I’ve personally lived in places where the closest convenience store was 2.25 km, and the grocery store was nearly 18km, as well as places where a convenience store was literally a part of my building, and grocery stores were walkable distances.

The U.S. is enormous and varied. Take a look at truesizeof and compare the U.S. and Europe (don’t forget to add Alaska and Hawaii - they won’t be included in the contiguous states). Consider how different London is from rural Romania.

The president’s “official act” would be issuing the pardon. The referenced Supreme Court decision just means it would not be a “crime” for the president to issue said pardon, not that the pardon would stand.

The president can’t intervene at the state level. From americanbar.org:

A U.S. president has broad but not unlimited powers to pardon. For example, a president cannot pardon someone for a state crime.

This ignores the first part of my response - if I, as a legitimate user, might get caught up in one of these trees, either by mistakenly approving a bot, or approving a user who approves a bot, and I risk losing my account if this happens, what is my incentive to approve anyone?

Additionally, let’s assume I’m a really dumb bot creator, and I keep all of my bots in the same tree. I don’t bother to maintain a few legitimate accounts, and I don’t bother to have random users approve some of the bots. If my entire tree gets nuked, it’s still only a few weeks until I’m back at full force.

With a very slightly smarter bot creator, you also won’t have a nice tree:

As a new user looking for an approver, how do I know I’m not requesting (or otherwise getting) approved by a bot? To appear legitimate, they would be incentivized to approve legitimate users, in addition to bots.

A reasonably intelligent bot creator would have several accounts they directly control and use legitimately (this keeps their foot in the door), would mix reaching out to random users for approval with having bots approve bots, and would approve legitimate users in addition to bots. The tree ends up as much more of a tangled graph.

This ignores the first part of my response - if I, as a legitimate user, might get caught up in one of these trees, either by mistakenly approving a bot, or approving a user who approves a bot, and I risk losing my account if this happens, what is my incentive to approve anyone?

Additionally, let’s assume I’m a really dumb bot creator, and I keep all of my bots in the same tree. I don’t bother to maintain a few legitimate accounts, and I don’t bother to have random users approve some of the bots. If my entire tree gets nuked, it’s still only a few weeks until I’m back at full force.

With a very slightly smarter bot creator, you also won’t have a nice tree:

As a new user looking for an approver, how do I know I’m not requesting (or otherwise getting) approved by a bot? To appear legitimate, they would be incentivized to approve legitimate users, in addition to bots.

A reasonably intelligent bot creator would have several accounts they directly control and use legitimately (this keeps their foot in the door), would mix reaching out to random users for approval with having bots approve bots, and would approve legitimate users in addition to bots. The tree ends up as much more of a tangled graph.

I think this would be too limiting for humans, and not effective for bots.

As a human, unless you know the person in real life, what’s the incentive to approve them, if there’s a chance you could be banned for their bad behavior?

As a bot creator, you can still achieve exponential growth - every time you create a new bot, you have a new approver, so you go from 1 -> 2 -> 4 -> 8. Even if, on average, you had to wait a week between approvals, in 25 weeks (less that half a year), you could have over 33 million accounts. Even if you play it safe, and don’t generate/approve the maximal accounts every week, you’d still have hundreds of thousands to millions in a matter of weeks.

If someone is consistently falling for phishing emails (real, or from the IT department), shouldn’t that person eventually be fired? Isn’t that a punishment?

If there is neither a punishment nor a reward, what is the incentive to learn? Some people may not need one. Many others do.

I agree that a single failure resulting in the loss of significant income might be harsh, but I think there needs to be a way to convince people to take the issue seriously, and a punishment of some kind is therefore always warranted (e.g. eventual firing).

You can balance out the issue by creating a reward system as well, e.g. if you report all of the test emails sent to you in a year (i.e. not just ignore them), your bonus is increased by X% or something. Similarly, if you report an actual phishing email, your bonus is increased by some percent, even if you initially fell for it. I think it is possible to foster a consciousness and honest culture, with a system that includes punishments.

In a scientific context, a hypothesis is a guess, based on current knowledge, including existing laws and theories. It explicitly leaves room to be wrong, and is intended to be tested to determine correctness (to be a valid hypothesis, it must be testable). The results of testing the hypothesis (i.e. running an experiment) may support or disprove existing laws/theories.

A theorem is something that is/can be proven from axioms (accepted/known truths). These are pretty well relegated to math and similar disciplines (e.g. computer science), that aren’t dealing with “reality,” so much as “ideas.” In the real world, a perfect right triangle can’t exist, so there’s no way to look at the representation of a triangle and prove anything about the lengths of its sides and their relations to each other, and certainly no way to extract truth that applies to all other right triangles. But in the conceptual world of math, it’s trivial to describe a perfect right triangle, and prove from simple axioms that the length of the hypotenuse is equal to the square root of the sum of the squares of the remaining two sides (the Pythagorean Theorem).

Note that while theorems are generally accepted as truth, they are still sometimes disproved - errors in proofs are possible, and even axioms can be found to be false, shaking up any theorems that were built from them.

A law describes what happens, a theory explains why. The law of gravity says that if you drop an item, it will fall to the ground. The theory of relativity explains that the “fall” occurs due to the curvature of space time.

Are they Bluetooth headphones? If so, check the protocols supported by your phone, and by the headphones, e.g. aptX vs LDAC vs SBC. It’s possible that it’s not a “downgrade” on the new phone, but rather an upgrade to a better protocol, but unfortunately not one compatible with your headphones, so you end up using a low quality fallback.

You may also want to check your settings, and see if you can select a specific protocol. Sometimes a lesser protocol is chosen by default, if the better protocol uses more battery. This may be available to you in the phone settings, or as an option in an app for the headphones (e.g. my Anker Soundcore app allows choosing between two protocols).

If your drive is the bottleneck, this will make things worse. If you want to proceed:

You’re already using ffmpeg to get the sequence of frames, correct? You can add the -ss and -t flags to give a start time and a duration. Generate a list of offsets by dividing the length of video by the number of processes you want, and feed them through gnu parallel to your ffmpeg command.

My first thought was similar - there might be some hardware acceleration happening for the jpgs that isn’t for the other formats, resulting in a CPU bottleneck. A modern harddrive over USB3.0 should be capable of hundreds of megabits to several gigabits per second. It seems unlikely that’s your bottleneck (though you can feel free to share stats and correct the assumption if this is incorrect - if your pngs are in the 40 megabyte range, your 3.5 per second would be pretty taxing).

If you are seeing only 1 CPU core at 100%, perhaps you could split the video clip, and process multiple clips in parallel?

If your computer is compromised to the point someone can read the key, read words 2-5 again.

This is FUD. Even if Signal encrypted the local data, at the point someone can run a process on your system, there’s nothing to stop the attacker from adding a modified version of the Signal app, updating your path, shortcuts, etc to point to the malicious version, and waiting for you to supply the pin/password. They can siphon the data off then.

Anyone with actual need for concern should probably only be using their phone anyway, because it cuts your attack surface by half (more than half if you have multiple computers), and you can expect to be in possession/control of your phone at all times, vs a computer that is often left unattended.

it doesn’t unravel the underlying complexity of what it does… these alternative syntaxes tend to make some easy cases easy, but they have no idea what to do with more complicated cases

This can be said of any higher-level language, or API. There is always a cost to abstraction. Binary -> Assembly -> C -> Python. As you go up that chain, many things get easier, but some things become impossible. You always have the option to drop down, though, and these regex tools are no different. Software development, sysops, devops, etc are full of compromises like this.

“Desktop publishing” is the category of software you want. I’ve not used it, but I believe Scribus is the standard FOSS tool for this. If you want a simple graphical way to make your album, this is the way.

Many people have metnioned LaTex - I would not recommend it for this purpose. LaTex, while powerful, will have a steep learning curve, and isn’t really made for artistic tasks - its purpose is for writing technical papers. From literally the first two sentences on the project site:

LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system; it includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents.

It’s probably possible to make a beautiful photo album with LaTex, but without a lot of work, it’s more likely to come out looking like a calculator manual.

I think it is less a question of whether the voice sounds like Scarlett Johansson, as that is subjective and arbitrary (e.g. assume you could objectively measure the similarity, what’s the acceptable cut off - 80%? 90%?). The same is true for the uniqueness of her voice.

I think the real question will come down to intention. They clearly wanted her voice. Did they intentionally attempt to replicate it when they couldn’t have the real thing? If so, there is precedent that would suggest they could be in a little trouble here, e.g. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-05-09-me-238-story.html

This kind of reminds me of Crispin Glover, from Back to the Future. He tried to negotiate a higher pay for the second movie, so the producers hired a different actor to play the role, but deliberately made the actor up to look like Glover. In response, Glover sued the producers and won. It set a critical precedent for Hollywood, about using someone’s likeness without consent.

The article mentions they reached out to her two days before the launch - if she had said ‘OK,’ there’s no way they could have even recorded what they needed from her, let alone trained the model in time for the presentation. So they must have had a Scarlett Johansson voice ready to go. Other than training the model on movies (really not ideal for a high quality voice model), how would they have gotten the recordings they needed?

If they hired a “random” voice actress, they might not run into issues. But if at any point they had a job listing, a discussion with a talent manager, or anything else where they mentioned wanting a “Scarlett Johansson sound-alike,” they might have dug themselves a nice hole here.

Specifically regarding your question about hiring a voice actor that sounds like someone else - this is commonly done to replace people for cartoons. I don’t think it’s an issue if you are playing a character. But if you deliberately impersonate a person, there might be some trouble.

Not sure if it’s what you’re looking for, but lirc has a database. Instructions for contributing files can be found here, files should adhere to the checklist here.

Considering that you are not using their software, was the laptop worth the premium you paid for it, vs buying from Clevo directly?

I figured the hardware and software coming from the same vendor would yield the best results, and wanted to support a company that supports right-to-repair, and Linux in general. But ultimately I found Pop!_OS buggy and had performance issues, so I’m not using their OS, and their firmware is causing issues with my SSD, so I’d like to be off of it as well (but was told "there’s no process for reverting to the proprietary firmware“ for the specific model I have). I could have bought a Clevo directly, saving hundreds of dollars, and probably had a better working machine.

Would not recommend System76. I’ve had many issues with my machine (primarily software, related to their buggy custom firmware, and Pop!_OS, until I ditched that for stock Ubuntu). Their support has been terrible - rather similar to OP’s, actually. I’ve had the laptop for about 2.5 years, and I’m checking practically daily for something to replace it.