An Alabama landline that keeps ringing
oxfordamerican.org
oxfordamerican.org
I had the opportunity to work the Foy Desk a few times during my undergrad at Auburn in the early 2000s - mostly as a volunteer while the regular workers would be in meetings. At the time we had a multi-page list of common questions and answers, the Internet (as it was then), as well as access to university computer systems for things like class schedule lookups.
The most common questions I got then were from other students, most around when a certain class started or where it was located. This is was the early 2000s and, while a lot of this was available via OASIS (the Auburn student system) for any student, many either didn't have the computer savvy to use it or ... didn't have a computer at home at all!
The most unusual call I took was from a student who was lost in Haley Center (the largest building on Auburn's campus - at the time, not sure about now as I haven't been back in decades - and somewhat difficult to navigate if you aren't familiar with its layout). The poor kid sounded absolutely panicked. I actually had to pull up a map and walk the him turn-by-turn until he found the main hallway again.
As an aside, it's neat to see a few other Auburn alums on here. WDE!
Talking about being lost in the Haley center gave me flashbacks to freshman year. I still have dreams sometimes of trying to find the stairwell/elevator bank and the layout keeps changing like the backrooms.
Ugh, yeah, some of those hallways especially in 1st and 4th quadrants where there aren't very many classrooms and not many people can have a very, very liminal space feel to them. I can totally understand how he got lost in there.
Literally nothing about that building makes any sense unless you stand on your head until you almost pass out. :D
Jim “Dean Foy” Foy was a wonderful human being.
I got to know him a little through Rotary in the last years of his life because I had an off and on honor of chauffeuring him to and from meetings in the Grand Caravan. Even got to bring my boy along on the days he didn’t have school.
He was an Auburn University legend — the Foy Information Desk was created when they remodeled Foy Hall. [1]
Anyway, ironically Jim graduated from Tuscaloosa despite his Auburn being his familial allegiance. The Boll Weevil drove his parents out of Eufala and to Tuscaloosa for work and so he went to college there.
During the war he flew Corsairs and told me and the boy about bailing out and hanging from a tree as we drove home from a meeting.
He’d been Club president in 1953 and had 100% attendance for about 60 years. And always led the Club in a War Eagle before home football games until he couldn’t.
I am truly blessed to have spent time with Jim and more blessed that my boy now man did.
[1] At the time, the plan was to rename the building, but Google streetview shows that didn’t happen and now even the street is named for Jim. Yeah he was that big a deal.
I suspect something similar would happen to podcasts for me, maybe sooner than I am hoping for. And podcast player apps.
It's worth mentioning that goog-411 enabled at least a couple very niche internet subcultures in the early 2000's. When skype brought in free 1800 calling, GOOG-411 could be used as a way to dial any business with skype for free (so no credit card info associated with an account). Think Xbox live lobbies but its a dozen kids on a call, muted, and taking turns unmuting to prank call (harass) businesses all day. I watched a childhood friend spend a summer doing this with a group he met playing mmo's/forums, two of which ended up making it as famous streamers over a decade later. I imagine this experience is very common for a type of kid that grew up online in a certain era (mw2), and google could probably see the tool was garnering a disproportionate amount of abuse
It's worth mentioning that goog-411 enabled at least a couple very niche internet subcultures in the early 2000's. When skype brought in free 1800 calling, GOOG-411 could be used as a way to dial any business with skype for free (so no credit card info associated with an account). Think Xbox live lobbies but its a dozen kids on a call, muted, and taking turns unmuting to prank call (harass) businesses all day. I watched a childhood friend spend a summer doing this with a group he met playing mmo's/forums, two of which ended up making it as famous streamers over a decade later. I imagine this experience is very common for a type of kid that grew up online in a certain era (mw2), and google could probably see the tool was garnering a disproportionate amount of abuse
("Do you guys have battletoads?")
Wonder how many queries which the university is calling can now be automated
SMS based services are useful to me when traveling without my laptop.
"Google Shuts Down GOOG-411" (October 9, 2010)
The service has helped Google build a large database of voice samples and improved the voice recognition technology. Here's what Google's Marissa Mayer said about GOOG-411:
"The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that. ... So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call up or we're trying to get the voice out of video, we can do it with high accuracy."
<https://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2010/10/google-shuts-down-...>
""The 411 Parable": Make sure you are playing the same game." (2011)
But just when the "head-to-head" competition was rolling Google announced GOOG-411 was no more... they'd captured all the human speech they needed to train their algorithms and were on to bigger and better things... Huh, voice recognition... algorithms?
<https://web.archive.org/web/20130810032940/http://buildconte...>
Not that the sudden death didn't kill what was at the time a useful service, and squander goodwill in the process.
Back in the early 2010s when I was going to Auburn, the smartphone internet was still pretty young. It wasn't uncommon to call the Foy info desk to settle an argument.
Really makes me want to swing back to Auburn for a visit. War damn Eagle!
https://wgntv.com/news/cover-story/fine-arts-building-manual...
Of course, observation towers tend to have elevator operators too.
There was a safety mechanism where, IIRC, the gate on one of the floors wasn't closed, none of the other floors could call the elevator, so it was a bit of a pain. Even though we were on the top floor, it was pretty rare for anyone to use it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiP0FpY88E4
The song is naturally called Elevator Operator.
Either cause the elevator is super old or because union contracts require them.
Then there are hospitals I’ve been in that have them.
The Red Phone
https://www.amazon.com/Desk-Telephone-2500-Analog-Phone/dp/B...
I believe those of us who were around from then to now experienced peak information. We went from having to look things up in libraries to being able to find anything with a Google search. We're on the downward slope now. Business models have changed, spamvertisers are winning the war against search, and generative AI slop is already the dominant source of "content", ensuring the genie can never be put back. This is not an anti-AI rant, it is just an acknowledgement that like so many things, we were foolish to think that access to information was just going to keep getting better. I did not expect that in my lifetime, I would see the best it was ever going to be.
Maybe in the future, calling a trained human for help will be the only way to sort through the mountain of infogarbage to find something. Or we'll have to go back to the library.
More optimistically, I hope doubt about know whether you are dealing with a real person or an LLM will encourage people to be more social offline.
When I moved to my current town and visited their library, I very quickly found some books written about the local area for which not much info existed online. It's a great way to spend some time if you're into that kind of thing!
I'm doing fine, I already have enough information overload from places that are willing to distribute it to me.
Goddamn, arXiv is my favorite website now, PDFs don't pop up any of that shit.
A popular question was “how many severed heads can fit into our stadium” and a couple of kids reasoned it out.
I’m actually curious if anyone knows how they’ve adapted it for a LLM-era
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 wasn't, and then, I realized that the latency was messing with us. Because of the latency, from her point of view, I interrupted her, and from mine, she interrupted me. That's when I realized how much it mattered, we simply can't have a normal conversation with high latency. Either we deliberately take turns, as if it was a traditional 2-way radio communication, or we may get these awkward situations, neither feel natural.
High latency can be as little as 100ms (corresponding to about 30m of distance in real life).
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 output buffering too.
And that's over unprioritized 5G/LTE and Wi-Fi. Properly prioritized VoIP, such as the one used in VoLTE and NGN networks, should have even better jitter and latency characteristics.
30-40 ms latency is probably the lower bound on a VoIP call [1]; most calls will be a lot more. But you might not notice it if that's all you have access to, or if all of your calls are long distance that it would never be good anyway. On long distance, you probably have a better transmission delay now over internet than you would have had over telephone networks, as cable routes have improved and routing is often more direct; that will probably offset some of the packetization delay.
[1] You can do better, but it involves having great connectivity and sending lots of very small packets, and mainstream calling isn't willing to send 200 packets per second of 5 ms of samples when most people don't notice/complain about the latency when sending 50 packets per second with 20 ms of samples.
Probably 15-20 years ago? That would have most likely been over DECT, though, which adds 10 or so ms by itself (our wired landline phone was in a slightly awkward location :)
> Did you notice that cell phones had higher latency than landlines?
Compared to landlines, the most noticeable aspect of GSM wasn't the latency (unless the person on the other line was right next to me, in which case there was an echo), but rather the absolute potato quality compared to both G.711 landlines and modern VoIP codecs.
> mainstream calling isn't willing to send 200 packets per second of 5 ms of samples
Yeah, that would probably be too much overhead for most applications. But now you got me wondering: Do video calls have lower latency audio (assuming the codec can do better than 20ms in the first place), given that there's probably much more data available to send at any given time?
At least for WebRTC, no. The audio and video streams are separate, there's no mechanism in WebRTC to piggyback audio onto video packets. If the receiver is synchronizing audio with video, there's potential for additional delay (but when A/V sync works, it's probably worth it)
I don't know details about WhatsApp calling (although I worked there, I didn't touch the realtime calling stack), I think it does use RTP which isn't really built around piggybacking, but since it's a closed service, they can do whatever. No idea about Apple's calling either.
It used to be that if you had two landlines in a large room, you could call one from the other, and your voice would go into one phone, electrically go across town into the switch, back out the other line, and out the other phone, before the soundwaves traveled the length of the room. It was _so_ good.
There's an old linguistics tale, AFAIR fuzzily, of Inuit kids going off to boarding school, and upon return, having lost interest in hearing from adults. The kids believe the adults have little to say to them. ... Because the kids' conversational turn-taking invitation pauses had shortened, and were going unrecognized.
> as if it was a traditional 2-way radio communication
If there was a low-latency side-channel for the end-points to coordinate, they might provide mic clicks and carrier noise for awareness? Like an electric car playing engine rumble.
It's not a microphone in a reciever oscillating a copper line. In my opinion, if it's voip it's not a "landline".
Except in very special cases, like emergency phones in ships, it is never a direct connection, there are at least amplifiers in the middle. So between a direct connection from the microphone to the speaker at the other end and VoIP, where do you draw the line? (pun not intended)
I didn't have these problens when running Ventrilo or old p2p Skype.
You can call 1-800-CHATGPT if you want, but there’s clearly still a place for this service.
I also maybe agree with “very very far away”, in the 20ish year range. Farther than some people think, closer than others do.
If and when we get to a place where AI reaches that holistic facsimile, I’m not sure what I’ll think of humans who reject the idea and insist that we are qualitatively different because (insert biological or spiritual rationale here). I suspect it will feel like seeing someone mistreat a call center employee because they happen to be in India, or sound like a disliked minority.
Almost as a matter of definition by the time AI can provide such a connection there won't be anything distinguishing it from an actual human. Which is to say, what you're implying there is an artificially manufactured but fully functional human.
One reason is that the human experience is dependent upon the biological nature of man. The biological systems color the experience. The pumping of blood, the nervous system, the heart beating, and ultimately, one's awareness of the specific type of mortality inherent to biological organisms, are integral to the experience. If you accurately reproduce that experience then perhaps you've simply made a human rather than a machine. Of course that claim spurs many subsequent philosophical arguments. Ultimately though, a video game console emulator is not the literal console no matter how accurate it is.
A second reason is simply the subjective experience of a person. Regardless of how accurate the simulation is, ultimately, if the person is aware the other end isn't human, the experience is tainted (for better or worse depending on the individual's opinion - but tainted nonetheless). Knowledge of the truth will necessarily affect the experience. The alternative - being in the dark or outright deception - raises other questions of genuinity that taint the experience.
A conversation with a human, by another human, will never be the same as a conversation with a machine - by definition.