Weird, Deepseek runs on a little mini PC.

Just use an enum lol

Honestly that fits what I use it for then. I’ve got into debates with my family about not changing the filter when the pitcher tells us to and doing it only when we taste the chlorine in the tap water (since the only reason I didn’t want it in there was because I didn’t like the taste). I always just saw it as a way to make the water taste better but they think there’s a health benefit and that it filters out more than just chlorine.

Can we keep the robot uprising looking like HAL and not Terminator? Please? It’s bad enough to die when the robots conquer Earth but I have to die while looking at creepy uncanny valley humanoids?

Username checks out

More satisfying and gives me a little more motivation to see the tasks I’ve already done.

I sort of suspect that the wiring is in a diagram somewhere

That’s called a schematic and not only are those not public, they’re closely guarded trade secrets that companies will spend a lot of resources to prevent from leaking to the public.

Also, just because a schematic says the switch is connected a certain way doesn’t mean that’s actually how it’s connected. The only way to prove how the switch works is to inspect the traces in the PCB, which is very difficult to do especially without destroying it. Modern computers have multi layer PCBs that you’d basically need to peel apart to see the inner traces.

If feminist just means I think women deserve the exact same rights as men, and same with any other gender, then yes I’m a feminist.

If feminist means a woman advocate who strives to push more female perspectives in a world dominated by male ones, well I’m a cis man so by definition I can’t do that. If I want to support that, and I do, the best thing I can do is stop talking and listen.

What I learned from covid is a lot of US states had laws criminalizing wearing any kind of mask in public because it’s considered “suspicious” or “threatening” or something, and most states are now reinstating those laws post covid.

Like what the actual fuck?

Framework laptops have a little physical switch to turn off the camera / mic when you don’t want them.

Unfortunately even this is not that comforting because we don’t know how the switch is implemented. Is it actually in series with the microphone data lines? Power lines? Ideally both but you’ll never know. It could even just be a software GPIO switch (gonna bet Amazon Echos with their microphone switches are implemented like that) and unless you have the knowledge to check the PCB you’ll always have that lingering suspicion.

Expedition Society theme from Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon. Has some commie marching song vibes.

My Todo app is a Markdown file because I can cross stuff out.

Also, when Chinese covid lockdowns were perceived as too restrictive and went on for too long, Chinese citizens in many different cities started protesting. Did the evil commie government (A) reenact the Tiananmen Square massacre to silence all opposition or (B) listen to the people and actually drop most of the restrictions? Bet most westoids will pick the wrong answer.

So, is there an easier way to completely disable the microphone?

First take it apart and determine what form factor the microphone is.

Is it a through hole microphone with two pins that are soldered to the underside like this? If so it’s best to desolder it to prevent damaging the PCB. Use a soldering iron to heat up the pins and pull it out with pliers from the other side. If you don’t have a soldering iron and don’t want to buy one, I’ve also seen people using side cutters to cut off the solder joints and loosening the component enough for it to be pulled out through brute force without breaking the circuit board. If you can’t or don’t want to do either of those and don’t mind risking the device, you could just yank it out with pliers like you’re an old timey dentist pulling teeth, and hope that the pins break before the board does, might also help to twist it back and fourth repeatedly until the metal gets fatigued and break.

It might also be a surface mount microphone that, as the name suggests, is only soldered to the surface of the PCB. Might look something like this. These are pretty challenging for most people to desolder especially if it’s close to other components, but they’re small enough that the solder pads don’t need a lot of force to break, so if you can get a good grip with pliers you should be able to just rip it off. Twist it until you feel the solder joints snap and then pull straight up. It doesn’t really matter if you rip the pad off the circuit board since you don’t plan on soldering anything else to it. But what you do need to be careful of is if you peel off more of the copper traces than just the pad, which can damage other components. If you do want to desolder it, touch the soldering iron to the metal casing which should hopefully heat up the entire component enough to melt all the solder joints, then pull it off with pliers. Just be careful not to touch any nearby components with the soldering iron.

Failing all those, you could also take a screwdriver or awl, put the pointy end on the microphone, and hammer it a few times to cave the metal casing in and hopefully crush the audio sensing parts. This will probably destroy the microphone, but less certain than removing it.

I’ve also heard recommendations about grounding the microphone connections after removal for extra privacy, mainly to prevent the traces from picking up EM waves, but I don’t know how to reliably do that without breaking stuff so can’t give any advice.

Does putting tape over it completely mute it?

No. Speech is surprisingly robust from an audio perspective and it’s entirely possible for audio not recognizable to humans as speech to still be decoded by speech recognition AI. The thing is even if this works 90% of the time and makes the audio completely unusable, you can never prove if your case is in that 10% where there’s juuust enough information for AI to detect. You also can’t easily hear the actual output of the microphone so for all you know it might be fully intelligible and just muffled. If you’re concerned about privacy to the point where you’re asking how to remove a microphone, I doubt you’ll accept that 10% chance anyway and removing the microphone entirely will save you a lot of anxiety.

deleted by creator

Matt Ferrel has been shown time and time again to support literally anything that fits the futuristic tech bro vibe regardless if the concept is viable or even makes sense. Probably not the best source.

deleted by creator

Which does cause problems now that Google search is shit.

Seriously at what point did search engines stop matching results by keyword?! Just a few days ago I tried looking for a quote I didn’t fully remember, but knew the basic thesis and some identifying terms it definitely mentioned and all I got was tabloid articles for pages and pages on end which only vaguely matched the thesis but didn’t mention any of the identifying terms I remember the quote using. It threw me for a loop because I remember being taught in school to search for stuff this way and I don’t know if I’m just stupid or misremembered the quote or search engines don’t actually match keywords anymore. Why would they remove the most basic form of search, literally just regexing for all the strings given?!

There are more than 15,000 cattle and hog feeding operations in the United States. These operations rear 70% of the country’s cattle and 98% of its hogs.

Is this the new sanitized corporate term for factory farm? I doubt they’re just feeding the animals and letting them go afterward.

Somewhat tangential hot take: I REALLY think the scope of free as in beer use of open source projects should be limited to personal and small scale business use only (when the business makes below a certain yearly revenue). It’s infuriating how the biggest tech companies openly use open source software as the base of their products while giving NOTHING in return to those open source projects, and in fact only bash them when they show the least bit of resistance to whatever evil profit driven change they demand the project make. If you’re making billions in revenue using open source software which has saved you R&D money, why shouldn’t the open source project itself be entitled to even half a percent of that which will more than cover all their development costs? I’m so sick of companies seeing open source as free outsourced labour they can exploit. There are also existing licenses that only allow free as in beer use of the software if it’s for personal use or in a worker co-op, which I think is also an interesting approach worth considering.

Alternatively, I think we should seriously explore even more copyleft licenses than AGPL. I think it was either Elastic Search or MongoDB that tried to implement a license requiring every software that depends on the open source version of their software be open source as well? Everyone, including the OSF bashed that decision when it came out, and as far as I know there were indeed a lot of problems with how that license was written, but people also denounced the very concept of going beyond AGPL which I don’t get.