Well, I once got a callback from a mobile operator support rep, and she was speaking so perfectly (tone, pauses, the way she built sentences, everything), that our conversation came out like:
Booooring! Give me human. Human operator. O-pe-ra-tor! Person!
I'm sorry, but you will have to deal with the fact I'm real lol
!!!
I don't know what she was doing at a call center, because that was a professional voiceover or advertisement level
I am currently living in a country where I already know enough local language to do the taxes, but from conversational point of view I look like a 5 y.o. kid: sometimes people wait for me to finish poorly building a phrase while they already know what that will be.
How would even a greatest text to speech or speech to speech LLM help me? Would I pull out my phone and start talking through it at a job interview? If I was single, would I do it say "hey guuuurl!" into my phone if I wanted to approach a girl an a cafe? (well, that would be either really weird, or funny in a good way). My point is, it would still be a crutch, and I don't want to ba a person with a crutch, so I have to learn the language myself.
PS llms are helping me on a daily basis, because what google made for translating sentences, that openai and anthropic did on a more complex level - now I can ask: "the person said this - why did they say it in such a weird way?". It was a "question to a private tutor" territory before
"There is a misconception of this being an easy thing to do. It’s not. Administration is not an easy path and not somehow evading all responsibilities. It's hard..." - you pay for your coffee. Barista gets out of the coffee shop, comes back in 5 minutes chewing a bagel: "It's hard to make coffee these days! Btw, we're out of beans"
Yeah, apple always hated the "(any device) is a thing with folders and files inside" paradigm - it was always "I got this app that plays music, I don't know how". So it would be crazy if they would just make any device show the contents of the drive.
I was selling smartphones and smartphone accessories when they were just emerging, ending PDA era, and we had FM transmitters - it is powered from car, you plug in your device through aux, and the transmitter sends out the sound in FM, so you can catch it on your effin radio (the frequency were either fixed or selectable). This was the future!
Yes, that's a risk, I'm just saying the eastern part of Russia is not exactly winning by being under Moscow. They have a major part of Russian's heavy industry, oil, ores, lumber, and several million cities packed with universities, so they have an initial set of everything to "live independently". But whoever is nearby will always look at those resources - material or human.
Right after the "Crimea referendum", some guys in Saint-Petersburg tried to start a referendum for the independence of the North-West, and got majorly fucked for treason. Guess the "democracy" wasn't a democracy enough
North-west is a self-sustained region: machinery, ageiculture, large port, a 5-mil city you name it. We could live separately and be fine
Russia is called a federation, but in the reality, power of regions were largely taking away. So it is about sending taxes to Moscow and getting shit in return.
People are more "European", before war a large part of more active/younger people were shopping/taking vacations in Finland, going to Estonia, or travel further through those countries. Same with Finns buying stuff in Russia or partying in SPb.
With all the general closeness, I absolutely can see Saint-Petersburg and the region being a separate country with close ties (no-visa, EU member?) with Nordic and Baltic countries.
But I guess it's not happening, and by writing the things above I became a terrorist, "promoting rebellion and dissolution of the Russian state"
"I'm an old man, and I am a trusting person. Best trusting person there is. You gotta trust young people, they are the future of our great country! And this highwayman took advantage of it, he robbed me, he robbed America! And he's the one who took that papers, you'll hear about 'em, not me!"
Well, I once got a callback from a mobile operator support rep, and she was speaking so perfectly (tone, pauses, the way she built sentences, everything), that our conversation came out like:
I don't know what she was doing at a call center, because that was a professional voiceover or advertisement level