What a heartbreaking way to end that article... but, what a way to make the message stick.
I was wondering if that missing period was intentional…
An Alabama landline that keeps ringing
51–60 of 113 posts
Re: An Alabama landline that keeps ringing
#52800-GOOG-411 was planned to do a similar thing; the difference is that was online for 3 years and unceremoniously shut down, versus this one which is still in operation 72 years later.
How about calling 1-800-CHATGPT (1-800-242-8478) now ? Wonder how many queries which the university is calling can now be automated
Where’s the joy in that? We don’t have to replace humans for everything.
Re: An Alabama landline that keeps ringing
#53800-GOOG-411 was planned to do a similar thing; the difference is that was online for 3 years and unceremoniously shut down, versus this one which is still in operation 72 years later.
Even their SMS api (GOOGLE) was shut down. That was just an automated google search and didn’t have to be staffed. Used it all the time to ask a trivia question or convert some units or get nearby locations. Like text pizza and my zip code and it would reply with 3 names and phone numbers. It made dumb phones smart.
Yeah but... who still uses dumbphones?
Re: An Alabama landline that keeps ringing
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what? Do you mean it is not analog and latency is higher as a result? Then yes, it matters. I hate latency in voice calls, I already went into arguments because of that. I remember in a remote work meeting, we had a frantic discussion, with some disagreements and strong opinions, but it was productive and purely technical, nothing personal. But then someone angrily told me "stop interrupting me!", the thing is, I…
> Do you mean it is not analog and latency is higher as a result? Digital teleophony doesn't imply significant latency. PRI calling (T1/ISDN) is digital, but the sampling delay is minimal, and it's sent one sample at a time, so there's no packetization delay. VoIP tends to run a codec with sampling/encoding delays, and tends to be at least 20ms packetization, and then you have a jitter buffer and probably input and o…
The main problem is packet switching instead of circuit switching. Internet sucks for voice
Re: An Alabama landline that keeps ringing
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a severe reach to say that AI can provide human connection. At best, it can provide the illusion, for some. And for those people, I'm not going to say that that's not valuable or legitimate for them. But it's pushing it one step too far to imply that that's a good idea for everyone.
God help us if we determine there is nothing special about human cognition. A lot of people are putting a lot of faith in what amounts to the soul. I’m not at all sure it exists.
Both can be true. There can be nothing physically or metaphysically "special" about human cognition, and at the same time, we can also be very, very far away from creating even a holistic facsimile. We've got echoes of it in statistical, predictive models, though, and that's shoved the idea into the discourse far before its time.
Re: An Alabama landline that keeps ringing
#56Somewhere someone is probably still working as an elevator operator too. Like when I was a kid I had a job shoveling coal into a boiler. And someone is still manufacturing buggy whips. The future is unevenly distributed. Call Bunny Watson and ask her, she'll confirm.
Elevator operators are pretty common at arena events. I think to help ensure the elevators aren't under or overloaded. Of course, observation towers tend to have elevator operators too.
I think the GP is referring to manually operated elevators, in which a human inside the elevator pulls a lever to tell the elevator when to move. When I was a kid, my dad worked in a building with a semi-automated elevator that had floor buttons and an automatic return to the ground floor, but still had the lever. There was an operator inside on weekdays, but if you came in on the weekend you had to operate the elevator yourself.
Re: An Alabama landline that keeps ringing
#57We got an old landline big red phone and we had it for quite a while using Magic Jack. It was a fun anachronism to have and use and give out to friends as a number we will always hear if it rings. I'm going to get it again when we move in a few weeks to a new house. As my friend Nick described it when we got rid of it- "It feels like the world lost a bit of whimsy". The world we live in needs whimsy.
The Red Phone
https://www.amazon.com/Desk-Telephone-2500-Analog-Phone/dp/B...
Re: An Alabama landline that keeps ringing
#58Somewhere someone is probably still working as an elevator operator too. Like when I was a kid I had a job shoveling coal into a boiler. And someone is still manufacturing buggy whips. The future is unevenly distributed. Call Bunny Watson and ask her, she'll confirm.
elevator operators are still in use in NYC
Re: An Alabama landline that keeps ringing
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Elevator operators are pretty common at arena events. I think to help ensure the elevators aren't under or overloaded. Of course, observation towers tend to have elevator operators too.
I think the GP is referring to manually operated elevators, in which a human inside the elevator pulls a lever to tell the elevator when to move. When I was a kid, my dad worked in a building with a semi-automated elevator that had floor buttons and an automatic return to the ground floor, but still had the lever. There was an operator inside on weekdays, but if you came in on the weekend you had to operate the eleva…
I think it was in Lima, not many years ago (6? 8?) that I saw in a federal building the elevators were manually operated. They had physically disabled persons in charge of them, so I guess it was a way of integrating some of those jobs.
Re: An Alabama landline that keeps ringing
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even their SMS api (GOOGLE) was shut down. That was just an automated google search and didn’t have to be staffed. Used it all the time to ask a trivia question or convert some units or get nearby locations. Like text pizza and my zip code and it would reply with 3 names and phone numbers. It made dumb phones smart.
Yeah but... who still uses dumbphones?
Ever been in an airport with no WiFi and overloaded cell towers? Text doesn't use much bandwidth no matter how it's transmitted (SMS, RCS, or data).