Onihikage

[…] I’d like to be able to backup to my home server. The main thing would probably just be my photos […]

For the photos, since you have a home server, have you heard of Immich? For anything else, there was a time when I could have recommended syncthing-android, but development on that has been discontinued, though you can still try using it. Some privacy-conscious cloud services may allow you to sync app folders, backing up WhatsApp that way, but I have no experience with that.

is the 8a likely to drop much in price after that? I don’t know how quickly the prices drop but considering the 8a is currently £500 I can’t see it dropping to <£300

Instead of buying straight from Google, you can consider buying a refurbished 8a off ebay or something local - my last two Pixel purchases have been through that method. It tends to be substantially cheaper than buying new, even as little as 6 months after the product launch, and the 8a launched 9 months ago. Just be cautious of seller ratings, reputations, and consistency - prices are lower there because it’s more of a risk for the buyer.

https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e

Thanks for the link, that’s a lot more context than the usual reactionary “Andy Yen said one nice thing about a Republican therefore he’s fascist pro-Trump MAGA” takes I’ve been seeing. Not only does it more or less disprove that narrative, it makes me question how much of the hate against him lately is genuine and how much of it has been seeded and signal-boosted by nation-state actors who don’t want people to use encrypted communications.

Yen is clearly trying to be nonpartisan and praise what he sees as good for privacy while pointing out abuses of power, regardless of who has the power at the moment. He sees this as his way of adding weight to the scale in favor of better privacy and tearing down big tech. I know many in my country and on the web are hyper-polarized and addicted to anger, to the point that if someone says anything even slightly positive about their perceived political enemy, it’s seen as legitimizing and aligning with that enemy, but I don’t believe that’s a healthy or productive mindset to have. I believe that kind of divisive attitude is preventing us from uniting with those who should be agreeable to our cause, and that’s exactly what the oligarchs want. It’s making us weak.

I’ve been on the fence for a while since this whole thing started, because I do use a paid Proton email, and it sounded bad, but I kept getting this nagging feeling I wasn’t seeing the full picture. That’s gone now - Andy may be politically and/or socially inept, and he may have a different perspective on what it means to support privacy and democracy, but I think it’s clear his heart is in the right place, and the work he and Proton are continuing to do for tech privacy is helping to erode authoritarian power structures, including Trump’s.

I appreciate the links, but these are all about how to efficiently process an audio sample for a signal of choice.

Your stumbling block seemed to be that you didn’t understand how it was possible, so I was trying to explain that, but I may have done a poor job of emphasizing why the technique I described matters. When you said this in a previous comment:

I do think that they’re not just throwing away the other fish, but putting them into specific baskets.

That was a misunderstanding of how the technology works. With a keyword spotter (KWS), which all smartphone assistants use to detect their activation phrases, they they aren’t catching any “other fish” in the first place, so there’s nothing to put into “specific baskets”.

To borrow your analogy of catching fish, a full speech detection model is like casting a large net and dragging it behind a ship, catching absolutely everything and identifying all the fish/words so you can do things with them. Relative to a KWS, it’s very energy intensive and catches everything. One is not likely to spend that amount of energy just to throw back most of the fish. Smart TVs, cars, Alexa, they can all potentially use this method continuously because the energy usage from constantly listening with a full model is not an issue. For those devices, your concern that they might put everything other than the keyword into different baskets is perfectly valid.

A smartphone, to save battery, will be using a KWS, which is like baiting a trap with pheromones only released by a specific species of fish. When those fish happen to swim nearby, they smell the pheromones and go into the trap. You check the trap periodically, and when you find the fish in there, you pull them out with a very small net. You’ve expended far less effort to catch only the fish you care about without catching anything else.

To use yet another analogy, a KWS is like a tourist in a foreign country where they don’t know the local language and they’ve gotten separated from their guide. They try to ask locals for help but they can’t understand anything, until a local says the name of the tour group, which the tourist recognizes, and is able to follow that person back to their group. That’s exactly what a KWS system experiences, it hears complete nonsense and gibberish until the key phrase pops out of the noise, which they understand clearly.

This is what we mean when we say that yes, your phone is listening constantly for the keyword, but the part that’s listening cannot transcribe your conversations until you or someone says the keyword that wakes up the full assistant.

My question is, how often is audio sampled from the vicinity to allow such processing to happen.

Given the near-immediate response of “Hey Google”, I would guess once or twice a second.

Yes, KWS systems generally keep a rolling buffer of audio a few seconds long, and scan it a few times a second to see if it contains the key phrase.

How can you catch the right fish, unless you’re routinely casting your fishing net?

It’s a technique called Keyword Spotting (KWS). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword_spotting

This uses a tiny speech recognition model that’s trained on very specific words or phrases which are (usually) distinct from general conversation. The model being so small makes it extremely optimized even before any optimization steps like quantization, requiring very little computation to process the audio stream to detect whether the keyword has been spoken. Here’s a 2021 paper where a team of researchers optimized a KWS to use just 251uJ (0.00007 milliwatt-hours) per inference: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.04988

The small size of the KWS model, required for the low power consumption, means it alone can’t be used to listen in on conversations, it outright doesn’t understand anything other than what it’s been trained to identify. This is also why you usually can’t customize the keyword to just anything, but one of a limited set of words or phrases.

This all means that if you’re ever given an option for completely custom wake phrases, you can be reasonably sure that device is running full speech detection on everything it hears. This is where a smart TV or Amazon Alexa, which are plugged in, have a lot more freedom to listen as much as they want with as complex of a model as they want. High-quality speech-to-text apps like FUTO Voice Input run locally on just about any modern smartphone, so something like a Roku TV can definitely do it.

Intellectual property as a concept ultimately stifles progress every time it’s been tried. Information wants to be free, and we prosper far more when we accept that reality.

Everyone should read Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine. It’s on David’s website, Internet Archive, Anna’s Archive, and various bookstores. Feel free to buy or print some copies and distribute them to your favorite people, libraries, bookstores, and congress critters~

My favorite response to that currently is "Okay, send me your email password and show me all your credit cards. Oh, why not? You’ve done nothing wrong, so you have nothing to hide, right?

Audile is on F-droid, though it uses AudD for the actual music recognition backend. I’m not sure it’s possible to have a FOSS backend for this kind of service.

Also, the raw material is expected to be quite rare relatively soon.

To be fair, this wouldn’t be nearly as true if we had persisted with our original plan which was to reprocess the spent fuel, more than 90% of which is still usable material. Once we found a couple huge deposits of Uranium, it became much cheaper to simply mine more of it and dispose of the spent fuel, so the recycling plans were scrapped. Sure, we can technically still pull the spent fuel back out again and recycle it, but we spent many years building reactors without building an equal capacity of reprocessing facilities (which are almost as hard to build safely as reactors), so that ship has more or less sailed.

The dreaded onosecond happens to the best of us.

Try clicking the sign in button, then navigating back to the video without actually signing in. Seems to work every time I’ve tried it so far.

Yep. In fact, Amazon devices can connect to other Amazon devices over their Sidewalk meshnet and get the wifi password that way. I’m never getting anything from Amazon more complicated than a screwdriver.

Webtoon is still shitty in other ways. When they adapt a property, they want it their way, regardless of the author’s original vision. I’ve seen several stories that originated on Royal Road get Webtoon adaptations, and the adaptations always seem to change or leave out important parts of the story, making characters look stupid or just completely replacing entire sets of characters, forcing the story to diverge substantially when inevitably something they got rid of turns out to have been critically important to where the author was taking things. They turn great stories into middling slop every single time.

Tweet not found, not even when I change the URL to go directly to Twitter. Was it deleted?

I wouldn’t trust any phone with GrapheneOS preloaded unless it was directly sold by GrapheneOS themselves. Especially not from a site that phrases things in an almost uncanny way.

MPV is a video player.

It’s a little more tinkering than Windows, but definitely less than it’s ever been, and getting better all the time. I’ve found it to be basically exchanging one set of weird OS quirks for another. And hey, if you have any issues, the folks in the Universal Blue Discord are super friendly and helpful!

The biggest thing missing for me is good VR support at the OS level. Even with all the optimizations in Bazzite making regular games perform about equivalent to Windows, latency in VR is awful, and motion smoothing just plain isn’t supported in Linux yet, on any hardware. Those two pain points make the experience much worse than on Windows, I’d be motion sick in minutes if I tried to actually play something. Thankfully, normal gaming works just fine, and I don’t play VR as often as flat games, so I can just boot into Windows when I want to do that.

The second thing is the poor state of music players. I’m used to the very extensive feature set in MusicBee, and not a single native player hits all the boxes that MusicBee does. It can be run in Bottles, but not very well, and as a newbie, it took me a lot of extra tinkering to get things working even sort of right - file permissions, dotnet stuff, font libraries, etc. I still haven’t quite gotten file permissions working right, and font rendering is pretty bad (and custom font selection is broken entirely), but maybe I’ll figure some of that out eventually so I can stop booting into Windows whenever I want to make changes to my library.

Bazzite, from Universal Blue, based on Fedora Atomic Desktops. Immutable-style distro which means critical OS files and folders are read-only and all system apps (the ones preinstalled) are updated together as a full image rather than piecemeal. Anything not preinstalled can be installed in a distrobox or as a flatpak/appimage/aur, or as a last resort, layered with rpm-ostree. Extremely user-friendly, everything a gamer needs is either installed and preconfigured out of the box or available as a flatpak. Bazzite’s the first time I had a good enough experience on Linux that I made it my daily driver; now Windows is the secondary OS I only go to when I really need that one thing that only works there.

I’d get premium if they weren’t so insistent on bundling in bullshit I don’t want or care about to justify the high price. I put up with enough of that from cable TV. I’ll pay when there’s an ad-free tier that doesn’t do anything else and is a reasonable price for “the service that’s free with ads, but without ads”. If there was a per-device premium tier that I could throw on my Roku, and all my family members could have premium when they stream from there, I’d pay for that. I’d pay for family tier if it didn’t have the dumb single-household rule which screws over truckers and those who travel for a living.

Google has options they could take to convince consumers to pay to not see ads, but there’s no creativity left there, no effort to court the market or adapt the service and prices to what potential customers need and are willing to pay. And it’s because they believe they are the market, and want to keep it that way.

It’s not gone, they didn’t even take down all of the Nintendo games, they took down specific games (reddit link), albeit a lot of them, but there’s still lots of stuff left.