tal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LRC_(file_format)

For time-synchronized lyrics.

It looks like my Scandroid audio files from Bandcamp have embedded non-synchronized lyrics.

$ metaflac --list *08*.flac

[snip]

    comment[12]: UNSYNCEDLYRICS=Beware the shadows of the drones 
Destruction wrapped in pretty silicone 
They’ve taken everyone I’ve known 
And now I walk these empty streets alone 

In my memory the past is fading 
The future has been redesigned 
It’s hard to focus on it when I’m running out of time 

Surrounded by streetlights at midnight 
My destination is unknown 
I walk these empty streets alone 
Digital dreams thrive in the moonlight 
I’m only flesh, circuit and bone 
I walk these empty streets alone 

Beware the faces of the clones 
Deception sent from Neo-Tokyo 
They’ve erased everyone I’ve known 
And still I walk these empty streets alone

I don't know how widespread that is.

Note that lyrics are themselves copyrighted works, regarding simply sharing them. That is, if you want to create, say, "Lyricsnet, the new Fediverse service" or something like that, you may attract attention from IP owners.

I think that we're going to be multiple generations of HMDs away from enough resolution to do text as well as today's monitors, unless someone gives up on having it projected into 3D space.

There was an article from someone critiquing it a while back, talking about some of the issues with the Apple Vision Pro (a rather expensive, high-resolution HMD) as a monitor replacement.

https://kguttag.com/2023/08/05/apple-vision-pro-part-5a-why-monitor-replacement-is-ridiculous/

https://kguttag.com/2023/08/09/apple-vision-pro-part-5b-more-on-monitor-replacement-is-ridiculous/

Those who believe we’ve been in an incrementally escalating software crisis since at least 2007.

Web development is now especially notorious for completely disregarding accessibility, user device capabilities, and regulations. Most of the ideas of user-centred design are alien to modern developers.

goes to archive.org's copy of Yahoo from the golden era of 2006

https://web.archive.org/web/20061212011659/http://www.yahoo.com/

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Supported browsers include:
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I use Vanilla Music.

https://f-droid.org/packages/ch.blinkenlights.android.vanilla/

It's fine for my purposes. I don't know what functionality you're missing with these other programs, though, so hard to say if it meets your needs.

I don't think that that's really a platform issue per se. I mean, you can spin up an instance here on the Threadiverse and set whatever instance policies you want. Someone else could have an instance with very different policies.

https://www.englandcast.com/2024/06/decline-serfdom-elizabeth-i/

It didn’t happen overnight but the official nail in the coffin, as it were, came during the reign of Elizabeth I who formally ended serfdom in England.

Serfs were tied to the land on which they lived and worked, and they were subject to the will of the land owner. However, unlike slaves, serfs had some personal freedoms and rights, but their economic and social mobility was severely restricted. They could not leave the manor without the lord’s permission

Oh, for the long-lost halcyon days of yore.

On the negatives:

• Online abuse: AI is fueling the spread of sexual abuse material and sexually explicit deepfakes, with women and children most at risk.

Eh. I don't see this as that fundamental. I mean, Photoshop lowered the bar too to making synthetic pornography, to slapping a head on someone else's body. The ability to do image warping allows resizing body parts in a convincing-at-first-glance look, and I remember when that was a fad. It just doesn't seem to have changed society all that much in the past. It may be that people just stop caring much about pornographic images of a particular person. I'm not saying that it won't have an impact, but I have a hard time seeing a scenario where it really deeply alters society.

• Disinformation: AI can generate false information that is as convincing as the truth, undermining trust in public debate and democracy.

Yeah, that's a bigger issue.

It is not one that is impossible to deal with. It was a situation that we had to deal with prior to recording technology. And there were problems

like accusing politicians of going to one place and saying one thing in their speeches, and then to another and saying something else was a real thing in the US back when the only record we have was from newspapers printing summaries of what they said. We had solutions for that era, like people who would put their reputation on the line to attest to various facts. We could do it again. But we've benefited from having easy technology that made it pretty easy to make a credible record cheaply and easily of all sorts of things, audio recording, photographs, and video recording, and the bar for that might rise.

It was always going to happen one day, whether-or-not neural networks were involved. Computer graphics and audio synthesis have only gotten more-accessible and convincing over the years.

I think that one new issue is the ability to synthesize propaganda using the bandwagon effect on social media. That is, it used to be just financially impractical to have a zillion people online trying to influence people. But...if chatbots drastically lower the cost to that, that could be a real issue, and one that we haven't had to deal with before, ever.

Crime: Criminals are using AI to carry out cyberattacks, fraud and social engineering scams.

Yup. Some of this we can fix, and is because we have outdated authentication mechanisms (like recognizing someone's voice on a phone because the phone network has basically no authentication mechanism). Some of it is going to be harder. I think that this is largely not fundamental problems, but some things are going to have to change.

• Mental health: Some AI systems can reinforce harmful beliefs or behaviours, leading to mental health crises, including suicide.

Ehhh. I mean, yes, but so can all sorts of other things. Sitting alone watching TV all the time. I remember distress when the Internet became more widely-available about how people could enter into harmful forums. And we've always had crackpots with weird ideas out there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube

Ray didn't need AI to develop his theories.

Honestly, I'm kinda more concerned about stuff like cults and scams, cases where someone is actively attempting to maliciously manipulate people than "random person goes and spends time talking to a chatbot and feels that it reinforces his crackpot views".

• Loss of control: As AI becomes more autonomous, experts warn it could become harder to monitor and govern without stronger safeguards.

Yeah, this is a big one. The Friendly AI problem is a hard one. I don't know if there are practical solutions, not for self-improving advanced intelligences, which we are certainly going to try to build.

• Environmental impact: The energy-hungry data centres which power AI are contributing to greenhouse gas emissions which leads to global warming.

Eh, yeah, but this is basically the same as our existing energy problems. Like, we were already emitting an unsustainable level of carbon dioxide emissions. The answer has to be shifting to different generation methods. The answer was never going to be "we keep burning coal and whatnot and everyone just reduces energy usage enough on a per capita basis to keep human-driven carbon dioxide emissions at a sustainable level".

But you’re not selling that as a service.

No, but...is your concern the ability to run a commercial service involving AI compute? I mean, there are certainly a ton of startup companies doing that. Heck, there are people selling access to their GPUs for parallel compute on vast.ai.

I'm just saying that I don't believe that the ability to run neural nets on parallel compute hardware is something that is going to be terribly exclusive over time, and certainly isn't today something limited to someone with a net worth of a billion dollars.

As I've commented before, we'd need a lot more RAM than exists in the world today if everyone's going to do it. Like, AI companies are buying more 2026 RAM production than the rest of the world combined, on the order of two-thirds of global production. If they get something like 100% capacity utilization of their hardware, and a typical user doing local AI compute would get something like 1% capacity utilization of their hardware, then we'd need about a hundred times that much memory to let everyone run comparable stuff locally. That's a pretty stupendously large amount of memory. But if, over time, there's demand for it, I expect that it'll happen. We've scaled up parts of the computer industry by orders of magnitude in the past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym

In English, the word is used in two ways. In the narrow sense, an acronym is a sequence of letters (representing the initial letters of words in a phrase) when pronounced together as a single word, like NASA, NATO, or laser. In the broad sense, the term includes this kind of sequence when pronounced letter by letter (such as GDP or USA). Sources that differentiate the two often call the former acronyms and the latter initialisms[1][2][3] or alphabetisms. However, acronym is popularly used to refer to either concept,[4] and both senses of the term are attributed as far back as the 1940s.[5]

This is bullshit. Have they not heard of "the boy who cried wolf"? If they throw a meaningless label on everything warning about potential lead exposure, it loses meaning.

I don't disagree. I'm not justifying the policy, just telling you not to panic when you see one.

At this juncture, I would point out that !floridaman@lemmy.world also accepts "Florida Woman" submissions.

EDIT: Unfortunately, it appears to be fake.

https://x.com/i/trending/2033968232433127550

A wide range of products and businesses in California have scary looking Prop 65 warnings. Most restaurants have them posted. Just disregard it. They're internal California politicking, and don't represent a meaningful danger. If you see the text "known to the State of California", it's not a warning that you really need to worry about.

At one point, a group opposed to meat consumption tried to get a Prop 65 carcinogen warning stuck on all meat in California, though thankfully, that fell through.

One day, we will get our shit together in California, and you won't see stuff like this.