Melody

Like a Hydra; You cut one head off; and two grow in it's place.

The homogenization of these icons has been a long source of consternation for me.

They're barely functional as icons; you can scroll right by them and miss them; which makes finding the apps in a list of apps a bit annoying sometimes. Removing each icon's unique color scheme and replacing it with the 'company 4 colors' was the stupidest fucking idea ever.

Even more infuriating is how they keep renaming the applications to unexpected things every so often; so they move around; and it's dreadfully annoying to remember if they prefixed the name of the app with a G or something else completely different, which renders strict alphabetical sorting a bit moot.

You don't hire a well known "PR Superstar"-level lawyer without being super worried that your conduct might be viewed as wrong in a court of public opinion, regardless of whether or not you broke the law. The Lawyer ensures public opinion doesn't affect the possible legal case mess that's likely going on.

Until those legal tangles are resolved, we really won't know more; and oftentimes details left for public record will be minimal if no wrongdoing was found.

Personally; I think it's possible that the allegations might not be 100% legitimate, I do believe people would love to smear him if it meant potential financial gains and social notoriety. But I also think it's equally as possible that he is in fact as bad of a person as is alleged; and I believe he's likely to be very much a self-serving person who hides that dark side with his very public persona. There are a number of people in creator circles who whisper stories of negative interactions with him.

In general he is not a nice person when criticized. This is usually obvious in his content and social media interactions.

His content is low quality, 'feel good', Reality TV garbage. Think like Dude Perfect; except they give out giant wads of cash and recruit random people. He has TWO FAILED BRANDS; Mr. Beast Burger, which is a chain of low quality ghost kitchens, and his Chocolate brand; which shows a clear lack of business acumen and capability. Much of his video content is clickbait; written explicitly to game the algorithm and garner attention with only minimally required guardrails to obey ToSes and relevant laws that are actually enforced. Frequently he invades other YouTuber's channels for a video or more to "promote his brand" and spread his junky content around. This is sometimes fine; when the channel is celebrity centric or otherwise good at staying on it's own topic; but I've heard...horror stories from certain youtubers about working with Mr. Beast...and even the Greens, (John and Hank, vlogbrothers) don't seem to like him all that much it seems like; as evidenced by their large lack of interactions with him. Sure, they 'professionally respect' him; but that's about as far as that seems to go. I think a lot of Nerdfighteria (Fans of the vlogbrothers) doesn't seem to interact with Mr. Beast that much and it makes me wonder.

Lemmy has it's start by being that upstart anti-reddit competitor. ...Just like Reddit was back when Digg dominated the web.

Give it time; it seems Spez didn't learn his lessons from how reddit ended up dominating over Digg.

Honestly; I think the "Negative" reactions to the bot are overblown and only done by a vocal minority who are sockpuppeting followed by a few people who are irrationally angry that the bot can be, GASP! Dare I SAY IT???!!11, Wrong.

Personally I don't find the bot problematic at all; and I think it could easily be blocked or ignored by people who find it too inaccurate. So I find it extremely disappointing that the mods are listening to the vocal minority about this.

That being said; I do understand why Mods want to make the bot more accurate. It's assessments and information can easily make obvious extremists and trolls more obvious to the naked eye; and can help people consume media with some grains of salt. More sources of data are good for accuracy.

Yeah this seems like a non-issue to me as well; the source material for the models is probably the cause of this bias.

I also don't think there's a lot of sources for this manner of speaking. Let's also not forget that there's oftentimes instructions given to the LLM that ask it to avoid certain topics which it will in fact do.

This is why I use SearXNG; locally hosted on a container. It collates and sorts out the crap from all the engines at once. I get a useful list of results normally. My personal instance is configured to shotgun several engines at once and uses Wolfram Alpha or Wikipedia for informational boxes over other engines; if those services present a result.

My experience:

• Infobox (if applicable), Source is reliable; usually Wolfram Alpha or Wikipedia. May not always be immediately relevant but it's usually a close enough match.
• Most relevant results (3 to 7 of them)
• Relevant results containing any terms (Many)
• Less relevant results (Usually on page 2 or 3 by this time)
• Nonsensical results; may be slightly relevant (Usually you're 7 to 10 pages deep by then)

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Typically, using your own VPN should suffice. Depending on your situation you can do other things as well. If you are unable to download these tools on the school network in question; do not attempt to do so again. Use a public or other network connection elsewhere to obtain the tools you need to bypass their crap.

For example, NextDNS could be helpful. By running their client app; ( https://github.com/nextdns/nextdns/wiki/Windows ) you can make sure all your DNS requests are encrypted. Similarly you could simply set up a local DNS server that you point Windows at which can redirect those requests over DNS-Over-(HTTPS or TLS) to a DNS provider of your choosing.

As someone who owns a similar set; I can estimate you're probably dealing with the upsampling issue due to an OS configuration issue. You should try listening to MP3s and FLACs at 44100hz sample rate for your comparison. Not 48000, not 96000.

In general I don't believe you can tell any difference between MP3 and FLAC if you listen to the audio at the intended sample rate.

Meaning that @44100hz with 8 bit samples; you can't tell.

Listening at higher sample rates with higher bits per sample; sure...there's lots of room for unwanted and even audible error. Audio interpolation algorithms are not miracles, not smart, and not even close to being finely psychoacoustically tuned to your ears in most cases.

If you say you can hear a difference...you are lying or you are cheating by playing back the MP3 over an audio pipeline with a higher sample rate and bits per sample. Anyone could hear the difference when cheating like that. Human hearing can span all the way up to 128Khz; but oftentimes most people can't notice a credible difference even at 96Khz.

But if you listen to a 44.1Khz signal via a 96Khz set of equipment; you'll pick out exactly when the audio output shifts between being 96Khz and 44.1Khz.

This is how you can tell when audio is a recording at a lower sample rate. Most hardware is capable of outputting 96Khz so long as you don't put older things in your audio chain (The pipeline from file to your ears, and yes this includes software and your operating system as well).

The problem usually arises when something is upsampled. Going from 44.1Khz to 96Khz is noticeable when you "Compress" the audio signal to boost apparent loudness. Most low-end equipment and unaware software will do this sort of operation automatically when upsampling your audio to make sure the process does not render your audio too quiet to hear. Your ears can hear frequencies being clipped or limited to a certain volume as well; which can also happen a lot to prevent certain issues. Because most people are unable to regulate this hidden software aspect of their playback chain; you can sometimes hear it.

Luckily if you spend some time with proper DSP software and/or hardware, you'll be able to unmuddle/unmix these mistakes in your chain. It does take time and patience; and you'll need a large blend of HQ audio (like FLACs or MQTTs) as well as your standard "downsampled" audio (like MP3s and other lossy tracks), and you'll be able to tweak things so that everything sounds good.

Software packages like Viper4Windows or Viper4Android are good starting points and are often easy to figure out how to use and offer a very wide and diverse range of controls you can use to adjust the audio to your needs and liking.

Because everyone's ears are different; there's also plenty of tools that claim to adjust for your individual ears...and those can be helpful as well in chasing your perfect flat audio response curve and equalizing things to your preferences.

Businesses that do this do not get my visits usually. It's usually pretty evident.

I'm not going to fund that; and they should be demanding that the system stop and be adjusted so that such cases do not in fact happen.