It kind of sounds like that article is about the “hey Siri” feature getting activated accidentally, like if it picks up something that sounds similar to the trigger phrase and starts recording
Which is still a big security/privacy issue, but not exactly the same as if they’re just turning the microphone on whenever they want to listen to you and serve you ads
I don’t think that most of the big tech companies are listening to your microphone (I’m not ruling it out entirely, and I’m certainly there are some smaller sketchier companies that are doing it)
But I think most of the time most of the time they don’t need to
They know what ads you’ve seen on your phone/computer, what you’ve been googling, the websites you’ve visited, where you’ve used your credit card, what shows and movies you watch, and where you’ve been (from gps locations, or from what wifi networks and Bluetooth devices you’ve been near or connected to) and what ads, playlists, stores, products, etc. you were exposed to while you were there, and of course who you talk to and all of that same information about those people.
That’s all going to influence the things you think and talk about, they probably have a pretty good idea what kind of conversations you’re going to have well before you do.
And don’t get me wrong, that’s creepy as fuck.
I think most of it comes down to people not even realizing how much data about ourselves we put out there and all of the ways it can be collected and used to build a profile about you.
And honestly I think they can probably get better data from that most of the time than from trying to filter out background noise and make sense of what you’re talking about through your microphone.
I think it’s also worth having frank discussions with your kids about their inheritance and encouraging them to work things out themselves ahead of time.
My family has maybe a bit unusual but I think very healthy relationship with death. It comes for us all eventually, no sense dancing around it.
There’s no complicated inheritance situations in my family, if you have kids everything gets divided up evenly among them. If they don’t have kids it gets divided up evenly among their nieces/nephews.
So for example my parents estate gets split between my sister and myself, my uncle who doesn’t have kids gets split between us and my cousin, my cousin gets his parents’ all to himself.
We’ve already got things divvied up amongst ourselves pretty well. As long as my sister signs over her claim to our parent’s house, I’ll sign over my third of our uncle’s house to her, and she’s happy to buy our cousin out of his third or trade him for her current house (which would also have the benefit of getting all 3 of us in the same town, cousin has some disabilities and it would be nice to have us all nearby in case of emergencies, or the payout from my sister or money from sale of her house plus his own inheritance from his parents would set him up pretty well)
We also occasionally call dibs on some other desirable belongings, like my uncles skillsaw
The “language” that the n64 used was basically in a totally different language family than what PCs and later Nintendo consoles use.
Think of it as if the N64 spoke Japanese, while PCs speak Spanish. There’s a lot of things that don’t translate cleanly from one language to the other, you can’t just feed it into google translate and expect what comes out the other end to make sense, you’re going to need someone who understands both languages to go over it, rewrite some of it to make sure all of the nuance is coming through, add some asterisks and translation notes to explain some concepts that don’t really have a direct equivalent in the other language, etc.
Later Nintendo consoles spoke something more like Portuguese or maybe even Mexican Spanish instead of PC’s Castilian Spanish. They’re much more similar languages that translate more directly and some things may not even really need translation as long as both parties slow down, speak clearly, and maybe throw in some hand gestures here and there, and google translate will get you like 99% of the way there, without the translator needing to add as many explanatory notes.
All those translation notes are what the emulator is doing, and the N64 to PC emulator has to do a lot more interpreting than the Switch to PC emulator.