• 4 Posts
  • 312 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Some consider it a hassle, others of us obsessively enjoy manually downloading and sorting our files into our folder structure.

    I’ve got a collection going back to a 128k MP3 from a Napster download in 2000. Hundreds of gigabytes of lossless music.

    Bandcamp is great, but I use Redacted for those I can’t easily find.









  • How many times a day are you shown ads that are completely irrelevant?

    Me personally, I’ve never once experienced the “they’re listening to my mic for ads” phenomenon. I think someone would notice by now either by seeing increased upload usage or a hot device- at least with current technology. On device machine learning will make this much easier to analyze without having to upload audio.

    Not that I don’t think it’s entirely possible to listen right now, I just don’t think it’s occurring to unimportant people. I’m not particularly important or rich nor is anyone I know. It seems much more plausible to me that we’re just seeing conventional web tracking get a lot better + a healthy dose of confirmation bias.







  • I really doubt they’re listening to your microphone. Constantly uploading your audio would be noticeable in bandwidth and constantly analyzing audio on device would kill your battery - at least currently.

    What this demonstrates is how good tracking by other methods is getting. You don’t need to listen to someone’s microphone when you know what they and their friends/coworkers are looking up online and likely bringing up in conversation. It’s trivial to fingerprint someone and track near everything they’re looking up online, and even if you’re privacy conscious, many of those you associate with share their contact list with every app that asks for it. This makes suggesting things your friends are looking up pretty easy. Add a bit of confirmation bias to the mix and you’ve got this “listening to the microphone” theory, because you’re not counting the number of times an ad isn’t something you’ve been recently discussing.






  • I had a really pleasant drive through Croatia, it didn’t seem too crazy to me. This was more than a few years ago though. Drove from Plitvice Lakes park to Split by way of some rural as fuck road through the woods, eventually getting on some highway, A1 I believe. My expectations may have been altered by the years of driving in Italy.

    Going through the tunnel on A1 was a cool experience. One side was green, temperate, and humid, then we cut through a tunnel, the other side was brown, dry, and hot. One minute of driving completely changed the microclimate. This was northeast of Zadar.

    Edit: unrelated to driving but my girlfriend and I at the time went driving downstream from Plitvice lakes to find a place to swim. Ended up pulling off the side of the road near a river and walking upstream until we found a spot. We didn’t realize it was behind somebodies house but they came out and let us swim anyways. A super cool experience. We literally wandered into their natural river pool and they didn’t care.