Onihikage

This is how empires die. Power and wealth accumulates at the top, until eventually a tipping point is reached, and those with power then use it to frantically loot the rest of the nation and skedaddle to foreign lands with their ill-gotten wealth as the empire balkanizes behind them.

In truth, the looting phase started with Reagan, but in recent times it's begun to accelerate, particularly when Trump is in office.

[...] I’d like to be able to backup to my home server. The main thing would probably just be my photos [...]

For the photos, since you have a home server, have you heard of Immich? For anything else, there was a time when I could have recommended syncthing-android, but development on that has been discontinued, though you can still try using it. Some privacy-conscious cloud services may allow you to sync app folders, backing up WhatsApp that way, but I have no experience with that.

is the 8a likely to drop much in price after that? I don’t know how quickly the prices drop but considering the 8a is currently £500 I can’t see it dropping to <£300

Instead of buying straight from Google, you can consider buying a refurbished 8a off ebay or something local - my last two Pixel purchases have been through that method. It tends to be substantially cheaper than buying new, even as little as 6 months after the product launch, and the 8a launched 9 months ago. Just be cautious of seller ratings, reputations, and consistency - prices are lower there because it's more of a risk for the buyer.

https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e

Thanks for the link, that's a lot more context than the usual reactionary "Andy Yen said one nice thing about a Republican therefore he's fascist pro-Trump MAGA" takes I've been seeing. Not only does it more or less disprove that narrative, it makes me question how much of the hate against him lately is genuine and how much of it has been seeded and signal-boosted by nation-state actors who don't want people to use encrypted communications.

Yen is clearly trying to be nonpartisan and praise what he sees as good for privacy while pointing out abuses of power, regardless of who has the power at the moment. He sees this as his way of adding weight to the scale in favor of better privacy and tearing down big tech. I know many in my country and on the web are hyper-polarized and addicted to anger, to the point that if someone says anything even slightly positive about their perceived political enemy, it's seen as legitimizing and aligning with that enemy, but I don't believe that's a healthy or productive mindset to have. I believe that kind of divisive attitude is preventing us from uniting with those who should be agreeable to our cause, and that's exactly what the oligarchs want. It's making us weak.

I've been on the fence for a while since this whole thing started, because I do use a paid Proton email, and it sounded bad, but I kept getting this nagging feeling I wasn't seeing the full picture. That's gone now - Andy may be politically and/or socially inept, and he may have a different perspective on what it means to support privacy and democracy, but I think it's clear his heart is in the right place, and the work he and Proton are continuing to do for tech privacy is helping to erode authoritarian power structures, including Trump's.

I appreciate the links, but these are all about how to efficiently process an audio sample for a signal of choice.

Your stumbling block seemed to be that you didn't understand how it was possible, so I was trying to explain that, but I may have done a poor job of emphasizing why the technique I described matters. When you said this in a previous comment:

I do think that they’re not just throwing away the other fish, but putting them into specific baskets.

That was a misunderstanding of how the technology works. With a keyword spotter (KWS), which all smartphone assistants use to detect their activation phrases, they they aren't catching any "other fish" in the first place, so there's nothing to put into "specific baskets".

To borrow your analogy of catching fish, a full speech detection model is like casting a large net and dragging it behind a ship, catching absolutely everything and identifying all the fish/words so you can do things with them. Relative to a KWS, it's very energy intensive and catches everything. One is not likely to spend that amount of energy just to throw back most of the fish. Smart TVs, cars, Alexa, they can all potentially use this method continuously because the energy usage from constantly listening with a full model is not an issue. For those devices, your concern that they might put everything other than the keyword into different baskets is perfectly valid.

A smartphone, to save battery, will be using a KWS, which is like baiting a trap with pheromones only released by a specific species of fish. When those fish happen to swim nearby, they smell the pheromones and go into the trap. You check the trap periodically, and when you find the fish in there, you pull them out with a very small net. You've expended far less effort to catch only the fish you care about without catching anything else.

To use yet another analogy, a KWS is like a tourist in a foreign country where they don't know the local language and they've gotten separated from their guide. They try to ask locals for help but they can't understand anything, until a local says the name of the tour group, which the tourist recognizes, and is able to follow that person back to their group. That's exactly what a KWS system experiences, it hears complete nonsense and gibberish until the key phrase pops out of the noise, which they understand clearly.

This is what we mean when we say that yes, your phone is listening constantly for the keyword, but the part that's listening cannot transcribe your conversations until you or someone says the keyword that wakes up the full assistant.

My question is, how often is audio sampled from the vicinity to allow such processing to happen.

Given the near-immediate response of “Hey Google”, I would guess once or twice a second.

Yes, KWS systems generally keep a rolling buffer of audio a few seconds long, and scan it a few times a second to see if it contains the key phrase.

How can you catch the right fish, unless you’re routinely casting your fishing net?

It's a technique called Keyword Spotting (KWS). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword_spotting

This uses a tiny speech recognition model that's trained on very specific words or phrases which are (usually) distinct from general conversation. The model being so small makes it extremely optimized even before any optimization steps like quantization, requiring very little computation to process the audio stream to detect whether the keyword has been spoken. Here's a 2021 paper where a team of researchers optimized a KWS to use just 251uJ (0.00007 milliwatt-hours) per inference: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.04988

The small size of the KWS model, required for the low power consumption, means it alone can't be used to listen in on conversations, it outright doesn't understand anything other than what it's been trained to identify. This is also why you usually can't customize the keyword to just anything, but one of a limited set of words or phrases.

This all means that if you're ever given an option for completely custom wake phrases, you can be reasonably sure that device is running full speech detection on everything it hears. This is where a smart TV or Amazon Alexa, which are plugged in, have a lot more freedom to listen as much as they want with as complex of a model as they want. High-quality speech-to-text apps like FUTO Voice Input run locally on just about any modern smartphone, so something like a Roku TV can definitely do it.

Not if the biggest players buy all their competition and use their multi-state revenue to lobby municipalities to make it illegal to compete with them.

It's important to recognize that this is how capitalism works if you try to apply it to natural monopolies such as physical infrastructure, along with anything else subject to inelastic demand, such as healthcare. It's exactly why it makes no sense to have entities that provide such infrastructure operate according to free markets, because either (1) there will be no competition and the "market" with one seller will abuse their position to maximize profit, or (2) you have competing systems side by side, using double the resources and space (or more) for half the efficiency (or less).

Too often people think of Capitalism as an efficiency maximizer, when in reality it is a capital concentrator. Infrastructure needs to be efficient in order to best serve the people that use it. We see time and again that energy corporations in the "free market" use their revenue to buy their competitors and lobby for looser restrictions that let them hike rates faster and higher until they've completely escaped any semblance of regulation.

You're right, I was thinking in Wh. I don't think it changes my overall point though, which was that if one's goal is to generate clean energy, most people don't live in the ideal conditions for this device and hence have much more cost-efficient means available. I've edited my post.

1500 kWh per year is ~~effectively nothing. That runs a midrange gaming PC for a few hours.~~ (Edit: I was thinking in Wh, oops) The company won't even tell you the price up front - the product page just has a link to their contact form - but word elsewhere on the web is that little turbine costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $5500. I don't know if that's the price of the off-grid system which includes a battery, or the on-grid system, but I can't be bothered to email them because it ultimately doesn't matter.

In 2023, the Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) for both solar and wind power generation at grid scale were around $50 per Megawatt-hour. That means $5500 spent on one of those methods is expected to yield a total return of about 110 megawatt-hours. If we say the Liam lasts 20 years, never breaks down, is placed in the perfect location where it gets exactly the wind it needs to meet its rated power output (more on that below), you'll get 1.5 MWh per year or 30 MWh total. If your goal is to spend lots of money to feel like you're saving the planet, I suppose it's not a bad product, but if your goal is to actually save the planet, $5500 can go several times farther than this. For that price, I can find kits online rated for 3.28 kW, which even as far north as the state of Maine in the US, will generate about 4 MWh per year, a little over 1/3 the average US home's electricity consumption.

Per the graphs on the product page, their turbines also require a very narrow range of wind speeds to even come close to the claims about the power output: 12 m/s, which in 99.9% of the world is a significant gust, but it shuts off entirely at 14 m/s, and the output drops off very rapidly with wind speed. At half its maximum wind speed, it's outputting 1/8 of its maximum output.

Contrast these limitations with traditional large wind turbines, which cut-in at around 4 m/s of wind speed (same as the Liam), but can maintain full capacity along a much wider range of wind speeds, typically from around 10 m/s all the way up to 20 m/s. For these turbines, half their maximum windspeed is still maximum power output. It's a night and day difference in efficiency.

This mini-turbine is a product with a vanishingly small market. It's for people who live in very particular locations where solar + battery systems are either so inefficient as to not make financial sense, or their property is occluded for most of the day, yet they also have access to continuous high winds that don't fluctuate much and average right around this turbine's sweet spot but no higher. There might be 1000 people in the entire world that this product is well-suited for, and I wouldn't be surprised if the real number is far fewer. There's no justification for any article to so enthusiastically say it "destroys" solar panels.

Edit: Fixed my terrible math and expanded on the costs between this and the current market price of solar systems. My point remains that this is a product for a very niche market, and for most people is not a good value for clean energy generation.

Intellectual property as a concept ultimately stifles progress every time it's been tried. Information wants to be free, and we prosper far more when we accept that reality.

Everyone should read Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine. It's on David's website, Internet Archive, Anna's Archive, and various bookstores. Feel free to buy or print some copies and distribute them to your favorite people, libraries, bookstores, and congress critters~

Always has been.

I would recommend against pairing Battlemage with a low-spec CPU. As shown by Hardware Canucks, Hardware Unboxed, and others, Intel's Arc graphics driver overhead is currently much higher than competitors, which means they're disproportionately affected by having a weaker CPU. This causes the B580 to lose significantly more performance when paired with low-end CPUs than a roughly equivalent Nvidia or AMD card. At the very low end, the difference is especially stark. In some games, the B580 goes from neck-and-neck with a 4060 on a high-end CPU to losing half its performance with a low-end older CPU, while the 4060 only loses about 25%.

If you're really stuck with a lower-end CPU, it would be far better to get a used midrange AMD or Nvidia GPU from an older product generation for the same price and use that.

I'm late to the party but have you seen Linux Journey? https://linuxjourney.com/