Ah, yes, just over five attempts for every human alive. I assume they took the reply addresses at face value and have forwarded 45 billion cease & desist letters to Microsoft’s Redmond office?

Could have been MMANAA 😔

Yeah, I’m subscribed to notifications for the PR and have been holding out waiting for it to get merged because it’s easier to maintain a clean git history that way. If the PR’s still not merged by this evening I’ll just bite the bullet and do it the (slightly) harder way for the sake of staying current with the new seasonals

No, I am not contradicting myself. Let me say it again with the ambiguity removed:

1. Cox Media isn’t an advertiser, they sell a dressed-up analytics service. Think spreadsheets (that’s literally the service they’re selling in this copy, a monthly report spreadsheet).
2. The “technology partner” selling this data to Cox is accessing it by bypassing the normal and correct operation of the device using malware.
3. What does not “exist” is a shadowy cabal of smartphone manufacturers scheming to hide listening devices in the pockets of their consumers.

I’m sure you still believe this is a load of apologia and frankly you can think what you want, but you should probably know that I’d already read about the Cox story when it first broke and specifically chose my words with that knowledge in mind.

Read the document:

The growing ability to access microphone data on devices like smartphones and tablets enables our technology partner to aggregate and analyze voice data during pre-purchase conversations.

Key word is “technology partner”. They’re buying voice transcripts ripped from someone else’s spyware and selling the service of scraping it for keywords and maybe somehow tying that back to an individual by cross-referencing the hit against data from traditional above-board ad platforms.

Google isn’t buying transcripts, Facebook isn’t buying transcripts. It’s Cox Media buying shady recordings stolen from spyware-compromised devices and then trying to whitewash it into something sellable with their (unverifiable) cross-analytics middleware.

we still have people that do not believe that the phones are always listening when seemingly any website or app you use gives you advertisements about what you were just talking about in the other room with the phone locked.

Oh come on. Don’t bring this into conspiracy territory. Yes, eavesdropping does happen, but it’s not something an uncompromised Android phone will do when locked. Even when it does happen in the case of spyware, the people doing it aren’t selling your transcriptions to advertisers.

People should still opt out of as many of GAPS’s spyware-like features as possible, as you suggest, but not because it’s a special anti-listening-device warding spell.

It could probably be argued that the board didn’t do what was best for the investors, which is what they exist to do.

Incorrect. OpenAI LLC (the traded company) does not have a board of directors. The board of directors actually belong to the parent company, simply “OpenAI”, which is a nonprofit organization – the only thing that they’re beholden to is the OpenAI company charter.

Here’s a simplified breakdown:

Board of Directors =[controls]=> OpenAI (non-profit) =[controls]=> OpenAI LLC =[employs]=> OpenAI CEO

OpenAI LLC is obligated to act in the best financial interest of their shareholders, but OpenAI LLC does not actually have control over who sits in the CEO chair. That power goes to the non-profit “OpenAI” parent company – a company beholden to their board, not shareholders.

I present for your consideration the case of September 3rd, 1967: the day Sweden switched from driving on the left side of the road to the right side. One would expect that the incredibly distracting process of overcoming a lifetime of learned habit would be a recipe for chaos, but in fact there were significantly fewer accidents than average on the day of the change ^[1].

As it turns out, the danger of complacency outweighs the danger of distraction. It does not particularly matter where one directs their focus if they are not driving mindfully. In a more natural environment, we’re good enough at identifying dangerous situations to pay attention when it matters, but roads are not a natural environment. For every alert person briefly annoyed by an audio notification there will be at least as many pedal-pushers too relaxed to even form coherent memories, let alone engage in defensive driving.^[2]

Not a dumb question! This is what I’ll have to do if no better solution comes around.

The reason I haven’t already done that is that the underlying Holo code is not designed for multi-user. I won’t be able to just swap out the credentials because doing so will cause it to blow up when it fails to edit old posts owned by the old bot account. In other words: it’s going to be a big hassle to move over and even in the best case scenario things will break and generally look ugly.

This is actually a big fear of mine. The content on !anime@lemmy.ml is nearly identical to the content found on ani.social. If you compare the new queues you can see for yourself just how much crosspost activity there is.

If it’s a content problem, then we have a content problem too. It’s an uncomfortable position to be in with this much uncertainty

I used my WF-1000XM4s daily for 2 years until the batteries gave out. They were already out of warranty, but Sony replaced them anyway. I still use mine daily and am quite happy with the performance. They’re great IEMs if you’re fine with the batteries croaking after a couple of years – not a big deal if you’re comfortable installing aftermarket cells.

It’s not ideal, but I’ve had worse exeriences with other IEMs. My worst experience was actually with the GalaxyBuds, which unfortunately I developed an allergy to (Don’t roll your eyes – I’m not the only one! It was an issue with the rubberized coating in a few specific batches). Those assholes accepted my in-warranty RMA, but then never sent anything back. I literally only wanted a replacement, not even money back! Support completely stonewalled me even though I had the UPS receipt from their return slip 😤

Actually, forget ANC. Get some of that Automatic Brainwave Cancellation

Whoops! I went back to double-check after seeing what you said and found that the provision was actually dropped from the bill in the time between when it was passed by the Senate and signed by the governor.

The way it got quietly dropped like that kept it from being well publicized, but the long and short of it is that I misremembered and then failed to spot this detail while fact-checking myself. I’m sorry for spreading misinformation – I’ve updated the original post

It’s not a precedent, it’s a playbook and telecos have been following it for decades. If you have one of the big telecoms in your city, they will sue to block municipal broadband. These suits win more often than not and even when they lose the rollout is usually delayed long enough as a result that they break even on legal fees.

This is actually Cleveland’s second attempt to expand municipal broadband after their prior effort in 2021 was thwarted when the Ohio state government banned Cleveland and other cities from offering a public option – obviously at the behest of lobbying from ISP special interests. Correction: the broadband provision was struck from the budget bill before it was signed by the governor. It appears that the 2021 effort to build out municipal fiber failed for other unrelated reasons.

This new initiative is actually a bundle of public-private partnerships as opposed to true state-owned infrastructure:

SiFi and CircleC, not the city, will own the finished networks. With little to no taxpayer money being spent, it’s a tradeoff city leaders say they felt made sense.

“They already have a right to use our right of way—we’re not providing any special access to it, the agreement is just us all getting organized for how permitting for such a large scale project will go,” Davis said of the SiFi partnership. “Since the city’s [not] paying for it or putting anything in, it’s not getting an equity stake.”

Similarly, Davis noted that DigitalC will also maintain ownership of their finished wireless network.

“We at the City are not contracting for infrastructure,” Davis noted. “We’re contracting for DigitalC to take 23,500 households–about 50,000 residents–that don’t subscribe to at-home broadband today and get them to become at-home internet subscribers, and provide digital adoption services and training to 50,000 residents. Basically, we’re paying to halve our present unconnected rate of 32 percent.”

NOTE: The original article has a typo where they misquote Davis as saying “Since the city’s paying for it or putting anything in, it’s not getting an equity stake.” This has been corrected in my quoting of the article

At least two whole Denuvos

It depends on whether the plan is prepaid or postpaid. Postpaid plans are the ones which establish a line of credit since the phone company is tracking your tab and asking you to pay it down at the end of each month.

With that being said, phone companies want as many people as possible on prepaid plans because why wouldn’t they want to borrow your money every month? If you want postpaid you need to specifically ask for it and also pass a credit check.

Just FYI: the western conception of Chinese “Social Credit” is not particularly accurate. It technically exists, but mostly only on paper as a botched policy initiative. I’d refer you to this PolyMatter video (and their sources list) if you’re interested in learning more.

I was not ready for this held shot after the flashback/dream scene. I hate that I know exactly how it feels

And now for two interesting themes I’m picking up on:

• Clear blue skies seem to come up frequently during moments of danger, both in this episode and the last
• Blue hair guy likes acting like he’s above the drama and makes that quite literal by perching above everyone else in almost every single one of his shots