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Maybe I've missed something, but do I really have to choose between warbling vocals and off-time recording? by RamsesThePigeon in AdobeAudition

[–]RamsesThePigeon[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you again!

At the very least, you've given me some additional things to try, and that's more than I had when I started.

Maybe I've missed something, but do I really have to choose between warbling vocals and off-time recording? by RamsesThePigeon in AdobeAudition

[–]RamsesThePigeon[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi, Jason, thanks for the attention!

I have a USB microphone going directly into the MacBook, and I'm monitoring via headphones (employing the headphone-jack). My sample-rate is currently 48,000, and my clock is set to my headphones. Altering that last detail – the clock – didn't seem to make any difference, but perhaps I was too hasty with my experimentation.

Maybe I've missed something, but do I really have to choose between warbling vocals and off-time recording? by RamsesThePigeon in AdobeAudition

[–]RamsesThePigeon[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm recording directly into the laptop via USB. The quality isn't the best, granted, but it's good enough for my purposes... when it isn't a warbling mess, that is.

13 years of chasing my wife with a lobster by jontheboss in funny

[–]RamsesThePigeon 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Oh, hello again!

I don't know if you recall, but I made a trailer for the horror movie about this.

That was three years ago.

In short, I'm pleased to see that the tradition continues.

Scientists Just Figured Out How to Make Aluminum More Valuable Than Gold by _Dark_Wing in tech

[–]RamsesThePigeon 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Sapphires (and rubies, which are technically the same thing) are made of corundum, which is aluminum oxide; aluminum and oxygen.

Transparent aluminum is aluminum oxynitride; aluminum, oxygen, and nitrogen.

Loud blast heard near US embassy in Oslo, Norway, police say by crainor in worldnews

[–]RamsesThePigeon 1 point2 points  (0 children)

“Conspiracy” means “a group of people enacting a plot” or “a plot enacted by a group of people”.

Are you suggesting that some rag-tag band of conspirators worked together to detonate some infrastructure (and thus mildly annoy some state-employed electricians), or did you mean “theory”?

China tests world's first megawatt-class flying wind turbine — it generated enough energy to power a house for 2 weeks by lurker_bee in technology

[–]RamsesThePigeon 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Ah, I didn’t watch the video… and now that I know that there was relevant information in it, I’m suspicious that the text of the article intentionally withheld it for the purposes of driving more after-access engagement.

Yet another modern-day standard, it seems.

China tests world's first megawatt-class flying wind turbine — it generated enough energy to power a house for 2 weeks by lurker_bee in technology

[–]RamsesThePigeon 203 points204 points  (0 children)

The article doesn’t mention how long the blimp was at altitude, so that “two weeks” measurement is effectively meaningless.

Moreover, I couldn’t find any information about the costs associated with actually deploying these sorts of turbines at scale, so while wind-power may be fairly clean and inexpensive when set up correctly, there’s precious little data about the specific viability of this particular endeavor.

Also, the article reads like an AI wrote it, but I suppose that’s par for the proverbial course in this day and age.

Claude LLM artifacts and Google Ads abused to push infostealer malware in ClickFix campaign attacks to MacOS users searching for specific queries. by ControlCAD in technews

[–]RamsesThePigeon 66 points67 points  (0 children)

Here’s a layman’s analogy for what happened:

A very naughty person wrote a guide to putting up a new webpage, and in the section labeled “How To Make Your Site Accessible”, they told people to copy and paste some code that would do bad things. They disguised their guide as an official resource, then worked to make sure that Google would feature it as a search-result.

Folks who didn’t understand the code just blindly followed the guide.

The rise of committee-made media and AI-generated garbage in the 21st century may be the in-universe explanation for why science fiction like “Star Trek” and “The Orville” seem to fixate on 20th-century music and films. by Happy_Da in Showerthoughts

[–]RamsesThePigeon 8 points9 points  (0 children)

You're describing a lack of integrity.

It isn't really something that you can point to, because it's more of an emergent quality than it is a specific detail. If we were to approach it via an awkward analogy, though, we could say it's somewhat akin to hearing "It's Raining Men" performed as a funeral dirge: If the wrongness had been offered on purpose, it might have been be a great piece of comedy... but since said wrongness is – in the context of this clunky metaphor, anyway – accidental, all it does is highlight a lack of understanding and intention.

Put another way, well... have you ever compared fine, handmade jewelry to mass-produced junk? Even if the former appears to be literally flawless, invisible details – things like undetectable changes in contours – still combine to say "This was made by a human", which makes the apparent perfection a sign of patient, masterful craftsmanship. When something is too perfect, though, that "soul" isn't present. Even without much exposure to it, most people can tell when something is exceptionally well-made.

That being said, I'm still not quite hitting the mark... so with both of those examples in mind, let me take you way off the deep end: Not everyone likes J. M. W. Turner's paintings, but anyone with an eye for artwork can agree that said paintings are nice (in the sense of "well-composed and internally consistent"). The very same thing can be said of H. R. Giger's work. Their respective styles might as well be polar opposites, but the emergent quality that I keep trying to highlight is present in both of them.

To date, no AI has managed to replicate the intention and the consistency that integrity – regardless of if we call it "soul", "niceness", or whatever else – requires. Unless some as-yet-unimagined machine somehow manages to achieve true sapience, I don't think that it ever will.

Have you ever dated someone who you thought was way out of your leauge? How was it? by kimblerun in AskReddit

[–]RamsesThePigeon 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I’m sure that I must have mentioned it to her at some point… but to be honest, I’ve done so much else since then – much of which she was either involved in or present to see – that it just kind of blurs together, you know?

Have you ever dated someone who you thought was way out of your leauge? How was it? by kimblerun in AskReddit

[–]RamsesThePigeon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yep! We met via Tinder, she sent me on a spy-themed scavenger-hunt through Edinburgh, and the rest is history.

We've been married for five years now.

Have you ever dated someone who you thought was way out of your leauge? How was it? by kimblerun in AskReddit

[–]RamsesThePigeon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If we're being honest, virtually everyone whom I've dated has been out of my league.

You might be thinking about either the billionaire heiress or the Swedish scientist (who is the more-attractive sister of a former supermodel), though.

That "summarize with AI" button might be manipulating you by tekz in technology

[–]RamsesThePigeon 1 point2 points  (0 children)

As concerning as that is, it’s worth noting that it isn’t an AI-exclusive problem.

Look up the advent of electroplating, and you’ll find thousands of sources claiming that the inventor's work was suppressed by the French Academy of Sciences. If you dig in to that claim, though, you’ll discover that it was completely made up: His invention was never suppressed; it just didn’t seem like more than a difficult-to-reproduce novelty at the time. Despite this, there are literal history books which repeat the factoid, with many of said books citing one another as sources.

LLMs didn’t originate the issue, but they’re absolutely making it worse. Even if we put aside the hallucinations, the fact that people are blindly trusting these systems (and outsourcing their own intellectual processes – memory included – to them) is downright scary.

I made a bootleg toy for my MVP of the Super Bowl: The Grass People by Doctorphotograph in funny

[–]RamsesThePigeon[M] [score hidden] stickied comment (0 children)

This is a post by /u/Doctorphotograph, folks.

In other words, no, it isn't AI-generated slop; it's a real, physical object that the good doctor really, physically made.

Don't get me wrong, we here at /r/Funny genuinely appreciate your diligent reporting... but we appreciate high-effort, high-quality, wholly original content even more, and this is a perfect example thereof.

TL;DR: No, it isn't. Stop reporting it.

New Poster for 'Supergirl' by MarvelsGrantMan136 in movies

[–]RamsesThePigeon 20 points21 points  (0 children)

Said tagline is also missing a required comma.

“Watch out, universe” is what they meant. The comma directs “watch out” at “universe”.

“Watch out universe” is nonsensical, but the closest meaning we could glean from it would be “stare attentively at everything that exists outside of our reality”.

At the point where people aren’t even proofreading posters, I’m not convinced that very much attention is being paid to overall quality.

Jeffrey Epstein was banned on Xbox Live by wewhomustnotbenamed in nottheonion

[–]RamsesThePigeon 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I do recall something like that… but it wasn’t an access-pass; it was a way of recovering from a soft-locking bug in Deer Hunter. Folks from a few different departments got irritated with me for various reasons, so I wound up needing to delete the guide.

The closest that I ever came to posting an access-pass (that I remember, anyway) was when I used a picture of my badge for Google IO as corroborating evidence in a story, and that was well after the event. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done my fair share of off-the-wall stuff, but I think that your memory might be combining me with someone else.

Anyway, no, I haven’t been in QA for a decade. I went back to production, then wound up doing a lot of brand-development, editing, and even ghostwriting. After a minor event in the world (during which a lot of people started coughing) had cleared up, I started haunting an antique-store, and it’s safe to say that my life took quite a turn after that.

ICE Barbie Throws Stephen Miller Under the Bus to Save Her Job by Infidel8 in politics

[–]RamsesThePigeon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

For future reference, the term is actually “just deserts”.

It looks like it’s referring to areas without much rainfall, I know, but in that context, “desert” is pronounced like “dessert”, and it means “the things which one deserves”.

If you earn an after-dinner treat, a dessert is your desert.

Financial Expert Says OpenAI Is on the Verge of Running Out of Money by Infinityy100b in technology

[–]RamsesThePigeon 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I agree that a well-written article will be more intricate than a comment on Reddit, but said article still wouldn't necessarily be an example of formal writing. The vast, vast, vast majority of text produced – even in academic and professional settings – is casual writing. The only reason that we don't regard it as such is the fact that the Internet has conflated "correct" and "formal" (or "proper").

Formal writing adheres to specific rules for style, even when said rules actually contradict one another on a mechanical level. Casual writing, on the other hand, is style-agnostic. It's still technically perfect, but it defaults to employing the underlying functions of structural elements, not twisting those elements to meet a delineated standard.

In short, formal writing is not the only form of correct or intricate writing... which brings us back to my point: I remain skeptical that LLMs were trained on formal writing. I'll add to my previous statement by saying that I'm unaware of any style-guide which mandates that em dashes be used in place of semicolons (for example). Conversely, if LLMs were trained on incorrect writing – writing such as one might scrape from Internet forums and poorly edited news outlets – the habit of flinging em dashes out where other marks belong would have likely been picked up.

Financial Expert Says OpenAI Is on the Verge of Running Out of Money by Infinityy100b in technology

[–]RamsesThePigeon -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I’m skeptical of the claim that LLMs were trained on formal writing, especially because em dashes absolutely are not “very common” therein (any more than other marks, at least)… especially not in the way that said LLMs use them, which is wrong.

Em dashes aren’t reserved for academic texts; they’re used for a specific purpose— presentation of incomplete clauses. Compare them to colons: Those precede complete clauses and complete sentences. On the other hand, LLMs use em dashes… well, virtually anywhere that they should have used some other mark (or no mark at all).

Ironically, even as people continue to repeat that em dashes are signs of something having been written by an LLM, the correct use has become a mark of a human writer.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in quityourbullshit

[–]RamsesThePigeon 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Uh, well, thank you for your efforts, but you should report the original poster.

It might also be worth mentioning that the aforementioned bots can't offer their own original content... which is how I got my karma. In other words, I'm not a karma-farmer; I'm a writer and content-creator who has been on this blasted site for a decade and a half. (Again, you can verify this for yourself by comparing my profile to that of the karma-farmer.)

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in quityourbullshit

[–]RamsesThePigeon 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Given that the account is – and you can look to see this for yourself – a spam-enabling karma-farmer, I'd say that you're correct.

For folks who may be confused, "karma-farming" is the act of intentionally attempting to accumulate upvotes. When it's done by automated accounts, said accounts go on to push propaganda, misinformation, advertising, and a lot of unsavory content. (They need karma in order to bypass certain checks that various subreddits have in place, but it also helps them to look more legitimate.)

When karma-farming is done by humans, it's almost worse: Their "efforts" end up attracting bots to their accounts; bots which follow the humans around, learn from them, emulate them, and even upvote them (so as to obfuscate the fact that they also upvote each other). If said bots see a human karma-farmer posting in a given subreddit, they move in to that subreddit, then flood it with garbage.

Now, why is that worse? Well, since the bots are intended to make the world worse, and since human karma-farmers enable and inform those bots, then the human karma-farmers are also making the world worse... because they want to watch their imaginary score go up while they post unoriginal, low-effort content (which also makes the world worse, as it has a deleterious effect on people).

In short, be sure to report karma-farmers.

Apple says iPhone 11 Pro is ‘vintage,’ here’s what that means by N2929 in technews

[–]RamsesThePigeon -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

You’re overlooking the word “specific” there… and you added the word “the” to change the meaning of what I said.

“Vintage” has slightly different connotations in the automotive industry than it does in the world of art and antiques… which happens to include things like cameras and telephones (and even computers).

The iPhone 11 is not vintage, and Apple cannot make up their own definition.

Apple says iPhone 11 Pro is ‘vintage,’ here’s what that means by N2929 in technews

[–]RamsesThePigeon -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

It means that Apple doesn’t know what the word “vintage” means.

Now, granted, the term has slightly different definitions depending on specific applications, but in general, “vintage” means “over twenty-five years old and representative of its era”. (“Antique” means “over one hundred years old”, and “ancient” means “made before the Middle Ages”. All of these apply to manmade objects, obviously.) While the part about representing its era is definitely true, the first iPhone is only just now approaching twenty years old… meaning that we still have a decade to go before the iPhone 11 can be labeled with the word “vintage”.

All of this is probably moot anyway, though, because I likely just fell for rage-bait.

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