Dial Tone

4am@lemm.ee to Showerthoughts@lemmy.world – 194 points –

Sometime, probably close to 20 years ago, but perhaps more recently, you heard a dial tone for the last time and you didn’t even realize it would be.

64

I will never be silenced!

I’ve been meaning to ask, has anyone ever told you your F is a tad sharp for equal temperament? I’m not suggesting you change. I think your clean beat frequency makes you pretty cool just the way you are.

I first read it

has anyone ever told you F

And thought it was going to be a joke continuing OP's thought 🫡

I thought we were paying respects to the fallen dial tone

Did you... join during the Rexodus and wait all this time just for this joke? 🤣 (if there is a more mundane explanation, I don't want to know - I prefer this one:-)

I'm so angry today, that I didn't even catch the joke. It wasn't until I was making my own reply of confusion that I needed to copy the username of who said that, that I realized their name was /u/dialtone

Then I got their joke. I still don't know what a Rexodus is though.

Have you lost your mind!? Hehe, I could not resist doing it again:-P.

Rexodus = Reddit Exodus. Lemmy is several years old (>5), Kbin is newer (3.5 years?), and Mbin is a fork off of the Kbin code - the latter two being different code that both implement the ActivityPub (snooze... bored yet?:-P). Anyway, when the CEO of Reddit, Huffman (platform username: spez) pissed off a bunch of users, content creators, and 3rd party app devs, a lot of us came over here to the Fediverse at that time. And Rexodus is one of the names - the top one iirc - that we call that event that prompted us to leave there. It may lose all meaning soon again, i.e. when Reddit kills off the old.reddit access there will be another such migration wave, possibly larger than the first, and surely there were past such waves as well, but for now it means the time of the protests, so roughly one year ago. Which is also roughly the age of that person's account.

Oh. I came here a month ago because reddit took their IPO public, and within about 2 months, I had 3 different bans for 3 different comments. None of which were remotely offensive. This on a 10+ year old account that never had issues before the talks of IPO. In 2021 they even awarded me as being the 1% of top karma earners for the whole site.

One of the comments on reddit that I got banned for 3 days was "Awwwww, what a cute kitty!!!" on /r/aww. It was flagged for "Bullying and harassment" by a bot, and supposedly reviewed by a human on appeal who still agreed with the bot. Which is how I know that humans are not reviewing the human reviewed appeals.

And they were all similar to that in different subreddits.. With the 3rd one banning me outright a month ago.

You know what WAS all over my account though? Absurdist humor. Probably 90% of my account was nothing but absurdist humor. You know, the kind of comments that a HUMAN would have no offense over, but an AI bot may not be able to identify as not being serious.

The kind of comments that would result in glue as a pizza topping. Not that I'm responsible for that exact fiasco, but my comments might cause an AI to create a similar situation. I'm sure before all these bans came, my name was predesignated for ban as my account would muddy their whole plans of selling real people's comments to google for AI training.

I mean one of my comments was "WAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH WAH! WAH! WAH!" because somebody had mentioned Wario (from nintendo). What's an AI supposed to do with that? What are you, the Lemmy user reading this, supposed to do with that comment without context? But in regards to that exact post? It made sense and was a funny joke.........well, I thought it was funny anyways. It only got 10 upvotes.

So as they try to turn a profit on reddit, they will absolutely alienate their audience. This is ALREADY a disaster......but it kind of feels like 8:48am on 9/11. The second plane hadn't hit yet. There was already one disaster, but there was still a bunch more disasters to come that would continue to keep happening for years to come. That's where reddit is right now. 8:48am. If they kill old.reddit.com, that will be 8:56am (I think?).

And the worst part is, it's all self inflicted. Selling reddit user data to train AIs is just immediately the worst idea I can think of. It's reddit. Have you SEEN what gets talked about there???? Do you know what a cum shoebox is? I do. I wish I didn't. But I look forward to the day it's somehow misused by AI and reccomends people buy Nike for their own cum shoebox. It'll be especially funny because while 90% of the reddit userbase knows what a cum shoebox is, I'd say only 10% of society does. Coincidently enough, that 10% are also reddit users. I cannot WAIT for the news stories, where they have to dance around what happened, and how to report it without saying the word "cum".

I'm waiting for the day that Gemini shittymorphs me.

(a) a cum shoebox seems an awesome name for an alt account btw...😵

(b) though I've never heard of that phrase before - life is better here, without Reddit. Obligatory "fuck spez".

(c) abso-fucking-lutely everything else. The mods and app devs and highest-contributors saw all of that coming, more so than the regular userbase, as too did the techie Linux crowd who actually knew about AI stuff. More than 9/11 (where at the time we legit did not know about the other plane) it's like a tough guy walks into a bar and stares another tough guy in one of those movie scenes, and the music starts playing - the best time to have left was 5 minutes ago, the second best time is NOW, and if you wait for the whole area to erupt in violence, then it's too late for you, who will get caught up in the crossfire.

Spez was trying to follow in Elon Musk's footsteps, except even as dumb as Elon is, some of that actually made sense... for Twitter/X, which was a publicly traded company going private at the time (which it did succeed at), but then spez pulled a double stupidity by trying to do the same, for a private company trying to go public - it's not the same at all, especially in reverse like that!!?! Elon totally played his rival spez, who fell for it hook, line, & sinker - and took all of Reddit along for the ride. Now, spez will never become a billionaire like he planned, but also, the hard work of people who built up Reddit - people who created those subs, and filled it with content, is gone. Some of it came here, some went to Mastodon or X, most of it seemed to go literally nowhere as people are just swearing off "social media" altogether now. So all their knowledge, all those skills, all the shitposts and jokes, they say it to their irl family but we no longer get to hear it too. spez killed it all.

We have our mass-comnunity-banning Nazis here too but they are few and far between, mostly only in the political communities (in Reddit it's "subs", here it's "communities" -> ngl I still have to stop myself from saying the former:-P), and at least are humans rather than actual fucking bots. Bots wouldn't even be so bad, if they actually worked, and if they were honest about using them - "bot overlords" should become a phrase, it might even already be!:-P

The Fediverse is different here than there - e.g. you end up not in niche communities so much as generic ones, just to get enough content - but virtually all of us like it better. You can always use both for awhile if you aren't sure, but people mostly tend to be friendlier here (some very noticeable exceptions aside - btw you may want to block the instances hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, and lemmy.ml - unless you want to troll them and that can be fun too I guess:-P), and importantly the people here are actual human beings! (I guess you've heard the thing where Reddit posts the identical posts, with every comment inside of it word for word, to try to fake higher traffic stats) There are bots here too but clearly labeled as such.

Enjoy! I for one look forward to seeing shitposts from you!:-D

Dial tone still exists. Pretty much every business phone that’s most likely a VoIP line still generates dial tone to the user’s headset.

That’s just sparkling doot

Man, reading this sentence felt like a little electric jolt to the brain as it pieced the memes together.

Indeed, but most people will not hear it anymore as they don't use business phones, same as ordinary landline phones

You can pick up a payphone anywhere that still has them and most of them will play a dial tone, though those are starting to dwindle.

Last time I heard a dial tone was just a second ago when I pushed the speakerphone button on my Cisco ip phone.

It's actually fake, though. IP phones "play" that. Also, when on a call, they insert "comfort noise, that very low hiss you may hear, to augment the odd feeling most get with crystal clear VOIP audio.

It's only a dial tone if it comes from a land line

otherwise it's just sparkling audio lies

Well, it's generated in the same way as modern tones are in a telephone exchange, not a played sample. You can usually configure the tone frequencies (never tried on cisco ip phone, but asterisk allows it for its own generated tones and I had a cisco ATA that let you configure them).

So, unless we're limiting ourselves to the original mechanically generated dial-tones. I'll consider them for all intents and purposes to be one and the same.

E.g. for the UK on cisco/sipura ATAs you would use the configuration found here https://teamhelp.sipgate.co.uk/hc/en-gb/articles/208200875-UK-Regional-Settings-Cisco-Linksys-Sipura-Adaptors and as an example (dial tone)

Dial Tone: 350@-19,440@-22;10(*/0/1+2)

The comfort noise is also generally only added when there's no other noise on the call. This is to prevent you thinking you were disconnected when no-one is talking.

I still hear a dial-up modem when I close my eyes

But can you tell the difference between 28.8 and 33.6 just by listening?

I don't understand the need for these. I can't read text faster than 300 baud anyway.

Wait until this guy learns about webtv, and its ability to load a 320x480 jpg in a little under 10 minutes.

We tech support folks used to be able to discern a legit US Robotics 56K over a software modem. By listening to our customers connect.

I used to confuse my 56k modem in 1998. I used to pick up the phone and make modem noises. It used to "connect", and then IMMEDIATELY spew out a diarrea of errors that it wasn't connected.

I miss the 90s....

300, 1200, 2400, 9600, 19.2, and 56k yes.

I don't remember 28.8 and 33.6 sounds, though. I guess my life has been for nothing :(

Ngl I wish I was of the generation where I could've acquired this skill. As it is, I just have the faint childhood memory of our home modem. (In my 30s, for reference.)

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I have a landline, I hear a dial tone every time I pick up the phone.

Low-key way of informing everyone that nobody ever calls your landline.

Or that they're the ones making all the calls.

if you have tinnitus it never really stopped

Sorry to nitpick... Tinnitus is more likely to introduce high-frequency sound than the 440Hz dial tone. If anything, that is the one frequency that old-timey phone techs would eventually struggle to hear...

On a similar note for parents: At some point, you did/will pick your child up and then put them down for the last time.

I have a captain crunch whistle so I hear it anytime I want to!

You were one of those people.

It is still wild to me that a cheap toy was able to "hack" the phone systems back then.

What's even worse is in some countries the file tone was a pretty good match for a guitar note so some musicians would use it as a starting point to tune their guitars.

True, I remember tuning my guitar to it. Thanks for bringing back that memory.

I heard it last night in a movie. From an actual phone, it's been a few years, but less than 10. EDIT: actually, less than 3 years as I had to fax paperwork to get my internet. Japan!

My phone makes a dial tone the moment I press a single key on the keypad to make a call. 🤷🏻‍♂️

It's not the same as picking up a landline; it's just the phone app adding it probably to let you know you're dialing.

Are you sure about that? Dial tone is a sound you hear before dialing, not the sound you hear when you press a key.

I'm old enough to know what a dial tone sounds like. On this phone's phone app once you hit a key, it'll make the key tone and then start making the droning dial tone sound until you finish dialing or hit the back button to cancel.

The only reason I can think of for them to put this in the app is to let you know you've got it open and some numbers have been pressed to prevent butt dialing. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I don’t know. I have several old phones and a touch tone dialing adapter. I like the experience. I can say with high confidence that I’ll hear a dial tone in the future.

Plus, watch any movie from the seventies through the nineties that includes a phone, and you’ll probably hear a dial tone.

Sometimes I pick up the phone behind my desk and just listen to the dial tone. Having a voip line from my fiber internet provider is cheap. Sometimes I’ll use it to connect my old computers to the line and dial into the few remaining bbs.

My work uses VoIP and when I call anyone I hear a dial tone.

My office phone has a dial tone. It's VOIP but when you pick up the receiver it BOOOOOOOPs... So I think it was last week I heard one...

Hopefully not for the last time...

Same for the R2D2-56k gatekeeper of the internet; master of the slow reveal.