aedocw

There is a lawyer (Alec Karakatsanis) who has been writing about police driven propaganda for years. His recent book "Copaganda" is fantastic. He carefully breaks down how major papers (NYT is chief among them) create stories that fit a narrative by using very one-sided sources. Like an article on crime written in bad faith where the only people quotes are police, police consultants, and ex-police.

It's a really good book, I wish more people were aware of it and read it.

I think https://github.com/caddyserver is the best option here. Automatic handling of SSL certs, it's incredibly lightweight, and has super clear config syntax.

Give https://github.com/aedocw/epub2tts a look, the latest update enables use of MS Edge cloud-based TTS so you don't need a local GPU and the quality is excellent.

Take a look at https://github.com/ekzhang/rustpad

The best part about this discussion is seeing all the people pop up to defend the money (sometimes fantastic amounts) they have spent on their business/executive coach.

You can do this today, though you would definitely be breaking copyright (you need to strip the DRM from the epub), and if you're cloning someone's voice without their permission you're probably breaking some more laws. You're pretty safe though assuming you don't distribute it or try to make money.

Check out https://github.com/aedocw/epub2tts for creating an audiobook from epub. Take a look in the utils directory for notes about fine-tuning a voice clone. I can tell you I've done some voices that are close enough to the original to be pretty shocking.

Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions, it's pretty fun making your own audiobooks with the reader of your choice!

I wrote https://github.com/aedocw/epub2tts and the quality is pretty phenomenal if you use XTTS for the voice generation. It's really excellent, but requires the book not have DRM.

It does not handle that. A PR to replace stuff like that would be fantastic, I'd love it - please do!

I put together a script to read epub books using Coqui TTS and I think the results are not far off from this. It's super quick if you've got a GPU, but it's reasonable too if it's just using CPU to do the text to speech.

https://github.com/aedocw/epub2tts

For a really fun exploration of this, read Avogadro Corp by William Hertling.

Some strings:

Many/most shelters will not let you bring in a pet. If you've never had any hard times in your life and had a dog companion at the same time you might not understand, but for many people having that pet is the only thing sustaining their will to live day to day.

Many/most shelters will not let you sleep with your companion, even if you're married. The comfort of another human is an easy thing to get used to, and can be devastating to go without. Generally though if you're running a shelter and taking in people with MH issues or other challenges this one makes some sense, you are always at risk bringing of in folks who can't respect boundaries and will want to have inappropriate intimacy in the open (for instance).

All shelters have a strict limit on how many personal belongings you can bring in. If you have no house, but you do have a shopping cart full of possessions, what are you supposed to do with them?

On mac or linux with sox installed, this is a perfect source for brown noise: play -n synth brownnoise gain -25

Also works for whitenoise or pinknoise.

For a related but MUCH deeper dive into this subject, check out the book "The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization" by Peter Zeihan.

Depending on what you are looking for from an audio book, there are options. If you expect essentially a professionally made radio production of the book (multiple voice actors, effects, etc) then a real audio book is hard to beat.

On the other hand if you just want to listen to the book being read, check out https://github.com/aedocw/epub2tts ... It does not sound as good as a pro human, but it's not far off in my opinion. I've used that to listen to 30+ books that I owned the digital version of.

Coqui-TTS with vtck/vits is very good right now. Not as good as eleven labs or coqui studio, but for fast open TTS it's pretty good, in case you're not familiar with it.

It will be great when there's eventually something open that competes with the closed models out there.

It works with pull requests too AFAIK.

I've been watching the text-to-speech space for a while, waiting/hoping for something both open and better than CoquiTTS. ElevenLabs sounds amazing but is super expensive for something like a book, and tortoiseTTS is so slow as to be unusable.

I wrote a quick python script to read an ebook using coqui and the end result sounds pretty good. It's come in especially handy for books I want to listen to while doing yard work and stuff around the house.

https://github.com/aedocw/epub2tts

Except an environment that is highly toxic does not attract decent people with good community intentions. While you have learned a lot about LLMs and generative AI for instance, it is extremely unlikely you have learned from the most well informed sources. It's definitely a community, but nobody can reasonably argue 4chan is a community that creates the best/most useful content.

Lame keeping is not the hard part, that’s been solved for a while. It’s dealing with pedestrians and other drivers doing unpredictable things. Slow moving infrastructure projects will not help that at all.

That o2 sensor is an important part of the engine/emissions management system. Without that info, the car computer is not able to efficiently map the fuel/air mixture and over time is likely to lead to more problems. Depending on the car, the CPS sensor could be really critical (like if you've got variable valve timing in an interference engine I think?). Understandable you want to ignore that check engine light but recognize that $600 cost to repair could balloon into a lot more (even a destroyed engine).

Recently I wanted an audiobook version of a book I was going to read, but it didn't exist. I put this together using Coqui-TTS and the voice sounds really good. It's not as good as Eleven Labs, but it's far better than anything else I had previously heard.

https://github.com/aedocw/epub2tts

If anyone knows of better TTS synthesizers that I could use please let me know!

I'm not blind but I wrote an EPUB to Text-To-Speech reader using Coqui (a really good AI TTS project). There are books I wanted to listen to while doing other things, and I couldn't find audio-book versions of them, so this worked out perfectly. It could be that I did not do enough searching, but I was surprised I didn't see anything out there that already worked this way.

https://github.com/aedocw/epub2tts

Moxie Marlinspike came up with a powerful yet quiet blower, but I haven't seen anything else about since a he put up a video on Twitter some time ago: https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1582154037700399104

For folks who want to do something similar (no CO2 measure, and possibly less accurate) for far less per sensor, you can easily connect an ESP8266 ($5) to an IKEA VINDRIKTNING ($16) air quality sensor[1]. Stick a AM2302 ($7) on the outside and you get PM2.5, temperature and humidity for about $30.

[1]: https://style.oversubstance.net/2021/08/diy-use-an-ikea-vind...

This is wildly inaccurate.

The population of Germany is about 84m. The total prison population in Germany is 56557. [1]

What are you talking about?

[1]: https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/germany

That might say more about you and who you follow than about twitter overall. It's possible you're not exposed to it, it's also possible you are seeing hate speech that you would not classify as hate speech.

There has definitely been a rise in hate speech on twitter since mush took over.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/shaunharper/2022/10/31/elon-mus...

I love VLC. I've got the follow alias to shuffle what's in my music directory from the command line, very convenient:

alias music='find /home/me/music > /tmp/tunes.m3u; vlc -I rc -Z --no-auto-preparse /tmp/tunes.m3u'

Pretty sure you are wrong. Let's see...

All Nazis are bastards. Yep, that works.

All pedophiles are bastards. Still works.

I've got a few zsh functions that let me type "note" which creates a file named todays date (if it doesn't exist), inserts a timestamp, and opens it in vim. When I exit vim, the notes directory is committed to git then pushed up. This lets me keep my notes directory in sync across machines, and available via web (gitea).

  note () {
   DATE=`date +"%Y%m%d"` 
   TS=`date +"%Y%m%d %H:%M:%S"` 
   FILE=$HOME/Documents/notes/$DATE.txt 
   notegitpull
   echo $TS >> $FILE
   vi $FILE
   notegitpush
  }
  
  notegitpull () {
   pushd $HOME/Documents/notes
   if ping -c 1 git.server &> /dev/null
   then
    git pull
   else
    echo "Offline, not pulling changes"
   fi
   popd
  }
  
  notegitpush () {
   pushd $HOME/Documents/notes
   git pull
   git add \*
   git commit -m "Autocommit due to edit of $FILE"
   if ping -c 1 git.server &> /dev/null
   then
    git push origin main
   else
    echo "Offline, not pushing changes up"
   fi
   popd
  }