open-source audio streaming solutions and I think Sonobus is not on there yet, so this is a pretty useful comment to me. Thanks.

Is this your fire pit? If so, does the crack bother you? Also, what’s the the benefit of lighting from above, and do you feel it burns equally quick / evenly?

Thanks. I was reading the first sentence and my reaction was a big WTF - who wouldn’t be happy that their kid doesn’t want to spent time in front of a TV?

The ket spell is a cantrip.

No, not at every level. But yes, fascism is also on the rise in Germany, same as pretty much everywhere else.

Sure, but you just said the same thing as I did. Do you think you can trust brands? Or that any company actually cares for their customers, as long as they can get away with it? Or at all, if the fines are smaller than the profits they gain from exploitation?

The solution is what you mentioned: independent testing (and systematic changes, but that is a whole other topic)

Sunscreen works, just not if you buy it from shady manufacturers that try to maximize their profits and care about nothing else.

He did it so he could do this:

If only. My wife’s phone is affected by a Google battery recall. You basically get $50 of shut-up money and get to live with a software update that nerfs your phone to an almost unusable state, or you can try and have a local, approved repair shop replace the faulty battery.

We’re living in a large city, there is exactly one approved store available. You can’t contact them by email, no one has picked up the phone in weeks. She is close taking the $50.

I happen to work in machine learning. You are most likely referring to the Stanford Gyrophone paper. Given that the sampling frequency of the gyroscope sensor on typical smartphones is extremely limited, you can only get very low frequency content (Nyquist).

It wouldn’t be possible for any human to process or understand the recorded signals, so the researchers trained a machine learning model on the recorded samples, with a very limited vocabulary consisting of only the digits from 0 to 9 and “oh”.

If the model was not trained on the particular speaker (requiring annotated training data for that particular speaker, which would be almost impossible to get in the assumed scenario), the recognition rate was 26%. For a vocabulary of 11 words.

It’s a nice proof of concept, and doubly so if tge CIA considers you a target, but otherwise it’s not happening.

So you are saying that apps on your phone can access your microphone without your permission? Wouldn’t you want to report that to Google or Apple or whoever made your phone’s OS?

Also, how did your individual phone become relevant for the assumption that this is a widespread phenomenon?

Finally, it’s great that you log your app activity, but you are aware that the scientist in the study I cited examined 17620 apps and found not a single instance of the app turning on audio and sending the data?

As I said, I’m sure companies will try. But what you’re looking at there is a pitch deck presented to someone so they’d cough up money. That does in no way imply that this has been widely deployed without requiring user consent and therefore there are apps out there en masse, listening to smartphone users in a form of clandestine operation. It’s basically the same thing as the patent for the old greentext Mountain Dew commercial meme at this point:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sony-patent-mcdonalds/

In fact, the article clearly states that the data Cox Media Group uses comes from apps where users have agreed to grant the application permission to use their voice data, and that Cox Media Group was subsequently removed from the Google Ads program (a precaution for Google to save face).