FOSTA-SESTA

Content warning: mentions/links to data on sex trafficking, and murders of women & sex workers.

I know this site gets zero traffic, but regardless I regret that I didn’t take the energy to write about FOSTA-SESTA before FOSTA passed. FOSTA-SESTA is anti-sex-worker legislature posing as anti-trafficking legislature. It’s a bipartisan pile of shit, and the party split among the two dissenting votes in the FOSTA passage was also bipartisan. Since the passage of FOSTA, Craiglist has shut down all personals1, reddit has shut down a number of subreddits, and today Backpage was seized. I would implore anyone who gives a shit about sex workers and/or the open internet to follow Melissa Gira Grant on Twitter.

If you don’t support sex workers, frankly I don’t want you reading my blog. But if you’re here anyway, it’s worth pointing out that the absurdity laid out by FOSTA is a threat to the open web at large, which almost certainly explains why Facebook supported it. It’s not just sex workers who oppose this thing, NearlyFreeSpeech.net, the host I use for all of my sites, had a pointed and clear blog post outlining how frightening it is.

Obviously, it’s worth listening to sex workers on this matter, which nobody did. But it’s also worth listening to law enforcement, the folks who are actually trying to prevent trafficking. And, who would have guessed, law enforcement actually works with sites like Craigslist and Backpage to crack down on the truly villainous aspects of the sex trade. Idaho, just last month, for instance. Meanwhile, having outlets where sex workers can openly communicate and vet their clients saves their lives — when Craiglist opened its erotic services section, female homicide dropped by over 17 percent. That is to say that so many sex workers are routinely murdered, that helping them vet clients significantly reduces the overall female homicide rate.

This whole thing is misguided and cruel2, and I don’t really know what to do about it at this point. But listening to people who are closely following the impacts is a start. It’s a death sentence for sex workers, and a death sentence for the open web, and anyone who cares about either needs to keep abreast of the impact as it unfolds.


Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp has been available stateside for about a week now, and it is… strange. This post on ‘Every Game I’ve Finished’ (written by Mathew Kumar) mirrors a lot of my thoughts – I would recommend reading it before reading this. I haven’t really played a lot of Animal Crossing games before, and I tend to avoid free-to-play1 games. The aforementioned post is largely predicated on the fact that Pocket Camp doesn’t fully deliver on either experience. Which, I guess I wouldn’t really know, but something definitely feels odd about the game to me.

Early in his post, Kumar states that ‘[Pocket Camp] makes every single aspect of it an obvious transaction’, which is comically true. My socialist mind has a hard time seeing the game as anything but a vicious parody of capitalism. My rational mind, of course, knows this is not true because the sort of exploitative mundaneness that coats every aspect of the game is the norm in real life.

This becomes even more entertaining when you observe how players set prices in their Markets. For the uninitiated, when your character has a surplus of a thing, they can offer that thing for sale to other players. The default price is its base value, but you can adjust the sale price down a small amount or up a large amount. Eventually you’ll likely just max out your inventory and be forced to put things up for sale in this Market. More eventually, you’ll max out the Market and be forced to just throw stuff away without getting money for it. But in the meantime, people (strangers and friends) will see what you have to offer and be given the opportunity to buy it.

For the most part, if you need an item (I use the term ‘need’ loosely), it is common, and either hopping around or waiting a couple of hours will get you that item. So there should be no reason to charge a 1000% markup on a couple of apples. But (in my experience thus far) that is far more common than to see items being sold for the minimum (or even their nominal value). I don’t know if it’s just players latching on to the predatory nature of free-to-play games or what, and I’m really curious to know if it works. I’ve been listing things in small quantities (akin to what an animal requests) for the minimum price, and while I’ve sold quite a few items, most still go to waste – I can’t imagine anything selling at ridiculous markups.

So far this description of a capitalist hellscape has probably come off as though I feel negatively toward the game, which I really don’t. To return to Kumar, he leaves his post stating that he hasn’t given up on the game yet, but ‘like Miitomo, the first time I miss a day it’s all over.’ This comparison to Miitomo is apt, and a perfect segue into why I’m invested in this minor dystopia.

Miitomo (another Nintendo mobile thing) is really just a game where you… decorate a room and try on clothes. You answer questions and play some pachinko-esque minigames in order to win decorations and clothes, but it’s basically glorified dress-up. It seems like mostly young people playing it, but it’s also just a wonderful outlet for baby trans folks, people questioning gender, and any number of people seeking a little escape. I find Miitomo to be very valuable and underrated, and a lot of the joy Miitomo brings me is echoed by Pocket Camp.

While the underlying concept behind Pocket Camp is that you’re a black market butterfly dealer or whatever, there’s also a major ‘dollhouse’ component to it. You buy and receive cute clothes and change your outfits, which has no bearing on the game. You buy things to decorate your campsite which (effectively2) has no bearing on the game. You can drop 10,000 dollars bells on a purse that does nothing but sit in the dirt looking pretty. I guess it’s hypocritical to praise this meaningless materialism, but it’s a nice escape. A little world to mess around in and make your own.

I don’t know how long I’ll obsessively island-hop the world of Pocket Camp, but I think that (like Miitomo) once the novelty wears off, I’ll still pop in to play around with my little world when it occurs to me to do so. And the whole time, in my mind, it will remain a perfectly barbed satire on capitalism.


Speech synthesis

When I was in elementary school, I learned much of my foundation in computing on the Commodore 64. It was a great system to learn on, with lots of tools available and easy ways to get ‘down to the wire’, so to speak. Though it was hard to see just how limited the machines were compared with what the future held, some programs really stood out for how completely impossible they seemed1. One such program was S.A.M. – the Software Automated Mouth, my first experience with synthesized speech2.

Speech synthesis has come a long way since. It’s built into current operating systems, it can be had in IC form for under $9, and it’s becoming increasingly present in day-to-day life. I routinely use Windows’ built in speech synthesizer along with NVDA as part of my accessibility checking regimen. But I’m also increasingly becoming dismayed by the egregious use of speech synthesis when natural human speech would not only suffice but be better in every regard. Synthesis has the advantage of being able to (theoretically) say anything while not paying a person to do the job. I’m seeing more and more instances where this doesn’t pan out, and the robot is truly bad at its job to boot.

Three examples, all train-related (I suppose I spend a lot of time on trains): the new 7000 series DC Metro cars, the new MARC IV series coach cars, and the announcements at DC’s Union Station. None of these need to be synthesized. They’re all essentially announcing destinations – they have very limited vocabularies and don’t make use of the theoretical ability to say anything. Union Station’s robot occasionally announces delays and the like, but often announcements beyond the norm revert to a human. Metro and MARC trains only announce stops and have demonstrated no capacity for supplemental speech. Where old and new cars are paired, conductors/operators still need to make their own station stop announcements.

So these synthesizers don’t seem to have a compelling reason to exist. It could be argued that human labor is now potentially freed up, but given the robots’ limited vocabularies and grammars, the same thing could be accomplished with human voice recordings. I can’t imagine that the cost of hiring a voice actor with software to patch the speech together into meaningful grammar would be appreciably more expensive than the robot. In fact, before the 7000 series Metro cars, WMATA used recordings to announce door openings and closings; they replaced these recordings in 2006, and the voice actor was rewarded with a $10 fare card3.

Aside from simply not being necessary, the robots aren’t good at their job. This is, of course, bad programming – human error. But it feels like the people in charge of the voices are so far detached from the final product that they don’t realize how much they’re failing. The MARC IV coaches are acceptable, but their grammar is bizarre. When the train is coming to a station stop, an acceptable thing to announce might be ‘arriving at Dickerson’, which is in fact what the conductors tend to say. The train, instead, says ‘this train stops at Dickerson’, which at face value says nothing beyond that the train will in fact stop there at some point. It’s bad information, communicated poorly. Union Station’s robot has acceptable grammar, but she pronounces the names of stations completely wrong. Speech synthesizers generally have two components: the synthesizer that knows how to make phonemes (the sounds that make up our speech), and a layer that translates the words in a given language to these phonemes. My old buddy S.A.M. had the S.A.M. speech core, and Reciter which looked up word parts in a table to convert to phonemes. This all had to fit into considerably less than 64K, so it wasn’t perfect, and (if memory serves), one could override Reciter with direct phonemes for mispronounced words. Apple’s say command (well, their Speech Synthesis API) allows on-the-fly switching between text and phoneme input using [[inpt TEXT]] and [[inpt PHON]] within a speech string4. So again, given just how limited the robot’s vocabulary is (none of these trains are adding station stops with any regularity), someone should have been able to review what the robot says and suggest overrides. Half the time, this robot gets so confused that she sounds like GLaDOS in her death throes.

Which brings me to my final point – the robots simply aren’t human. Even when they are pronouncing things well, they can be hard to understand. On the flipside, the DC Metro robot sounds realistic enough that she creeps me the hell out, which I can only assume is the auditory equivalent of the uncanny valley. I suppose a synthesized voice could have neutrality as an advantage – a grumpy human is probably more off-putting than a lifeless machine. But again, this is solvable with human recordings. I cannot imagine any robot being more comforting than a reasonably calm human.

Generally speaking, we’re reducing the workforce more and more, replacing the workforce with automation, machinery. It’s a necessary progression, though I’m not sure we’re prepared to deal with the unemployment consequences. It’s easy to imagine speech synthesis as a readily available extension of this concept – is talking a necessary job? But human speech is seemingly being replaced in instances where the speaking does not actually replace a human’s job and/or a human recording would easily suffice. In some instances, speaking being replaced is a mere component of another job being replaced – take self-checkout machines (which tend to be human recordings despite the fact that grocery store inventories are far more volatile than train routes, hence ‘place your… object… in the bag’). But I feel like I’m seeing more and more instances that seem to use speech synthesis which is demonstrably worse than a human voice, and seemingly serves no purpose (presumably beyond lining someone’s pockets).