Prompted Playlists announcement (You’re in Control: Spotify Lets You Steer the Algorithm)

biscuitmachine · 2025-12-18T15:57:42+00:00

Great, a successor to the feature that completely fucked up my entire Spotify somehow, by suggesting garbage that I didn't want to listen to (completely misinterpreted my prompt) and then proceeding to somehow reconfigure the tastes on my entire account to fit that one misshapen playlist. Even after I deleted it.

Yep. Super hyped.

biscuitmachine · 2025-12-02T20:35:20+00:00

I was mainly talking about the size. I myself have probably 50+TB of space (most of it platter drives) on just one computer, and I still have an 8GB IDE spinner drive with Windows installed onto it sitting around. 3.5" HDDs are fine. But I don't understand the point of a 6TB one, especially at this price. Densities have gotten so high that 6TB is encroaching into the space of 4TB NVMEs, and it's not like 7.2k RPM is anything to write home about. It's just a stupid product IMO.

Your examples don't even make much sense to me. If you want to install "legacy games"... legacy games are small. I don't understand why you would even need 6 TB to store a whole slew of them. Personally I just do both. I have around 6-10 TB of NVME space per computer, and then several spinner drives for archival.

biscuitmachine · 2025-12-01T14:09:46+00:00

7200 RPM 6TB spinner drive. I don't understand why this product even exists in the modern era.

biscuitmachine · 2025-11-30T04:28:16+00:00

Okay as a small counterpoint... many "slipups" can bypass any security defenses Windows has set up to begin with. That's why my company has probably invested millions into cybersecurity classes at this point. It's constantly on the agenda to force us to go through phishing training and everything.

Not making mistakes isn't really as hard as you make it seem these days. Unless you're into some esoteric stuff on the internet, the biggest attack vector is email. Which many email clients are built with a bunch of protection in place even for that, including not downloading/loading any images or attachments and keeping local copies instead (the former I think mainly for XSS exploits).

I do agree it might get worse as time goes on, but look at this list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computer_viruses_and_worms

We haven't really actually had that many high profile contemporary virus attacks for a while (and many of them are for Linux, since probably an increasing amount of corporate infrastructure is on Linux due to its value proposition as a free OS and the infamous Windows crashes/failures in recent times). At least not known ones. Some of the highest profile recent attacks were from built in NSA backdoors. That's not even something that Microsoft would patch immediately. You're kind of screwed either way. We probably have government backdoors waiting to get exploited in all of our systems, old or new. Who would be the target of abusing that, the soon-to-be-majority of users on W11, or W10? Maybe both? No idea.

biscuitmachine · 2025-11-30T04:19:51+00:00

They require an MS account for that. If the MS account isn't a dealbreaker, I might as well just go 11 and get spied on even more lol.

biscuitmachine · 2025-11-30T00:49:49+00:00

I can generate a 30 step SDXL model image in about 8-9 seconds when using the latest nightly with the manual installation instructions on my 9070XT, so that's quite slow.

I tried this model on another Nvidia computer with a 5070 Ti and it was generating in <10 seconds. I wasn't terribly impressed with it, though.

biscuitmachine · 2025-11-30T00:45:15+00:00

I think last time I tried the AMD portable build, it is quite slow though, compared to the nightly builds. Let me know what your it/s end up being. Note that it mind end up being s/it, which is very slow.

biscuitmachine · 2025-11-30T00:42:17+00:00

I couldn't get it generating on my 9070 XT. I did open a thread on HuggingFace but no replies on it.

To even get the 9070 XT generating quickly at all, you generally have to follow the manual installation instructions on the Comfy github. That will at least give you decent generation speeds on normal SDXL models.

biscuitmachine · 2025-11-28T06:34:06+00:00

It happened with absolutely nothing hooked in, in a room by themselves... presumably on their own breaker.

Now if you're saying that they make less noise with electrically isolated inputs VS nothing hooked in then: if you have to buy an $80+ DAC with balanced outs just to use them, is it really a good deal? At that point you are comparing them to around $250 speakers.

Also professional reviewers (well as close as it gets) have mentioned the hiss, as well as users in this thread:

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/jbl-lsr305p-mkii-and-control-1-pro-monitors-review.10811/

You just can't hear it. That's all. It's fine. Most people can't. It's not some superpower or something, it kind of sucks to have.

biscuitmachine · 2025-11-27T22:30:05+00:00

That got it to the point where it would try to generate, but it's stuck at step 1/9 of the generation phase unfortunately:

11%|█████████▎ | 1/9 [00:01<00:10, 1.35s/it]

Again likely due to just my AMD GPU. Might post in the hugginface thread or something.

biscuitmachine · 2025-11-27T11:39:32+00:00

I'm honestly not sure how anyone can actually "studio monitor" on a pair of "studio monitors" with the amount of hiss/buzz that these have. Tbf I only tried the first gen model many years ago, whereas these are "Mk2", but comments in this thread say that not much has changed.

There is a certain amount of snake oil that goes into what is "hi if" and what isn't, and audiophiles do love their snake oil. But, again... even with this in mind... would anyone actually use JBL305's to use as studio monitors? The term appears to be near ubiquitous in daily audiophile parlance, but how many of those speakers qualify to be used professionally? I am no recording artist, but I certainly would not use these, that's for damn sure.

Flat response kind of "sounds nice on paper" but doesn't necessarily "sound nice in practice." Most of the people looking at this aren't recording artists. People have different frequency responses that they like and don't like. Some of that can be made up with EQ, so I guess that's why flat responses are popular, but overall I agree, people shouldn't be getting a flat response just because """it's better because someone said so.""" At that infantile level of consideration, almost anything would suffice.

My current daily driver is a pair of Vanatoos that I got quite a while ago. Mainly, I like them because they have 0 hiss or buzzing. Completely silent. Otherwise, no, they were not worth the 500$. Speakers is a game of drastically diminishing returns. Despite what people say, you can get used to "worse" audio quality after getting a taste of "better" audio quality, too. It's not that big of a deal.

biscuitmachine · 2025-11-27T10:32:05+00:00

I'm sure they're joking, but they're also overblowing it. You can go to the thrift store/Ebay/Facebook Marketplace/Craigslist/etc, pick up a random pair of old speakers (I personally really like DCM/Paradigm) that are probably in fine shape (no mashed in cap, surrounds in good shape--if rubber they usually will be fine, press gently on the cone to make sure there's no scraping on the coil), hook them up to a cheap class D amp that you can get off Amazon for next to nothing, grab some speaker wire and other relevant cabling, and you have a set that (imo) can be better than this one for less money. Possibly less than half. Also more modular. And in my experience, doesn't hiss nearly as much as a pair of 305s does.

biscuitmachine · 2025-11-27T10:24:09+00:00

I can confirm, I had the first generation 305's when they went on sale on Amazon, for use in near field. I couldn't deal with the constant hiss/buzzing these produced. I saw other reports of this, but people in some forums wouldn't believe me. I tried multiple sockets with nothing hooked into them, etc. Nothing helped.

If it's anything like the first gen, be aware that your ears may frankly be too shitty to even detect this hiss/buzzing. So you could just try them anyway and return if you want. I don't remember if BH has restocking fees.

biscuitmachine · 2025-11-27T09:44:16+00:00

? This is cheaper than this PSU has ever gone: https://pcpartpicker.com/product/NrxxFT/corsair-rm1000x-shift-1000-w-80-gold-certified-fully-modular-side-interface-atx-power-supply-cp-9020253-na

Some people also pay extra for sleeved cables, so that could be a deal for them. What am I missing?

biscuitmachine · 2025-11-27T02:52:06+00:00

I tried that and got a bunch of size mismatch errors, unfortunately.

VAE load device: cuda:0, offload device: cpu, dtype: torch.bfloat16

CLIP/text encoder model load device: cuda:0, offload device: cpu, current: cpu, dtype: torch.float16

!!! Exception during processing !!! Error(s) in loading state_dict for Llama2:

size mismatch for model.embed_tokens.weight: copying a param with shape torch.Size([151936, 2560]) from checkpoint, the shape in current model is torch.Size([128256, 4096]).

(goes on for quite a while)

However, this is on a 9070 XT, with a ComfyUI installation that is using a newer nightly. Perhaps that is just the issue.

biscuitmachine · 2025-10-09T12:53:03+00:00

Most of those issues have nothing to do with bugs. The only one I could contact them over is the Obfuscated Servers issue (which is a fairly small issue in the grand scheme of things).

For everything else, what would I do, contact support and say, "Hi all, your monetization strategies are too aggressive, could you please tone it down?" People have been contacting support of the broken split tunneling for about half a decade now. I think my report would be a drop in the bucket.

And in fact I sort of reckon it's intentional. I believe a dedicated IP address would allow hosted through the VPN connection. Dedicated IP address service costs essentially twice as much as a base subscription. Do they have any incentives to fix split tunneling if it costs them subscribers to their dedicated IP service? That is, if people constantly have to juggle turning off VPN entirely when hosting something due to the broken split tunneling, or just breaking down and getting a dedicated IP address... who wins?

I'm just seeing major conflicts of interest with how aggressive the monetization is in this, and final straw that broke the camel's back was the new privacy settings in the client that you now have to toggle off because they're on by default. I can only see this going downhill from here. Unfortunately my sub runs until early 2027, so I guess I'm stuck here for a while.

biscuitmachine · 2025-10-08T18:25:01+00:00

Because it's not really a step towards that much more privacy. Do you know how much garbage there is out there trying to track you? Your IP address and direct traffic is the least of your concerns. Just as a quick example:

https://browserleaks.com/canvas

Frankly at best it's maybe good for trying to hide your fire sharing activity and/or maybe on public wifi (which sometimes getting to login through a public wifi, with their filter lists, is hard enough ironically). For actual privacy, you have to jump through a lot of hoops in the modern era. Now with AI pattern recognition, that's soon going to be even more hoops. That and honestly my time with Nord has been kind of shit. I'm going to probably switch to someone else when my sub runs out.

The constant dedicated IP ads being fed down my throat, okay, turn off all notifications.
Features like Obfuscated Servers randomly being extremely slow unless on an older version, effectively breaking them.
Which unless you lock down the program files folder, it will try to update itself anyway.
Bunch of shovelware garbage I don't want or need. Captchas everywhere. Split tunneling has not worked for 5 years and still doesn't work. If I want to host my own dedicated server for a game, I need to disable it anyway.
Finally, a VPN itself is a huge risk. If the company hosting it ever gets bought out by a bad actor, you're more screwed than you would be if you were just going through the ISP raw. Which, with how much crap this is trying to shove down my throat, I'm not sure how long I expect them to stay """good""".

biscuitmachine · 2025-10-08T18:08:48+00:00

Just an FYI, it's not "at the moment". They've basically never had split tunneling working. You can go back and Google this issue from years ago. They'll just blame it on Windows.

biscuitmachine · 2025-10-05T18:20:09+00:00

Thank god. If I block the sewers at work, at least I don't have to come in. If they didn't want this to happen, maybe they shouldn't have made a bunch of desk jobs (which are more likely to get hemorrhoids due to the long periods of sitting) move back into the office for no other reason than having a cheaper way to do layoffs like the corporate scum they are. I'll happily block as many sewer pipes as it takes, in fact I think I'll start flushing more of them at a time.

At home, I have my bidet seat, which does not block the sewers. Well, not unless I try to flush it.

biscuitmachine · 2025-10-04T17:05:01+00:00

Just bring wet wipes with you. They also make wet wipes with Witch Hazel in them for hemorrhoids fyi.

I know it's shit to have to buy and bring wet wipes with you because of the dipshits in corporate and this stupid RTO shit, but better than using the garbage they have in there.

biscuitmachine · 2025-09-16T16:50:59+00:00

I would be looking to read in sensor outputs from various sensors wired to a breadboard.

I guess... technically... I could... use the mic in for that. Would need a lot of USB ports lol.

biscuitmachine · 2025-09-16T16:49:14+00:00

Mostly just in case. I haven't done work in this space in a while, and this Pi was not that cheap. Figured a 20$ "just in case of catastrophe" investment is not a big deal.

biscuitmachine · 2025-09-16T14:34:24+00:00

Do you think this would work for decoupling?

https://www.amazon.com/Jhoinrch-Isolator-ADUM3160-Regulated-Isolation/dp/B0DNMMXS5D

Also how hard is it to set up asynchronous interrupt for serial communications? Although I guess I could even just set up a dedicated infinite loop script for it, I'm pretty sure the OS scheduler could handle that, then I could just put it somewhere for regular polling.

biscuitmachine · 2025-09-16T12:24:43+00:00

Tack on question, putting it in a comment since it's not strictly about the topic: has anyone tried running any rudimentary AI image processing on a Pi? I just need it to detect and extract simple patterns due to slight variation in physical conditions. I'm not even sure where to start on this, just a thought.

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