This is good advice. However (more toward OP), be advised that call recording laws like "two-party consent" (which means both parties must agree to the call) only means the call cannot be admissible in court if recorded improperly, not that you can't record it or that the recording is illegal.

A lot of companies with numbers you can call will say that the call may be recorded, regardless of where you call from. This is good because it covers their side of the consent. They cannot legally only consent to their own recording. Even in a state with one-party consent, once they consent to their own recording, if you record that, they just consented to yours. They might fight this if it goes to trial (it won't), but if you are in a one-party consent area, you can argue that you can disagree with being recorded and still have a right to call if you have business with them. They will argue and say your consent is absolute because you stayed on the line. If they say that, they're fucked — their consent becomes absolute as well. "What's good for the goose is good for the gander" for the most part. Also, with an iPhone, when you start recording, it plays a similar message. If you do that while they have you on hold, they won't record it, but it will be recorded on your end. They can't say "you played the warning while you were on hold, we couldn't hear it" because then you could say you couldn't hear their warning while you were on hold. After all, some smartphones handle hold for you, alerting you when a human comes on the line. Therefore, if you did not hear the warning and it's still valid, the same is true for them.

Alternatively, be more honest and start the recording when a human gets on the line. If they refuse to continue the conversation, you can at least assume they are up to no good. That should tell you all you need to know.

Any PC, laptop, or tablet running ~~spyware~~ Windows 11. Not any.

I don't do this. If I see a paywall, I don't visit the site again.

The Verge recently went with paywalls... I just deleted the bookmark. It was never a very good site anyway. They blasted an Android phone for doing something new, and then praised Apple for doing the exact same thing. I forget what. We were calling them iVerge for a while after that. (It was not recently.) Even as an Apple guy, I could not respect that. But the content has been entertaining, so I kept going back. I definitely will not pay them for their content though.

I follow that logic as far as computers today could not simulate this reality. Computers in the far future? What if — and this is a complete ass-pull, so feel free to disregard it as such, but what if — 25,000 years in the future long after the world's dead and moved on, someone pulled some information on the way we were and made a simulation of it, and you're one of them, with no memories of life outside, experiencing what this ancient civilisation experienced?

So maybe science types feel they can rule out the explanation because computer science as they know it doesn't have the capability. But what about alien tech? Future tech?

I'm not a huge fan of the "simulation" theory, but I think ruling it out because it exceeds what we can do now is a bit silly.

They're talking about food stamps, in the US.

Remember when it was cool to quote Inglorious Basterds? ("I'm in the business of killing Nazis, and business is good.")

There are tells but it's getting harder and harder. One thing is, you have to look for the people.

Case in point, a few weeks ago I discovered some really good covers of the KPop Demon Hunter songs. So if you don't know the scene, this Netflix musical has been making record breaking profits and numbers and everyone and their brother wants a piece. And the music is so good, and tons of people are doing covers.

A few months ago, "is it on Apple Music/Spotify" wouldn't have been a tell, but now it is. So a lot of these covers are on paid streaming, because covers are perfectly acceptable legally. It's fair use. However, recently AI generated music has started to come up, and the streaming services have recently put their feet down and said "no more." So when you're looking at such a cover on YouTube, it's probably going to have streaming links. It's more convenient to listen on one of those services than it is to watch YouTube, and Spotify pays more than YouTube, and Apple Music pays more than both of them. So that's where they want you to listen. When people are all over the comments saying "put it on Spotify" and they say "nah we're YouTube exclusive," what they're saying is, they aren't allowed on Spotify (or Apple Music). They do want more money, but they won't get any on platforms that ban generative AI. So they stick to YouTube, which is one platform that allows it.

With legitimate art, you can usually find the human behind it. With some art, the artist will want to remain anonymous. In anime, for example, a lot of these artists are underage, and they're savvy, they're not putting themselves out there on social media beyond the art and their anonymous comments. They're still more human than AI, they just won't show their face or say where they're posting from. (And that's just good OPSEC in general.)

There's also the frequency. Art takes time. It takes weeks, months, depending on what it is. AI can do it in seconds. So if they're posting whole new stuff every day, every other day, there's a solid chance they're using AI to make it.

Not all AI slop is completely made by AI. Sometimes they take stuff made by humans and use AI to enhance it somehow. That's what the KPDH stuff was. They were using an AI tool to separate the stems (the individual instruments) and enhancing each one, changing some, altering others.

Anyway, in 2025 now, it's much harder than it ever was before to spot AI slop. The time of six fingered hands is gone. Next year, year after, certainly the next decade, it's gonna be next to impossible to tell.

What's worse, these days, AI made stuff is still prompted by humans. All AI slop has a human behind them. But what happens when the AI starts doing this stuff on its own? Right now, AI is interacted with by humans. Soon, AI will initiate the interactions. It could be doing it already, we don't know.

IMO the best way to do it is to acquire lossless (e.g. FLAC) and compress it yourself, if you want to. I use the MPEG4/AAC Low Complexity filter in fre:ac at 192kbps. Makes .m4a files about 10MB each. They sound great. AAC is supposed to be about twice as efficient as MP3 (and a looser license) but the files I make are about the size of MP3 320k files. Which tells me they're about twice as good.

Apple gets associated with M4A/AAC a lot, but that's just because they use it. I do use Apple hardware, but the same hardware runs MP3 without issue. The only issue I had with AAC was getting the old Winamp (2.x) to play it, back when we used Windows. But even then I found an input plugin and from there it was smooth sailing. It's basically superior to MP3 in every way. (But for free licensing I think Ogg Vorbis will be a better fit.) (I also stream it via my Plex server, so if a device can't play M4A — rare — Plex will transcode it.)

Anyway, I use Nyaa for a source (nyaa.si) but that is primarily Japanese/Asian media. That's mostly what I listen to though. I do like some western rock from the 80s and 90s, but as the west stopped pushing rock music, I went where it was being pushed, which was Japan (and a lot of those guys sing in English, like ONE OK ROCK and Survive Said the Prophet — though, to be fair, 1OR is basically an American band now; while the guys were born/raised in Japan, they've lived in Los Angeles for years now, are signed to Fueled by Ramen, and they want to be more like Paramore and Fall Out Boy, which is fine, but it feels a bit disingenuous calling them Japanese rock in 2025).

Charlie Kirk may have been for debates he could win. And it’s the same as any radio show: vet the opposition first. You don’t even invite them until you know them inside and out. Turn their mic down and talk over them so they raise their voice, and turn it back up so they sound aggressive, then passively aggressively talk them down to gain the moral high ground. And if they start making sense, cut to commercial.

If all that fails, put them on a list and demonise that list.

They can in many areas but chose not to. So you’d have to ask them why they don’t when they can. Why aren’t they setting an example for the other areas? Like New York I believe allows women to go topless. The Empire State. Home of the biggest or at least most populous state in America and they don’t do it.

That doesn’t sound accurate. Plenty of places use ballasts and those are legal. A ballast is a barrier, typically concrete but some are plastic and filled with sand, and they are commonly used to keep cars out of pedestrian spaces. You might not even notice them sometimes, but if you think about what keeps cars off the sidewalk or out of parks, you might notice them.

No. But we can sideload. Two apps for free, have to be authorized every 7 days. (It’s actually three, but the app that does this for you takes a slot, so that and two others.)

You can also get a developer license for $99/year that lets you do unlimited with a much longer authorization window.