I, too, have (or as you can probably guess from the title of this post, had) a Facebook account. I only ever used it for two purposes.
Still, every now and then I get a glimpse of a post by the people I actively chose to follow. Specifically a friend was pondering about the behaviour of people who do happy birthday posts on profiles of deceased people. Like, if you have not kept up with someone enough to know that they are dead, why would you feel the need to post congratulations on their profile pages.
I wrote a reply which is replicated below. It is not accurate as it is a translation and I no longer have access to the original post.
Some of these might come via recommendations by AI assistants. Maybe in the future AI bots from people who themselves are dead carry on posting birthday congratulations on profiles of other dead people. A sort of a social media for the deceased, if you will.
Roughly one minute later my account was suspended. Let that be a lesson to you all. Do not mention the Dead Internet Theory, for doing so threatens Facebook's ad revenue and is thus taboo. (A more probable explanation is that using the word "death" is prohibited by itself regardless of context, leading to idiotic phrasing in the style of "Person X was born on [date] and d!ed [other date]" that you see all over IG, FB and YT nowadays.)
Apparently to reactivate the account I would need to prove that "[I am] a human being". That might be a tall order given that there are days when I doubt that myself.
The reactivation service is designed in the usual deceptive way where it does not tell you all the things you need to do in advance. Instead it bounces you from one task to another in the hopes that sunk cost fallacy makes you submit to ever more egregious demands. I got out when they demanded a full video selfie where I look around different directions. You can make up your own theories as to why Meta, a known advocate for generative AI and all that garbage, would want a high resolution scans of people's faces. I mean, surely they would not use it for AI training without paying a single cent for usage rights to the original model. Right? Right?
The suspension email ends with this ultimatum.
If you think we suspended your account by mistake, you have 180 days to appeal our decision. If you miss this deadline your account will be permanently disabled.
Well, mr Zuckerberg, my response is the following:
Close it! Delete it! Burn it down to the ground! I'd do it myself this very moment, but I can't delete the account without reactivating it first.
Let it also be noted that this post is a much better way of proving that I am a human being than some video selfie thing that could be trivially faked with genAI.
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If you maintain a Linux audio settings component, we now have a way to globally enable/disable mono audio for users who do not want stereo separation of their audio (for example, due to hearing loss in one ear). Read on for the details on how to do this.
BackgroundMost systems support stereo audio via their default speaker output or 3.5mm analog connector. These devices are exposed as stereo devices to applications, and applications typically render stereo content to these devices.
Visual media use stereo for directional cues, and music is usually produced using stereo effects to separate instruments, or provide a specific experience.
It is not uncommon for modern systems to provide a “mono audio” option that allows users to have all stereo content mixed together and played to both output channels. The most common scenario is hearing loss in one ear.
PulseAudio and PipeWire have supported forcing mono audio on the system via configuration files for a while now. However, this is not easy to expose via user interfaces, and unfortunately remains a power-user feature.
ImplementationRecently, Julian Bouzas implemented a WirePlumber setting to force all hardware audio outputs (MR 721 and 769). This lets the system run in stereo mode, but configures the audioadapter around the device node to mix down the final audio to mono.
This can be enabled using the WirePlumber settings via API, or using the command line with:
wpctl settings node.features.audio.mono trueThe WirePlumber settings API allows you to query the current value as well as clear the setting and restoring to the default state.
I have also added (MR 2646 and 2655) a mechanism to set this using the PulseAudio API (via the messaging system). Assuming you are using pipewire-pulse, PipeWire’s PulseAudio emulation daemon, you can use pa_context_send_message_to_object() or the command line:
pactl send-message /core pipewire-pulse:force-mono-output trueThis API allows for a few things:
This feature will become available in the next release of PipeWire (both 1.4.10 and 1.6.0).
I will be adding a toggle in Pavucontrol to expose this, and I hope that GNOME, KDE and other desktop environments will be able to pick this up before long.
Hit me up if you have any questions!
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