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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • Your comment wasn’t in a meta discussion; it was on a post where they were venting about people complaining about them having a women’s only space. There was certainly no indication that the regular community rules didn’t apply, nor any invitation for men to comment.

    Commenting that it’s hostile for them to have a women’s only space might be ironic, but couldn’t possibly be good faith, in that context. And if the same mod banned you from multiple communities, then either it was out of line and you could appeal it, or it was warranted due to the perceived likelihood of you causing problems in those other communities and the perceived low likelihood of you contributing anything of value to them.

    Even now, you’re acting like the mod(s) banned you because of her / their emotions. You don’t see how that’s misogynistic?

    It makes logical sense for bad actors to be preemptively banned. Emotions have nothing to do with it.


  • Right now I have Ollama / Open-WebUI, Kokoro FastAPI, ComfyUI, Wan2GP, and FramePack Studio set up. I recently (as in yesterday) configured an API key middleware with Traefik and placed it in front of Ollama and Comfy, but currently nothing is using them yet.

    I’ll probably try out Devstral with one of the agentic coding frameworks, like Void or Anon Kode. I may also try out one of the FOSS writing studios (like Plot Bunni) and connect my own Ollama instance. I could use NovelCrafter but paying a subscription fee to use my own server for the compute intensive part feels silly to me.

    I tried to use Open Notebook (basically a replacement for NotebookLM) with Ollama and Kokoro, with Kokoro FastAPI as my OpenAI endpoint, but turns out it only supported, and required, text embeddings from OpenAI, so I couldn’t do that fully on my local. At some point, if they don’t fix that, I’m planning to either add support myself or set up some routes with Traefik where the ones OpenNotebook uses point to the service I want to use.

    ETA: n8n is one of the services I plan to set up next, and I’ll likely end up integrating both Ollama and Comfy workflows into it.







  • It was already known before the whistleblower that:

    1. Siri inputs (all STT at that time, really) were processed off device
    2. Siri had false activations

    The “sinister” thing that we learned was that Apple was reviewing those activations to see if they were false, with the stated intent (as confirmed by the whistleblower) of using them to reduce false activations.

    There are also black box methods to verify that data isn’t being sent and that particular hardware (like the microphone) isn’t being used, and there are people who look for vulnerabilities as a hobby. If the microphones on the most/second most popular phone brand (iPhone, Samsung) were secretly recording all the time, evidence of that would be easy to find and would be a huge scoop - why haven’t we heard about it yet?

    Snowden and Wikileaks dumped a huge amount of info about governments spying, but nothing in there involved always on microphones in our cell phones.

    To be fair, an individual phone is a single compromise away from actually listening to you, so it still makes sense to avoid having sensitive conversations within earshot of a wirelessly connected microphone. But generally that’s not the concern most people should have.

    Advertising tracking is much more sinister and complicated and harder to wrap your head around than “my phone is listening to me” and as a result makes for a much less glamorous story, but there are dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of stories out there about how invasive advertising companies’ methods are, about how they know too much, etc… Think about what LLMs do with text. The level of prediction that they can do. That’s what ML algorithms can do with your behavior.

    If you’re misattributing what advertisers know about you to the phone listening and reporting back, then you’re not paying attention to what they’re actually doing.

    So yes - be vigilant. Just be vigilant about the right thing.


  • proven by a whistleblower from apple

    Assuming you have an iPhone. And even then, the whistleblower you’re referencing was part of a team who reviewed utterances by users with the “Hey Siri” wake word feature enabled. If you had Siri disabled entirely or had the wake word feature disabled, you weren’t impacted at all.

    This may have been limited to impacting only users who also had some option like “Improve Siri and Dictation” enabled, but it’s not clear. Today, the Privacy Policy explicitly says that Apple can have employees review your interactions with Siri and Dictation (my understanding is the reason for the settlement is that they were not explicit that human review was occurring). I strongly recommend disabling that setting, particularly if you have a wake word enabled.

    If you have wake words enabled on your phone or device, your phone has to listen to be able to react to them. At that point, of course the phone is listening. Whether it’s sending the info back somewhere is a different story, and there isn’t any evidence that I’m aware of that any major phone company does this.


  • Sure - Wikipedia says it better than I could hope to:

    As English-linguist Larry Andrews describes it, descriptive grammar is the linguistic approach which studies what a language is like, as opposed to prescriptive, which declares what a language should be like.[11]: 25  In other words, descriptive grammarians focus analysis on how all kinds of people in all sorts of environments, usually in more casual, everyday settings, communicate, whereas prescriptive grammarians focus on the grammatical rules and structures predetermined by linguistic registers and figures of power. An example that Andrews uses in his book is fewer than vs less than.[11]: 26  A descriptive grammarian would state that both statements are equally valid, as long as the meaning behind the statement can be understood. A prescriptive grammarian would analyze the rules and conventions behind both statements to determine which statement is correct or otherwise preferable. Andrews also believes that, although most linguists would be descriptive grammarians, most public school teachers tend to be prescriptive.[11]: 26











  • You can run a NAS with any Linux distro - your limiting factor is having enough drive storage. You might want to consider something that’s great at using virtual machines (e.g., Proxmox) if you don’t like Docker, but I have almost everything I want running in Docker and haven’t needed to spin up a single virtual machine.