sudobash1 · HackerTrans

há 21 horasdiscuss

I find it easy to detect. If I wave my hand in front of my face quickly, the movement looks choppy instead of being just a blur. I can often tell lighting is cheep LED even without doing this. Movement just feels off. It is mildly annoying, but I can mostly ignore it.

sudobash1

há 5 diasdiscuss

I have used Kokoro fairly extensively for an accessibility product. I have loved working with it (especially because I don't have an NVidia GPU like many TTS of similar quality require).

I particularly appreciate the fact that it lets you manually add IPA pronunciation guides. There have been some cases where an important word is a homograph and Kokoro assumed the wrong pronunciation.

The place where it falls a little short is in saying just a single word or two. Try having it say simply "six" and it almost always says something like "ah-six-ah". I found a way around that though. If you give it a longer sentence to say (eg "The word is: six") it will say it fine. The trick is that the Kokoro API gives you the timestamp of each word in the sentence. So you can have a Python script crop out just the word you care about. The intonation is a little flat this way, but is very reliable.

I asked about this on the discord, and was told that it is a limitation of the small parameter size. But in fairness to Kokoro, even eleven-labs' voices suffer from this occasionally.

sudobash1

há 6 diasdiscuss

We see this all over. Generic brands can be on-par with (or even 100% identical) to name-brands, and the name brands still make money. For example at my local grocery store, you can buy distilled white vinegar from Heinz or the generic brand. The generic brand costs half-price (or less if you get the bigger container), but the product should be chemically identical.

There can be some arguments made (maybe you think the generic cuts corners and it is only 4.5% vinegar instead of 5%), and the same arguments can be made for the drugs. But IMHO they come nowhere near to justifying the price gap.

The thing that is particularly frustrating in the case of the drugs is how the brand-name is (for many people) the vernacular name. I grew up in a family that called many drugs by their actual name (eg ibuprofen & acetaminophen), but when I go to the doctor, many of them insist on calling them Advil & Tylenol. Sometimes it seems to take them a second to recognize the generic name.

sudobash1

há 13 diasdiscuss

It is linked at the top of the article. It is a physics-based sandbox building game. Back in the day it was commercial, but it was abandoned a while back and somewhat more recently released as open-source.

sudobash1

há 18 diasdiscuss

I don't think it is supported anywhere else currently, but Batocera has a simple wsquashfs format. It is basically the game compressed into a squahsfs. Then it can be managed as simply as other traditional ROMs:

https://wiki.batocera.org/systems:windows#folder_compression

sudobash1

há 20 diasdiscuss

I am pleased to see hardware not being locked down as a selling point:

> Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?

It feels very commonsense that you should be able to run whatever you want on the computer that you have purchased, but it is surprisingly uncommon.

sudobash1

há 26 diasdiscuss

Unlikely to happen (with the author anyway). From TFA:

> Importantly to me, it’s not defined in some complex DSL

sudobash1

mês passadodiscuss

I don't think of HTML as low level, and I don't think that writing "high-level" web (whatever that is? React?) would be any faster to develop or produce better results for his example.

If you looked at the gov.uk page [1] that he linked, it is clean and readable. It doesn't look hard to me to make, and I don't think it is lacking functionality.

I'll grant that writing web-apps without a framework is going to be harder for many people (especially with all the fancy features that are expected now days), but that is not the point of this writing. This is an argument that the web (especially government services) should be usable on limited devices too.

1 https://www.gov.uk/housing-benefit

sudobash1

mês passadodiscuss

My home server has been running alpine for a while now. I'm always delighted with how simple and robust it is. Not that this is probably recommended, but I have a cron script that checks for upgradable packages every night and automatically installs them. It has always been seamless. My family uses this server throughout the day, and the only daytime down-time has been due to power outages. (In some way the reliability is an issue because it enables me being lazy with backup testing).

For a little home-server, I am in love with the KISS-ness of Alpine.

sudobash1

há 2 mesesdiscuss

That is just what the (edited) title makes it sound like. The article states that Christopher Olah will be a speaker present at the encyclical release. It does not imply that he had any hand or influence in the content.

sudobash1

há 2 mesesdiscuss

The title seems to be editorialized. To me, it makes it sound like Christopher Olah (the mentioned Anthropic co-founder) is a co-author. Instead he is going to be one of several speakers present when the encyclical is released.

sudobash1

há 3 mesesdiscuss

As other commenters here have noted, I found this interesting but a little frustrating. The second color it asks about is clearly cyan (or turquoise). For me, this is like showing an orange screen and asking if it is red or yellow.

I understand that across cultures "orange" does not exist as a distinctly named color (it only got its name in most European languages around the 1500s), but as someone who was trained since preschool that orange is a distinct color, it would feel wrong to "round" it to red or yellow.

I haven't had green-cyan-blue drilled into me the same way as red-orange-yellow. So sometimes I do "round" it. I might note how "green" some cyan river water is, or call something cyan "blue" when it is next to something kelly green. But when I just have a screenfull of pure cyan light, I don't know what else to call it.

As a side note, I do wonder how differently a child would perceive color if they were taught more than 7 colors in preschool.

sudobash1

há 3 mesesdiscuss

I don't think this makes a difference for independent contractors.

sudobash1

há 5 mesesdiscuss

> Though it may seem comparably ridiculous that 700MB is small in 2024 when DSL was 50MB in 2002...

It really depends on what you are looking at. This is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison, but OpenWrt happily works with 16MB of disk space, and can go down to 8MB if you squeeze it. It includes a modern Linux kernel, shell, networking stack, ssh server, package manager, text editor, web server with dynamic pages, etc...

Part of it's trick is that it aggressively pares down the hardware support, such that you normally download an OpenWrt image customized to your exact router. But of course the biggest difference is that it doesn't include a graphics stack or any GUI applications.

I work in embedded Linux, and its a whole different world here of trimming the fat on Linux to keep the BOM prices low. But you'd be surprised how lean we can get it.

sudobash1

há 5 mesesdiscuss

Particularly not with the free advertising they got from this.

sudobash1

há 6 mesesdiscuss

I think RSS feed reader users are also unaffected by flags. At least hnrss.org feed followers are. I haven't tried news.ycombinator.com/rss. But as long as the post hits the RSS feed before it is flagged, your reader can pick it up.

Honestly, for me, most of the time I am not interested in the flagged posts, but if you are, RSS is another way to see them.

sudobash1

há 6 mesesdiscuss

I have come away from Christmas with almost the opposite conclusion. I have 3 young kids, and I notice almost an inverse correlation between the number of toys around and how contently they play.

The ideal number of toys is non-zero, but my experience suggests that it is pretty low.

sudobash1

há 6 mesesdiscuss

This title is misleading (or at least it doesn't correspond to the article content). According to the article, Version is having an outage. AT&T and T-Mobile are fine. Their only issue is that they can't reach Version (because it is down).

sudobash1

há 6 mesesdiscuss

You can even still do fax machines if you really wanted to.

sudobash1

há 6 mesesdiscuss

I feel I should point out that USPS has a lower rate for postcards (currently $0.61), so the threshold might be a bit lower.

I know that this is tongue-in-cheek and would be pretty funny to receive, but it isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. The experience of getting a little message printed on receipt paper is nothing like the experience of receiving a note or card in the mail. Through the mail you receive something physically from someone with their handwriting and some personality to it. Getting the Amazon message is more like printing out a text message on crummy paper.

Also, I don't have Prime, so it definitely isn't cost competitive for me anyway.

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