I bought a Fairphone 5 when they were somewhat new and immediately flashed an alternative ROM onto it (CalyxOS at the time, though now it’s iodeOS as Calyx appears to have gone on hiatus).

Nothing terrible bug-wise, but I have already had to return the phone to be repaired for a fault I couldn’t repair by swapping parts out myself… Which considering it’s apparently got a number of years ahead of it before it officially gets dropped is a bit worrying.

None of those listed are decentralised or Discord-like though, except maybe Matrix, which in theory does both but in practice fails at basically everything

Ahh crap my cover is blown

The H&B ones were absolutely awful. They were loaded up with all kinds of herby flavours that just ruined it. Like someone had just haphazardly emptied their spice shelf into there without caring about which ones are actually going to work.

They were also one of the more expensive ones on the list!

I saw one posted somewhere that’d been polished to a mirror finish. It looked awesome, but then I remembered how much more dangerous such a thing would be on the road and I shelved it into the “cool, but fuck no” part of my brain

Ahh fair enough! Yeah, not sure about all that.

A very long time ago I remember there being FUSE filesystems that allow you to mount a .torrent like a network drive. I have no idea if these are still kicking though. Still doesn’t provide all of your extra bullet points but might be a good start to the rabbit hole

I suppose this explains why I keep having to move Funkwhale servers every few months because they keep shutting down (That and the usual “server costs outweighing the donation pot” issue).

Shit me, 200gb in metadata, 2.2TB in cover art before we even touch a piece of music! Wild

Torrents manage this without any extra tech. Just grab the .torrent file, and only select the files you have space for. Download them then seed, and get your 150 friends to do different files. If I then go to download a file that’s in your batch, the download will happen from your server (and whoever else is seeding these files), and if I go to download a file that’s on one of your 150 others’ server it’ll download from there.

I feel deeply sorry for the poor EU agent who has to sift through the depravity that likely exists on your average MAGA twat’s phone. You hear about those police staff members who have to view all the CSAM to investigate it and how it traumatises them, this would be the next tier down

I fully jumped on the Spotify bandwagon hoping the algorithm would decide what i listen to, I’d become stuck in a rut and hadn’t really listened to anything new for a good 15 years.

Well… After letting it figure my music tastes out, every single automatically generated playlist on there starts off with crap I just immediately skip before devolving into the same 5-10 songs I listened to pre-Spotify. So i guess it knows my taste well? But it has turned out to be useless for this too!

Volvos for dads

Is he also aware that basically the entire world outside of America thinks American cars are shit?

I absolutely do have an idea how well it’ll be able to do the job, based on AI’s past performances in basically every other area, knowing its strong and weak points and knowing the job very well myself. Obviously I don’t know for sure, but I’m not hopeful!

Not to mention the rich people who’s pockets will get further lined with your tax dollars for their horseshit AI dispatcher!

So they have money to spend on AI that will absolutely not be able to do the job half as well as a human, but not any money to spend on humans. Got it

That… doesn’t answer my question at all. Why is the AI specifically required? How is it an improvement over making the job more attractive to humans and getting more of them to do the job instead?

Where I work we take both non and emergency calls, and have a separate number for each. The phone system we use will make sure the emergency calls come through first, so it’s not uncommon to have zero emergency calls queueing while the non-emergency queue sits at 10-20 minutes (just like any other call centre, we have the boards up on the wall showing the stats).

It seems like this AI thing is trying to solve the problem of people calling the emergency number for a call that doesn’t need an emergency response, which is super common. Either people don’t know about the non-emergency line, or they think the non-emergency line is for other people and calling the emergency line will get their issue sorted faster. The first kind are usually very apologetic when you ask them to call the non-emergency, the second kind will argue with you and we’re instructed to just hang up on them after repeating the instruction to keep the emergency queue free.

The thing is, anyone with half a brain can identify a non-emergency call within max 2 minutes. It’s probably the easiest part of the whole job. But it definitely requires a human, because people will call up shouting and screaming like they’re mid-way through getting stabbed, when really they’re just a grumpy old fuck who’s neighbours are playing rap music. And on the flip side, plenty of people are able to make a full-on emergency call in an almost spookily calm tone, and even more so if they’re not directly involved (Common example is a teacher or social worker calling something in a child’s disclosed to them about their parents). So being able to read between the lines in a way humans are very good at, but robots are not, is obviously super important.

When the operator identifies the call as a non-emergency (which takes an absolute maximum of 2 minutes, even for very complicated calls), they simply say “please call the non-emergency line on XXX, thanks, bye”. Why is the AI required?

I agree that people shouldn’t be calling the emergency line with rubbish, but unfortunately they do, because the non-emergency line isn’t as well publicized and even if they do know about it people think that “non-emergency” means “we can’t be bothered dealing with it” and so calling the emergency line somehow means their issue will be taken more seriously.

I’m a dispatcher (not in the USA) and our managers start flipping out and running round like their heads are on fire if the wait time reaches 30 seconds. If there’s more than 3 calls in the emergency queue then they sit down and take them themselves (If you’ve ever worked in any call centre at all, emergency or not, you’ll know shit has to really hit the fan before management will consider doing this!)

Usually high queue time/numbers are just multiple calls for the same incident (think large RTC’s or very public assaults/stabbings right in the middle of a heavily trafficked city centre) so we can get that queue down very quickly, especially as 99% of the time any call after the initial one will simply be “we’re already aware and we’ve got crews en route, bye”.