>As someone who has used TTS a Lot in recent projects, I’m not excited about listening to AI read a book to me. It feels soulless.
AI TTS still uncanny valley enough to distract. I prefer even more soulless traditional TTS which sounds "neutral" after habituation. To the point where my brain can start layering on characterization as if I was reading. AI TTS feels like listening to to medicore voice actor, where it's hard to overwrite their creative choices, so just left disapointmented and annoyed.
It's getting more passable. As someone who listens to a lot of TTS at high speed for years, eventually I adapted my brain do it and now it feels similar to phsyical reading with subvocalization where I can adjust the voices of characters. It's occasionally even preferrable, i.e. too much over produced podcasts these days where I just TTS the transcript.
PRC more insulated against deglobalization than most. Despite trope, PRC is relatively less trade dependant vs OECD/G20 tier countries. It's close to US and JP where internal market is enough to generate growth and development. Meanwhile PRC exports is increasing, especially up value chain in intermediate goods, and among emerging markets. Actual risk of trade disruption with wealthy LIO block is also overstated IMO, first it's ~10% of PRC's GDP. Impact from countries who are serious (so far surprisingly little) about subtantially reducing trade, friendshoring or PRC+1 models are a fraction of that. The really rough patch are US tech blockades that inhibits PRC's ability to upgrade internally, but if overcome, huge boost to development. All of which is to say, PRC exposure to deglobalization is smaller than most think. While reality is PRC so far is inserting herself more and more into global trade despite some efforts to balkanize.
To stay on topic of India (but applies to many countries), PRC / Asian Tiger model of export driven growth model via light industries to generate surplus to upgrade capital is going to be increasingly difficult and expensive. Era of high western consumption (low interest, debt driven etc) and cheap commodities is being tapped out for short/medium term. The TLDR is PRC extracted as much benefit as it can from globalism under relatively ideal conditions while those that did not are going to have a much harder time trying to replicate similar feat. Especially India, because let's be real, west is not going to repeat the PRC "mistake" with India again, especially when India is difficult to geographically contain.
I think in a few years India will find focusing on middle class is not enough. There's finite demand for domestic+outsourceable white collar jobs for 1.4B internal market + ~400M English speakers around the world. PRC has 10s of millions of white collar jobs + 100s of millions of manufacturing that pays better than trickle down housesitting, but there's still 100s of millions more stuck in informal economy while both countries are stuck with another few 100s of millions of subsistent farmers because keeping agriculture low tech is an essential jobs program. Even by PRC standards, India is hyper Deng's "let some get rich first" scheme that's going to cause long term uneven development issues.
Wut, India started from a better state, took same amount of time, to progress 1/5th as much, while still having north korean tier food insecurity. Dooming generations and hundreds of millions of avoidable deaths due to being stuck in poverty for longer than need be. There's nothing to be envious about. Also eliminating rural poverty + building rural infra is the actual hard part that takes time and resources. We'll have to see if India has the resources to even get there, PRC didn't until $6000 gdp per capita. India and by extention relying on democracies to develop still a case of what not to do. Also India did their own sterilization / family planning campaign.
>Application of the passive approach as a non-mechanical method is an effective technique to tackle high energy consumption as well as diminishing the destructive effects of buildings on the environment. Using passive cooling can lead to peak load reduction as well as peak load offset, diminishing the interior temperature fluctuation, maintaining indoor air temperature in a comfortable range which consequently reduces fossil fuel usage as well as decrease the greenhouse gas emission. In this study, using passive approach from the economic point of view was discussed. The competition between cost saving (owing to applying passive methods) and added cost (owing to the initial investment, maintenance and operation cost) can specify the usefulness and effectiveness of using passive techniques. In this regard, special points such as building function, ventilation requirements, sensible and latent heat gains, the ability of any technique to save energy, geographical location, user financial ability, initial investment, maintenance and operation cost, regional climate data should be taken into account. Literature review affirmed that owing to applying passive approaches in building, energy consumption is diminished by 8%–70% (using external shading), 37% (utilizing cool colored paints roof), 25% (Creating green space), 7.88% (construction of the prismatic building), 32%–100% (using vegetation-based wall), 50% (using PCM-base wall), 33% (incorporation of insulation into the wall), 10%–20% (building equipped with solar chimney), 25% (using radiative cooling system). From the economic viewpoint, it was found that through finding optimal passive approaches, life-cycle cost saving reached 52%.
Vernacular architecture is taught in 101 courses, but my experience in arch schools / grad programs in North America is they're too divorced from building science. Apart from checking LEED boxes / certification, it's risky / hard to justify remixing vernacular elements outside of prestige projects with big budget that can afford to do the modelling to spit out confident operating costs. Maybe when the software improves.
They did a series of town halls, funded a bunch of urban / tech meetups. Pretty proactive for a period. The townhalls were very... SF style, it didn't mesh with the local culture well. But I don't think they did a lot of work either, there's a pretty lackluster showroom and they put out some very middling concept sketches - not proper renders like you see in most smart city projects. Didn't seem like they were taking things seriously. A lot of words. Maybe too many. At least not enough right ones.
Shame, some genuinely descent ideas in terms of building science and urban design. 11/10 chance the technology elements would have gone the way of the Google Grave yard after 10years, but at least it will leave a set of interesting buildings to draw lessons from. Now nothing. Lots will stay empty or be filled with generic condo developments with questionable longevity. The Google branding and Silicon Valley outreach style didn't help. Simultaneously, the inability for western societies to at least entertain rapid urban experiments is going to backfire. I'm not a big fan of Google, but they have fuck you resources and at least tried to direct it in prosocial designs with the expected cost of privacy. If they can't succeed in Toronto then it doesn't bode well for anyone else.
Form over factor = endearingly ugly. I can see the narrative for a simple aerodynamic wedge eventually changing public sentiment. Basically the modernist argument against decoration. If this actually ends up being a solid workhorse, the same energy efficiency and fragile masculinity arguments that shamed humvee owners might also work against frou-frou status symbol pickup trucks. That said the bedrail is high AF so I don't even know if this design is practical. I assume there's some sort hood and winch int he front, and mounts for lights / accessories that would ruin the profile.
AI TTS still uncanny valley enough to distract. I prefer even more soulless traditional TTS which sounds "neutral" after habituation. To the point where my brain can start layering on characterization as if I was reading. AI TTS feels like listening to to medicore voice actor, where it's hard to overwrite their creative choices, so just left disapointmented and annoyed.